Osprey Island

“Our garden.” Eden gestured toward the back of the house, where tomato vines grew in neat, staked rows, and beans climbed their tripod poles like trained ivy. “It’ll need to be twice the size next summer.” Her plans were long range. “Enjoy that roast”—she pointed to Roderick’s dinner plate—“because once the freezer’s emptied you’re not getting any more of it unless I can find a farmer who raises them without all that poison. Because that’s where it is,” she insisted, “in the food. And I won’t have it anymore. Not in my house. Unless you want to raise the pigs out back yourself. Otherwise, you need a chop or a steak, you get it down at Tubby’s or the Grill. Not here.” She paused. “We’ll turn the shed out back into a henhouse, so we’ll have eggs. The library’s ordering me a book about milk cows, but I just don’t know if we’ll have the room. They have to graze, you know.”

“A cow!” Roderick exploded. “I’m a carpenter! Not a farmer! I am not raising goddamn cows!” And though the rage was bubbling deep inside him, the words that came out were nothing more than steam.

“Then we just won’t have milk,” Eden said, and the case seemed to close in her mind.

Eden and Roderick’s had never been a marriage of love, but a product of their time and circumstance: not companionable, but suitable. He paid the bills; she cooked the meals. Arguments, she won, which only sent him to the bar, or hunting, which was fine. In the end he did as he was told, and in turn she took care of him, which he couldn’t have done on his own. Like a governess and her ward, they were mutually dependent. They got on sufficiently to make it through the days together, and they did in fact make it through a good many days.

Eden Jacobs had never kept a rooster. No need. Not if you just raised hens for laying, that is. Those girls each put out a good eating egg every couple of days, no matter what—as long as you fed and kept them well and gave them a few hours under an electric light in winter when the days got short and temperatures brought production down. It was a lot easier to keep things under control without a rooster in the henhouse.

Eden liked the chicken shed full to about ten hens. She believed— firmly—in population control for humans, and she believed in it for birds. Naturally, in the late spring, early summer, a hen might start going broody: that biological imperative to amass a clutch of eggs and sit on them until they hatched. And sure, there were plenty of hybrid hens with the instinct for broodiness bred right out of them, but those, Eden thought, were birds for the egg-laying corporate empires. She didn’t believe in some kind of superchicken bred for human convenience. If she was going to raise her own, they were going to be honest-to-goodness, nonengineered, unsaccharine hens.

Mostly she raised them for eggs, but Eden liked a nice roast chicken or a broiler as much as the next person, and her chickens were safe and healthy to eat, not like the poisoned garbage they sold down at the IGA. So Eden raised dual-purpose birds—good for eggs and good for meat—and every so often she’d cull one from the flock and slaughter it. No business raising them if you’re not willing to do the work, she’d say. The killing and cleaning wasn’t her favorite job, but it was a necessary part of it all. To keep up with the ones she ate and the ones she inevitably lost to predators or the random undetected disease, about once a year Eden took a drive over to George Quincy’s place and borrowed a rooster for a week or so to mate with one of her girls and raise up another brood of baby chicks.

George Quincy had a sizable piece of land on the north end by Osprey Cove, and he’d been raising all sorts of critters out there for years, and those animals had kind of become his pastime and his family. George was happy enough to have Eden take one of his birds over to her place for a roll in the proverbial hay (hay actually made a very poor nesting litter for chickens, all those hollows to trap moisture—much better to use wood shavings, but that was a whole other issue . . .) with one of her hens.

In late May, soon after Roddy’s return to Osprey, Eden had driven over to George’s with a large cage in the back of her car to pick up Franklin, a remarkably good-natured Cherry Egger who’d already fathered a few of Eden’s broods in the past. George had been having some trouble mating his own birds that season, but he said he was nearly one hundred percent sure that Franklin wasn’t the problem.