The first thing I noticed was the quiet.
Forty laying hens are never quiet at two in the afternoon. There’s 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. She said 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 whole morning in town. Settling up at the funeral home. Carrying casserole dishes back to the church. Now 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 always used when she cleaned.
There wasn’t a hen in the run.
Not one under the lilac. Not one dusting herself in the bare spot by the propane tank, where they’d 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’d driven right past it coming in, because I’d been busy trying to remember how to spell the organist’s last name.
I walked back down the lane to read it.
Black marker. 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 hadn’t 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. 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. 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’d 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 kitchen 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 that part was partly my own fault.
Mom died in her sleep on a Thursday night. Her heart, the doctor said. No warning to speak of.
On Friday, I sat in the arrangements room at the funeral home with my head in my hands, and I 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.
Aunt Lucille heard a decision.
She’s seventy-eight. My mother’s older sister. She left the farm for Lincoln the week she finished high school, and she worked forty-one years in the claims office of an insurance company. In forty-one years, she never once left a file open on her desk overnight.
By Saturday, she’d found a realtor.
By Sunday, she’d moved into Mom’s spare room with a bucket and a box of trash bags.
I didn’t have the strength to stop her. And I thought there’d be time. I thought the worst thing that could happen before Friday was a clean pantry.
The place was coming to me. Mom and Dad had settled that years ago, and Lucille knew it as well as I did. She wasn’t stealing from anybody. In her own mind, she was saving me the trouble.
“Who bought them?” I asked.
“People.”
“Which people, Aunt Lucille?”
“People from the radio. I don’t know them. I don’t know anybody out here anymore.” She pulled the glove back on. “A young woman with a van full of children. A heavy man. Somebody’s hired man in a seed cap.”
“Did you write down a single name?”
“It was cash, honey. You don’t write a receipt for two dollars.”
“Not one name.”
She thought about it.
“One. An old man. Zeller. He said to tell you he’d taken twelve. He said it twice, like I was hard of hearing.”
So there it was.
I couldn’t pick up the telephone and undo it, because there was nobody to call. Forty hens had gone down that lane in the backs of strangers’ cars. And the only record of it was eighty dollars in a bank envelope.
I felt like screaming.
I’m forty-seven years old. I have never screamed at a relative in my life. I came closer that afternoon than I ever hope to come again.
But arguing with Lucille had never once, in my whole lifetime, changed what Lucille had already done. And it wouldn’t bring home a single hen.
And she was right about one thing, though not the way she meant it.
A laying hen in her second spring is worth fifteen dollars to anybody in York County who knows a hen from a hat. Two dollars is what a spent hen brings at the sale barn. The kind that’s headed for somebody’s soup pot.
Whoever answered that radio call had either gotten the bargain of the year, or meant to wring some necks.
