The Forty Hens I Bought Back

The first thing I noticed was the quiet.

Forty laying hens are never quiet at two in the afternoon. There is always one bragging about an egg and three more arguing with her about it. My mother used to say you could tell time by her hens, and that two o’clock sounded like a church basement right before the coffee was ready.

That Tuesday, the day after we buried her, the yard sounded like nothing at all.

I had spent the morning in town, settling up at the funeral home and carrying casserole dishes back to the church. I sat in my car with the engine off and a box of thank-you cards on the seat beside me, and I listened to the wind work at the wire on the chicken run.

The little pop door on the coop was standing open. The big door was open too, propped with the cement block Mom used when she cleaned. There was no hen in the run. No hen under the lilac. No hen dusting herself in the bare place by the propane tank, where they had worn a bowl into the ground over thirty-five years of afternoons.

Then I saw the sign.

It was a flap torn off a cardboard box, leaned against the mailbox post at the end of the lane. I had driven right past it coming in, because I was trying to remember how to spell the organist’s last name. I walked back down the lane to read it. Black marker, in my aunt’s tidy slanted printing.

Laying hens. Two dollars each.

And under that, smaller: All must go today.

I stood there in my funeral shoes, because I had not thought to change them, and the April mud came up over the sides.

Aunt Lucille met me at the kitchen door. She had on yellow rubber gloves and one of Mom’s aprons, and behind her the kitchen smelled like bleach instead of coffee.

“There you are,” she said. “I’ve got the pantry about done. You would not believe what that woman kept.”

“Where are the hens?”

“It’s handled.” She peeled off one glove, finger by finger. “I called it in to the swap program on the radio this morning, and I put a sign out, and they were gone by one o’clock. Every last one. People came with boxes. One man had a feed sack.”

“You sold them.”

“I sold them.” She took a bank envelope out of the apron pocket and held it up the way you would hold up a good report card. “Eighty dollars. I thought that was something, for a bunch of old chickens.”

I looked at the envelope.

“Forty hens,” I said. “Two dollars apiece.”

“The realtor comes Friday at ten, Annette. She said herself a place shows better without livestock. You can’t have a yard full of chicken mess and expect anybody from town to see past it.” She set the envelope on the table and squared it with the edge. “Nobody has time for chickens. You work. Dale works. That boy has school. Somebody had to be sensible.”

I should explain about the realtor, because it was partly my own doing.

Mom died in her sleep on a Thursday night. Her heart, the doctor said, and no warning to speak of. On Friday I sat in the arrangements room at the funeral home with my head in my hands and said out loud that I did not know what on earth we were going to do with the place. I meant it the way you mean anything on a day like that. I meant I was tired.