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

Chapter 6

The barn smelled of hay, feathers, and warm animal breath. The birds, roused by the rooster’s proclamation, regarded her from their roosts with the grave, unflattering attention of a jury that has no intention of being swayed by the defense. The rooster himself sat on an overturned bucket like a king on a borrowed throne, fixed her with one baleful orange eye, and crowed again — directly into her face, at a volume that suggested he considered his accommodations personally insulting.

“Good morning to you too,” she said.

Then she looked down.

Eggs.

Not the small, pale, fragile things she had seen in markets all her life. These were enormous, nearly twice the size of ordinary eggs, with shells the color of dark cream splashed in brown. They were heavy. They were warm. And there were a lot of them. She counted twice, because the first count couldn’t be right: twenty-four eggs. Twenty-four eggs from thirty-one hens, on their first morning in a strange place, half-starved from the move and settled in a barn that offered none of the comforts their breed was supposed to require.

She stood there with one egg in each palm, feeling the impossible weight of them, and for the first time since the letter had arrived in Fairbrook, something in her chest loosened. It was not hope — hope was still too large a word for what she could afford. It was more like the absence of despair, which was, she decided, the nearest honest neighbor hope had ever had.

She broke one into a skillet. The yolk was deep orange, nearly sunset-colored, and it spread across the pan like a small piece of the morning. She ate it standing at the stove, and it was rich and dense and tasted like the eggs of her childhood — Aggie’s kitchen, a smaller world, a door that had been closed for seven years and stood now, for an instant, cracked open.

“Okay,” she said to the empty room. “Okay.”

She went back to the barn and looked at the flock: thirty-seven ridiculous, wonderful, secretly dignified creatures, scratching and clucking in the straw with low, serious voices, going about their enormous lives as though being laughed at by an entire county was simply weather.

“All right. Here’s the deal.” She planted her hands on her hips and looked them each in the eye, starting with the rooster. “I spent everything I own on you. Every last cent. If you don’t produce, we’re done — all of us. The bank takes this place, I go back to folding calico, and you go wherever unwanted chickens go. So let’s make this work.”

The rooster looked at her, crowed once — a short, dismissive, thrilling note — and went back to his breakfast.

That afternoon she tore the henhouse apart and put it back together better. She replaced the rusted wire with good, patched the walls with board scavenged from the barn, hung a new door trimmed to fit, and laid down fresh straw so deep the birds sank into it like royalty. By evening she had moved the entire flock into proper housing: crooked, mismatched, and utterly sound, assembled by a woman in a hurry who had come to understand that a door that works beats a door that impresses.

The birds filed in without comment, found their roosts, and settled down with the calm efficiency of creatures who knew exactly what they were doing even if nobody else on the continent did.

Mack came back the next morning without being asked. He simply appeared, cross-lots and shoeless, sopping through the wet grass with his hands in his pockets and his gap-toothed grin already switched on.

“Came to see the birds,” he said.

“You came for breakfast,” Maren said.

He didn’t deny it. She fed him two eggs scrambled with the last of the cornbread, and watched him eat with the concentrated devotion of a boy for whom meals were not a guarantee. He was thin — too thin — with hollows under his eyes that no fifteen-year-old should have had.

“How’s your father?”

Mack’s fork paused. “He’s got good days and bad days. Today was a bad day, so I figured I’d let him rest.”

“What’s wrong with him, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Doc says it’s his lungs. He worked the Sandstone Mine up north, back before we came here, and something got into his chest that won’t come out. Can’t farm, can’t haul, can’t hardly walk to town. So it’s just me. And I ain’t big enough to do everything.” He pushed an egg around his plate. “I try, though.”

Maren looked at this boy — skinny, scraped, obstinate, holding his world together with the same two shaking hands she used to hold hers — and made a decision before she could talk herself out of it. “I can’t pay you wages,” she said. “I don’t have any money. But if you want to come help with the birds, I’ll feed you breakfast and supper. Every day you show up.”

Mack’s face performed a careful, failing attempt at casualness. “That sounds fair,” he said.

“Good. Then finish your eggs and get to work.”

They worked the henhouse up properly over the next week — nesting boxes from scrap wood, a waterer rigged from a barrel and a length of copper pipe she found behind the barn, a scratching yard fenced with salvaged posts. Maren made mistakes constantly, and with enthusiasm: she hung a gate backwards, hammered a nail through a board and into her own knee brace, and once trapped herself inside the pen so thoroughly that Mack had to pull the door off its hinges to free her, and then had the good sense not to laugh until she laughed first.

The hens laid through it all. Twenty-four eggs. Then twenty-seven. Then thirty-one on the day the weather turned warm, each huge, each heavy, each one a small, perfect argument against everyone who had laughed. Some were lopsided. One hen laid eggs with a lump on one end that made them look like tiny gourds. None of it mattered. They were eggs, and they were money, and money was time, and time was the one thing the bank would not sell her.

She carried the first basket into town on a Tuesday. A Tuesday — and Maren had to stop in the middle of the road and laugh at that, because Tuesdays had never once, in her entire memory, brought her anything good, and here she was, walking into one both hands full.

Mrs. Farrow took one look at the basket and both eyebrows climbed her forehead. “What on earth?”

“Brahma eggs. Giant breed, like the birds you’ve heard about. See the size?”

The mercantile keeper lifted one, turned it over, held it to the light like jeweler’s glass. “I’ve never seen the like.”

“Taste better, too. Richer. Bigger yolk.” Maren had rehearsed the price in the dark, standing in the yard with her eyes shut. “Forty cents a dozen.”

Mrs. Farrow set the egg down. “That’s steep.”

“Try one first. If you don’t think it’s worth it, I’ll match the regular price.”

It was a gamble, and she knew it. She needed every cent she could get, but she needed Mrs. Farrow to say the eggs were good far more than she needed a single sale, because a woman who feels cheated tells fifteen people, and a woman who has been astonished tells fifty.

Mrs. Farrow took a dozen home that afternoon. The next morning, she was at Maren’s gate before sunrise.

“Two dozen more,” she said, out of breath. “My husband says it’s the best egg he’s had in twenty years, and Henry has not complimented a single thing since the war.”

Word spread. Nothing moves fast in Highwater, but it moves thoroughly, and within two weeks Maren had regular customers — families who tried her eggs and quietly discovered they could not go back to the pale ones. The saloon put in an order for five dozen a week for their breakfast trade. Even the hotel in the next town over sent word that they’d take everything she could spare, sight unseen.

The money was small. Twenty dollars a week, sometimes twenty-five. But it was steady, and it was hers, and on the first day of the second month, Maren Whitfield walked into the bank and made a payment — twelve dollars in coin, set down on the counter with a hand that shook and a voice that didn’t.

The clerk, a young man named Abernathy with the personality of a well-kept filing cabinet, examined the money, examined her, and consulted a ledger. “This covers the interest,” he said, “and a small amount of the principal. You still owe four hundred and—”

“I know what I owe. Thank you.”

She walked out onto the boardwalk and stood there in the rising light, twenty-four years old, tired, poor, and suddenly, dangerously close to believing, for the first time since the letter, that it might be possible to win.

Eli—Mack — was waiting by the feed store, holding a sack of scratch grain they’d bought with a portion of the egg money.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Twelve dollars paid. Forty more to go.”

Mack did the arithmetic on his fingers, frowned, and did it again. “That’s a lot of eggs.”

“Yes, it is. But the hens are laying more every week. The pullets will come into production soon. And if we can grow our own grain next spring, we’d cut the feed bill by a third.” She looked at him — this boy who turned up every morning, who talked to the chickens like they were people and somehow got more out of them than any rational person ought to be able to — and said, “You’ve been thinking about this.”

“I like the birds.” He shrugged. “And I like the math. The math works if nothing goes wrong.”

“Something always goes wrong.”

“Yeah.” Mack shifted the grain on his shoulder. “But something always goes right, too.”

That evening, standing by the henhouse fence, scattering feed to a flock that came obediently and without grace, Maren watched the rooster — she had taken to calling him the Judge, because he observed everything from the highest post he could reach and pronounced on all of it with total authority — pick his way across the yard, feathered feet leaving tracks in the dust like a small, furious general inspecting his troops.

“Ugly as sin,” she muttered, echoing the feed-store man.

She was smiling, though. She had been doing that more and more, and it took her a long time to notice, and an even longer time to admit to herself what it meant.

She was beginning to believe it might work.

That, as it turned out, was her first mistake. Believing things might work out was, in Maren Whitfield’s experience, the surest, swiftest way to guarantee that they wouldn’t.