Prairie Evers (3 page)

I made a face. That was just silly, because crowing at dawn is the whole point of a rooster in the first place.

“They don’t want the trouble of a big bold rooster strutting around, and maybe attacking ’em, too, if they haven’t treated him right. You shouldn’t have too much trouble finding one.”

“But I wanted to raise him from when he’s a baby!”

“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry. I was surprised at how cranky he seemed, but probably he didn’t have much fun, stuck behind that counter all day. I would’ve hated that—being indoors all the time, under the bright lights, breathing trapped-inside air. I was disappointed about the rooster, but I kept my chin up. “When can I get my chicks then?”

He checked a calendar he had on the counter. “It’ll be a month for the Reds, a little more than that for the others.”

“A whole
month
?”

“For good things, you have to wait. Welcome to farming, young lady.”

I sighed, but I made my nod businesslike. “Okay then. That’s what I want. Four of each of those kinds of chicks.”

“There’s a minimum order of six per breed.”

“Six! I only want four of each, so I have twelve total.”

“Six per pickup,” he repeated. “That’s the rule. And besides, pretty often some of the chicks don’t survive. You should get a few extra anyway.”

That gave me a sinking feeling but I nodded again, determined to be professional. I could hear Grammy’s voice quoting one of her favorite sayings in my head like she was whispering in my ear:
It’s a bad plan that can’t be changed.
I said, “Okay then. I’ll take six of each, please.”

NO QUITTER

I wanted those chickens
something fierce, for Grammy’s leaving had put a big hole in my world. Finally, one morning in April, someone at the Agway called to say the first batch of chicks were in. I started hopping up and down in the middle of the living room floor. “Can we go and get them, Daddy?”

“This very minute?”

“Yes! They’re
babies
. They need to come home right away.”

Daddy had just put on his big rubber boots to go out
and begin tilling the garden, but after he leveled a kind of exasperated look at me, he sat back down and changed into his regular boots.

The same man as before was behind the counter. I told him my Rhode Island Reds were in and he led us over to a long table with cages full of chicks on them. I am not someone who normally gets real gushy, but they were
so
darling
. They were just balls of fluff on little stick legs, and it was all I could do not to start jumping up and down again.

“So these are going to be your very own baby chickens, are they, missy?” he asked as we headed back to the register.

I didn’t like his tone of voice much but I said, “Yes, sir, they are.”

He gave me a smile I didn’t think was really friendly. “I suppose you think they’ll be like a pet.”

“No, sir,” I said, though I did think that in a way. “I’m going to sell the eggs.”

He hooted. “You’ll never make any money off of these few.”

“I’ve got twelve more coming,” I reminded him. “Silver-Laced Wyandottes and Australorps.”

“Well, if you really wanted top-notch layers, you should’ve gotten Golden Comets.”

I hadn’t run across the name Golden Comets in my research or I might have ordered some—it did sound pretty. But all I said was “I ordered what I wanted.” I didn’t see that I had to be overly friendly, as he’d hardly been that to me. Daddy was
frowning—he was getting fed up with the man. But he’s not much of a talker, especially not with a stranger, and he didn’t say anything.

The man added up my total and I handed over the money my folks loaned me to get started.

“Well,” he said. “Just so you know, they’re not going to stay cute like this. They’re going to grow up, and I’ll bet a dollar you lose interest in them then. Kids always do.”

Daddy spoke up then. He looked at the man real flatlike and said, “You might be surprised, mister. My girl is no quitter. She knows her mind.”

The man gave a disbelieving laugh that Daddy didn’t hear. He’d already headed out the door to put the chicks in the truck. I didn’t tell him about it. I was too busy feeling good about how he had stuck up for me.

THE MISS NEW PALTZ

The rest of my chicks
were in three days later. “They weren’t scheduled to come until next week, but they’re here,” the man on the phone said. “Sorry about the change of plans.”

“That’s okay,” I told him kindly. As soon as I hung up the phone, I whirled around to Mama, who was washing the dishes. “Mama, the rest of the chicks are in! Can we go and get them?”

“Well—in a little bit.”

“Mama!”

“Prairie! How about helping me with these dishes and we’ll get gone sooner.”

I sighed, then went and grabbed a dishcloth.

When we got to town, Mama thought of all kinds of errands to run, and I was beside myself with impatience. I guess my fidgets got to Mama, because just as she was about to head into the grocery store parking lot, she flipped her blinker the other way and pulled into the diner across the street instead.

“I always loved this place,” she said. “It’s been here forever. How about you get a malt while I shop? Then we’ll get the chicks, I promise.”

The diner was big and silver, and it was called the Miss New Paltz. As soon as I went in, I decided it was the second thing I liked about New Paltz, New York. It had fat red booths to sit in and red stools on silver pedestals up at a long counter. The waitresses wore pale yellow dresses, the color of a store-bought egg yolk, and had name badges pinned to their chests.

The booth nearest the counter was filled with ladies drinking coffee. I looked them over once but didn’t give any thought to them. I climbed onto a stool and ordered a chocolate malted with extra malt from the waitress, whose name tag said
LOLLY
. I thought that was a funny kind of a name to drag through life. Then I thought maybe that’s why she was a nice, friendly waitress who didn’t talk at a person like she was a baby, and didn’t make a fuss over her accent either. Probably she got called “Lollipop” as a child and knew what it was like to be a fish out of water.

While I waited, I couldn’t help overhearing what the women in the booth were saying. I had my back to them, so I suppose they didn’t notice me.

One of them said, “Loren Lynn Patton is back living here now, you know, has been since last fall, though you hardly see hide nor hair of them. She came with that southern husband of hers, I don’t know his name, and their little girl. Tom told me they were in the store the other day picking up baby chicks for the girl. If that isn’t a waste of money, I don’t know what is. They can’t have two cents to rub together. Tom gets so tired of the way children always take on these projects and then lose interest.”

I had sat up real straight at the mention of my mama’s name, and I sat up even straighter at the mention of my poultry. I thought it was no wonder that the Agway man had seemed so crabby, with this mean lady waiting at home for him.

The lady went on. “It’s silly for a child to raise chickens. Loren is just foolish for encouraging her. But that’s the way she always was. No common sense. They’ll never get anywhere trying to run her folks’ farm, which is what I hear they’re doing. Going to try and live off the land or some such nonsense. She’s nothing but a dreamer.”

“Now, Anne. You know Loren was always very creative,” a soft voice said.

“Oh for pity’s sake, Erma. She named that girl of hers Meadow.”

A new voice said, “It’s a wonder the county hasn’t gone after them to get the girl put in school.”

“She probably can’t even read,” the mean one named Anne answered.

I wanted to spin around on my stool and tell her, “My mama has plenty of common sense, if it’s any of your business, which it isn’t, and my daddy’s name is Walton Evers. And I can so read, probably better than you. My grammy taught me at home and she did a good job of it. She was a schoolteacher back on Peabody Mountain in the little school they had before they built the big new one way off in town. Her mama before her taught in that same school, and we even have the big old dictionaries she used in her classroom. And my name is
Prairie
, not Meadow. There’s a big difference. If you looked it up, you’d know.”

I didn’t do it, though. I wanted to keep listening.

“What can you expect with that kind of people,” someone said. “Dirt-poor hillbillies.”

“Fiddlesticks. Loren Lynn grew up right here, and I’m sure her husband is as nice as can be,” the woman named Erma said, sounding vexed despite her gentle way of speaking.

“Well, I don’t see what—” the one named Anne began and then stopped short. I looked over my shoulder, and there was Mama coming in. Guilty, I thought, flashing them a look. Guilty, guilty, guilty. I thought that of all except the soft-voiced one—Erma—but she should’ve chosen her friends better. I marched past them without another glance as we went out the
door. I would not deign to give them one speck of notice. I was sure that was what Grammy would advise. I didn’t tell Mama about them either. I didn’t want to make her sad.

The fact is that those ladies were wrong about everything they said. Grammy taught me more than most kids learn going to regular school (which I know because the neighbor kids on Peabody Mountain were always behind me in their studies
and
they had to ride the bus an hour to school each day, which as Grammy said was a pure waste of time for a young person). Mama and Daddy carried on with my schooling right where she left off, and while maybe they didn’t have quite her knack of making every last thing in the world interesting, they did not slack off in keeping my studies going.

They were right to help get me started in the chicken business too. How many of those ladies had a flock of good laying hens, plus maybe even a handsome rooster, like I was going to? I’d bet zero.

RAISING BABIES

Raising babies
wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. Being in charge of six chicks was alarming enough, but once I had all eighteen of them in the brooder we found in the barn—a brooder is just a box with a lightbulb in it to keep the chicks warm—things got really hectic. For one thing, I couldn’t tell the Australorps from the Wyandottes. They all looked the same—black and white—and none of them looked quite like their pictures. Besides that, they were all so busy toddling about and cheeping that I didn’t have a prayer of keeping them straight anyway.

Even that first night, when I only had the Reds, I could hardly sleep. Were they too warm or too cold? Had they gotten enough to eat? Had they somehow blundered into their water dish and spilled it all over? They’d catch their deaths of damp and cold if that was so. I kept leaping up to check on them, and one time I was convinced they were dead, every last one. I went running for Mama and Daddy, but it turned out they were fine—just sleeping splayed out in deathlike poses.

“You all have broken my heart into smithereens already,” I told them sternly, but they didn’t seem to be listening.

Another thing I discovered is that chickens poop a lot, a truth that my research had not prepared me for. It takes a considerable amount of changing to keep their bedding clean, or even cleanish. Daddy said chickens produced the best fertilizer you could hope for and he’d get good use out of it in the gardens, but that didn’t make me like it any better.