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copacetic?”
    â€œThey look good,” Calvin reports.
    â€œDidn’t lose too many in transport did we?”
    â€œCouple of hundred max.”
    Norman is pleased. “Is that right? In this heat?” He pauses to make a notation. “And how’d things go with Jeanie? Everything copacetic there, I hope?”
    Jeanie comes home from the hospital the day before Rhea starts kindergarten. Her legs are weak and she can barely keep from vomiting but she manages to dress her daughter in a new blue corduroy jumper and make sure there are fresh peach slices on her Frosted Flakes. She props herself against the porch post while Calvin walks their daughter to the end of the driveway. The school bus gobbles her up. “Our baby’s growing up,” Calvin says when he gets back to the porch.
    â€œAnd I’m dying,” Jeanie says.
    Calvin presses his lips against her forehead and holds her in his arms. “You’re not dying.”
    She can smell the stale sweat on the collar of his workshirt. She likes the smell. “I’m not exactly living.”
    â€œYou’re going to be fine.”
    Jeanie closes her eyes, tightly, to keep the tears inside. “Everything’s going to be copacetic, is it?”
    â€œCopacetic as hell.”
    Rhea gets off the bus shortly after noon. Jeanie is waiting for her with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a hug. The phone rings shortly after one. It’s Rhea’s kindergarten teacher. She’s mildly concerned. “One of the first things I like to do is have the children draw a picture of themselves. It helps me determine if they view themselves positively. If they’re introverted, or extroverted.”
    â€œAnd what did Rhea draw?” Jeanie asks.
    â€œShe drew a very pretty picture of herself. I could actually tell it was her.”
    â€œHer father’s an art major.”
    â€œBut then she scribbled over her picture with black crayon. She said the scribbles were chicken shit, Mrs. Cassowary. She used those actual words— chicken shit .”
    The first thing Rhea does after changing her school clothes is run to the chicken coop and dig out a handful of cracked corn from the feed barrel. Then she runs to the old corn crib and crouches until her knees are higher than her ears. The crib sits two feet off the ground on cement block pillars, to keep snakes and rodents from getting in. The ground underneath is a jumble of old lumber, broken baskets, and rusted lawnmowers. The Leghorn she saved from the manure pit has been busy. Though she is closing in on her second birthday, and is officially spent, she does manage one egg every four days. So there are eggs everywhere. Unfortunately the mice and rats and chipmunks and raccoons have been busy, too. Almost all of the eggs have been broken open and their yolks and white sucked dry. “You under there, Miss Lucky Pants?” Rhea asks, giving the hen the name her grandmother gave her.
    Every fall, the door to the chicken coop is left open, so Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons can range free and feast on bugs and worms and swallow tiny bits of gravel from the driveway to resupply their gizzards with the grit they need to grind and digest their food. They also can scratch and peck to their hearts’ content in the vegetable gardens, making quick work of the tomatoes and cucumbers overlooked by their human masters. They can explore the high grass and the shrubbery and hop up on the low branches of the peach and apple trees to look sideways at the endless world and feel the clean fresh breezes. They can pretend to be what nature intended, free birds of the jungle; free to eat and run and sleep; free to lay eggs where and when they want; free to squirt their manure where they won’t have to step in it; free to strut as far in any one direction as they wish, without a wall of wire to change their direction; free to risk the hawks in the sky and the fast cats