Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [15]
Mark: “Are you effing kidding? Goddamn it.”
My mother came over that very afternoon and we sat around the cage, observing and admiring the little birds in much the same way we had sat around observing and admiring my children when they were newborns lying on a receiving blanket. We were sitting there when Mark came home and stood, arms folded across his chest, looking down at the cage.
“Oh, dear,” said my mother. “I think I’ll let you handle this in privacy.”
“Don’t we have enough going on without adding complications?” Mark asked.
“Probably,” I said. I thought: What exactly do we have going on?
He was silent for a minute. “Well, they are cute.”
They were cute. Almost immediately, I wanted more chickens. Having an all–Buff Orpington flock is a little like having a closet that contains nothing but khaki. There’s no prettier or friendlier fowl, but reading about poultry, as I found myself idly then avidly doing, I coveted variety. Chickens come in scores of colors and sizes and breeds, and they seized my imagination in a way probably familiar to collectors of orchids or antique watches. I wanted a gold-laced Wyandotte, whose plumage resembles a tortoiseshell comb; and a shiny black Australorp, the breed that holds the world record for egg production; and a blue-egg-laying Ameraucana, beloved by Martha Stewart; and a Cuckoo Marans, which produces the chocolate-colored eggs favored by James Bond. Our town’s laws allow us to keep up to twelve hens, so we got nineteen. I found another feed store with a wider selection and bought a Polish chick with a white topknot, and a Silkie bantam whose downy feathers lined her legs like tiny black pajamas, and a footloose white Leghorn, and an ill-tempered Frizzle with feathers that resembled a black shearling coat. The chicks were adorable and noisy and inquisitive and did not seem nearly as stupid as everyone said.
When they were six weeks old, the birds moved outside. In the mornings, released from their coop, they raced around the yard flapping their wings and squawking joyfully. We fed them everything we didn’t eat. (Everything, that is, except chicken.) They ate Total dregs from the bottom of Owen’s cereal bowl, cold spaghetti scraped from a plate, the core from a head of lettuce, a damp sandwich crust rescued from a dank lunch box, failed cakes, steak bones. Whenever I emerged onto the deck above the yard I sang out, “Hey, girls!” and they came racing from all directions to see what I was going to toss them. I was very proud of our smart chickens and their evident affection for me. One day I noticed Isabel watching me as I carried food out for the chickens.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“There’s something wrong.”
“Okay,” she said, “I really hate it when you say, ‘Hey, girls.’”
I said, “You do?”
“You sound dorky.”
“I do?”
“Kind of,” she said. She did not meet my gaze.
It’s a testament to the withering power of the adolescent female that I never called “Hey, girls” again. I took to saying, in a flat, almost contemptuous tone, “Okay, chickens, here you go.” As time passed, I stopped flinging platters of food off the deck, which seemed a little too Ma Kettle. I began to carry the food down and set it discreetly under a tree.
Pastoral literature suggests there’s a glorious synergy between chickens and gardens, that the birds eat up all the bugs and convert them into fertilizer, which they deposit directly in the beds, like little fairies spreading fairy dust. And they were indeed very picturesque, in those early weeks, roaming around the garden like moving flowers, bobbing and fluttering amid the greenery.
One morning, I stepped outside and noticed the hens were eating the squash starts. A few days later, every last leaf had been plucked from the melons. Then with their increasingly enormous, scaly claws, the birds trampled the pole beans and overnight, it looked as if the entire patch had been stomped by the yeti. After this, we shut them out of the “productive” area of the garden, restricting them to the lower part of the yard.