Osprey Island

That morning Eden set out some feed and then sneaked into the coop to collect eggs while the hens bustled about their meal. She hadn’t had the time to go pick up her weekly cache of oyster shells from Abel Delamico, so she gave the girls some extra kale and collards and promised herself to stop by Abel’s fish market that day. The oyster shells were for calcium, and you needed to make sure the hens got enough so they didn’t resort to eating their own eggs to get it. And then you also had to make sure you ground up the oyster shell finely enough and mixed it well into the feed so that the birds never knew they were eating shell, because that could make them think that eating shell was an acceptable practice and lead them to eat their own eggs, which is exactly what you were trying to avoid in the first place. You worried all the time about the quality of the eggs your hens were producing, and then the minute an egg got laid you had to worry about getting it out from under the bird before she broke it somehow and got tempted to have a taste. Or before she started going broody and got herself set on laying a whole clutch for hatching. Because a hen didn’t go broody when it was convenient for you. A hen went broody whenever she damn pleased. But if she went broody over a nestful of unhatchable, unfertilized eggs, then you were going to be in for a time of it, trying to break her brood. You’d have to get her out of the coop, away from any eggs—because she’d take someone else’s to set on if she was really fixed on brooding—and keep her in a hanging cage with cold air blowing on her rear end to get her out of the hatching mood entirely. An untimely brood was no fun for anyone.

Some folks said that chickens were about the easiest critters in the world to raise, but that, Eden thought, was only if you were keeping the specially bred broody-free birds, or if you kept hens and cocks and were happy enough to let them play and lay and hatch as they pleased. Eden’s coop was a tightly run house, and such order did not happen on its own.

Eden was changing the water beside Lorraine’s nest when she heard the door of Roddy’s shack close. She hustled back outside.

“Roddy!” she called.

He lifted a hand. “Hey, Ma.”

She shrugged the sweat and stray hair off her face with a shoulder, her henhouse-dirty hand up in the air. “You heading to the Lodge?” she asked.

“Heading to the Lodge,” he repeated, his voice strained with the tired patience grown men use to talk to their mothers.

“Could you check in at Lance’s? When you go down? Check on Squee, make sure he’s OK. I’m worrying . . .”

Roddy stopped on the path and turned toward the chicken coop. The controlled annoyance was gone from his voice, replaced by a directed urgency. “Lance came for him here last night?”

Eden nodded. “You were busy . . .” She gestured toward his shack.

“Ah, shit.” Roddy rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. He looked tired. “Yeah,” he assured his mother. “I’ll stop in.”

The Islanders thought Eden strange, and Eden might concede the point. She might even admit a sort of pride in that classification. When Eden looked at Roddy, she saw that her son was also maybe what people would call strange. He’d been a particular child, and he’d become a particular man, and a peculiar man, and Eden liked that about him. It marked, she felt, a certain freedom in his spirit. It marked him as her son. Eden had missed Roddy terribly after he’d left Osprey, and though she regretted the circumstances under which he’d gone, she also felt pride. Roderick had forbidden her to speak of it at the time, which was fine, since there was no one on the island to whom she might speak of such a thing. No one with whom to share the joy and triumph she felt when her son had said no to that ugly war.

Fifteen

IF THE PRICE WERE TREACHERY