Prairie Evers (2 page)

GOOD-BYE

A few days later
we went to the bus station with Grammy and waved her away. I struggled mightily, but I couldn’t keep from crying. My heart was cracking into a million pieces, and no matter how broken it got, it kept on breaking.

We went back to the house—I couldn’t think of it as home yet—and Mama fixed lunch. I poked at my macaroni and cheese, which Mama makes all cheesy and bubbly and crunchy on top. Normally it’s one of my favorite meals, but I didn’t have any appetite. I went to my room and crawled under the covers.

Mama came and looked in on me after a while. “How are you holding up?”

“I hate it here. I want to go home.”

Mama sat on the edge of my bed and patted my shoulder. “This was my room, you know,” she said after a while. “I always liked that window that looks east. I liked to watch the sun rise. I felt like I was the first one seeing the world get born every day.”

I sighed, but I liked knowing Mama and I felt the same about that window. The first thing I did every day back at home was look outside. I’d check on the weather and see the tangle of honeysuckle scrambling up the barn wall, the dark, quiet clump of rhododendron standing by the well house, the slender branches of the redbud tree etched against the mountainside. Here the view was different—there was a big hemlock tree giving the sky a sharp poke, an old chicken coop whose boards were as gray as a rainy day, a barn and some sheds and a meadow rolling slowly down the hill toward town—but it gave me the same good feeling to survey the world from up on high first thing.

“It’s a good house,” Mama said. “I hope you’ll like it better here one day.”

That made me feel like crying all over again. It sounded so final.

The house was a little old farmhouse with steep, narrow stairs to the second floor, where there were two bedrooms
tucked up under the eaves, one small and the other one, where Grammy had slept, smaller yet. It had a shady screened-in porch along the front and a big kitchen in the back with a potbelly stove in the center of the room. Outside there was the chicken coop, a falling-down shed and a standing-up one, a little barn with a steep, pointy roof, and about a hundred acres of gardens and berry patches Mama and Daddy had all kinds of plans for. Well, not a hundred acres really, but plenty. There was a big grassy meadow on the east side of the property and a craggy rock cliff along the west. The farm sat at the end of a dead-end dirt road that ran alongside a chunk of the Shawangunk Mountains, and if you couldn’t be at home in North Carolina, it was probably the next best thing. The house was homey and cozy even though the wind did whistle in at the windows some, and I had been getting just a little bit used to it all when Grammy took off and left me.

“It’ll be too quiet up here now. Grammy and I always talked at night.”

“I know you did.”

“Every night we gave everything a good going over. What we saw on our walks and how the garden was doing and my lessons and everything. And she always read to me. It’ll be too lonely. I won’t be able to sleep.”

Mama stroked a lock of my hair and said, “Well, Daddy and I can read to you if you want. And you can read to yourself, too.”

“I know.” It would be too mean to say it wouldn’t be the same. I got along with my mama and daddy like bread and butter. But Grammy wasn’t just my grammy. She was my teacher and my best friend too. For my whole life I’d been tagging after her, doing everything she did. We were always investigating. If we were outdoors, it was birds and trees and plants and bugs and the shape of clouds. Inside, it was the history of plumbing and where cocoa came from and how to make some crazy thing like eggs Benedict. Once, we even made our own marshmallows, or we tried anyway.

Grammy was always curious about things, and failing in an endeavor never got her down long. That was life, she said: noticing and trying. You didn’t have to succeed as long as you put your back into the effort. Everything gave her an idea about something else—something she had read or seen—and we were constantly looking further into the matter. There were so many books in our house, we didn’t even try to move them all north. Boxes and boxes got packed away and stowed in Great-Uncle Tecumseh’s shed, which I knew fretted Grammy something awful. She feared the damp would get into them and the mice would chew their pages despite the mothballs she sprinkled all around. I was convinced that was half the reason she headed back home.

“It’s like there’s a ghost,” I told Mama, but it wasn’t like that really. It was like there was a great echoing emptiness that scared me more than any ghost ever could.

“I know. We’ll miss her too.” Mama kept on patting my shoulder, and after a while I felt a tiny bit less woeful.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“I could heat up some of the leftover macaroni and cheese.”

I sighed. Then I said, “Okay.” I followed Mama back down to the kitchen and sat in the rocker right close to the potbelly stove while she heated my lunch back up. I felt like an invalid who had only just begun to recover from a terrible flu.

OH GLORY, HOW HAPPY I AM

That first while
after Grammy left, I was always closing my eyes and pretending she was just over in the next room. Maybe she was canning tomatoes, or checking the lessons she gave me, or picking out a little tune on her banjo. Whatever she was doing, she was always singing. In my mind I could hear her voice, all wavery and plain, belting out “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am” like there was no tomorrow. She always said that song just made a person feel better.

After she left, I tried singing “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am.” I never could remember the rest of the words, but even just that one line did make me feel better. But only for a little while. Pretty soon I’d go back to being lonesome again.

Some of that lonesome time I spent out in the chicken coop that I could see from my bedroom window. It was like a little house of my own, a secret place I could go to think. I’d sit hunched in the corner, bundled up in my winter clothes but still chilled to the bone, missing Grammy and Peabody Mountain and even the neighbor lady’s mob of kids who used to drive me wild with all their shouting. I’d daydream I had a twin sister to keep me company or that Mama and Daddy had announced we were moving back home. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

After a while I got the idea that it’d be nice to have something living in that henhouse, something like a chicken. The minute I thought of it, I knew it was right. I could see the flock of hens bustling around the yard, cheering me up. Then I imagined a big beautiful rooster, his head tipped back while he crowed.

I brought my idea up with Mama and Daddy at breakfast one morning.

“Chickens!” Mama said, like she had never heard of such an animal before.

Daddy leveled a doubtful look at me. “What in the world made you think of that?”

“I like the looks of them. They have those funny bodies,
all round and fat, and then those skinny little heads up top. I think it’d be fun to have a bunch of them running around. That coop out back is what gave me the idea.”

Mama and Daddy were still looking at me kind of doubtful, so I said, “I think it’d be interesting.” Finding things interesting is highly regarded in my family.

I gave the egg Mama had fried for me a poke while I thought how else to convince them. The egg was done just the way I liked it, runny in the middle with crispy edges, but it was store bought, you could tell. The yolk was pale and weak. “If we had our own chickens, we could have good strong yellow eggs like Mrs. Perkins raised back home. And maybe I could sell the eggs like she did.”

Daddy nodded, real slow. He looked over at Mama, who shrugged and raised her eyebrows. And he said, “Well then, you go on and give it a try. If you’re sure.”

“I am! So now what?” I looked at them expectantly. “Did you have chickens growing up, Mama? Do you know what to do?”

“My mother kept a flock. I remember a few things. You can get baby chicks or pullets, that much I know. Pullets are easier—they’re partly grown.”

“Baby chicks. That’s what I want.”

Mama rolled her eyes. “How did I know that?”

I grinned at her.

“You don’t have to have a rooster to have eggs, I remember that too. I think maybe roosters are a handful sometimes.”

“But I want a rooster! I want to hear him crow.” Our neighbor lady back home, Mrs. Perkins, had a big white rooster called Otis, and he crowed so loud, it was like he believed he was the one responsible for waking up the sun each day. In fact, he didn’t just crow in the morning but whenever the mood struck him all day long.

Mama said, “Of course you do,” and reached across the table to ruffle my hair.

“What else do you remember?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. It was my job to gather the eggs, and I didn’t like to do it. I suppose my mother got tired of arguing with me, because after a while she just did it herself. You’ll have to do a little research, I guess.”

That afternoon we went to the library so I could read up on how to go about raising a flock of chickens. So far the library was about the only thing I really liked about Mama’s hometown of New Paltz, New York. A library is a wonderful thing—all of our books combined couldn’t hold a candle to the number of books a library has—and I’d never had one so close by before. Back home we had to drive thirty-eight miles of bad roads to go to one, and we didn’t do that real often. Here it was only eight miles on pavement, and Mama was in the habit of taking me at least once a week. It was in a little old stone house on the main street that I purely loved—it made you just yearn to step in and start reading. I liked the librarian there too.

When I marched up to her desk and said I wanted to find
out everything I could about raising chickens, she nodded like that was not an out-of-the-way request at all. She asked if I knew how to use a computer, and when I said not too well, she nodded like that was nothing to get excited about either. I’d seen the computers at the library before, but I’d never tried them out. There was a computer at Mrs. Perkins’s house back home, too, but it didn’t work right. Those noisy little kids of hers had broken it about as soon as she dragged it home.

The librarian went ahead and showed me, and pretty soon I’d ventured out onto the Internet and read just about everything a person could read about chickens, plus some. I read and took notes and checked out three books she pulled aside for me, and by the time we left, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted.

ME AND THE AGWAY MAN

I was so excited
that I begged Daddy to take me to the Agway in town the very next day. He had to go anyway, to get more paint for the birdhouses he makes to sell at the farmers’ market, so he said okay.

I was all set with my order. I wanted twelve hens and one rooster. I would get three different kinds of hens: Silver-Laced Wyandottes and Australorps and Rhode Island Reds. I picked those breeds because I liked their names. Also because they were
supposed to be good at getting along with one another and pretty generous with their eggs and not too faint of heart for the cold winters up north. I planned to order four of each. Also I would order a Leghorn rooster. I had seen a picture of one, and he looked just like Otis: snow white, with a big red comb.

It turned out things were not that easy. For one thing, I couldn’t order just one rooster, or any rooster at all.

“You can’t sell me just one Leghorn rooster?” I said to the man behind the counter at the Agway, giving him my most pleading look.

“No, I can’t. It doesn’t work that way. We don’t sell roosters.”

“Why not?” That seemed purely unbelievable to me.

“Most people don’t want the bother of a rooster. They can be boisterous, and plus, they fertilize the eggs.”

“What does that mean?”

The man looked pained and flung my daddy an alarmed look, but Daddy didn’t say anything. The man cleared his throat. “Well, it means he plants a seed, like. To make a baby chicken. With the hen.”

“Oh,” I said, getting the picture.

“Most people don’t want that. They just want hens for eggs. So the upshot is, we only sell female chicks—or we try to. It’s hard to tell whether a chicken is a boy or a girl when it’s a baby, so you
might
get a rooster in there. But you’re not supposed to. The best way to get a rooster is to find someone who’s giving one away. People are fickle, is what I’ve found. They think they
want a rooster crowing in the morning but then they don’t. They come back complaining he woke them up!”