Prairie Evers (4 page)

Also, the chicks were rambunctious in a way that no amount of reading could have shown me. They bullied and fought, and I admit it alarmed me. I didn’t know when I should step in and when I should let them work things out themselves. I wasn’t sure if they were playing or if they were really going to hurt each other, especially since the Reds were a tiny bit bigger and stronger than the others, being just that little bit older.

I wrote to Grammy telling her my worries—we were always writing letters back and forth because Great-Uncle Tecumseh didn’t have a phone—and she wrote back and said I had to do
the best I could and hope it worked out. Her advice sounded calm, but it was not so easy. Every time I turned around, there was some new cause for worry, and once in a while I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

It was sad sometimes, too, for it was true what the man at the Agway said. The chicks didn’t all live. One of the Reds died on the fourth day I had them, and a week later, right when I was thinking everything was fine, one of the others died. I cried quite a lot over both, and Daddy and Mama and I held a ceremony for their burials out in the yard. Daddy let me use his paints to inscribe a big rock with the names I gave them after they’d passed: Willow and Fleece. I still couldn’t tell the chicks apart, really, but I didn’t want to lay them to rest nameless.

I went to the Agway with Daddy when he needed some garden seeds a few days after Fleece passed away, and the man named Tom was behind the counter again.

“The budding poultry woman.” He sounded friendlier than before. “My wife told me you’re Loren Patton’s daughter. Your grandmother always raised a nice flock of hens. I used to buy eggs from her. How are your chicks?”

“They’re fine. Mostly.” Then I blurted out, “Two of them died. I did my best to coddle them and build them up, I gave them supplements and everything. I made sure they had enough to eat and drink and kept them warm. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“The weaker chicks usually don’t survive no matter what you do,” he said, quite kindly. “It’s not your fault. It’s the way of the world, is what it is.”

And life did go on, for what else can it do?

The chicks that were left were as lively as anything, and by the end of the second week I was worrying less. I was beginning to have my favorites too. There was Bootstrap, who was a Rhode Island Red brave enough to sit on my lap, and Ezekiel, who was so big and bossy, I really hoped he might be a rooster. Also I decided that two chicks I named Miss Emily and Miss Polly were sisters. They were so alike—delicate in their manners and shy. I was pretty sure they were Silver-Laced Wyandottes, mostly because it was such a pretty name, just right for such ladies.

All in all the chicks kept me so busy that I didn’t have much time to feel lonesome. That was a good thing, because with the advent of spring, Mama and Daddy were busier than ever with their projects and chores.

Back in North Carolina, Daddy had a job at a furniture factory and only made his birdhouses as a sideline. But now Mama and Daddy wanted to make their living from the farm and from their crafts, with no outside job at all, and even I could see that was going to take a lot of doing. Between reclaiming the berry patch, and tilling and planting and tending the gardens and flower beds, and Daddy making a whole stockpile of birdhouses, and Mama sewing up quilts as if her life depended
upon it, they were busy every minute. They were so tired at night that pretty often Daddy fell asleep in the recliner and Mama had to jostle him awake to make him go off to bed. One night I wrote and told Grammy I wasn’t the only one who missed her. I said I was sure Mama and Daddy wished just as hard as I did that she’d come up north and live with us again, and help with everything like she used to. I said we needed her way more than Great-Uncle Tecumseh ever could.

In her next letter Grammy didn’t answer that exactly. She only said that Great-Uncle Tecumseh had wrenched his knee and couldn’t crawl around in the garden putting his seeds in like usual. She said she was doing it for him but was about ready to string him up by his shirt collar, he was so cantankerous about every last thing.

LOVE

In June,
Mama and Daddy and I started going to the farmers’ markets that were held all around. There was one in Kingston on Saturdays, and Woodstock on Wednesdays, and one right in New Paltz on Sundays. We’d get up early in the morning and load everything we had to sell—just the birdhouses and quilts at first, then the garden vegetables and berries as they came on—into the back of the pickup and cover it with a big tarp. Then Daddy would ease out of the driveway and go real slow along the back roads to whichever town we
were headed for that day. He would never get on Interstate 87. There was too much traffic there, he said, and he was afraid the truck might have heart failure at the speed of it. Also he didn’t want to call any undue attention to the fact that the muffler was more or less shot and he hadn’t gotten around to getting a New York State inspection sticker just yet.

I liked those times. The radio would be set to the oldies station, playing rock-and-roll songs from when Mama and Daddy were young. Mama would be sipping her coffee from a ceramic mug she made once, and Daddy would be smoking a cigarette with his window cracked open to let the smoke trail out. I nagged and nagged at him to quit, but that was his morning coffee, he said, and I couldn’t expect a man to venture out into the world without his coffee, could I? I’d sit in between them feeling snug and a little sleepy, wondering what the day would bring, singing along if a song came on that I liked.

We did that all spring and summer. We sold berries and flowers and vegetables, and Mama’s quilts and Daddy’s birdhouses. He builds them out of scrap wood and paints them in soft, rainy-looking colors with pictures of vines and flowers twining around. If I were a bird, I know I would want to fly right in. People like them too. They sell at a brisk pace, and folks are always smiling when they carry one away. I think it’s because of all the love Daddy puts in while he’s making them. People can just feel it, even if they don’t know what it is they are feeling.

It’s the same way with the quilts. Mama loves to make them. Not me. I help out some, but sewing cannot hold my interest long. Making a blanket is like climbing a mountain with a million small steps. It is one tiny stitch after another, stitch after stitch, never ending. I always ask her, “Why not just sew two big chunks of cloth together, a back and a front, and call it done?”

Mama laughs when I say that. She shakes her head and says, “Prairie Evers. The fun is in putting the colors and shapes together.”

“That’s crazy,” I always say back to tease her, but the truth is I love Mama’s blankets. She picks out the prettiest hues, things you wouldn’t guess would go together, but then they do.

I watched her one hot August night as she sat at the sewing machine, turning a block this way and that. She was making a starburst pattern, and every stitch and piece had to be just so or it would never come out right in the end. She had been at it for hours, and I could tell by the way she shifted in her seat and shrugged her shoulders every little while that she was weary. I went and leaned against her work table. “Don’t you ever get tired of it, Mama?”

“Tired of what?”

I ran a finger down the edge of a seam in the little pile of finished squares she had stacked up. “This.”

She sighed. “Well, I’m worn out tonight, I won’t deny it. But no, I don’t ever seem to get tired of making quilts. It’s a foolish thing, I guess, stitching little pieces of fabric together, but
I love it. I have these patterns in my head, and I have to make them come out into the world somehow.” She wrinkled her nose and smiled.

I watched for a while longer and then wandered outside to find Daddy. He was in the vegetable garden, pulling hornworms from the tomato plants. The hornworms were fat and green and blended in with the stalks. Daddy peered at each plant, put every worm he found in an old coffee can, and when he was sure a plant was clean, crawled on to the next. After a while I said, “Daddy, do you get tired?”

“What’s that, chicklet?”

“Do you get tired of doing stuff like this all the time? Pulling caterpillars off the tomatoes and making a ton of birdhouses that are kind of all the same and pulling weeds that just grow back overnight.”

He sat back on his heels and squinted at me. “Well. It needs doing.”

I kept watching him. I was not satisfied with his answer. After a little bit he looked up again. He scratched the back of his head. “You want to help?”

I shrugged and crouched down on the opposite side of the plant he was working on. The evening sun felt like a warm cloth on my neck. I squinted at the tomato plant, breathing real soft. Bootstrap wandered up the garden row and pecked in the dirt behind me. I smelled warm earth and green vineyness and almost-ripe tomatoes. I saw a hornworm, his antennae waving.
I reached out and pulled him off the vine, then dropped him in Daddy’s can. We worked our way down the row this way and then up the next one. “You ever feel like getting out of the chicken business?” Daddy asked about midway along.

I glanced at him real sharp to see what he meant, but he was looking at the tomato. “No,” I said.

“Do you love every minute of it all the time?”

I thought about cleaning up after them. “No.”

A little smile twitched around his lips. “Well, there you go then.”

When we were done, Daddy gave me the can of hornworms to feed to the chickens. Those poor caterpillars (for that’s what they are, not worms really; Daddy and I looked it up in one of his garden books) were devoured in about two skinny minutes, but the chickens were as happy as anything.

THE EGG

A few days later
when I went to the henhouse to clean the nest boxes, there in the straw was an egg. An
egg
. It wasn’t much bigger than a big marble, but it was perfect: egg shaped and smooth and brown. “An egg!” I whispered. I reached out to touch it, and it was still warm. I cupped it in my hand and ran outside.

“Whose is this?” I demanded—the hens were ambling around pecking at the ground beneath the maple tree—but of course they didn’t answer. I suddenly realized there might be more—there might
be a lot!—so I ran back in and looked in the other boxes, but they were empty. Next I headed for the vegetable patch where Mama and Daddy were working. When I got there, I just held my palm out. The egg wobbled there shyly. I was so proud, I couldn’t even speak.

Mama made a ceremony of frying it up for my lunch, though I debated at first whether to eat it. It was so tiny and sweet. But what else was there to do? It was an egg, not a piece of china. I had it fried easy and smashed on a half slice of toast.

The next day I found three eggs. The day after that I found none. But the next day there were four and then three after that, and by the end of the week I had my first dozen.

BYE-BYE, MISS AMERICAN PIE

That next Wednesday
started out like any other, except it was going to be the first time I tried to sell my eggs. We got up early and loaded the truck and headed for Woodstock. A song I liked came on the radio and I started singing along. I just knew my twelve eggs were going to sell, and this was only the beginning. In another week, I might have a dozen more. “Bye-bye, Miss American Pie,” I sang. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry—”