Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [16]
The first egg was a miracle. So was the second. So, really, was the five-hundredth. By the end of summer, the eggs were coming on like zucchini in August, at least zucchini in a garden without chickens. Every day, a half dozen more eggs waited in the henhouse and though I cooked eggs every way I knew how, and gave them to my sister and my friends and our neighbors, there were always forty or fifty eggs in a bowl in the refrigerator.
It was very simple and joyful, until it wasn’t. I’ve come to believe that having chickens is like having foxy teenage daughters. Trouble will find you.
In the fall, we discovered a hen lying dead in the bushes with a mysterious puncture wound to her throat. A month or so later, I walked outside to find a bobcat crouched over the corpse of another hen. We don’t live in the country. I had never seen a live bobcat before, let alone in my backyard, fifteen feet away. In October, a husky broke through the fence and killed four hens in five minutes. A few days before Christmas, a raccoon got her claws on Sally, one of my favorite chickens, and gnawed all the feathers and skin from her back before she ran shrieking out of the bushes. You know what her back looked like? It looked like skinless chicken from the supermarket, pink and tender and raw. Epic amounts of bacitracin and hydrogen peroxide saved her life and she was outside again in a month, laying again in two.
We decided we couldn’t let our chickens range around the yard anymore. Although the yard was secured by a tall wire fence, the sight of all those chickens drove the local predator population mad with bloodlust. I disapprove of factory farms, but I understand why people who depend on chickens for their livelihood might decide to keep them in a big, windowless room. I paid a carpenter $350 to build a fifteen-by-fifteen coop adjoining the henhouse, complete with a chicken wire roof to deter hawks. Now there were two wire fences between our chickens and dogs and bobcats. Three hundred and fifty dollars was more than twice what I used to spend on eggs in an entire year, but it was no longer about the money.
The chickens resented the coop. They paced the perimeter, yelling, looking out through the chicken wire. I liked them less almost immediately. I found them irritating with all their complaints and demands, and somewhat contemptible. I had an inkling of how becoming a prison guard might corrode the soul.
But I thought we were all set, that our chickens were now safe.
And so they were, for a couple of months. And then, three days after my mother died, two terriers broke through the outer fence one day, and then dug their way into the chicken coop. It was the same afternoon my sister and I met the pastor to plan our mother’s funeral. I drove home from the meeting in a heavy March drizzle and found an animal control van and a police car blocking the road. A dozen or so neighbors stood on the street outside our yard and a cop walked down the street, holding two bulging garbage bags that, it took me about three seconds to understand, were stuffed with dead chickens. Ten dead chickens.
I stood there in the middle of the street in my makeup and meet-the-priest dress, tears and mascara streaming down my cheeks. We’ve become a sideshow, I thought. The silly suburban people with their chickens that are always getting eaten. I looked at our yard, scratched and grassless and now strewn with feathers, as if a giant duvet had exploded. All we needed were a junked car and sprung sofas to complete the look. I was devastated, furious, and embarassed
After that, I did what I should have done the day we got the chickens: I went down to the lumber company and found someone to build us a wooden fence so the dogs and bobcats couldn’t see the birds and the neighbors couldn’t see our mess. I paid him $3,500 to take down the wire fence and replace it with redwood planks, and into the pocket of that