They Mocked Her 37 Giant Chickens—Then Their Eggs Saved an Entire Frontier Town
Chapter 3
Maren set her trunk on the porch, sat down beside it, and looked out at forty-seven acres of unharvested grass and bone-dry topsoil. “Aggie,” she said to nobody, “you always did know how to hand a girl a puzzle with no picture on the box.”
The first week was the cruelest week. It wasn’t the labor — hauling wash water from the creek had hardened her hands fast enough — it was the company. Every room held a ghost, not the kind that rattles chains, but the far worse kind that rattles the heart. Aggie’s reading chair by the window, the cushion still dented to the exact shape of her. Her boots at the back door, mud-caked to the ankles from whatever chore had been too important to stop doing. And in the bedroom, on the quilting frame, a half-finished quilt with the needle still threaded, as if the maker had simply stepped out to feed the chickens and would be right back.
It had been nine days. She wasn’t coming back.
Maren slept in her old room, under the faded blue curtains Aggie had sewn when she was twelve. She lay in the narrow bed and let the house creak and groan around her the way houses do when they’re trying to decide whether to accept a new tenant. The math didn’t listen to the house. After the stage fare and flour and beans and lamp oil, she had forty-one dollars. She owed four hundred and twelve. The land grew nothing that anyone would pay for. She had no seed, no stock, and no piece of iron on the place that wasn’t rusted, broken, or both.
On the third day she walked into town to see the lawyer, a thin, worried man named Whitelaw who kept an office above the barber shop and had the habit of clearing his throat before every sentence, as if apologizing in advance for the unpleasantness that was about to follow.
“The situation,” he began, clearing his throat, “is not what you’d call ideal.”
“I know the situation. I need to know my options.”
“Options.” He shuffled papers the way a man shuffles a losing hand. “Well — you could sell. The Draper brothers have been buying land south of town for years now. Your parcel sits right in the middle of their new fence line. They’ve already said they’d take it off your hands.”
“No.”
Whitelaw blinked. “I haven’t even told you their offer.”
“It doesn’t matter. My grandmother spent thirty years on that land. I’m not delivering it to Cale Draper wrapped in a ribbon so he can add it to his collection.”
“Miss Whitfield, I understand sentiment. Sentiment doesn’t pay debts. The bank has been patient with Miss Maggie, but Mr. Abernathy at the Savings and Trust is not a patient man. If the payments don’t come…”
“How long do I have?”
He cleared his throat again. The sound hung in the air like a verdict. “Sixty days. After that, they can begin foreclosure.”
Sixty days. The number settled into her stomach like a stone dropped into a well. She stood up, and her chair scraped the floor in a way she would later remember as the true beginning of everything — the scrape, the stone, the sixty days.
“Then,” she said, “I have sixty days.”
She walked out before Whitelaw could clear his throat again. On the boardwalk below, the wind had pinned a handbill to the barber’s doorpost: STOCKYARD AUCTION — Sunday, ten o’clock — livestock, poultry, sundry. She tore it down without quite knowing why, folded it small, and put it in her pocket next to the catalog page with the circled bird.
She would think about that scrap of paper all week, at first without wanting to, then without being able to stop. She would slide it under her plate at supper and read it while she ate beans. She would catch herself wondering, in the dark, what the hell a person could possibly do with giant, ridiculous birds that the whole county had already agreed were worthless.
That was the question the farm had been waiting for. Not the farm — the idea the farm had been holding, like water cupped in two hands, waiting for her to stop mourning long enough to look at it.