Flight (14 page)

“Hey,” he says, trying to be jovial. “What’s the country good for if not a nice dead chicken.”

Margaret glances at him quickly, then looks at the parcel on her lap. “I hate those factory-farmed chickens,” she says. “Did you know they cut off their beaks so they won’t peck each other to death?”

Will can’t tell if she’s making conversation or if a lecture is in the offing. He doesn’t want the friendly mood spoiled with a tirade about the evils of commercial food production. No one hates factory farms more than he does.

“So whatever happened to those chickens of ours?” he says. “I can’t remember.”

Margaret stares. “You don’t remember what happened to the chickens?”

Will doesn’t, but her surprise stirs a vague memory of something bad.

“We lost them, right?” he says. “But I don’t remember how it came about.”

Margaret looks back at her lap. “We had them for one summer,” she says. “Mom was planning to start a baked-goods business with the eggs. But those dogs from the Wagners’ came down the street and killed them all. All at once.”

“The Wagner dogs?” Will frowns.

“Yeah, the Wagner dogs. A hound and a little mutt. The chickens were out, and the dogs came into the yard and caught them all. They didn’t eat them, they just grabbed each chicken and sort of shredded it. For the fun of it. Then they ran on to catch the next one.”

“I don’t have any memory of this,” Will says.

“No,” Margaret agrees. “I don’t think you were home.”

“Was Leanne there?”

“Leanne was there. She and I stood on the porch and watched, and Mom chased the dogs all around the yard with a rake, yelling, ‘Bad dogs, bad dogs!’ like they were trampling her roses or something. But they just kept going until every bird was dead.”

Will knows he must have heard this story before, but it seems new to him. Perhaps he’s heard it only from Carol’s perspective, filled with acrimony and claims about how
this
was exactly the reason they didn’t belong in the country. He might not have listened carefully.

“What happened then?” he asks.

“Mom sent me to the garage for a rope, and she and I caught the dogs.”

“Were you scared?”

Margaret shrugs. “They weren’t actually vicious or anything. They came up to us, friendly as anything, once the chickens were all dead.” She looks out the window. “I remember the little mutt was a pale color, and he had blood staining the fur around his mouth. But he just sat there and wagged his tail like he was Benji or something.”

“What then?”

She glances over. “You must remember this. We killed them.”

“You killed the dogs?”

“Well, we had them killed. We took them to animal control and told them they were chicken-killing strays, and they put them to sleep.”

“Weren’t the Wagners mad at us?” This he would have remembered, surely.

Margaret laughs once, a short, bitter exhalation. “The Wagners?” she says. “They weren’t exactly intellectuals. We went over there and told them their dogs had killed our chickens, and she—Mrs. Wagner, I guess—stood behind the screen door and said, ‘You folks’d better shoot the motherfuckers, then. Them dogs got the taste of blood now.’” Margaret affects a rural midwestern accent for this, and Will is surprised at how convincingly it comes out.

Will shakes his head. “Where was I?” he says, more to himself than to her.

“At work, I’m sure,” Margaret says. She puts her hand to her face again, and Will thinks the story is over. He wonders if she’s expecting him to apologize for not being there, or for forgetting.

“The really weird thing,” she says, “is that afterward, when the chickens were dead, we were walking around the yard to collect their bodies, what was left of them, and they had laid all their eggs.” He can feel her looking at him, and he keeps his eyes on the road. “They must have done it out of fear or something, because there were eggs everywhere in the grass. Big ones, and then the ones that weren’t quite ready to be laid—almost full size but a little soft. And then smaller, softer ones. And then even smaller, little white eyeballs, and then teeny-tiny ones. Like caviar, just scattered in the grass.”

Will frowns. Margaret’s story has reminded him of a game he once played.
Ad misericordia
. It means “for sympathy”: you tell a story in order to try to gain sympathy. He played it in Vietnam. He shakes his head, expelling the memory. “People and their damn dogs,” he says.

Margaret laughs that short bitter laugh again. “Didn’t you ever wonder,” she says, “why Leanne and I never asked to get a dog? We both hated them after that.”

No one is around when they get home. Margaret goes into the kitchen with the chicken clutched to her. The package is warm. Behind her, Will deposits the rest of the groceries on the counter.

“Thanks,” she says. Her voice wavers slightly, but she doesn’t think he notices. Where’s Trevor? Why didn’t he come running when he heard them drive up?

“Okay,” Will says. He goes out to the living room, and she can hear him turning on the news.

There are soft voices coming from the basement. Margaret goes to the head of the stairs and listens. Her heart expands with relief
when she hears Trevor’s voice. He’s explaining something in exhaustive four-year-old detail.

“Hey, down there,” she calls. “How are things?”

“Just fine,” Carol’s voice comes back.

The knot of anxiety that burned Margaret’s stomach all the way to the store and back lessens. She vows not to leave the house again without Trevor. She just feels funny when she’s separated from him. What if David should show up after all?

“Do you need some help up there?” Carol’s voice is slightly sleepy.

“No, I’m fine. You guys stay down there and have fun.” Margaret goes back to grocery bags. She prefers to have the kitchen to herself when she cooks.

She unpacks the groceries and puts the ingredients she needs for gumbo out on the counter. The first and hardest part is making the roux. She feels almost cheerful at the prospect. There’s something satisfying about cooking: following the instructions, chopping and measuring and blending. It’s a neat, controlled process, each step creating something new out of raw ingredients, until you end with something entirely other, a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

She opens up Peterson’s brown paper package. The chicken lies there in a pose of limp abandon. It was alive half an hour ago, walking around the barn. Ted has taken off the head but left the feet on. Margaret goes to her mother’s knife drawer in hopes of finding a cleaver.

Something about the chicken story is still nagging at her. She remembers it exactly as she told her father, but there’s more. After the chickens, she never quite saw herself or her father in quite the same way again.

The first time she and Leanne gathered the eggs, Margaret got to the chicken coop first. The rooster and a few hens were clucking around on the floor, scratching back and forth. The other five hens were tucked into their boxes, like eggs in a carton themselves.

“How do we know they’ve laid their eggs?” Leanne asked. Margaret lifted her shoulder carelessly, reaching for the basket their mother had given them.

“They just have.” She was a little scared of the chickens, but she didn’t want Leanne to know it. They had glittery eyes like tiny black beetles, and pointy hard beaks. They didn’t blink. Their feathers were beautiful: brown and white and burgundy and a deep greenish black color, but up close, the birds were alarming. The way they looked at her made her think they were plotting against her.

Holding the basket in one hand, she walked up to one of the hens, a brown and white one that seemed less intense than the others. Margaret clucked softly, trying to act like she knew what she was doing.

Leanne went over to another hen, slipping her hand under it without hesitation. “Hey!” she cried, surprised and joyful. “There’s two eggs under here!” She held one up in triumph.

Not to be outdone, Margaret slid a hand under her hen. Its feathers were soft and its body squishy underneath, unlike chicken on your plate. It felt good beneath the hen; it would be nice to be a little chick there. Her hand moved through the slippery straw until she came upon a hard, warm egg. She pulled it out. The hen regarded her without seeming to notice that anything had changed.

After that, it was like Easter Sunday. They went from hen to hen, pulling out the eggs and putting them carefully in the basket.

“Wow,” breathed Leanne. “Our own eggs.”

They made the chickens go outside, as they had been told to do, and took the eggs inside to their mother.

“Look at these eggs!” Carol exclaimed. “They really are excellent, aren’t they?” She held one up to the light and admired it. “We could really do something with these.”

Margaret finds a cleaver in her mother’s drawer. She lines the chicken up on the cutting board and brings the cleaver down as hard as she can. There’s a satisfyingly loud thud, and she’s holding a foot in her hand. It’s golden, the color of chicken stock, and lined with tiny scales. In a dim-sum place in San Francisco, she and David once ate chicken feet. They were visiting a Chinese
friend who joked that chicken feet separated real foodies from amateurs, so they had to try them. Both Margaret and David claimed to like the feet, but Margaret remembers being unimpressed. It was like the last joint of a wing: bony, with little threads of meat. She sets the foot on the counter.

Not long after they brought the chickens home, Margaret went out to the coop alone. She watched the chickens and thought about the roast chicken their mother made, how she and Leanne liked to eat crispy, burned pieces of skin off the bottom of the pan. There was one chicken she liked especially, a brick red hen she and Leanne had named Rose. She watched Rose peck along the floor. Underneath her feathers there was skin.

“Are you delicious?” she asked the hen. She wondered if they would eat her one day. When she had asked their father, he just laughed and said the chickens were young and would lay good eggs for years, so there was no need to think of eating them now.

Looking back, she knows she didn’t want to eat Rose. But part of her did, wanted to grab Rose and squeeze her thigh, find the part she would bite into. But when she thought of her father catching Rose, she felt different. Growing up on a real working farm, their father had killed chickens. Sometimes he joked about how a chicken would run around the yard with no head, and Margaret would feel a hard white anger against him, something akin to hate.

She remembers nursing that feeling. Sometimes she would get a strange desire to hate him, and she would bring to mind things he had done, like killing chickens. Surely he had killed people, too—he had fought in Vietnam. In high school she got interested and read several books about Vietnam: that was when she started loving history. But she didn’t talk to him about it. He had never spoken of the war, so no one brought it up. It was hard even to imagine. Instead, when she wanted to hate him, she would recall something that happened on a family trip to Mexico. Her mother was lying down because she didn’t feel well, and her father wanted to go and get sodas at the village store to calm her stomach. He asked Margaret if she wanted to go with him.

They walked down the middle of the street to the tiny store. The heat beat down on them from above and rose up again from the road. Inside the store, it was dark and cooler. Margaret stayed close to her father’s side. As he was paying for the Cokes, Margaret saw a young boy in the store. He was about Margaret’s age but skinny in his baggy shorts. He was coming toward them, saying something in Spanish and holding out his hands, begging. Margaret remembers freezing as she looked at him, because one of his hands wasn’t a hand at all but a twisted thing, like a bird claw. It had two tiny deformed fingers that curved toward each other like pincers. It wasn’t even where a hand should be, but higher up, right after his elbow.

Now she can imagine the possibilities: thalidomide, industrial waste, poor pre-natal care. The boy is a symbol for her now, of corporate greed, injustice, the appalling callousness of the first world for the third. Thinking of him makes her angry in an abstract, distant way. Then her horror was more direct. She stared at the boy, appalled, until her father pulled her out the door. He kept a hand on her shoulder as they silently walked back to the hotel, and as she stumbled along beside him, Margaret began to feel angry, not at the things she knows to be angry at now but at her father. She hated him so much she almost wept with disgust. She wanted to tell him to go back and give the boy some change, but something in the way he walked made it clear that he would never do that. Margaret hated him for his certainty, hated him more completely than she had ever hated anyone, even Leanne when they fought. She hated him like the chickens must have hated him, a grubby farm boy, when he grappled them onto the block.

That day in the chicken coop, she watched Rose, and she thought of how her father had lifted the chicken out of the crate and tossed her lightly to the ground. All of them, even Margaret, even Leanne, had the power of life and death over the chickens. They fed them, let them live in their coop. Someday they might decide to kill them.

“I think you are delicious,” Margaret whispered to Rose. She
said it with a mean tone in her voice. She said it like something the chicken didn’t want to know but had to.

Once she has the feet off and the few remaining feathers plucked, Margaret cuts up the chicken. She takes off the legs, then the wings, then separates the breast from the back. She drops the back and wings into a bowl to make stock later, then cuts the rest into smaller pieces, dividing the breast in half lengthwise and crosswise, splitting the thighs apart from the drumsticks at the knuckly joint. She sets the chicken pieces aside and gets the shrimp out of the fridge. She heats up oil and adds flour to make her roux. She has even found okra in Ryville, which surprised her. It’s going to be a good gumbo. They’ll all sit down together for dinner: her parents, Leanne and Kit, soon to be her brother-in-law, and herself with Trevor. They’ll have a wonderful meal, and David won’t feel like an absence, or a presence, either. This is their family now.