The Forty Hens I Bought Back

“Why Thursday?” Colt asked.

It was the first thing he had said, and Mr. Zeller almost smiled.

“Open it, son.”

Colt lifted the lid.

Twelve brown eggs. Wiped clean, every one, and set in with the small ends down the way Mom did.

“A hen goes off laying when you move her,” Mr. Zeller said. “They gave me four the first day and three the second. It took until about four o’clock this afternoon to make the dozen, and I was not going to hand Rosalie’s daughter eleven eggs.”

I am not a woman who cries in front of people. I had gotten through the visitation and the service and the cemetery with a dry handkerchief.

I cried in that old man’s yard until my son put his arm around me. He is taller than I am now. I had not noticed until that minute.

Mr. Zeller had the twelve penned by themselves, with fresh straw and their own waterer. He had cut air holes in three apple boxes. He lifted the last hen out himself and held her a moment before he handed her to Colt, a big old Barred Rock, gray as a rainy day, with a red band so faded it was nearly pink.

“This one’s no layer,” he said. “I expect you know that.”

“That’s Pearl,” Colt said. His voice cracked on it. “You got Pearl.”

“I got her first,” Mr. Zeller said. “Nobody was going to want her for anything but the pot.”

I asked him to come Saturday. I told him there would be coffee. He said he would think about it, which from a man like that means yes.

Thirty-one hens went to roost in my mother’s coop that night. Pearl took her place at the end by the window, where she has slept since Colt was in the second grade.

Friday morning I went out to the back porch to see about the eggs.

Mom kept a second icebox out there, an old round-shouldered one that hummed, and that was where the egg business lived. It was the only thing in that house Lucille had not scrubbed.

I opened it.

Fourteen cartons, stacked two deep, and beside them the bowl of loose eggs Colt had gathered since. Mom had packed the cartons the Thursday she died, for the Saturday she did not live to see. Every lid had a name on it in fresh pencil. Pavlik, 2 doz. Schmidt. Pastor. The school cook. Fourteen names, in the handwriting that had signed my report cards.

There was a fifteenth carton on the door shelf, off by itself.

I heard Lucille come out behind me. She had her car keys in her hand and her good coat on, and I understood that she had been about to tell me she was going home to Lincoln.

I did not say anything. I took the fifteenth carton off the shelf and held it so she could read the lid.

Lu. Sunday. No excuses.

My aunt sat down on the porch step as if somebody had cut her strings.

“I wasn’t coming,” she said.

I waited.

“She asked me for last Sunday and I told her I had a hair appointment Saturday and I didn’t feel up to the drive. It’s fifty miles, Annette. It is fifty miles on a good road.” She was looking at the carton and not at me. “And she said, then come this Sunday, and I said I’d see. I had already thought up what I was going to tell her. I had it ready.”