Eliza Eddy

That whole summer she slept with her windows open just in case. Just in case the fit went on for a while, and she’d have to get up and walk the old and lanky horse out of the corral and up the road in her nightgown, with a puffy coat, the moon the only light washing everything blue, like a thin milk brushed atop a crust — the horse, the road cut through the crowding thickets. Her.

Mer walked along the bottom of the valley in her chore boots, her bare feet gripping the thin, chewed up insoles that bunched under her toes as she and the horse walked in step. The hem of her nightgown moving at her knees, the swishing of the horse’s tail, small whispers of a wind in the still night. There was nakedness, a pureness to the routine. A privacy between two animals walking side by side in the middle of the night.

Up and down the road Mer would walk the retired quarter horse with the clouded blue eyes and mottled brown coat, a thick line down the center of his back an angled brush of a wide marker — a dun, his coloring — until he worked the indigestion out. Sometimes they only had to walk a short distance, other times a bit further to the mailboxes a mile down the road. She often wondered, when making those walks, if for those animals that were awake in the deep Montana woods, such a sight of a woman walking a horse in the middle of the night would be so out of the ordinary, ghostly, that it somehow protected the pair. An apparition, a dream, the predators might tell themselves. And remain on their haunches.

But last night she hadn’t heard anything from the corral or the woods, the hills that cupped the tight valley. No coughing from the old horse; no shrieks of mountain lions, no huffing of wolves. Though in the morning, when Mer woke, she had the feeling something wasn’t right. Reaching out, she felt the vacated space beside her, the sheets still warm, soft from weight in the same place over time.

Stepping over the dog as she got out of bed, Mer grabbed a sweater and walked outside. Morning air met her with a chill, and she wished she were still encased in the warm vacuum of her bed. The air had slowly been changing from the dry sucking heat of summer to thinner fall air, and it was clearer, brisk. It had startled to smell cold, which she remembered she loved. Unmown grass wet and cold on her bare feet, she squished a bit of mud between her toes as she walked. Plucked a cone of clover caught between her toes, twirled it in her fingers.

            She stumbled suddenly, feeling something hard underfoot. A plastic animal, an ape. Continuing to walk, a zebra. Giraffe. Then, horns of a goat stabbed the web between her first and second toe. Clutching the toy in the curl of her toes, she drew it up like a crane pulling a fish from water, flinging it out into the lawn. Wincing, she looked around: a massacre of fallen plastic animals, at least half of the girls’ collection. “Girls!” she cried out, though they were still asleep in their rooms upstairs and wouldn’t hear even if their windows were open.

Nine and seven, they slept like bears, their hair tangled nets under which somehow, they got enough air. Since they were babies, she had brushed the bridges of their noses to get them to fall asleep. Quick, light sweeps up between their eyebrows, until they could no longer keep their eyes open. The eyes, shut, looked like two halves of small fine shells, like the ones Mer and the girls collected in the dark, loamy soil of the hills near their house. This used to be ocean, girls, Mer would say, spreading her fingers, making her hands large, raising them slowly as if she were lifting a large box above her head. Before the mountains rose up from inside the earth bringing the shells with them. The girls’ eyes getting bigger as Mer’s hands rose, suddenly she’d tousle the hair of one of them, and pull a shell from behind the girl’s ear. Tah Dah!

She’d have to rouse them herself.

            Lumpy shapes of something larger caught her eye. She bunched the sides of her nightgown in her fists, tiptoeing, she walked to the edge of the lawn.

            Eight chickens laid perfectly still; mounds still as discarded forgotten dolls. Like the ones the girls left in the living room after whatever play they had been engaged in, including swapping heads or bodies, the birds were headless. Their wings neat at their sides. Their yellow feet hung limp from grey shanks. What was this lawn of hers but a repository of abandoned things?

Shadow swept the lawn, and she looked up. Blocking the slow-rising sun as they scanned, the first hawks to arrive, heads tilted, beaks at an angle to the earth, their shade briefly rendered the carcasses the color of bruised fruit. Was this you? Mer, hand over brow, following the birds as they wound their way away from her, climbing columns of warm air. She’d heard once the terms kettles, boils, for multitudes of hawks riding the thermals and the image was beautiful to her: a steam of birds climbing, righting themselves when knocked about by changes in pressure. She took a large breath, tucked the sides of her nightgown into her underwear.

            By then, John had come out to the deck, put his mug of coffee on the railing, leaned over, and seen his wife in her nightgown, barefoot and high stepping around the decapitated birds. The hood of her sweater over her head, her long blond hair falling in front of her, like a forest child, a field nurse walking gently among the dead.

            Mary, the oldest girl, came out on the deck next. “Daddy, what is it?” Anna followed. “No, girls, go back inside,” he said, ushering them back inside.

“Weasels,” he mouthed to Mer.

“Huh?” squinting up at him.

John cupped his hands and shouted:

“Weasels!” His tie snagged on a splinter on the railing, he pulled at it carefully, tucked it inside his shirt. “I have a meeting. I have to go!”

             Her gown filling with air at her sides as she marched, Mer looked like a genie in short balloon pants. Headless birds, a million miniature plastic animals, Mer barefoot wove among it all, quietly cursing, I have to go…It had been both their idea to buy land, build a house — I didn’t come to Montana to live in a city, Mer had said, and he’d agreed. But this…had I signed up for this? She began collecting the toys in the pouch at the front of her nightgown. Doing everything she could to not think of Mr. Mr.

*

Just the week before, they had gotten rid of a tall, lanky white rooster. Foghorn Leghorn type.

Earlier in the year, April, Mer and the girls had gone to the feed store. It was Chick Days, the yearly event when the store brought in chicks, ducklings, bunnies, and the town came whether they were buying or not, everyone imagining themselves a bona fide rancher, homesteader. A full coop already, there hadn’t been a need for more, but Mer, like the others circling the tanks, couldn’t help but look. Leaving their cart at the end of the aisle with the dog food, they walked into the makeshift nursery.

Oval stock tanks turned brooders stacked two high on the scaffolding and ran the length of two aisles. Soft cheeps gave the space a warmish murmur. The glow from heat lamps cast a pinkish tone to the white floors. Strayed birds trapped after flying through the automatic doors of the store’s entrance flew between the metal ceiling trusses, dropping to perch atop the scaffolding.

            “Momma, look at this one,” Anna called on her tiptoes from the end of the aisle, hair pouring over the tank. “She’s all alone.”

            Mer looked in. A pale-yellow chick stood at one end, pecking at the side. Shards of aluminum flecked the shavings on the floor of the brooder.

“Aww…can we take her?” Mary softly begged, sticking her hand into the tank. “She’s all alone.”

            “I think we have plenty, Mary. We’re just looking, remember?” Mer said, and circling her daughter’s wrist, she lifted out the girl’s arm.

            “Hey, don’t reach into the tank. Thanks.”

Mer turned her head as the employee in the store’s brown vest and Wrangler jean uniform came down the aisle, glints from rhinestones on the toes of the woman’s boots ricocheted off the aluminum tanks making Mer blink. “But if you’d like him, you can have him,” the woman said lifting the chick out, picking shavings from its chest. “For free. You look like a good home,” she added, winking at Mer.

             “Him?” Mary asked.

            “Yep. A he. Boy. One of the last roosters sent with the chicks to keep them warm in transit from the hatchery.”

            “You ship roosters as packing material? Like popcorn peanuts?” Tables have turned. When did males get so disposable?

            “Mm-hmm.” The chick hopped between her hands.

“Oh my god. Seriously?” Mer continued.

“What’s going to happen to him?” Mary asked, bouncing on her toes.

            “Well…” the woman said, looking to Mer, eyebrows raised.

            “We’ll take him.” And Mer immediately turned to the shelves behind her, grabbing packets of electrolyte, mash. A heat lamp. “Mary, get the cart.” Packing material, my god, forgetting for the moment how past roosters had played out.

One spring, six of seven chicks were roosters and their brother-in-law, a bird hunter, came and “pantsed” them. Quick, easy, he’d said, dusting his gloved hands after dressing the birds. Mer put them in the freezer in the basement thinking she’d try coq au vin. She’d forgotten about them until after a power outage, and a terrible stink rose through the floor vents. John went down with a kitchen bag and brought them to the dump. Another time, feeling it was more humane, he dropped their beautiful, yet mean, green-bellied, buff-winged rooster off at a trailhead at sunset, coming home eyes red — That was terrible — saying next time a rooster had to go it was for Mer to do.

            “Yippee,” Mary said. Braids swinging against her back, sneakers squeaking across the linoleum as she ran for the cart.

“Great,” the woman said, and handed the chick to Anna while she got the carrying box. Scratching a “1x chick/FREE” on the box, she added “ROOSTER” in fat sharpie. “In case any questions at checkout.”

            “Look momma,” Anna said. The chick had settled in her palm, tucked his wings into his side, closed his eyes. His nostrils on his beak mere specks, dots of a pen. Anna petted him gently like a puppy. Mer stroked his putty-colored body, feeling his small, shallow breathing. Be nice, okay? “Okay Anna, put him in the box now” A ceiling bird flew low above Mer’s head, and she felt her hair lift.

            Mer had always liked watching the hens pecking in the lawn for bugs — Life! — or in the manure in the corral. The spreading of their wings as they rolled in open pans of dirt. It disturbed her slightly when they bathed. Their third lens a film, sliding across their eyes to keep dust out; the maneuvering and contorting of their bodies, there was something slightly erotic about it, and she wondered if she shouldn’t be watching. When they ran across the yard, heads bent and wings spread, they reminded her of a congregation of nuns.

            The eggs were delicious. The yolks a deep orange, almost red. If too many, she threw them against nearby trees, liking the clacking they made against the tree, shells splintering, creamy orange thick and running down the nubbed, scaled bark. A metallic tang blooming in the air. Ants would come immediately; it was so satisfying watching the ants slow when meeting the sticky slurry. Studying world religion in college, Mer read about a monastery in Greece — Mt. Athos — where only men were allowed entrance. The only female animals they kept were cats for mousing, hens for their eggs, whose yolks were used for painting deities. An ardent feminist (she’d later been the editor of her law school’s journal of law and gender) it unnerved her that no women were allowed. Yet, she appreciated simple rules sometimes, when things could be black and white. A yes or no question.

The girls took turns stroking the chick’s nappy, pre-feathered coat, making him jump over their fingers as they drove home. Mer had been caught off-guard, flattered. You look like a good home, and the heat rose again in her cheeks.

Over the next few weeks, they’d pick up the chick from the brooder they’d fashioned out an old doll cradle of Mer’s that her mother sent out, insisting on keeping it on the floor outside their rooms. They freshened his water, cleared shavings from his mash, dressed him in scraps of fabric, tissue from the bathroom. “Silly Anna, he’s a boy,” Mary said to Anna when she’d dressed him in a bonnet, a strapless dress, a wrap. When it was her turn, Mary carefully made trousers around his toothpick legs, twisting the ends into hems.

            The rooster became Mister. Then Mr. Mr. after one of the girls began calling — Oh, Mr. Mr. Here I come! — and it’d stuck. This made Mer laugh, thinking of the eighties band she and her friends would listen to with their eyes closed in someone’s damp basement, pulling pretend cigarettes from their lips. The lyrics a little too over their heads, yet convinced they’d felt so much meaning.

Mr. Mr. tolerated the handling with only a few nips at the outfits, or at the girls’ fingers. They pushed him in the doll stroller. Put him in their doll house (Mer’s too) where he walked from room to room, pecking at the ceramic plates of food — a golden-brown roast turkey, vegetables, cake. He’s a giant! A gentle giant! the girls exclaimed, giggling as he walked past the dolls folded in their chairs at the dining table, ducking his head into the sitting room, pecking at the tufted-backed chairs arranged in front of the fire.

When Mr. Mr. outgrew the cradle and no longer fit through doorways in the doll house, the girls made him a larger brooder from an appliance box, cutting doors to accommodate his height and width. They drew in rugs, paintings. Appliances and domestic animals. Doorbells and televisions. They’d recently visited Frontier Town, a living history museum with their school, and cauldrons hung over fires, stacks of logs scribbled with fat crayons.

“We’re making him feel at home,” said Mary.

“Aww, does he have to go outside?” Anna pleaded.

Mr. Mr. did go outside and made it out there a few months before becoming so protective of his new brood that Mer couldn’t get to the coop without reinforcements. She’d started taking the dog, but after Mr. Mr. jumped on his back, pecked at his neck, the dog eventually refused and wouldn’t leave the porch. She took to bringing a shovel with her, but one morning when Mr. Mr. heard her approaching, he ran out cheek tufts and neck feathers flared, and she tripped over the shovel, fell on the step and chipped a tooth.

He’d even gone after the old horse once when it had gotten too close to the hens, pecking at its ankles as it hobbled down to the lower pasture.

She excused Mr. Mr. initially: he was just being protective, doing his job. She had watched him stand down a hawk from the coop door, clear a skunk coming for eggs. She remembered his small light-yellow body, alone in the tank at the feed store, his walking through the doll house dressed in bath tissue, the girls squealing, until one morning she came out on the deck and found the girls leaning over the railing.

“What’s he doing?” Anna asked. “He’s not being nice.”

Mr. Mr. was on the back of a crouched hen, biting her neck, feathers flying.

“Boys will be boys,” Mary answered.

“Mary, what did you just say? Where did you hear that?” Mer asked, turning the girl around.

“Mary May?”

“One of my teachers said that. In the hall. A boy was pulling at the back of a girl’s shirt. Snapping her bra. And I heard the teacher say that to another teacher. And that’s what boys do when they like girls — they’re mean to them.”

            Mr. Mr. stood, shook out his feathers. The squawking ceased. Mer could hear the horse idly pulling at grass in the pasture. She could hear the flapping wings of large birds above her.

“It’s a little different, Mare-bear,” fluffing her hair.

Mer thought she had a few more years before the birds and the bees, a few more years after that for talk of consensual sex, rape. Pleasure. How to explain that sex isn’t always violent. It never should be. When her beloved, once docile rooster, had become a monster before her eyes?

            She needed a minute.

She had come into puberty in the eighties where the objectification of women was blatant and outright. When cultural appropriation was a term that hadn’t left academic circles. The front of a Land o’ Lakes butter package hung on the fridge at her aunt’s house, the knees of the Native American woman removed and cut into her chest for breasts, hidden by a flap scored into the box. Mer would lift the flap to sneak a peek at her breasts, feeling sheepish. She learned about male and female physiology, how babies were made, from the rosy-cheeked gnomes in the book in her grandmother’s living room. She picked up on the sexual innuendo from the collection of New Yorker cartoons her grandmother cut and pasted into an annual book at Christmas time, bound by the same red yarn her grandmother tied into her braids, and left on the chest in the bathroom. Not from her parents.

This is not how I am going to raise my daughters.

That night Mer put an ad on Craigslist: Free rooster to a GOOD home and received an almost immediate reply: We’d like him, please.

Please, well that’s a good sign.

The next morning, she made pancakes and squeezed fresh juice for the girls.

“We’re not getting rid of him,” she said to Mary, “We’re re-homing him, sweetheart.” And went to get dressed. Put on her heavy denim work pants, layered on three shirts. Her mother was visiting, and helped clean up, getting the girls ready.

Mer met John by the front door as he was getting ready to leave.

“Your mother can help catch him,” John said. “I can’t, I have a meeting. Sorry!” kissing Mer on the cheek.

“I can do what now?” Mer’s mother responded from the kitchen, turning her head from braiding Anna’s hair to look at her daughter.

“And it’s your turn. Remember?” John grabbed his coat off the hook, kissed Mer again.

             Mer found a box in the garage, the one that had been Mr. Mr.’s playhouse. With the dog leashed to her waist, holding the box in front of her, she walked to the coop. Banging, some knocks, and Mr. Mr. ran out, head low, wings fanned. The dog dragged on the leash, but Mer stood. Okay, I’m ready. Come to me, young man.

“Got you,” Mer placed the box on top of Mr. Mr., rolled the box on its side, feathers protruded from windows added in the renovation, then quickly folded the flaps. A bit of battering against the box, then silence. She unleashed the dog. Wiping her forehead with her shoulder, she walked the box to the car, went inside to get her mother and the girls.

            When they arrived at the determined meeting spot, a beat-up white Four Runner was waiting for them at the pullout. All four doors opened at the same time, and four women emerged, all in acid-washed denim, oversized t-shirts, looking rough, hard-up. A fifth woman remained in the car, looking over her shoulder through the open rear window with a scowl – WTF? What are we doing here? Mer wondering the same thing.

“Momma,”, said Mary in a small squeak from the backseat, “Who are these people?”

Mer didn’t answer, stepped out of the car. One of the women was approaching. She read the print on the woman’s faded pink shirt: I never argue, I just explain why I’m right.

            Mer walked to the rear of the car and opened the trunk. It smelled hot, like fear — heavy and moist. She lifted the box, and the rooster shifted to one side, tilting it in her hands. Righting the box, she opened the folded flaps some. He needs a bit more air.

            Mr. Mr. sprung out with as much punch as a Jack-in-the box, and Mer almost dropped the box. Flying a few feet, he landed in the middle of the road, instantly looking small. By then a couple of cars had come to the stop sign at the junction of the two roads, and Mr. Mr. ran and tucked himself under a compact car with out-of-state plates. A UPS truck, the driver Mer recognized as theirs, was behind the wheel of his van, laughing. Suddenly this was a show. Mer could hear the cloying music of a carnival.

Don’t move, Mer mouthed to the driver of the car where Mr. Mr. cowered. She walked across the road, then knelt and began to coax Mr. Mr. out — “Here, chick chick. Come on, chick chick,” slapping the hot asphalt. He looked back at her, eyes pinning. She’d seen videos of people hypnotizing chickens, drawing the birds into a trance by pulling a pencil, a stick from their beak out in a straight line. The birds could be hypnotized for thirty minutes. She patted her pockets. Nothing. Her elbows and knees hurt from the nubby road. The window rolled down, and a voice called out, “Need help?”

Mer broke the rooster’s stare to answer. “Maybe?” And Mr. Mr. dashed out the other side of the car towards the highway.

            Mer jumped up. Run, Mr. Mr.! she called in her head. Run! A large cattle truck passed on the highway, the noise stopping him. He turned and began running back towards Mer. She crouched, reached her arms out, and caught his bony body, lifted him up. The out-of-state car driver, Mer could see, was moved. The UPS driver honked.

            Mer felt like crying. In that moment when Mr. Mr. was at the highway’s edge, she’d wanted him to run, find his own freedom. Clean her hands of the outcome. Now, it was all she could do to not put him back in the box, load him up and go home. Pray for the best. But the jam she’d created, the inconvenience foisted on others. She had to follow through with what she came here to do.

            She walked slowly with the bird in her hands, holding him tight so he wouldn’t fly. Her fingers latched underneath she could feel the tiny bones of his ribs. His heart pounded. He felt hot, and her hands began to itch. He was an ugly bird: patches of bald spots in his white feathers, his comb, pallid, the color of old elastic. But she felt tenderness, love even, for him. He didn’t peck at her which made her feel worse. The backed-up traffic started moving. The UPS truck drove by and the driver gave her a thumb’s up through his open door. She replied with a weak smile. This was victory?

The woman in the pink shirt approached with a box. Mer continued past her. As she walked by her car, she saw the girls with their hands pressed to the window. Their faces, side by side in the frame, worked into a silent fright. Fingertips suctioned to the glass like the webbed feet of African dwarf frogs they once kept.

            What am I doing? She stopped and turned. Her mother leaned out the window — “Mer?” She could see the girls now wedged between the front seats, smudges of shadow.

            Mer walked to the woman at the back of her truck, tailgate down, box open. She could feel the irritated stares of the others. Who were these women? Without eye contact, Mer plopped Mr. Mr. in, tucked the flaps, tapped the top of the box with two fingers. Walked to the car. Drove away.

            It was silent for a time. Though she could hear muffles, shifts from the backseat, Mer tried to keep What have I done? to herself. She hoped they were going to eat him but had the bad feeling he was going to be subjected to something much worse.

            Until her mother started:

“You know, back home, people just rent chickens.”

“What did you say?” Mer looked over at her mother.

“People that come for the summer, they rent chickens. The lady gives them the coop,feed, everything. Fertilized eggs even, timed to hatch when the grandchildren arrive. At the end of the summer, poof, they go back to the lady. The summer people go home.”

            Mer could see her mother’s hands in a washing gesture out of the corner of her eye.

“Mom, that’s bullshit.”

“Meredith! Is it?”

“You can’t just keep chickens and give them away when you’re through with them.

That’s too easy. Too convenient.”

“Why not? Seems perfect to me. Guaranteed no roosters. They disappear, they die, they get replaced.”

“No, it’s not right. It’s performative. For show.”

“Mer, how is that any different from what’s going on here?”

“Mom…” Gripping the steering wheel, she stared at the center line, going a bit cross-eyed. Her head hurt. “He was a rooster.”

“Still, Meredith. My goodness.”

*

That was all last week, and after Mer had cleaned up the yard, given the hens a quick burial while the girls were at school, and John had told her about the hunting tactics of weasels — They kill for blood, not flesh — she stirred a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove, Mr. Mr. still on her mind. The girls in the other room in some imaginary play. They’d sifted for gold, mined for sapphires, watched as women pounded wheat kernels into flour at Frontier Town, and they’d not stopped with their own reenactments of prairie living on the floor.

“I kind of liked Mr. Mr. He wasn’t that bad,” John said, coming over.

Mer jumped. “What did you just say? Why are you bringing up Mr. Mr.?” Grabbed

John’s finger as he reached into the pot.

“Yikes. Just wanted a taste.”

“Nope.” Mer pushed his hand away. “Too hot.”

She gave the sauce another stir. Lit the stove beneath the pasta water then heard Anna cry from the living room:

“Noooooo… Stop it. I don’t want to…”

Churn, churn make some butter for a little bad girl’s supper. Anna’s mad, and I’m glad I know what to please her, Mary sang, sticking a long wooden spoon at Anna.

“No, I don’t want that,” Anna cried.

“Just a taste. It’s not bad. Promise,” Mary coaxed.

“Mary May, stop it. Stop it right now,” Mer yelled from the kitchen.

“I’m just pretending,” Mary called back.

“What has gotten into them? It’s been like this all week.”. Mer dropped the pasta into the boiling water.

“Well, you did just give away their favorite pet,” John said, leaning against the island, holding a drink. “What did you expect?”

Mer stood body square to the stove. Curls of steam rose from the pasta. She started to feel light, floaty. She took a slotted spoon and lifted the pasta sticking to the bottom of the pot, the starched liquid draining slowly through holes. She dipped the spoon into the sauce, turned to John, and slapped him with it on the soft pooch of his belly, leaving a splotch of chunky warm sauce on his white sateen shirt. How dare you.

Later, after John and the girls had gone to bed, Mer got online and went to Craigslist. Typed in, Hens Wanted to the search box.

“Rent-a-chickens,” she scoffed.

Tomorrow evening, after everyone was asleep, Mer would go and pick up eight hensfrom a woman east of town whose flock was being decimated. By racoons, I think, the woman would say to Mer. I want them to go to a good home. Mer wouldn’t tell her why she was getting chickens — to replace the ones she’d lost to the weasel because last week she had given away Mr. Mr. — but that she was a good home. And that she could do hard things. That, she would keep to herself.

She would come home, grab a headlamp, the light of which creating a small cone of light directly in front of her, and carefully walk the chickens down to the coop. Put them in before anyone knew any different. Water, food, refilled; coop cleaned earlier in the day. The heat lamp releasing the smell of pine from the freshened shavings.

Mer would reach and touch the old horse leaning against the coop, his large body flexing the screen. Coat pressing through the grid of tight mesh. “You watch over these ladies, ok?” and pat him. “You’re a good boy. Treats in the morning.”

Up above, unable to sleep, the girls together in Mary’s bed looking out the window. From Mary’s room, the corner of the corral where the chicken coop sat in plain sight, the girls, cross-legged, huddled under the blanket, would watch their mother. The light of her headlamp, though small, sending intermittent beams of light out into the dark.