Return to Shepherd Avenue by Charlie Carillo

Author:Charlie Carillo [Carillo, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-two

When the sack of corn ran out I switched the chickens to table scraps. Suddenly I had no more garbage. Stale bread, leftover macaroni, meat loaf—anything old or stale got chopped into bits, thrown into the yard and gobbled up.

The birds were getting bigger by the day. One morning I was feeding them when I noticed that one chicken remained on her nest while the other five fed. She looked as if she might be suffering, but as I approached the coop to see what was wrong she stretched her neck, cackled and leaped up to join the others, leaving behind a dung-streaked egg.

I reached in to get it, still warm from its mother. My first egg. The pleasure it gave me was almost perverse.

The following morning three more eggs appeared in the nests. I upped their food supply.

I brought that first egg to Atlantic Avenue to show it to Nat, who was not impressed.

“Want to hold it?”

“Why would I want to hold it? There’s shit on it!”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I don’t eat eggs. Never liked ‘em.”

“I don’t like them much either.”

“So what the hell’s the deal with all these stupid chickens?”

He had a point. I was about to have a steady stream of eggs with nothing to do but waste them.

Then it hit me: My next-door neighbors, on either side of the coop! I’d been living here all these weeks, and I still hadn’t even met them! Maybe it was time to knock on their doors to officially introduce myself, and make a neighborly offer.

Thanks to Rose, I knew a little bit about them. A black family, the Washingtons, lived in the house to the left of mine. The husband was a subway motorman, and the wife was a nurse who worked at Brooklyn Hospital. They had two small sons.

That afternoon I rang the Washington doorbell. A plump, pretty woman in a nurse’s uniform answered the door and eyed me as if I were a Jehovah’s Witness.

“Good afternoon. I’m your next-door neighbor, Joseph Ambrosio.”

She nodded. “Bertha Washington.”

“Pleased to meet you, Bertha.”

She jerked a thumb behind her back. “Those are your chickens out there.”

“Yes. That’s what I wanted to talk about. I hope they’re not disturbing you in any way?”

She continued to stare at me. “Not yet.”

“Anyway, they’ve begun laying eggs, and I just wanted to say that you’re welcome to as many eggs as you like.”

She shook her head and chuckled. “Are you kidding?”

“No, ma’am. I can leave them in a basket on your porch.”

I suddenly ran out of words. I felt like an idiot. She broke her stare to look at her watch. “I gotta get ready for work.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“You keep your chickens in your yard, we won’t have no problems.”

“Thank you.”

“But we don’t need no eggs.”

She closed the door before I could say another word.

Tingling with embarrassment, I went to the house to the right of mine and rang the bell. Rose had told me an old man with a big moustache lived here, and that’s all she knew.

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