Part 3
Within a week, Clara learned that goslings could turn clean water into mud faster than any animal she had ever kept. They stepped into every pan, shook wet bills over the bedding, and slept wherever the dampness collected. The first brooder layout lasted six days.
On the seventh morning, Clara found two goslings pressed together behind a feeder. Their down was cold and clumped, their feet tucked beneath them. She carried them into the kitchen inside her coat while Ruth stripped the wet bedding from the pen.
“Water belongs at the other end,” Ruth said when Clara returned. “Mesh under the pans. A drain if you can manage it.”
Clara looked at the enclosure she had built. Every partition would have to move, and the windbreak she had nailed up the night before would no longer fit.
“All right,” she said. “Draw it on the wall.”
Ruth glanced at her, perhaps expecting the argument that did not come. She took the carpenter’s pencil from Clara’s pocket and sketched a new plan directly on a whitewashed board.
They rebuilt the brooders by evening. Clara put the water pans over wire frames above shallow catch trays, moved sleeping areas closer to the warm interior wall, and cut a narrow drain through the mortar at floor level. The two chilled goslings recovered under a heat lamp in the kitchen and returned to the flock the next afternoon, each marked with a small blue band so Clara could watch them. Ruth found Clara checking their feet. “You didn’t have to mark them.”
“I know.”
“You going to stare at them every hour?”
“Probably.” Clara set the gosling down. “I’m not moving the water back.”
Ruth’s mouth pulled briefly at one corner, but she said nothing more. As April warmed, the birds began taking supervised trips outside. Clara walked them first into the barnyard, where they moved as a single nervous body around her boots. A red-tailed hawk appeared over the machine shed on the third afternoon.
Clara clapped and advanced steadily until it banked toward the cottonwoods, then strung reflective tape above the most exposed run and changed the flock’s turnout times. The event frightened her, but it did not become another reason to keep the birds indoors.
By late April, the largest goslings were ready for pasture. Clara opened a temporary lane from the barn to the eleven acres at the northwest corner of the farm, the low ground everyone called the wet pocket. Her father had tried corn there twice and lost both plantings. A rented tractor had sunk to its axle when Clara was twelve, and Ruth had brought lunch to three men who spent a day pulling it free.
“We should have fenced it off then,” Ruth said as they watched the first group approach the meadow.
“You did fence it off.”
“I mean from your father.”
The goslings hesitated at the change from firm yard to springy sedge. One tested the ground with a webbed foot, plucked a young shoot, and swallowed. The rest poured past it.
They grazed water grass no cow would have bothered with. They picked small snails along the pond margin and moved over the soft ground without breaking through its surface. Within an hour, the flock had spread across a strip of green that had appeared on every farm appraisal as nonproductive acreage.
Clara drove stakes to divide the meadow into sections. Each week she recorded time on pasture, grain purchased, average weight from a sample of birds, and the pond depth against a marked stick. Ruth teased her about the ledger until Clara caught her adding weather notes in the margin.
The first rainless week passed without concern. The second made the upland pasture lose its spring softness. By mid-June, corn leaves were beginning to curl across Cedar County, and the feed store had taped new prices over the old ones twice in nine days.
The wet pocket stayed green.
Its shallow pond dropped by inches, not feet. Sedge roots held moisture below the surface, and each rested section came back fast enough to graze again. Clara still bought grain, but less of it each week per pound of growth. She brought the ledger to the feed store once and compared her receipts with the figures on the wall calendar, certain she had made an error. She had not.
People who had laughed at the egg crates began slowing on South Road to watch the gray young geese cross between pasture sections. At first the birds had belonged to a joke. Now the same neighbors asked whether Clara intended to sell breeding pairs, and whether she was taking names.
Miles Reddick came on a Thursday afternoon in a dark pickup clean enough to reflect the white glare of the sky. He owned Cedar Run Hatchery, though he did not look as Clara had imagined an owner would. He wore work boots dusted with feed, and when a goose pressed too close to the gate, he moved it back with one hand under its breast rather than grabbing a wing.
Ruth was repairing a latch nearby. Miles saw her and stopped.
“I heard you were involved,” he said.
“You heard late.”
“I’ve had other fires.” He looked toward the pasture. “Your old turning charts are probably still in our training binder.”
“Then somebody ought to read them.”
Miles accepted that without offense. He had given Ruth flexible shifts during Harold Whitlock’s illness, and he had also eliminated her department when Cedar Run automated its candling line. Ruth had never made either fact cancel the other.
Clara took him to the barn. He asked about isolation, mortalities, and the condition of the shells. His questions were precise. When she showed him the ledger, he read the pages instead of pretending to.
“You lost eighteen after setting?”
“My ventilation was wrong.”
His eyes lifted to hers. “Most people would leave that part out.”
“Then most people can’t use their own records.”
He closed the ledger. “The driver should never have left the load with you.”
Ruth put down the latch. “His dispatcher authorized it.”
“Dispatch was trying to clear a roadside problem, not transfer breeding stock.” Miles rubbed his thumb over a cut in the ledger’s cover. “Cracked eggs are rejected for a reason. Disease exposure, contamination, poor hatch. Our customers cannot take that risk because one batch turned out better than anyone expected.”
It was the first thing he said that Clara had prepared herself to hate, and it was also true. Cedar Run had been right not to sell the eggs. That did not make the living birds in her pasture Cedar Run’s property.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“To buy the flock.”
He offered fourteen thousand dollars, collected from the farm once the birds reached target weight. The amount would cover Clara’s October payment with something left for winter seed. It was more money than she had held at one time in years and less, Ruth later said, than Miles expected the flock to be worth by fall if the drought continued.
Clara did not answer immediately. The goslings sounded from the meadow, deeper-voiced now, their calls carrying through the open barn door.
“All of them?” she asked.
“All 191.”
“I planned to keep breeders.”
“Then you planned before you knew the market.” Miles took a business card from his pocket and set it on the ledger. “You have birds and pasture. You don’t have processing, refrigerated transport, standing buyers, or a breeding-stock reputation. I do.”
“You also had the eggs.”
His jaw moved once. “Yes. And we wrote them off because that was the responsible decision with what we knew then.”
There was no apology in it, but no lie either. Clara slid the card back toward him. “They’re not for sale as one flock.”
Miles left the card where it was. At the door he paused beside Ruth. “You know what the fall bottleneck looks like in a dry year.”
“I do.”
He faced Clara again. “Call the processors before you decide I’m trying to scare you.”
After his truck disappeared down South Road, Clara went to the kitchen and began calling. The first processor had no opening until December. The second had stopped taking new farms altogether. A third could handle twenty birds on one weekday in September, but no more.
By dusk she had called every licensed facility within a hundred miles.
Miles had not been trying to scare her…
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