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than chickens. But they all said that I had to work where I was needed.
    It was a hard job made worse by Pluto’s mood swings. Some days she would start early, waking me up before the rooster crowed, insisting we remove all the old pine shavings and scrub every board in the coop before lunch. Other days, she would sleep into the afternoon or avoid showing up to the coop at all, leaving me to collect and store all the eggs on my own, which I did slavishly, intent on proving my value to the Family.
    But we could never keep up with the demands from the restaurant and Farm. When I first started, we had seventy-five laying hens and were collecting an average of four hundred and fifty eggs a week. But the farm alone could go through thirty dozen, leaving a measly seven dozen eggs for the restaurant. Gamma put pressure on Pluto to increase production, and soon we were squeezing thirty-five new hens into a coop just large enough for the original seventy. Peckings were brutal, with some of our newer hens bleeding heavily from their combs, and our egg production plummeted.
    Maybe the stress was too much for Pluto. Six months after EARTH departed on his Mission, she left, too, packing up all of her belongings one day and standing on the main road with her thumb out. No one tried to convince her to stay.
    So before I was even fourteen years old, I became the principal caretaker of a hundred and ten hens, one rooster, and a chicken coop full of mites and strife. I cried every day for a week, and I don’t know what I would have done without Iron. Even with the harvest to manage, he met me every morning at dawn to collect eggs and every evening to strategize managing the flock. It took a full year and plenty of planning for us to triple the size of the coop and outdoor run, improve ventilation and watering units, and strengthen the fencing from predators. Now I am the keeper of two hundred healthy laying hens producing nearly eighty-seven dozen eggs a week, six roosters, and a constant crop of chicks.
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    â€œNo more questions about my Calling,” I said to Ursa after ten minutes of her babbling on the subject. We were moving a few of the hens so we could clean out the laying boxes.
    â€œBut it’s exciting.” She was holding White Chocolate, our most productive Delaware hen. With so many chickens, I only let her name a handful.
    â€œIt’s a job as a waitress.” I was using a scrub brush to vigorously clean the corners of a box. “That’s even less exciting than making chicken feed.”
    I put the box down and grabbed another one. What I told Ursa about waitressing was true—it did sound boring and unimportant—but I didn’t tell her that there were other reasons I didn’t want to leave the Farm. The image of Indus Stone crossed my mind. Specifically, a picture of him, shirt off, bringing us fresh pine from the wood chipper, walked right through my thoughts. “Besides, what if EARTH came back and I was gone? The Believers have to be here to welcome him when his Mission is finished.”
    Ursa moved Cocoa, one of our Sussex hens, from a box to the yard. When she came back in, she was brushing feathers off of her threadbare pants legs. “Well,
I
want to be a waitress in Seattle. How would you like your eggs?” She pulled an egg from each pocket of her worn corduroys.
    â€œYou couldn’t be a waitress in those pants,” I said. “You can have my blue skirt. Eve made it for me and I can’t fit into it anymore.”
    â€œThanks, Starbird.” Ursa pulled her loose-fitting pants away from her legs. “There’s nothing left in the vintage closet but polyester.”
    In the earliest days of our Family, members made all their own clothing by hand. According to Fern, there was even a time when they sheared sheep and cleaned and spun the wool for sweaters and hats. But as the Family grew, our demand for clothing was too much for the sewing group.