Fresh Eggs (28 page)

Calvin Cassowary not only rebuilt his flock to a million hens, but with new loans, expanded it to a million-three.

The flight to Chicago seems to last forever, even though it only takes an hour. Calvin and Donna are a million miles away from each other, even though their shoulders are touching. The Ziploc bag of feathers is safely stored in the breast pocket of Calvin's sports jacket, making him look like he's got one breast.

The egg-yolk yellow limo again takes them to Gallinipper Foods and the emaciated woman again takes them up to Bob Gallinipper's office. Bob hugs them and leads them over the skyway to EggGenics. When they reach the windowless stainless steel door, Bob pulls an electronic card from his shirt pocket. “Even I need one of these to get inside,” he says. He inserts the card in a slot that for all the world looks like the menacing mouth of a snake.

EggGenics is cleaner than a hospital. White floors. White wall tile. People in white scrubs and white tennis shoes, identification cards clipped to their collars.

In a small office with a stainless steel desk, Bob Gallinipper introduccs them to Special Projects Director Sophia Theophaneia. Her curly Greek hair, despite the many barrettes, goes just everywhere. Under her lab coat she wears a EuroDisney tee shirt.

“Are those the
you-know-whats
in your coat there?” Sophia Theophaneia asks, pointing at the bulge over Calvin's heart.

Calvin hands her the bag of feathers.

Sophia puts the bag in a plastic picnic cooler. Then she says this:

“Any day now the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh is going to announce to the world that they've successfully cloned a sheep. Half the world is going to pat them on the back and the other half is going to whine about them playing God. Truth is, we've been successfully cloning hens right here in this building for twenty-two months. So we can do this thing.”

She lets those last five words of hers soak in. Then after an appreciative wink from Bob Gallinipper, she continues: “There is nothing illegal about human cloning. Nothing inherently unethical about it either. I consider myself a religious person. I see it as just another reproductive option, like adoption or artificial insemination. Children no different than other children except they have the exact superimposed physical image of the donor.
Imago dei
as we embryologists like to say. It's your decision to proceed, of course. But I want you to know that as a Christian and a woman and a scientist, I'm comfortable with it.”

Calvin's eyes are glued on the picnic cooler. “We're comfortable with it, too, philosophically, but whether it's something we're actually going to do—”

Sophia is nodding. “It's a huge decision. One you won't have to make for some time yet. We'll have to successfully remove Rhea's DNA from the feathers first. Then see if we can activate it, so all the genetic codes are functioning, just as they would be in an egg cell. Then, Donna, we'll take some of your unfertilized eggs and remove the nuclei, where your genetic codes are kept. Then we'll implant Rhea's DNA in your eggs. If and when we get a healthy embryo, we'll attach it to the wall of your uterus. And pray for a successful pregnancy.”

Bob Gallinipper claps his hands, startling everybody. “And bingo! Our new little Rhea!”

Sophia tugs nervously on her curly, everywhere hair, wishing the man who signs her paycheck hadn't said that. “Not really Rhea, of course, we all understand that. But, yes, an exact genetic copy of her. Your new baby would be a separate and unique individual. This isn't a resurrection.”

Bob Gallinipper doesn't appreciate the religious reference. “They understand that,” he growls.

Sophia Theophaneia didn't get to be Special Projects director by not understanding the corporate ladder as much as she understands those spiral staircases of life called the double helix. “We embryologists like to babble on,” she says softly.

Donna sympathetically waves off her apology. “Cal and I haven't been able to have a baby. So this could be a godsend for us. Rhea was special and saw the world in a special way. Maybe we can have another special child.”

“It could take many tries,” Sophia cautions.

“We understand that,” Donna says.

“So the first thing,” says Sophia, studying Calvin's uncertain eyes, “is to get to work on these feathers. See if we can extract some good DNA. It could take months. Then we can proceed. If that's what you both finally decide.”

Bob Gallinipper claps his hands again “I can almost feel that new little ball of feathers bouncing on my knee.”

Thirty-three

Bob Gallinipper walks the Cassowarys back across the skyway, his arms tucked in their arms. “I'll call you the minute Sophia has something to report,” he tells them when they reach the elevator. “It'll be good news, too. I can feel that in my ol' Indiana bones.”

After the elevator door closes he pulls out his hanky and blows his nose, the
honk
echoing down the empty corridor. He does not want to go back to his office, not now, not after this. He wants to jump in his car and drive like a bat out of hell to that cemetery where his granddad is buried, just below that line of wonderful old hickory trees. He wants to sit by his granddad's granite gravestone, and run his hands through the wild strawberry leaves, the way he used to run his hands through the old man's bushy white beard when he was a kid. He wants to say, “Gramps, I'm doing something good for somebody again.”

That's what he wants to do. But he has to go back to his office. He has three more meetings before lunch. Two meetings during lunch. Who knows how many meetings after lunch.

It's tough being The Rooster. Sure you get the perks of office—perching where you want, shitting where you want, riding the backs of all the hens you want—but you've also got The Responsibility. You've got to be the first one up every morning and crow like there's no tomorrow, even if your throat's sore. You've got to puff up and strut even though you're as frightened as everybody else. And it's always your carcass on the dining room table. Take, eat: this is Bob Gallinipper's body.

Bob Gallinipper was born in Pennibone, Indiana, at the height of the Great Depression. He was too young to truly understand how bad things were. But his father and mother were old enough to know how bad things were and they made sure he suffered right along with them. He grew up understanding that life was about working hard and going without, even if you didn't have to.

They had a farm right where the Wabash River swung south to begin its long fall to the Ohio. It was a good spot for a farm. Indianapolis to the east, Chicago to the north, two big cities where people had to eat food grown by somebody else. After World War II, his father saw the factories in these big cities sucking up even more people. The 1950s were coming. The suburbs were swelling. “Eggs,” his father said one night at supper when young Bob was gnawing on a porkchop. “We're going to specialize in eggs.”

And so the Gallinippers gave up cows and corn and built a long layer house and filled it with four thousand chickens. Bob learned all about gathering and candling eggs. Learned how to keep shoveling chicken manure when the ammonia was so thick he could barely breathe. By the time he was ready for college, they had three layer houses, each one bigger than the next, twenty thousand hens in all.

Bob Gallinipper wanted to go away to college. Wanted to major in architecture and be the next Frank Lloyd Wright. But Purdue University was just twenty-four miles up the road and it had a damn good agriculture department. So it was Purdue during the day, eggs at night. Even now he wonders how he ever found time to romance Bunny Yeddo. But where there's a will there's a way, and he sure had the will to romance pretty Bunny.

He hated the classes on animal husbandry and farm management. But those marketing classes—now that was fascinating stuff. Especially that one lecture by adjunct professor Edna Mills, about
middle men
, those logistical magicians who wore white shirts and neckties every day of the week, who knew how to make money in agriculture without ever going near the ass-end of a chicken.

He graduated the same year Dwight D. Eisenhower became president, 1953. Got married that year, too. “Daddy,” he said the very afternoon he and Bunny returned from their honeymoon on Mackinac Island, “we'll never get anywhere selling our own eggs. We've got to start selling other people's eggs.”

“Is that why I sent you to college?” his father asked.

“Daddy, that's exactly why you sent me to college.”

By the time John F. Kennedy was taking the oath of office in January 1961, the Gallinippers had eleven farmers in their pockets and the eggs from 322,000 hens in their white and yellow cartons. Printed across the top of those cartons was this:

GALLINIPPER FARMS COUNTRY FRESH EGGS

We gather
—
You'll like them!

Bob thought up that final line himself. It helped them wrangle 38 percent of the egg market in Indianapolis, 53 percent of the egg market in Terre Haute, and 7.6 percent in metropolitan Chicago, the toughest damn egg market to crack in the Middle West.

So Bob Gallinipper today has forty years experience with little roosters like Calvin Cassowary. And he genuinely does admire Calvin's grit. Calvin was willing to risk the family farm, just as he'd risked his family's farm. He was willing to think big. Willing to submit to The Rooster.

Unfortunately, Calvin Cassowary also had a tendency to backslide into independent thinking from time to time, no better example than his carting poor little Rhea around to those county fairs. But God was looking down, and those bunny huggers from Animals Are People, Too, who'd been a burr in the poultry industry's saddle for years, finally bit off more than they could chew, and tumbled headfirst, with a little push from Bob Gallinipper, into the old poop pit of public opinion.

Deciding what to do with Calvin Cassowary was another bowl of peas. He prayed about it: “Lord, I ought to give that idiot the boot considering all the hoo-hah he's stirred up. I should just wash my hands of him, invoke that Good Citizens Clause in his contract. But, Lord, I know he was just trying to take care of his family. Same way I take care of mine and you take care of yours.”

The Almighty responded, as He always did when the going got tough, filling his head with uncomplicated Indiana wisdom: when you're handed lemons you find some way to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. So Bob Gallinipper made Rhea the company mascot. He put together the biggest advertising blitz in the company's history. Print ads. TV and radio spots. Public appearances. Then Rhea wandered into the woods and was eaten by coyotes. The Devil's doing, no doubt.

Despite the feathers and the blood, Calvin had refused to accept his daughter's death. Three weeks after the search teams disbanded, he was still walking the woods and fields screaming her name. According to Norman Marek, he screamed Rhea's name all through the memorial service.

Calvin finally accepted Rhea's death. Yes, he still spent several hours a day wandering the woods and fields, but instead of screaming her name, he reached deep into the holes of animals, hoping to find her bones, or a few scraps of her flesh, something he could bury. He got nothing for the effort but a skunk bite that required a tetanus shot. On the first anniversary of Rhea's death, Calvin and Donna buried an urn containing the feathers found by Sheriff Affenpinscher's deputies. Norman said that Calvin hugged Jeanie's gravestone and bawled like a baby.

Bob had wanted to go to Rhea's funeral, just as he had wanted to go to Jeanie's funeral, and the funerals of so many people he was either related to or responsible for. He even put the corporate jet on standby. But he just couldn't make himself go. Just as he couldn't make himself go to his granddad's funeral all those years ago. How do others do it? Stand over that box and look down at someone who just hours before was as alive as a butterfly?

So he did what he could do. He filled another clay pot with wild strawberries from his granddad's grave and had Norman deliver it. Over the years he must have done that two hundred times, feeling guilty as hell, hating himself for being so weak.

He was seven when his granddad drowned himself. The happy old man rowed his little fishing boat to the middle of the pond behind the cow barn, tied three cement blocks around his cancer-infested belly and jumped in. Two days before Easter.

Every June Bob and his granddad used to wander across the fields looking for wild strawberries. That June he had to go picking by himself. He cried the whole time but felt better afterwards. The next spring he dug up some of those strawberry plants and walked to the cemetery by himself, mile and a half, and planted them around his granddad's grave. Sending Calvin Cassowary a second pot of strawberries was just about the toughest thing he ever had to do in his life.

But it helped matters. And that's all that mattered.

Little by little, Calvin Cassowary recovered and went to work building one of the best egg operations in the Gallinipper family. According to Norman, Calvin and Donna also were trying to rebuild their family, trying like the devil to have a child of their own.

Then just a year ago when he and Bunny were in San Francisco to attend the high school graduation of their daughter Robin's oldest boy, Robbie, they wandered into a Border's bookstore, and there on the front table was C.W. Weed's best-selling book,
Of Course We Should: Making the Case For Human Cloning
. He stayed up all night reading and rereading. First thing the next morning he was on the horn to Sophia Theophaneia in Chicago.

Thirty-four

Calvin Cassowary has already swatted about twenty flies this morning and he's yet to do the upstairs. He's got the swatter in one hand and a dustpan in the other. The flies are docile these first days of spring and you can walk right up to them and flatten them dead and let their black-jam carcasses bounce into the dustpan.