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cringing in the shadows.
    Yes, when the sun sets they will hurry back to their perches in the coop and their human masters will close and latch the door—after all, they are not truly free birds of the jungle—but at dawn the door will swing open again and another day of sweet pretending can begin.
    The white Leghorn looks out from her broken basket beneath the corn crib and sees the Buff Orpingtons scratching in the garden. She sees the magnificent caramel-red rooster with his great red comb and dangling wattles and great curl of black tail feathers and realizes for the first time what this egg laying business is really all about. She scoots out from the dark jumbled safety of the corn crib and nonchalantly pecks her way toward the garden.
    Captain Bates sees her among the tomato vines and remembers her from the day she fled past the chicken yard. He calls out his intentions to her. She pecks closer. He fluffs out his neck feathers. She pecks closer. He prances through the tangles of rotting cucumber vines. She coyly trots away. He pursues. True, she is not much to look at. She is small and a good many of her feathers are gone. But Captain Bates knows from her body language what she wants.
    And so that afternoon the chromosomes of old Maximo Gomez find their way into the scientifically perfected uterus of a Gallinipper Leghorn. And so it is that Miss Lucky Pants is invited to spend the night on the perches in the coop.
    â€œHow in hell did that Leghorn get in with the Orpingtons?” Calvin wonders as he and Jeanie walk with Rhea along the row of grapes Alfred Cassowary planted so many years ago. The grapes are finally sweet enough to eat and they stop every few seconds to pinch one off and suck it out of its purple-blue skin. It’s late in the afternoon and a huge flock of starlings is washing back and forth across the empty cow pasture below the layer houses. Captain Bates and his hens are in the garden scratching among the potato vines.
    â€œThat’s Miss Lucky Pants,” Rhea tells him. “I saved her from the chicken shit.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t be using that word,” her mother says. “It gets your father and me in trouble with your teacher.”
    â€œOkay,” says Rhea.
    Calvin knows he should go into the chick coop tonight and grab Miss Lucky Pants by the feet and wring its neck and bury it and then make up some story to tell Rhea: “It must have escaped” or “It died of old age.” He sure knows he can’t keep every damn Leghorn that gets away from Phil Bunyip’s chicken catchers. The Leghorns aren’t pets. They’re not like the Buff Orpingtons. You don’t talk baby talk to them, or sing to them, or give them names. They’re not part of the old farm. They’re part of the new farm. They’re egg machines . Yet Calvin knows he can no more wring that hen’s neck than he could Rhea’s.

Six
    Two days after Thanksgiving Jeanie Cassowary contracts pneumonia. Three days after that she dies.
    â€œMommy was very sick and God didn’t want her to suffer anymore,” Calvin tells his daughter as they sit on the edge of her bed. “So He took her to Heaven.” The next afternoon they drive to the funeral home in Tuttwyler and Rhea is surprised to see her mother lying in a box. “I thought God took Mommy to Heaven.”
    â€œOnly her soul,” her father explains. “Her body stays down here with us.”
    That seems fair enough and Rhea has no more questions. Only when they drive her mother’s body to the cemetery and lower it into the ground do the peculiarities of death bewilder her again. “Why can’t we keep her at home? Where we can look at her sometimes?”
    Her father closes his eyes and slowly shakes his head no.
    After the funeral everyone gathers at the Cassowary house for a party of sorts. The kitchen counters are covered with casseroles and desserts. The wobbly table in the