Mom called the refrigerator the icebox her whole life. On top of it, pushed back against the wall, sat a red coffee can with a plastic lid gone cloudy with age.
I reached up and took it down.
That was her egg money.
She’d sold eggs out of that kitchen door since 1991, the year I turned twelve. That was the year she decided the hens were going to buy the groceries. Three dollars a dozen, lately. Two for most of the years before that. It all went in the can. And it was nearly all ones.
I took the lid off and counted it out on the table, next to Lucille’s envelope.
A hundred and twelve dollars.
“What are you doing?” Lucille said.
“They paid two,” I said. “I’ll pay three.”
“For chickens.”
“For Mom’s.”
“Annette, you can’t even find them.”
“I can find twelve.” I put the money back in the can and pressed the lid down. “That’s a start.”
She didn’t have anything sensible to say to that.
I picked up the can and went outside to call my husband.
Dale drives the anhydrous truck for the co-op. And the last week of April is no time to ask a co-op man for a day off. He’d already used his three days of funeral leave standing next to me. Every farmer in the county wanted nitrogen on before the corn went in, and he was hauling tanks from before daylight until after dark.
He listened to the whole thing without interrupting. I could hear his truck idling.
“Two dollars,” he said finally.
“Two dollars.”
He was quiet for a second.
Dale loved my mother. She fed him every Sunday for twenty-two years and never once let him leave without a carton of eggs under his arm.
“Take my pickup,” he said. “The keys are on the hook. Put Duke’s crate in the back. The big wire one. It’ll hold six or eight if you don’t go far.”
Then he said, “Bring them home, Annie. I’ll be out there the minute I can.”
Our son, Colt, is fourteen.
I picked him up at the school at three-thirty with the dog crate already in the truck bed and the coffee can on the seat. And I told him what his great-aunt had done.
He didn’t say a word for about a mile.
Colt had been feeding those hens since he was big enough to carry the scoop. He’d fed them all four days since Mom died. Morning and night. He’d gathered the eggs and put them in the icebox on the back porch, the way she taught him.
“Did she sell Pearl?” he said.
“She sold all of them, honey.”
He looked out the window at somebody’s planter crawling across a field.
“Pearl’s seven,” he said. “She lays about one egg a week. Whoever got Pearl is going to eat her.”
“Then we’d better get moving,” I said.
I had one name, and it wasn’t enough. So I drove to the feed store before it closed.
Lucille had tacked a card on the bulletin board there too. I took it down and handed it across the counter to Jeff, who’d sold my mother layer pellets and oyster shell for as long as I could remember.
He read it. His face changed.
“I wondered,” he said. “I heard it on the radio, and I thought, that’s not Rosalie’s voice, and that’s not Rosalie’s price.”
“Do you know anybody who went?”
“Kim Kroeker was in here at noon. Bought a sack of pellets. Told me she’d gotten eight hens for sixteen dollars and felt like a thief.”
He was already writing on the back of the card.
“North of Benedict. Second place past the church. Go on. She’s good people.”
She was.
Kim Kroeker came out on her front step with a baby on her hip and two more children behind her. Before I’d even finished saying my name, she said, “Oh, no. Oh, it was your mother.”
“It was.”
“I knew two dollars was wrong. I said so at dinner. I said, somebody’s grandma has died and somebody’s cleaning out, and I just didn’t know whose.” She shifted the baby. “I’ve got them penned by themselves. You don’t put strange hens in with your own the first week.”
It was getting on toward dusk by then. That’s the only sensible time to catch a chicken. A hen on the roost at dark will let you lift her off like a loaf of bread, as long as you hold her wings snug and keep the light out of her face.
Colt went in with the flashlight pointed at the floor.
He came out with a Rhode Island Red under each arm. He turned them toward me so I could see their legs.
A blue band on one.
A yellow band on the other.
Mom banded every bird she ever raised. A little plastic spiral on the right leg. A different color for each year’s hatch, so she always knew how old a hen was without guessing. Green for the birds from three springs back. Blue for the next year. Yellow for last spring’s pullets.
I’d never thought of it as anything but one of her fussy ways.
That week, those bands were the only proof we had.
We put eight hens in the crate.
The Kroekers’ little girl, maybe five years old, stood by the tailgate with her chin shaking. She’d named one of them Butterscotch that very afternoon.
Colt got down on one knee in the gravel.
“She’s going back to my grandma’s house,” he told her. “That’s where she’s from. You can come see her any Saturday. I’ll show you where she sleeps.”
I counted twenty-four ones out of the coffee can.
Kim Kroeker put her free hand behind her back.
“I can’t take more than I paid.”
“You bought them fair,” I said. “You fed them, and you penned them right. I don’t want anybody out a dime because of my family. Please.”
She took it at last.
Then she walked me to the truck door and said, low, so the children wouldn’t hear, “Is your aunt all right? She seemed like she was in an awful hurry to be finished with something.”
I thought about that most of the way home.
