Osprey Island

Fourteen

THE BROODINESS OF HENS A Brief Lesson in Avian Reproduction

The chicken, like the Mormon of old, is a polygamous creature. At any given moment, and with little pomp or circumstance, the male selects the female whose vent is closest to his own. He drops one wing to the ground, grabs his intended under the other wing, and mounts. Flapping his wings, the male balances, his vent flush against the hen’s. Transfer of sperm from his cloaca to her oviduct is swift; the male dismounts. An avian sex act lasts roughly fifteen seconds. It is only afterward, in fluffing her feathers, that the female appears to experience any satisfaction whatsoever.

—WALKER WINSTON, A Gentleman’s Guide to Raising Chooks

IN JULY OF 1969, a year after Roddy had left Osprey Island in the skirmish of his parents’ tug-of-war, Eden Jacobs was reading the latest issue of National Geographic, when, between a tribute to Ike Eisenhower and a photo travelogue of Switzerland (“Europe’s High-Rise Republic”), she discovered an article of considerably greater personal interest. The opening photograph was arresting: a screaming bird, its wings spanned across a double-page spread. “THE OSPREY: Endangered World Citizen.” It had been quite some time since Eden had spotted an osprey on her daily beach walk. Mornings, Eden laced on her sturdiest shoes and patrolled a stretch of Scallopshell Beach, Roderick’s heavy WWII-issue spyglasses trained to the sky. She did not waver in her morning rituals, and over the years could boast having spotted any number of owls and red-tailed hawks and what have you. But the sighting of an osprey, its eagle-wings stretched majestically across the sky, that was rare—even on an island named for the creature—and, by 1969, getting rarer. The National Geographic article confirmed it: the osprey, as a species, was nearing extinction.

“It’s because of chemicals,” Eden told her husband that evening at dinner. She helped him to another serving of potatoes. “Dee—Dee— Tee,” she enunciated. “It’s one of the ones they use for pesticide. That’s what’s killing off the ospreys.”

“Maybe they’re pests,” Roderick suggested. He pushed a forkful of meat into his mouth. Relations in their home had been strained in the turmoil and wake of their son’s departure, but it was Roderick who’d been broken by it, not Eden. She had won—the boy was off in Canada with the rest of the cowards—and Roderick had taken his defeat badly, if quietly, in the end. It had taken the fight out of him.

“You hush,” Eden scolded. “This is serious.”

Roderick succumbed. He was a large man, physically imposing, but really no match for his wife in most things. Too heavy a drinker, he had never overcome the sense of his own intellectual inadequacy— that he was, ironically, just intelligent enough to recognize.

“Listen,” Eden instructed. She lifted the magazine from the table beside her. “If taken from an insecticide-polluted area, fish may introduce poisons into the birds’ bodies. The author”—and here Eden’s voice rose with importance—“world-famed ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson”—she spoke his name as if he were her own flesh and blood, repeating it as if to congratulate herself on such a prestigious relation—“Roger Tory Peterson believes that this may be the reason for egg failures in Connecticut River eyries.” Eden looked up at her husband. “We’re just across the sound from there,” she said, “and they mention us in the article.” She flipped a few pages forward and began reading again: “Ospreys are more than just birds to be enjoyed. They are an alarm system of things gone haywire in the river, the estuary, and the sound. They are sensitive indicators of the environment.”

“Probably true,” Roderick conceded.

“More than probably,” Eden added. Then she said, “I’m going to do something about it.”

Roderick’s body tightened. “What are you, one woman, going to do about it?”

“I’m going to build nesting platforms,” she said, “first of all. To help them know they have a safe place to lay their eggs. But it’s the eggs themselves that are the problem,” she told him, “and they’re worst in this area. The eggs are breaking before they hatch. They weigh twenty-five percent less than they used to. The eggshells. Twenty-five percent less.”

“How are you . . . ?” But she didn’t let him finish.

“We have to stop them from using those pesticides,” she said. “I’m talking to Mayor Worth tomorrow.”

“There’s no farms on Osprey anymore,” Roderick said.

“And I probably can’t stop farmers from using them on the mainland,” she agreed, “but we can ban them from here for good so no one can start. And we can try to get to people so they know.”

“Whoa! There’s no we here, Eden. Stop that with we. This is you, Eden. This is you alone.” This was Roderick, putting his large foot down wherever he could, just to feel the stamp. Roderick was born on Osprey, met Eden on a summer trip to Maine, and had her knocked up and home with him on the island before Halloween, and though she’d succumbed to the facts of her life early on—wife, mother, Islander— she’d never acquiesced to Osprey’s ways. This embarrassed Roderick; it marked him as a man who couldn’t control his wife.

“Our garden.” Eden gestured toward the back of the house, where tomato vines grew in neat, staked rows, and beans climbed their tripod poles like trained ivy. “It’ll need to be twice the size next summer.” Her plans were long range. “Enjoy that roast”—she pointed to Roderick’s dinner plate—“because once the freezer’s emptied you’re not getting any more of it unless I can find a farmer who raises them without all that poison. Because that’s where it is,” she insisted, “in the food. And I won’t have it anymore. Not in my house. Unless you want to raise the pigs out back yourself. Otherwise, you need a chop or a steak, you get it down at Tubby’s or the Grill. Not here.” She paused. “We’ll turn the shed out back into a henhouse, so we’ll have eggs. The library’s ordering me a book about milk cows, but I just don’t know if we’ll have the room. They have to graze, you know.”

“A cow!” Roderick exploded. “I’m a carpenter! Not a farmer! I am not raising goddamn cows!” And though the rage was bubbling deep inside him, the words that came out were nothing more than steam.

“Then we just won’t have milk,” Eden said, and the case seemed to close in her mind.

Eden and Roderick’s had never been a marriage of love, but a product of their time and circumstance: not companionable, but suitable. He paid the bills; she cooked the meals. Arguments, she won, which only sent him to the bar, or hunting, which was fine. In the end he did as he was told, and in turn she took care of him, which he couldn’t have done on his own. Like a governess and her ward, they were mutually dependent. They got on sufficiently to make it through the days together, and they did in fact make it through a good many days.

Eden Jacobs had never kept a rooster. No need. Not if you just raised hens for laying, that is. Those girls each put out a good eating egg every couple of days, no matter what—as long as you fed and kept them well and gave them a few hours under an electric light in winter when the days got short and temperatures brought production down. It was a lot easier to keep things under control without a rooster in the henhouse.

Eden liked the chicken shed full to about ten hens. She believed— firmly—in population control for humans, and she believed in it for birds. Naturally, in the late spring, early summer, a hen might start going broody: that biological imperative to amass a clutch of eggs and sit on them until they hatched. And sure, there were plenty of hybrid hens with the instinct for broodiness bred right out of them, but those, Eden thought, were birds for the egg-laying corporate empires. She didn’t believe in some kind of superchicken bred for human convenience. If she was going to raise her own, they were going to be honest-to-goodness, nonengineered, unsaccharine hens.

Mostly she raised them for eggs, but Eden liked a nice roast chicken or a broiler as much as the next person, and her chickens were safe and healthy to eat, not like the poisoned garbage they sold down at the IGA. So Eden raised dual-purpose birds—good for eggs and good for meat—and every so often she’d cull one from the flock and slaughter it. No business raising them if you’re not willing to do the work, she’d say. The killing and cleaning wasn’t her favorite job, but it was a necessary part of it all. To keep up with the ones she ate and the ones she inevitably lost to predators or the random undetected disease, about once a year Eden took a drive over to George Quincy’s place and borrowed a rooster for a week or so to mate with one of her girls and raise up another brood of baby chicks.

George Quincy had a sizable piece of land on the north end by Osprey Cove, and he’d been raising all sorts of critters out there for years, and those animals had kind of become his pastime and his family. George was happy enough to have Eden take one of his birds over to her place for a roll in the proverbial hay (hay actually made a very poor nesting litter for chickens, all those hollows to trap moisture—much better to use wood shavings, but that was a whole other issue . . .) with one of her hens.

In late May, soon after Roddy’s return to Osprey, Eden had driven over to George’s with a large cage in the back of her car to pick up Franklin, a remarkably good-natured Cherry Egger who’d already fathered a few of Eden’s broods in the past. George had been having some trouble mating his own birds that season, but he said he was nearly one hundred percent sure that Franklin wasn’t the problem.

“I think I got it figured out,” he’d said, as Eden climbed from her car. She went around back to collect the cage. “It’s the roost!” he declared, and he’d looked at that moment as happy as Eden had ever seen George Quincy. “Talked to a guy on the mainland—poultry guy—told me: check the roost. Sure enough, the thing’s getting wobbly. Poultry fellow said sometimes that’ll do it—eggs won’t fertilize right if you got a shaky roost.” George took the cage from Eden and stood by, beaming.

“If only it worked like that for people,” Eden had mused. “You got an unstable home and the kids’ll flat out refuse to get conceived. Oh, if only . . .”

George just stood there shaking his head, smiling thoughtfully, not quite following Eden’s train of thought but nonetheless appreciative.

After a moment he lifted the cage, recalling what Eden had come for. “Who’s going to be Franklin’s little lady this year?” he asked.

“Lorraine’s getting broody, I’m pretty sure,” Eden said. “The New Hampshire Red?”

George nodded his recollection. “She’s been through this before.”

“With Franklin, even, if memory serves . . . three, four years back?”

George was still nodding, scuffling his feet in the dirt, eyes down. “Think so,” he said. “I think so, yeah.”

Lorraine was about seven, had been born right out back at Eden’s. She was quiet, motherly, a little neurotic, but she handled well and wasn’t fussy. Some chickens were just plain stupid creatures—peckish, nervous, brainless beasts. You didn’t lose sleep over slaughtering one of them. Some of them practically sprawled themselves across the chopping block, as if they knew that’s where they’d been headed all along. Those were the ones to eat: the idiots. And the boys.

And then there were chickens like Lorraine, or like Paulette, or Margery. Eden’d had Margery since she’d started the whole coop— from the very first shed that Roderick had built, under grudging and grumbling duress. Margery was about as old as a chicken could get, had spent probably six, seven summers total in the coop for one, broody, sitting on her eggs. She was a good mother, but Eden had put her into retirement, let her rest in her dotage. Margery’d been with her through it all. For Eden, on Osprey Island—which is to say: for Eden, in this world—Margery the hen was about the closest thing she had to a friend. Margery was the sort of friend Eden respected. She made her needs known when she had them, and otherwise she minded her business. Eden thought—in new ways every day, it seemed—how much there was that people could learn from chickens. At the school— Eden knew through Reesa, who’d heard it from her kids—at the school they called her the Bird Lady. No doubt they meant to mock her, to poke fun at a strange old lady, as kids were wont to do. But the name, and the notion, had simply tickled Eden. She could imagine a lot of worse things.

So in late May that year Eden had gone to fetch George Quincy’s Cherry Egger cock, Franklin, and for a week or so she’d let Franklin and Lorraine do their thing, vent to vent, as it were. When Lorna used to help Eden with the chickens, she’d told Lance about the mating process and he’d been amazed: “A cock’s got a vent? You’re telling me a cock’s got no cock?!” He’d say to Lorna, or to Eden when he saw her: “How’s the cockless cock?” “You’ve got so much to learn,” Eden’d say back to him. “You’ve got a hell of a lot to learn, Mister Lance.”

And you could learn a lot from chickens, though a rooster was different from a man in some ways. It took seven days, sometimes more, for the rooster’s sperm to get where it needed to go. Then it got stored in its own sperm nest inside the hen for another couple weeks, just waiting there, patiently. A hen was born with her whole lifetime of yolks stored up in her ovaries. And those yolks, in a healthy girl, passed down pretty regularly, every day, every other day. The sperm cells just sat there, waiting for that daily yolk to pass by on its way to becoming an egg and getting laid. The sperm jumped aboard as the yolk traveled by, and there: a fertilized egg. An egg with the potential for chickenhood.

Each day that spring when she collected the eggs from the coop, Eden let Lorraine’s eggs be. When she’d laid about ten or so, she stopped, and began to set. Franklin was sent home to George, his work at Eden’s done.

On the day Lorraine had started to set, Eden calculated three weeks down the road and put the hatching date around Fourth of July weekend. Lorraine seemed well for a broody hen, feathers all puffed, her buk buk buk low and constant and contented. Such drive and devotion—these things impressed and inspired Eden. There were few people in the world Eden respected the way she respected some of those hens.

That morning Eden set out some feed and then sneaked into the coop to collect eggs while the hens bustled about their meal. She hadn’t had the time to go pick up her weekly cache of oyster shells from Abel Delamico, so she gave the girls some extra kale and collards and promised herself to stop by Abel’s fish market that day. The oyster shells were for calcium, and you needed to make sure the hens got enough so they didn’t resort to eating their own eggs to get it. And then you also had to make sure you ground up the oyster shell finely enough and mixed it well into the feed so that the birds never knew they were eating shell, because that could make them think that eating shell was an acceptable practice and lead them to eat their own eggs, which is exactly what you were trying to avoid in the first place. You worried all the time about the quality of the eggs your hens were producing, and then the minute an egg got laid you had to worry about getting it out from under the bird before she broke it somehow and got tempted to have a taste. Or before she started going broody and got herself set on laying a whole clutch for hatching. Because a hen didn’t go broody when it was convenient for you. A hen went broody whenever she damn pleased. But if she went broody over a nestful of unhatchable, unfertilized eggs, then you were going to be in for a time of it, trying to break her brood. You’d have to get her out of the coop, away from any eggs—because she’d take someone else’s to set on if she was really fixed on brooding—and keep her in a hanging cage with cold air blowing on her rear end to get her out of the hatching mood entirely. An untimely brood was no fun for anyone.

Some folks said that chickens were about the easiest critters in the world to raise, but that, Eden thought, was only if you were keeping the specially bred broody-free birds, or if you kept hens and cocks and were happy enough to let them play and lay and hatch as they pleased. Eden’s coop was a tightly run house, and such order did not happen on its own.

Eden was changing the water beside Lorraine’s nest when she heard the door of Roddy’s shack close. She hustled back outside.

“Roddy!” she called.

He lifted a hand. “Hey, Ma.”

She shrugged the sweat and stray hair off her face with a shoulder, her henhouse-dirty hand up in the air. “You heading to the Lodge?” she asked.

“Heading to the Lodge,” he repeated, his voice strained with the tired patience grown men use to talk to their mothers.

“Could you check in at Lance’s? When you go down? Check on Squee, make sure he’s OK. I’m worrying . . .”

Roddy stopped on the path and turned toward the chicken coop. The controlled annoyance was gone from his voice, replaced by a directed urgency. “Lance came for him here last night?”

Eden nodded. “You were busy . . .” She gestured toward his shack.

“Ah, shit.” Roddy rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. He looked tired. “Yeah,” he assured his mother. “I’ll stop in.”

The Islanders thought Eden strange, and Eden might concede the point. She might even admit a sort of pride in that classification. When Eden looked at Roddy, she saw that her son was also maybe what people would call strange. He’d been a particular child, and he’d become a particular man, and a peculiar man, and Eden liked that about him. It marked, she felt, a certain freedom in his spirit. It marked him as her son. Eden had missed Roddy terribly after he’d left Osprey, and though she regretted the circumstances under which he’d gone, she also felt pride. Roderick had forbidden her to speak of it at the time, which was fine, since there was no one on the island to whom she might speak of such a thing. No one with whom to share the joy and triumph she felt when her son had said no to that ugly war.