Jennifer is writing a collection of short stories - all fiction - and needed a place to post one for review. This is just one that will appear in a collection titled "I Want to See You Again".
Enjoy, critique, or slam, as you see fit:
The Seasonal Workers
They were only seasonal workers, so the animals didn’t pay much attention when the great scarlet tractor came blazing
along the old dirt road. It billowed dust right past the feed stalls and then on toward the vegetable garden. Bright and shiny and brand new as far as Hamby could tell. And the way he figured it, that surely meant trouble. Hamby had been keeping his eye on changes around the farm, divining their meaning, and during evening feedings, he shared his findings with the other animals.
Any farmer would tell you that a steer the size and weight of Hamby would bring top dollar at auction. No matter that he was blind in one eye, his strapping disposition set him apart and gave him absolute credibility with the other animals. If he had to strain to see, then it was commonly held among them that he must surely see more than they did. It was said that he had vision.
So it was no surprise that evening when he had startling news for them. All the animals gathered around the old weeping willow in the side yard at dusk. Even the blackbirds came to rest in a perfectly spaced line upon the twisted wire fence. All twenty-four and then some.
“There are changes about,” he began. “Farmer Grady is a clever man, but not so clever as to cross his wife. We all know how sacred her garden is, and let’s agree that not a one of us would risk our life for a bushel of her fat carrots.” They all murmured in agreement, but mostly in appreciation as they conjured visions of her bursting tomatoes and pungent thyme.
"Today that big red machine ate up her entire garden. You might’ve smelled it – the stench of hot tar and kerosene. And that my friends, is the smell of evil.” He set his lopsided gaze upon the silent bunch. They absorbed this news in that dumb-animal acceptance of things, whether for good or for bad.
When his good eye caught the knowing gaze of a pretty young French hen, the shared knowledge that passed wordlessly between them pierced his soul and caused his legs to grow wobbly. Why exactly, he could not say.
His words were a revelation, he was certain of that. Yet the farm animals disbanded as usual and followed their normal routines right on into the night. He grazed awhile in the side yard but the sweet grass left his stomach sour. He was given to too much thinking, and sometimes he lay awake all night just gazing at the stars and dreaming of the milk river that streamed endlessly across that faraway ranch.
Back in the coop, the hens were restless. Charla was an ample and outspoken Rhode Island Red, and she wasn’t the first to notice the distant sadness of the new girl, the one they called Laurel. Of the exotic French variety, Laurel’s black and white tail fanned flamboyantly, yet she was undeniably shy and remote. She smelled of violets and honeysuckle, but Charla wondered whether she had it in her to lay a decent egg. By all accounts, Charla lay claim to the largest Grade A Jumbo’s in the county, so she ought to know.
Farmer Grady fed his chickens on a diet of sweet basil, which accounted for the high demand of his unusually delicious eggs. His beef was renowned far and wide. The secret lie in the untreated Kentucky grasses they grazed upon and the honey his wife baked into their salt blocks. His animals enjoyed royal treatment and were generally happy. No one complained.
Until that night, as word began to spread about the leveled garden. An uneasy feeling overtook the animals. Scrub Jays could be heard whispering to their mates, something that never happened in the dark. The cattle whimpered pitifully, knowing but not knowing of some unspoken, impending ruin. Charla upended a violet stone near the water trough. A grave omen of misfortune, of lives hanging in the balance.
Laurel pecked at the ground under the waning moon as the other hens settled in for the night. She smelled Hamby before she saw him, and didn’t look up when he chewed the straw bale behind her. She had dreams, but never a friend to share them with. To her surprise, she told him of her desire to be an artist - how she envied the long arms of the weeping willow, painting a new story upon the grass with each change in the wind. And how she longed to be a mother, to raise chicks and sing her morning song. How she desperately wanted to fly.
Hamby understood this just as he understood things the other animals couldn’t see. Laurel was different, but not crazy as the other hens suspected. No, she was speaking to Hamby’s own dreams. At once, he realized why she left him trembling. Hamby had lost his ability to father his own brood in that awful barn accident last spring. Something to do with those seasonal workers, but he’d let himself forget the details. Still, even now, the want was inside of him, wild and newly awakened.
It went on this way, their fast growing kinship taking hold much the same way the flowering clematis vines twined against the stone walls of the farm house. Trading dreams and conjuring possibilities kept them calm through the rainy nights of spring, and before long, it became harder to separate their plans for the future.
Colorful sweet pea blossoms meandering through the witch hazel announced the arrival of summer. It was hot and the days were long. The sun draped generously over the rising fields. What with all the activity around the farm, no one noticed that Laurel wasn’t leaving her eggs in her nest. She rose early and dragged them one by one to the watery glade in the irrigation ditch where she sat upon them for hours each day. But alas, not a one ever hatched.
She sang them her morning song, scratched parables in the mud, and even tried to fly from the lower tiers of the wooden fence. Still nothing happened. Eventually, emptiness took root inside of her like a wild mint. Everything she wanted seemed farther and farther from the realm of possibility. She stopped dreaming at night of golden sunlight and spirited chicks. In their place, her dreams were filled with murky, inky blackness. She stopped clucking and her showy checkerboard feathers began falling to the ground, leaving a trail behind her. One by one, as her feathers grew back in, each was as white as snow.
When Hamby noticed Laurel’s fallen feathers in the pasture, he became alarmed and followed her downy trail. Near the watery ditch he came upon broken eggs – dozens of them. Some were fresh and cracked wide open, while others had turned to powder. The sight of it frightened him. He might’ve noticed sooner, and kicked himself because he hadn’t. Just as he’d foreseen, there had been trouble on the farm. A new corral filled with young steer had replaced the vegetable garden. The hens had grown agitated now that their fresh herbs had been replaced with commercial chicken feed. Even the wily farm cats had stayed away as the verdant scent of the garden gave way to swarms of black flies.
So it was that he sought the wise council of Belladora, an old black mare that grazed along the farthest edges of the pasture. Many believed her to be a sorceress because she was shod in red shoes. They tended to leave her alone unless they needed her special brand of magic. For she knew better than to let them into her heart. Though she and Hamby naturally got along, and understood one another as wise souls often do. She was a gentle spirit and unless asked, she kept her thoughts to herself.
“Why would a chicken break her own eggs?” he asked. Belladora calmly tore at the grass as Hamby told of Laurel’s deep wish to become a mother, and how none of this made any sense to him at all. How he was lost without Laurel’s companionship now that she refused to speak. How his heart was breaking apart.
He tried to graze alongside the dark horse, but was much too distressed to eat. He shuddered as a golden eagle swooped down and plucked its dinner from the field. It was a long while before Belladora issued her recommendation. “Offer her the one thing you treasure the most,” she proposed, “that which you cannot live without”. And with an air of finality, said nothing more.
Later that night, Charla whispered to Laurel through the wire wall which now separated them. The purple flower petals that Laurel used to line her nest had dried to a blackish gray and crunched as she shifted around to hear her better. Hamby had sent word to Laurel asking her to meet him under the willow when the moon was high. But she knew she couldn’t face him. Not now. She couldn’t find the words to explain what she had done. How they had come and stolen her babies each morning before she awakened. That she had named each one after a star. And try as she had, her chicks refused to hatch, and this truth had taken her very soul. Words filled with such darkness simply didn’t exist, she was certain of that.
The wind rustled through the chicken yard as she made her way across the farm. A violent gust of wind sent her rolling into the dusty cow pen. When she finally reached the willow, she was ruffled and exhausted. With no sign of Hamby, it didn’t take long before she realized she had made a grave mistake. Hope, it seemed, wasn’t her strong suit.
“I will give you anything Laurel, anything I have, just to see you happy again,” Laurel heard Hamby’s words but she couldn’t see him, nor was his scent carried with the wind. Once again, she heard his entreaty, certain of the sincerity of his words. But as with all of her dreams, he seemed to disappear as soon as she opened her eyes. And when she did, she was outside of herself, out on the far edge. Her center existed only in the reflection of Hamby’s eyes. Eyes she couldn’t possibly look into again.
All the way back to the coop, she saw nothing more than the swishing tail of the old black mare far off in the field. She trudged through the milkweed; it’s pods sticking to her feathers. She fought the wind and lost her way, shivering from her fall into the water trough. Through it all, his words echoed within her. I will give you anything.
She loved Hamby like nothing else in this world. There was nothing she would take away from him. Not a thing. All she wanted was to give to him. To share her little chicklets with him, to live out their dreams.
She had to think things over. With each passing day, the cattle grew larger, the wheat swayed golden-red in the evening sun, and the animals stopped meeting by the willow at dusk. Smoking diesel fuel mixed with dirt hung in the air and lined their noses. Even the flowering purple clematis, bleached by the sun, had turned an orangish gray. When Laurel found Hamby drinking all alone, she summoned what courage she could muster and startled him with her words.
“I want your whiskers,” she said, “I want the end of your tail, and…” she hesitated, ‘ I want your heart”. For the first time in weeks, Hamby smiled. That night they met under the willow, and with the help of the scrub jays, his whiskers were plucked and wrapped up in clover leaves. They trimmed his shaggy tail and tied the wavy locks to a broken limb. His heart, he silently imparted to her as they lie huddled together in the blue hour beneath the waning moon. For a little while, they were happy.
The next morning, the big trucks arrived early. The seasonal workers rounded up the cattle and pointed them toward the loading ramps. A bad feeling came over Laurel as she searched frantically for Hamby. When she found him lined up with the others, she scuttled beneath them to ask him why he was leaving her. But he couldn’t look at her. His good eye had failed him - his vision hadn’t foreseen this particular nightmare. His head was down but he refused to let her hear him cry as the truck took him far away from their farm.
But Laurel cried. She wondered if this was just the way things were in this world. If swallowing her sadness were the only means of survival – such as it was. She unwrapped his whiskers and lined her nest with them. She slept with his tail wrapped around her. And when the morning came, as it surely did, she opened her white wings and let the wind carry her high up into the breaking sky.
By Jennifer Monroe - Copyright 2011
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