Mrs. Armstrong had just finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes when the doorbell rang. Who could that be, she wondered. She wiped her hands dry on her apron. “Coming,” she said.
At the door was the Fuller Brush man, Mr. Petry, down from the big city peddling his wares. “Good morning Mrs. Armstrong,” said Mr. Petry.
“Good morning to you,” said Mrs. A. Then, “Weren’t you just here two weeks ago?”
“I was. This is a special trip. I have something you might like.”
“Ooh, how nice. Can I get you a coffee?”
“No time today ma’am.”
Mrs. Armstrong looked out past Mr. Petry toward his ancient station wagon. “What’s in your wagon today.”
“A chicken.”
Mrs. Armstrong wasn’t certain she had heard the man correctly. “A chicken?”
Mr. Petry, who always sounded like a dictionary said, “Yes. I’m afraid one of my rural customers was unable to pay for her complete order yesterday. So, she offered me three chickens. I have one remaining. She said they were excellent layers. I looked. I know nothing of chickens, but they were so darn cute I couldn’t say no. I could have let the lady slide, but she and her husband are proud people, and it may have seemed like a handout if I didn’t ask for payment. The poor old girl had ordered a fair number of brushes along with various cleaning products.”
“But what might I ever do with a chicken?”
“Eggs.”
“Eggs?”
“Yes. Free eggs. Farm fresh every morning.”
“But this isn’t a farm.”
“All she needs is a warm place to sleep and a little place to run around pecking at the ground. And chickens make wonderful companions.”
Mrs. Armstrong thought the idea ludicrous. “I don’t know, Mr. Petry.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” said Leonard Armstrong. He had, once again, snuck up on his wife, a habit she was eager for him to break. His comments, always welcome, would have been even more welcome without the sneakiness.
“Really?”
“Nothing like a fresh egg in the morning, Bunny,” said Leonard.
And that was that. Mrs. Armstrong had a chicken.
*******
With the help of her neighbour, Mr. Simpson, and his son Boyd, Mrs. Armstrong had a comfy coop and a wee run assembled by sunset. The chicken, christened Daphne after a dear old school chum, now passed, seemed content. She’d be fine for a few weeks anyway. Autumn was still weeks away and the nights would not be growing too cold for some time.
At dusk Mrs. A took her evening tea out to the back patio and watched as Daphne rummaged about. What an odd day this has been she thought. “She certainly is a cute one,” she said.
“Nearly as cute as my Bunny,” said Leonard.
*******
After church on Sunday Mrs. Armstrong sought out Mr. Dalgleish, one of the two town gardeners that did all they could to keep Newport on the Lake as pretty as could be. He was known as an excellent horticulture man. He had a third of an acre across from the church where he grew strawberries, corn, blackberries and raspberries and kept a wee vegetable garden for he and his wife. Mr. Dalgleish also kept chickens. That man, she thought, might be a splendid source of knowledge.
And he was.
He took the time to visit with Daphne. She showed him where Daphne rested and where she had laid her large brown eggs each day. Daphne had not disappointed in the egg department.
“What you have here is a Plymouth Rock. Quite hardy. A very handsome bird,” said Mr. Dalgleish. Then, “But she’ll be needing a friend.”
“A friend?”
“A chicken can get lonely. They’re a social animal.”
“Oh, my.”
“It’s unhealthy for a chicken to be alone.”
That was that. Mrs. A asked Mr. Dalgleish where she might acquire a mate for Daphne. He, knowing every farmer within a twenty-mile radius, said “Let me think on it a spell.”
*******
“They certainly look like they get along,” said Leonard Armstrong.
Mrs. Armstrong smiled. “Yes, they do.”
The Simpson men had expanded the run by a few square feet and added a small addition to the coop. They had also checked the perimeter fencing and made a few minor repairs to help deter any predators. Daphne and her new friends Madge and Jennifer pecked away at the ground, clucked a few times and unsuccessfully attempted flight. They were far better entertainment than television, thought Mrs. A.
*******
As much as Mrs. Armstrong enjoyed a nice soft-boiled egg, she soon found that she had an abundance. Being from the generation of underabundance she thought waste a sin. But what to do of the oversupply?
“May as well give them away,” was the answer from sneaky old Leonard.
Happy to have a project Mrs. A then spent the better part of an autumn afternoon fiddling around in her garage. She pulled the ancient Cadillac out onto the street, and, in a couple of hours, she had cobbled together a tasteful little sign that she tacked carefully to a pair of tomato stakes.
The sign said:
Fresh eggs – Pay What You are Able
and underneath in smaller letters,
Proceeds to The Covenant Christmas Fund
*******
Each morning Mrs. Armstrong would spend a few moments chatting with Daphne, Jennifer and Marge and thank them for their donations. She would gather the eggs and keep them in the old Kenmore refrigerator until there were a dozen or so. That happened about once a week. She would then tap her sign onto her smallish front lawn out by the boulevard, set a bowl of eggs out on a folding card table and place a Maxwell House coffee can to the side.
At first, she would find maybe fifty cents or so each time she collected. A dozen eggs up at Macintoshes Grocery went for anywhere from 45 cents a dozen for small white ones and up to 58 cents for the large brown ones. Her girls, happy Plymouth Rocks, produced the large.
One day, maybe three weeks into the experiment, the coffee tin held two dollars and twenty-three cents. That made no sense. After her dinner Leonard explained, “Maybe the guy had no change.”
Well, that did make sense. But two weeks later the same thing happened. There was a two-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill and almost fifty cents in nickels and dimes.
After church that Sunday, she asked the good Reverend Baggs if he might have a moment to chat. He did. Mrs. A explained her conundrum. Reverend Baggs, Allistair by name, smiled and said, “The Lord works in mysterious ways Mrs. Armstrong. In Mathew, 15 through 19, ‘This is a remote place, and it is getting late,’ said the disciples speaking of the crowd that had gathered to listen to Jesus, ‘send them away so they can go to the villages and buy some food.’ Jesus answered, ‘They do not need to go away. You will give them something to eat.’ The disciples said, ‘We have only five loaves of bread and two fish.’ ‘Bring them here to me,’ said Jesus. And you know how the rest of the story goes Mrs. Armstrong.”
“I do,” she said, “but it’s not the eggs that are multiplying, it’s the money. Three dollars for one dozen eggs is crazy.”
“There are two possibilities then,” said Baggs, “perhaps the money is multiplying or, and this does sound crazy, maybe the eggs replenish themselves.”
“You mean if someone buys three eggs three more suddenly appear to replace them?”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” was all the Good Reverend said about that.
*******
As the days grew shorter, and the autumn winds grew stronger, Mrs. Armstrong grew even more perplexed. She had tried to spy on her little egg setup. She had set her eggs out and watched. She had seen folks pull up, take an egg or three, drop coins into the Maxwell House tin and then drive or walk away. One day while young Boyd Simpson was raking her lawn and piling the leaves to be burnt, she approached him. “The same thing happens to the money in my bank account,” he said. Then, “Mr. Hamilton calls it ‘interest’.”
Mrs. Armstrong knew all about interest. Interest was what she lived on. That and her Bell Telephone dividends. But surely eggs didn’t pay interest, and if they did it would certainly not be at 100% a day.
That night she bundled up and sat on her patio and watched her girls pecking away at the ground. You are a strange collection of birds, she thought. Leonard agreed, “Not unlike Jacks magic beans, Bunny,” he said.
A day or two later Mrs. A had a dream. In the dream she had ten Plymouth Rock hens, and each hen produced ten big eggs a day. Once awake she promptly rambled out to visit with Daphne and her chums. There were just the three.
*******
The day after the first big snow of the season Mrs. Armstrong called Boyd Simpson inside. He had just completed her shoveling and it was time to give him a treat. The lad liked butter tarts and there was a dozen fresh out of the oven. “Take six, Boy” she told him. Everyone called Boyd Boy. “But share with the family.”
“I will,” he said.
“Do you have time for one more chore?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I pulled an old electric blanket down from the cupboard. Don’t laugh but I want to put it in the coop for the girls and then cover it with some fresh straw.”
“I won’t laugh. Dad does the same thing. You know the two stray cats that hang around?”
“The big orange one and the tiny calico?”
“My dad took them up to Dr. Bruce and had them fixed but they’re too wild to be house cats. So, he made them a house out in the back of the barn. He runs a cord out from his workshop and has an electric blanket for them in the winter.”
“He’s a good man.”
“The best.”
*******
On the second Wednesday of December Mrs. Armstrong arose in a good mood. Wednesday was the day that the local weekly The New Newport News arrived. The town tabloid had been resurrected by a strange little British fellow just last year. The rumor mill had the man down as a homosexual but that mattered not to Mrs. A. She’d had an aunt, back when she was just a wee girl, that the family had whispered about. But that same aunt would send a crisp one dollar bill every Christmas. Any faults the aunt may have had on the sexual orientation front were of little interest when the Christmas loot was transformed into chocolate or ribbons or penny dreadfuls at the local Five and Dime.
After greeting the girls and collecting that morning’s deposit of two eggs she planted her little sign in the snow next to the table, added the days haul to a bowl with seven others recently collected, placed the Maxwell House coffee tin just so and went in to do the clueless crossword. Making up a crossword puzzle with no clues required a well sharpened pencil and an eraser and a ton of patience. Mrs. Armstrong had all three.
Once the crossword was done, she perused the local gossip, the humorous want ads, the advice column and the sports page, this week detailing the more honorable ways to cheat at Rummy. Inside the back page there was a notice from Reverend Baggs at The Covenant Presbyterian Church asking for folks of means to pony up an extra two-bits or even a dollar for the Christmas Fund. The hard times had not vanished and there were, according to Baggs, a few families in town in need of a bit of ‘good Christian cheer’ that year.
At the back of the China Cabinet there sat an antique silverware box, now empty of silverware, where the egg money had been collected. The contents, once dumped onto the dining table, looked impressive. Had that many eggs really been sold? Daphne and Jennifer and Madge deserved a treat, though what might be considered a treat to a hen Mrs. Armstrong did not know.
A careful counting confirmed by a second careful counting revealed a total of two hundred and twenty-seven dollars in bills and fifty-three dollars and thirty-three cents in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Oh my! The arithmetic was checked. Yes, it still came out to two hundred and eighty dollars and thirty-three cents.
That night sleep did not arrive easily. That much money? Sitting here in my little house? In a silverware box of all things? Prudence required a visit with Reverend Baggs first thing on the morrow.
Just before drifting off Leonard said, “Don’t worry, Bunny.”
*******
The Cadillac started up with the first turn of the key. What a glorious car. The darn thing was growing though. It was getting harder and harder to look out the back.
After the recommended two-minute warm up Mrs. Armstrong placed the gear elector into the ‘R’ position and slowly, very slowly, eased the big car out onto the street. It was a sunny day. The light bounced off the snowbanks and filled the car with love and memories, the sweet kind.
Reverand Allistair Baggs, an emotional man at the best of times, could not help but gush over Mrs. A. and her donation. “You have no idea how much cheer this will bring to those less fortunate,” he said.
She laughed to herself. She had lived through The Great War, the one that was supposed to be ‘The War to End All Wars’. She had lived through the market crash and the dust bowl and the depression that had followed and then lingered on through the thirties. She and Leonard had lost their only boy, Larry, on the beaches of Juno Beach back in ‘44, on June the sixth. Yes, she did have an idea of how much cheer a minor blessing might bring.
Back in the still warm Cadillac Mrs. Armstrong chose to drive the long way home, past the old fort that the Yankees had burned to the ground back in 1813. Then it was past the marina, long ago a busy port of industry, now a leisure club for the sailing crowd. She drove through downtown Newport and past all the memorials to the fallen men of battles fought long ago and far away. She slowed as she came to where Leonard had toiled as proprietor of Armstrong Men’s Wear. God how she missed that man. Memories once again filled the car and caused a tear to form.
Once home she scattered a bit of extra feed for the girls. She told them all about the great deed they had done. Being modest the hens simply pecked away and dismissed the glory out of hand.
That night, snug as a bug in her bed, she said, after her bedtime prayer of thanks, “What a day!”
“The best day ever, Bunny,” said Leonard.