“But teaching him to lie?”
“Fine. Then just throw them away. But from now on I expect you to look that little tiger square in the eye, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, then.”
I was off the hook for all of about eight days. Then there she was again, at seven in the morning, bouncing up and down on our porch with eggs in her hands. “Hi, Bryce! Here you go.”
I tried to look her square in the eye and tell her, No thanks, but she was so darned happy, and I wasn’t really awake enough to tackle the tiger. She wound up pushing another carton into my hands, and I wound up ditching them in the kitchen trash before my father sat down to breakfast.
This went on for two years. Two years! And it got to a point where it was just part of my morning routine. I’d be on the lookout for Juli so I could whip the door open before she had the chance to knock or ring the bell, and then I’d bury the eggs in the trash before my dad showed up.
Then came the day I blew it. Juli’d actually been making herself pretty scarce because it was around the time they’d taken the sycamore tree down, but suddenly one morning she was back on our doorstep, delivering eggs. I took them, as usual, and I went to chuck them, as usual. But the kitchen trash was so full that there wasn’t any room for the carton, so I put it on top, picked up the trash, and beat it out the front door to empty everything into the garbage can outside.
Well, guess who’s just standing there like a statue on my porch?
The Egg Chick.
I about spilled the trash all over the porch. “What are you still doing here?” I asked her.
“I … I don’t know. I was just … thinking.”
“About what?” I was desperate. I needed a distraction. Some way around her with this garbage before she noticed what was sitting right there on top.
She looked away like she was embarrassed. Juli Baker embarrassed? I didn’t think it was possible.
Whatever. The golden opportunity to whip a soggy magazine over the egg carton had presented itself, and buddy, I took it. Then I tried to make a fast break for the garbage can in the side yard, only she body-blocked me. Seriously. She stepped right in my way and put her arms out like she’s guarding the goal.
She chased me and blocked me again. “What happened?” she wants to know. “Did they break?”
Perfect. Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Yeah, Juli,” I told her. “And I’m real sorry about that.” But what I’m thinking is, Please, God, oh please, God, let me make it to the garbage can.
God must’ve been sleeping in. Juli tackled the trash and pulled out her precious little carton of eggs, and she could tell right off that they weren’t broken. They weren’t even cracked.
She stood frozen with the eggs in her hands while I dumped the rest of the trash. “Why did you throw them out?” she asked, but her voice didn’t sound like Juli Baker’s voice. It was quiet. And shaky.
So I told her we were afraid of salmonella poisoning because her yard was a mess and that we were just trying to spare her feelings. I told it to her like we were right and she was wrong, but I felt like a jerk. A complete cluck-faced jerk.
Then she tells me that a couple of neighbors have been buying eggs off her. Buying them. And while I’m coming to grips with this incredible bit of news, she whips out her mental calculator. “Do you realize I’ve lost over a hundred dollars giving these eggs to you?” Then she races across the street in a flood of tears.
As much as I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t asked her for the eggs—I hadn’t said we wanted them or needed them or liked them—the fact was, I’d never seen Juli cry before. Not when she’d broken her arm in P.E., not when she’d been teased at school or ditched by her brothers. Not even when they’d cut down the sycamore tree. I’m pretty sure she cried then, but I didn’t actually see it. To me, Juli Baker had always been too tough to cry.
I went down to my room to pack my stuff for school, feeling like the biggest jerk to ever hit the planet. I’d been sneaking around throwing out eggs for over two years, avoiding her, avoiding my father — what did that make me? Why hadn’t I just stood up and said, No thanks, don’t want ’em, don’t need ’em, don’t like ’em … . Give them to the snake, why don’t you? Something!
Was I really afraid of hurting her feelings?
Or was I afraid of her?
Juli: The Eggs
After they cut down the sycamore tree, it seemed like everything else fell apart, too. Champ died. And then I found out about the eggs. It was Champ’s time to go, and even though I still miss him, I think it’s been easier for me to deal with his death than it has been for me to deal with the truth about the eggs. I still cannot believe it about the eggs.
The eggs came before the chickens in our case, but the dog came before them both. One night when I was about six years old, Dad came home from work with a full-grown dog tied down in the back of his truck. Someone had hit it in the middle of an intersection, and Dad had stopped to see how badly it was hurt. Then he noticed that the poor thing was skinny as a rail and didn’t have any tags. “Starving and completely disoriented,” he told my mother. “Can you imagine someone abandoning their dog like that?”
The whole family had converged on the front porch, and I could hardly contain myself. A dog! A wonderful, happy, panty dog! I realize now that Champ was never much of a looker, but when you’re six, any dog—no matter how mangy—is a glorious, huggable creature.
He looked pretty good to my brothers, too, but from the way my mother’s face was pinched, I could tell she was thinking, Abandon this dog? Oh, I can see it. I can definitely see it. What she said, though, was simply, “There is no room for that animal in this house.”
“Trina,” my dad said, “it’s not a matter of ownership. It’s a matter of compassion.”
“You’re not springing it on me as a … a pet, then?”
“That is definitely not my intention.”
“Well, then what do you intend to do?”
“Give him a decent meal, a bath … then maybe we’ll place an ad and find him a home.”
She eyed him from across the threshold. “There’ll be no ‘maybe’ about it.”
My brothers said, “We don’t get to keep him?”
“That’s right.”
“But Mo-om,” they moaned.
“It’s not open to discussion,” she said. “He gets a bath, he gets a meal, he gets an ad in the paper.”
My father put one arm around Matt’s shoulder and the other around Mike’s. “Someday, boys, we’ll get a puppy.”
My mother was already heading back inside, but over her shoulder came, “Not until you learn to keep your room neat, boys!”
By the end of the week, the dog was named Champ. By the end of the next week, he’d made it from the backyard into the kitchen area. And not too long after that, he was all moved in. It seemed nobody wanted a full-grown dog with a happy bark. Nobody but four-fifths of the Baker family, anyway.
Then my mother started noticing an odor. A mysterious odor of indeterminate origin. We all admitted we smelled it, too, but where my mother was convinced it was Eau de Champ, we disagreed. She had us bathing him so often that it couldn’t possibly be him. We each sniffed him out pretty good and he smelled perfectly rosy.
My personal suspicion was that Matt and Mike were the ones not bathing enough, but I didn’t want to get close enough to sniff them. And since our camp was divided on just who the culprit or culprits were, the odor was dubbed the Mystery Smell. Whole dinnertime discussions revolved around the Mystery Smell, which my brothers found amusing and my mother did not.
Then one day my mother cracked the case. And she might have cracked Champ’s skull as well if my dad hadn’t come to the rescue and shooed him outside.
Mom was fuming. “I told you it was him. The Mystery Smell comes from the Mystery Pisser! Did you see that? Did you see that? He just squirted on the end table!”
My father raced with a roll of
paper towels to where Champ had been, and said, “Where? Where is it?”
All of three drops were dripping down the table leg. “There,” my mother said, pointing a shaky finger at the wetness. “There!”
Dad wiped it up, then checked the carpet and said, “It was barely a drop.”
“Exactly!” my mother said with her hands on her hips. “Which is why I’ve never been able to find anything. That dog stays outside from now on. Do you hear me? He is no longer allowed in this house!”
“How about the garage?” I asked. “Can he sleep in there?”
“And have him tag everything that’s out there? No!”
Mike and Matt were grinning at each other. “Mystery Pisser! That could be the name for our band!”
“Yeah! Cool!”
“Band?” my mother asked. “Wait a minute, what band?” But they were already flying down to their room, laughing about the possibilities for a logo.
My father and I spent the rest of the day sniffing out and destroying criminal evidence. My dad used a spray bottle of ammonia; I followed up with Lysol. We did try to recruit my brothers, but they wound up getting into a spray-bottle fight, which got them locked in their room, which, of course, was fine with them.
So Champ became an outside dog, and he might have been our only pet ever if it hadn’t been for my fifth-grade science fair.
Everyone around me had great project ideas, but I couldn’t seem to come up with one. Then our teacher, Mrs. Brubeck, took me aside and told me about a friend of hers who had chickens, and how she could get me a fertilized egg for my project.
“But I don’t know anything about hatching an egg,” I told her.
She smiled and put her arm around my shoulders. “You don’t have to be an immediate expert at everything, Juli. The idea here is to learn something new.”
“But what if it dies?”
“Then it dies. Document your work scientifically and you’ll still get an A, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
An A? Being responsible for the death of a baby chick—that’s what I was worried about. Suddenly there was real appeal in building a volcano or making my own neoprene or demonstrating the various scientific applications of gear ratios.
But the ball was in motion, and Mrs. Brubeck would have no more discussion about it. She pulled The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens from her bookshelf and said, “Read the section on artificial incubation and set yourself up tonight. I’ll get you an egg tomorrow.”
“But … ”
“Don’t worry so much, Juli,” she said. “We do this every year, and it’s always one of the best projects at the fair.”
I said, “But … ,” but she was gone. Off to put an end to some other student’s battle with indecision.
That night I was more worried than ever. I’d read the chapter on incubation at least four times and was still confused about where to start. I didn’t happen to have an old aquarium lying around! We didn’t happen to have an incubation thermometer! Would a deep-fry model work?
I was supposed to control humidity, too, or horrible things would happen to the chick. Too dry and the chick couldn’t peck out; too wet and it would die of mushy chick disease. Mushy chick disease?!
My mother, being the sensible person that she is, told me to tell Mrs. Brubeck that I simply wouldn’t be hatching a chick. “Have you considered growing beans?” she asked me.
My father, however, understood that you can’t refuse to do your teacher’s assignment, and he promised to help. “An incubator’s not difficult to build. We’ll make one after dinner.”
How my father knows exactly where things are in our garage is one of the wonders of the universe. How he knew about incubators, however, was revealed to me while he was drilling a one-inch hole in an old scrap of Plexiglas. “I raised a duck from an egg when I was in high school.” He grinned at me. “Science fair project.”
“A duck?”
“Yes, but the principle is the same for all poultry. Keep the temperature constant and the humidity right, turn the egg several times a day, and in a few weeks you’ll have yourself a little peeper.”
He handed me a lightbulb and an extension cord with a socket attached. “Fasten this through the hole in the Plexiglas. I’ll find some thermometers.”
“Some? We need more than one?”
“We have to make you a hygrometer.”
“A hygrometer?” “To check the humidity inside the incubator. It’s just a thermometer with wet gauze around the bulb.”
I smiled. “No mushy chick disease?”
He smiled back. “Precisely.”
By the next afternoon I had not one, but six chicken eggs incubating at a cozy 102 degrees Fahrenheit. “They don’t all make it, Juli,” Mrs. Brubeck told me. “Hope for one. The record’s three. The grade’s in the documentation. Be a scientist. Good luck.” And with that, she was off.
Documentation? Of what? I had to turn the eggs three times a day and regulate the temperature and humidity, but aside from that what was there to do?
That night my father came out to the garage with a cardboard tube and a flashlight. He taped the two together so that the light beam was forced straight out the tube. “Let me show you how to candle an egg,” he said, then switched off the garage light.
I’d seen a section on candling eggs in Mrs. Brubeck’s book, but I hadn’t really read it yet. “Why do they call it that?” I asked him. “And why do you do it?”
“People used candles to do this before they had incandescent lighting.” He held an egg up to the cardboard tube. “The light lets you see through the shell so you can watch the embryo develop. Then you can cull the weak ones, if necessary.”
“Kill them?”
“Cull them. Remove the ones that don’t develop properly.”
“But … wouldn’t that also kill them?”
He looked at me. “Leaving an egg you should cull might have disastrous results on the healthy ones.”
“Why? Wouldn’t it just not hatch?”
He went back to lighting up the egg. “It might explode and contaminate the other eggs with bacteria.”
Explode! Between mushy chick disease, exploding eggs, and culling, this project was turning out to be the worst! Then my father said, “Look here, Julianna. You can see the embryo.” He held the flashlight and egg out so I could see.
I looked inside and he said, “See the dark spot there? In the middle? With all the veins leading to it?”
“The thing that looks like a bean?”
“That’s it!”
Suddenly it felt real. This egg was alive. I quickly checked the rest of the group. There were little bean babies in all of them! Surely they had to live. Surely they would all make it!
“Dad? Can I take the incubator inside? It might get too cold out here at night, don’t you think?”
“I was going to suggest the same thing. Why don’t you prop open the door? I’ll carry it for you.”
For the next two weeks I was completely consumed with the growing of chicks. I labeled the eggs A, B, C, D, E, and F, but before long they had names, too: Abby, Bonnie, Clyde, Dexter, Eunice, and Florence. Every day I weighed them, candled them, and turned them. I even thought it might be good for them to hear some clucking, so for a while I did that, too, but clucking is tiring! It was much easier to hum around my quiet little flock, so I did that, instead. Soon I was humming without even thinking about it, because when I was around my eggs, I was happy.
I read The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens cover to cover twice. For my project I drew diagrams of the various stages of an embryo’s development, I made a giant chicken poster, I graphed the daily fluctuations in temperature and humidity, and I made a line chart documenting the weight loss of each egg. On the outside eggs were boring, but I knew what was happening on the inside!
Then two days before the science fair I was candling Bonnie when I noticed something. I called my dad into my room and said, “Look, Dad! Look at thi
s! Is that the heart beating?”
He studied it for a moment, then smiled and said, “Let me get your mother.”
So the three of us crowded around and watched Bonnie’s heart beat, and even my mother had to admit that it was absolutely amazing.
Clyde was the first to pip. And of course he did it right before I had to leave for school. His little beak cracked through, and while I held my breath and waited, he rested. And rested. Finally his beak poked through again, but almost right away, he rested again. How could I go to school and just leave him this way? What if he needed my help? Surely this was a valid reason to stay home, at least for a little while!
My father tried to assure me that hatching out could take all day and that there’d be plenty of action left after school, but I’d have none of that. Oh, no-no-no! I wanted to see Abby and Bonnie and Clyde and Dexter and Eunice and Florence come into the world. Every single one of them. “I can’t miss the hatch!” I told him. “Not even a second of it!”
“So take it to school with you,” my mother said. “Mrs. Brubeck shouldn’t mind. After all, this was her idea.”
Sometimes it pays to have a sensible mother. I’d just set up for the science fair early, that’s what I’d do! I packed up my entire operation, posters, charts, and all, and got a ride to school from my mom.
Mrs. Brubeck didn’t mind a bit. She was so busy helping kids with their projects that I got to spend nearly the entire day watching the hatch.
Clyde and Bonnie were the first ones out. It was disappointing at first because they just lay there all wet and matted, looking exhausted and ugly. But by the time Abby and Dexter broke out, Bonnie and Clyde were fluffing up, looking for action.
The last two took forever, but Mrs. Brubeck insisted that I leave them alone, and that worked out pretty great because they hatched out during the fair that night. My whole family came, and even though Matt and Mike only watched for about two minutes before they took off to look at some other demonstration, my mom and dad stuck around for the whole thing. Mom even picked Bonnie up and nuzzled her.