They Mocked Her 37 Giant Chickens—Then Their Eggs Saved an Entire Frontier Town

Chapter 4

Cale Draper found her two days later, at the mercantile, while she was buying nails and a length of rope to brace the porch. The door threw a shadow, and when she looked up, there he was, framed against the light, taller than her by half a head and aware of it in every hinged joint of him. He wore a hat that cost more than her whole month, boots that had never seen a field, and a smile like a thing that had been practiced in a mirror.

“Well, well. Maren Whitfield. Hear you’re back in town.”

She set the nails down. “News travels.”

“Small town.” He leaned against the jamb in a way that was supposed to look effortless. “Sorry about your grandmother. Maggie was a piece of work. Stubborn as a post.”

“She was twice the man most of the men in this county ever pretended to be.”

“Mm. Sure. Tough old bird, that’s what she was.” He picked up an apple from the barrel, examined it like it owed him money, and set it back. “You know, she could’ve sold this place years ago. Saved herself a mountain of grief. You planning to make the same mistake?”

“I’m planning to fix the well and plant something that grows.”

Cale laughed. Not a cruel laugh, more like the laugh an adult gives a child who has announced an intention to fly — amused, certain, already bored. “Maren. That land has been bleeding out for five years. Your grandmother couldn’t keep it running, and she’d been farming since before either of us drew breath. You’ve been folding cloth in some shop for the better part of a decade. What exactly is the plan?”

“None of your business.”

“It kind of is, though.” He stepped in, and his voice shifted down a register, the salesman in him giving up and the landowner showing through. “My brother Royce and I have six hundred acres now. Your forty-seven sit square in the middle of where we need to string fence for the new cattle operation. It’s not personal, sweetheart. It’s practical.”

“Then it should be easy to hear me say no.”

For a flicker, something in Cale’s eyes went hard, the way water goes hard at the first moment of freezing. It was the smile that moved last. “I’m trying to do you a favor. That farm’s not worth what you owe on it. I’ll pay the debts, give you a few dollars for the road, and you can go back to wherever you came from with your head high. Everybody wins.”

“Everybody, or everybody named Draper?”

“Everybody.”

Maren picked up her nails and rope, counted coins onto the counter without ceremony, and walked toward the door. Cale did not move. She stopped six inches from him and had to look up to meet his eyes, and the look she gave him was the one she’d practiced her whole life on men like him, the one that took them back a step without them knowing they’d done it.

“My grandmother told me something about you once,” she said. “She said you’d spent so many years wanting things that you’d forgotten what it means to earn them. I think she was half right. I think you never learned in the first place.”

She walked past him into the sunlight and all the way out of town before the shaking started.

It felt good for exactly thirty seconds. Then the good feeling passed through her like water through a cracked dam, and by the time she reached the farm gate she was fighting tears, because Cale Draper had been right about the one thing that mattered. She didn’t have a plan. She had grief, stubbornness that raised blisters, forty-one dollars, a falling-down farm, and sixty days, and most mornings she woke up to the sound of her own heart doing arithmetic it didn’t like.

She fixed the porch that same afternoon. It took four hours, cost her a blackened thumbnail, and came out crooked and sturdy, which she decided was good enough to be called honest work. She fixed the well the next day, soaking a leather gasket in tallow until it softened enough to seal. The water came up brown, then rust, then clear, and she drank a cup of it standing in the yard with her eyes closed, and it tasted like the single most expensive thing she’d ever earned.

But fixing things doesn’t pay debts, and paying debts was the only harvest the farm could offer. She walked her land that week, acre by acre, cataloguing what she had: soil thin but not dead, brown with rest but not with rot; a barn that could be patched; a henhouse whose walls were sound if she replaced the wire and shored the door. What she didn’t have was anything to put in any of them. No seed that would pay before winter. No animal she could feed on nothing. No plan that survived contact with the first frost.

On Saturday morning she went into town to price grain she couldn’t afford, and that’s when she heard the two men at the loading dock.

“…Prowse is selling off his whole stock. Everything, even those monsters he brought back from back east.”

“Those ugly things? Nobody’s going to touch them.”

“They look like something out of a fever dream. I told him to turn ’em loose and let the coyotes have a say.”

Maren leaned around the corner. “Excuse me. What birds?”

A weathered farmer named Larkin tipped his hat without enthusiasm. “Old Prowse got himself some fancy breed shipped in from a breeder back east. Light Brahmas they call ’em. Big as dogs, every last one. But they eat a heap and they’re ugly as original sin, so he can’t give ’em away.”

“How many?”

“Thirty-some. Maybe forty.”

“When’s the auction?”

“Tomorrow, ten at the stockyard. But missy, save your time. Those birds are—”

“Thank you.” She was already walking. She had heard, lately, a great many people explaining to her why everything she intended to do was a mistake, and she had begun to suspect that each such explanation was a small key handed to her, and that the door it unlocked was the way out.

That night, in Aggie’s kitchen, under the hissing lamp, she did the math she’d been avoiding. Thirty-eight dollars and change, tucked in a jar. Forty-eight days until the bank moved. Beans were running low. There was nothing, not one thing, on forty-seven acres that would make money by Tuesday.

Except, maybe, a question she couldn’t stop asking: what is a giant chicken worth, if it lays an egg the size of a fist?

She took the catalog page from her pocket and laid it flat beside the jar of coins. The circled drawing seemed to look back at her — the ridiculous feathered creature, the words heavy layers, oversized eggs. And beneath them, in that slipping handwriting that had signed itself away to death: Start here.

“All right, Aggie.” Her voice came out rough. “I’m starting.”

The clock on the wall said ten minutes past midnight.

The auction began at ten o’clock the same morning. She had about six hours to decide whether she was the bravest woman in Kansas or the most foolish, and she had the terrible feeling, which she would carry for the rest of her life, that the two were the same person.