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

Chapter 8

They ate together, the old man and the girl, sitting on either end of Aggie’s long table with the wind pulling at the cloth. Emmett took a bite of the scrambled eggs, stopped chewing, and stared at the fork as though it had performed a miracle in his mouth.

“I tell you what,” he said finally, “I’ve been eating eggs since before the nineteen oughts, and I’d have sworn on my mother’s grave that I’d had them all. I hadn’t. I hadn’t had these.”

“Forty cents a dozen.”

“That’s robbery,” Emmett said, and then, without changing his tone, “I’ll take three dozen.”

At ten o’clock, a farmer named Larkin came up the road with his wife, both of them wearing faces that said they’d come to gawk and would stay to judge. At ten-fifteen, the saloon’s cook, Mr. Hooper — the very man who had told the town his customer complained — shuffled through the gate with his apron still tied, looked at the table, and stood there with something working behind his eyes.

“I suppose you want me to try one,” he said.

“I don’t want you to do anything, Mr. Hooper.”

“I’ll try one anyway, and if it’s bad, I’ll say so right here to your face.”

“It’s not bad.”

“We’ll see.” He ate an egg, standing up, in front of the whole gathering room of the yard. And he went very still, the way men do when a thing they’d made their mind up about turns out to be wrong in a way that costs them a little something. Then he took his hat off and put it back on and said, in a different voice entirely, “That’s a goddamn fine egg.”

The momentum broke open after that the way ice breaks on a river — not all at once, but in widening cracks. Families arrived. Children, who had come prepared to be frightened, stood at the fence of the pen with their mouths open as the Judge stalked his kingdom, and when he crowed, they burst into laughter of the exact opposite kind to the one Maren had heard at the stockyard. Women asked questions — about the birds, about the feed, about the eggs. Men asked about the price, and then the quantity, and then, one by one, about the standing order.

Royce Draper came along the road midafternoon, alone, on foot, and stopped at the gate with his arms folded, watching the proceedings with the stillness of a man measuring a debt. Maren walked over to him, and the yard went quiet enough to hear the grass not growing.

“Royce,” she said.

“Miss Whitfield.”

“Breakfast’s still on. Coffee’s hot. You’re welcome to come through the gate like everybody else.”

“I didn’t come for breakfast.”

“I know.” She said it without a trace of satisfaction. “That’s why I’m telling you the gate’s open anyway.”

Royce Draper’s jaw worked for a moment, like a man chewing something large and difficult. Then he turned around and walked back the way he came, and the yard slowly exhaled and got back to the business of eating.

By four o’clock, the table was down to crumbs, the coffee was gone, and Maren had taken more orders in a single day than she had in the previous two weeks — including a standing order from Mr. Hooper at the saloon, who had apparently decided, in the course of one scrambled egg, that a man’s taste buds could not be in league with a rumor against him.

“Word travels,” Mrs. Farrow said, sweeping the last of the crumbs off the cloth with her palm. “You did right. You let them see for themselves, and they’ll do your fighting for you. That’s the only kind of fight that ever sticks.”

Maren stood at the gate as the light drained out of the sky, with Mack sitting on the porch steps counting their take into a jar, and for the first time in her life she understood what her grandmother had meant, asking the land to hold her, and the land, without a word, agreeing.

It was Emmett Hale who stayed after the rest. He stood at the fence, looking out at the darkening fields, and when he turned, his face had lost its midday good humor.

“I’d like to tell you it’s all smooth water now,” he said. “It’s not.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Older. He looked at the sky, the color of dust, and at the far line of hills where the first cold had already touched the grass.

“Thirty years I’ve farmed this country, girl. I know what a hard winter smells like, and I can smell one coming hard down the road at us. The kind that buries the livestock and freezes the streams clear to the bottom. The mines up at Sandstone are done—shut down last week—so there’s half a county of men with no wages and no larder and no help coming. The harvest this year was thin all over, the thinnest I’ve seen since the die-off. Come January, a good portion of the folks in this town are going to have to choose between eating their seed corn and watching their children go without.”

He looked at her then, directly, and there was something in his eyes she had never seen in a grown man’s face before — not pity, and not warning, but a kind of tired, searching hope.

“I ain’t telling you this to spook you,” Emmett Hale said. “I’m telling you because that henhouse of yours is the only thing south of the river that’s producing more than it costs. And I want to know, since you know how to feed a yard full of strangers for free on a Saturday afternoon, what you’ll do with a county full of them come January.”

The wind came up off the field like a hand laid flat against the dark. Maren looked at the henhouse where the Judge had taken up his post on the roof ridge like a sentinel on a wall, and where, even now, in the cold dark, she could hear the low, ongoing, immensely patient muttering of thirty-seven birds going about their business.

“Emmett,” she said, “I don’t know yet. But I’ll tell you one thing I know for certain, because my grandmother told me the same.”

“What’s that?”

“The land doesn’t care who owns it. It only cares who takes care of it. And come January, the people of this county are going to find out which one of us did.”

The old man looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded once, slow, like a man shaking hands with a decision, and picked up his hat.

“I believe you,” he said. “That’s the problem. I believe you.”