Part 2
“Until dawn,” Clara said.
Ruth looked at the moisture on the shells, then at the heavy paraffin along the cracks. “You kept the heat in. You kept the bad air and moisture in with it.” She drew one slow breath through her nose. “I can’t tell you that last night explains every loss, or which mistake did the most damage. But the closed vent and the extra wax are the changes these eighteen share. If we leave the room like this, the rest can follow.”
Clara caught on the word we. She had expected anger or, worse, the clean withdrawal her mother had practiced when a decision was finished. Instead Ruth took off her coat and reached for the small warming tool.
“Tell me what to do,” Clara said.
“I did.”
The answer struck exactly where Ruth intended. Clara’s face heated.
Ruth pulled a stool to the shelf. “If you want my hands, you follow the chart. If you want somebody to approve whatever fear tells you at three in the morning, call somebody else.”
Clara almost defended herself. She could feel the old argument waiting: about cows sold too soon, about a father who had asked for his herd from a hospital bed, about Ruth signing bills while Clara stood useless in a hallway. It would have been easy to drag all of it into the damp room and make the dead eggs carry that weight too. Instead she sat on the second stool. “Show me how to take the extra off.”
They spent ten hours repairing what could be repaired. Ruth warmed the edge of the paraffin; Clara lifted it in flakes no larger than fingernail clippings. They discarded the eighteen eggs, cleaned the trays, changed the sand, and propped the roof hatch to the width marked on the chart. Clara added separate lines for each shelf rather than treating the room as if one reading described all of it.
At noon Ruth pushed a cup of coffee toward her. “Your father used to close every vent in the dairy barn when sleet came sideways. Thought a draft was what made calves sick.”
“You’re saying I got it from him?”
“I’m saying fear can look very much like work.”
Ruth said it while scraping wax from Clara’s sleeve, and Clara had no answer that would not become an excuse. From then on, Clara marked every check. When the far shelf cooled, she adjusted a wooden baffle instead of driving the stove hotter. When a shell troubled her, she candled it and recorded what she saw. She opened the vent on schedule even when frost silvered the pasture and her body insisted that warmth must be the only form of protection.
Ruth came daily for four days, then skipped the fifth. Clara phoned at dusk. “Are you sick?”
“No.”
“The third shelf is running uneven.”
“What did you change?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Good. So look before you change it.”
“Are you coming?”
“Tomorrow.” Ruth paused. “This room has to work when I’m not in it.”
Clara hung up annoyed, which was easier than admitting she had understood. She found that a board in the middle air channel had warped toward the heat. A quarter-inch gap was sending most of the warm air upward before it reached the last shelf. Clara replaced the board, waited forty minutes, and watched the thermometers settle within a degree of one another.
She wrote the repair in the ledger. When Ruth arrived the next morning, she checked the numbers and nodded once. That nod pleased Clara more than praise would have.
On the thirteenth night after the truck stopped, an egg moved while Clara was turning the evening row. She thought the sand had shifted. Then a second egg rocked toward its pencil mark and returned.
She held still. The stove ticked as it cooled. Rain touched the roof in scattered taps. Beneath those sounds came another, lighter and less regular—a faint scrape from inside a shell.
Clara lowered herself until her ear was level with the tray. “All right,” she whispered, not sure whether she meant the bird or herself.
She drove to Ruth’s house at eleven-thirty. Ruth opened the door in a robe and work boots, her hair flattened on one side.
“Pipping?” she asked.
“Three moving. Maybe four.”
Ruth took her coat from the hook. Back at the barn, the first external pip appeared shortly after midnight, a small starred break near the upper curve of a shell. Clara reached toward it and stopped her hand before Ruth had to speak. They waited in folding chairs with the lamp turned low.
Hatching did not resemble rescue from the outside. It looked like delay, exhaustion, and effort too small to help. The first gosling worked for hours, rested so long Clara thought it had died, then pushed again. Its bill opened a narrow circle along the shell. Close to four in the morning, the top gave way.
The gosling slid into the warm sand, dark with moisture and absurdly long-necked, one foot still caught in the lower shell. It made a sound no bigger than a squeaking hinge. Clara kept both hands around her coffee cup.
Ruth leaned forward, elbows on her knees. The sharpness had gone from her face. “Let it finish.”
It did.
By sunrise, five goslings were drying under the brooder. Twenty-one had emerged by the end of the first day. The second day brought so many overlapping pips that Clara stopped trying to listen for individual shells and began counting only when a bird was fully free.
The old barn changed by the hour. Low wooden partitions divided the earliest hatchlings from the wet and newly emerged. Feed trays filled the empty spaces between rusted stanchions. The room that had held only the smell of stone and old iron now smelled of damp down, warm grain, and the mineral dust of broken shells.
Seventeen goslings failed at the final stage. Ruth did not call those losses inevitable, and Clara did not call them her fault. They examined each one, noted what they could, and left uncertainty where there was no honest answer.
On the fourth evening, Clara carried the last dry gosling from the hatching room to the brooder. Ruth sat at the ledger with her glasses low on her nose.
“Count again,” Clara said.
“I have.”
“So have I.”
Ruth turned the book around. 191 was written beneath the column of hatch dates.
Clara checked the arithmetic from the beginning: 350 in the ditch. 124 removed before incubation. Eighteen lost after her mistake. Seventeen lost during hatch. One hundred ninety-one alive.
For several seconds neither woman moved. Then a gosling climbed onto another’s back, slid sideways into the water dish, and sent a fan of droplets across Ruth’s ledger.
Ruth snatched the book away. Clara laughed before she could stop herself. It came out ragged from four nights without sleep, but it was laughter. After a moment, Ruth joined her.
The sound startled the goslings into a brief hush. Then 191 small voices rose together, filling the repaired room, the abandoned barn, and the dark yard beyond its walls. Clara stood in the doorway and listened until Ruth came beside her.
“You did it,” Clara said.
“We got them through the shell,” Ruth corrected. “Tomorrow they’ll drink, spill, foul bedding, and eat. The next day they’ll do more of all four.”
Clara looked back at the crowded brooders. On the shelf lay the feed-store invoice she had not yet entered in the ledger. Hatching them had cost nearly everything left in the farm account.
The bank payment was still waiting in October. And now the miracle was hungry…
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