The Midwife by Jennifer Worth

Author:Jennifer Worth [Worth, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-29T19:22:03+00:00

Amelia, 2014

I crouch toward a hen that spreads her wings and hunkers low, guarding her eggs like treasure. I dart my hand beneath the feathers and feel a hard orb. The hen rises on her claws and squawks. Beating her wings, she fills the coop with swirls of hay and darts her head out of the shoe-box cubicle to peck my hand. Jerking back, I scream and crack the shell against the side of the coop. Two weeks ago I would’ve cursed or at least made a scene. But now I just wipe my fingers off on my shirt, toss the egg into the basket, and go down to the next hen. (Maybe prairie-girl Lydie’s having more of an influence on me than I thought.)

This time, I make vague “shoo shoo” motions, trying to get the hen off the nest. The hen remains. Her yellow eyes and hooked beak wink in the barn’s dingy light. Rubbing the puncture on top of my hand, I try to be more aggressive in my shooing—a little closer this time, but still out of pecking reach. The hen stretches its beak into a yawn. Out of options and running low on time, I bend my arms into wings, cluck my own tongue, and stamp my feet. Despite my two-hundred-dollar jeans and my pointe skills, I look like a performer at one of those old-fashioned hoedowns, doing the chicken dance.

Then something or somebody blocks the sunlight coming in through the barn’s open doorway. A shadow falls across the coop. My jig for the bored red hen stops. Groaning inside, I turn. Uriah Rippentoe is standing there. His arms are folded. His mouth is straight, but the tilted corners make me think he’s trying not to smile. “How difficult is it to gather eggs?” he says, swaggering into the barn and glancing at the straw bale, where my basket’s sitting empty, except for the single cracked egg. “You’ve been down here, like, what? An hour?”

“The chickens don’t like me.”

“Don’t like you?” He laughs. “You just need the right touch.”

Without hesitating, Uriah reaches under the hen that pecked me and takes out two smooth brown eggs, as easy as a fox. He passes them to me and moves down to the next hen. His hand reaches in and out so fast, the hen doesn’t even know he’s been there until she resettles her feathers over the nest and feels that her eggs are gone. He continues passing eggs to me, which I tuck into the cloth-lined basket.

“You build this?” I gesture toward the chicken coop.

Uriah nods.

The cubicles are painted white and stuffed with fresh straw; the outside is black. I wonder if I should, like, comment on it somehow, but I don’t know the terms. So I settle for a solid knock against the wood and say, “You want to be an architect or something?”

This time Uriah doesn’t even try to hide his smile. But then his eyes drift away from mine. “Our school only went to eighth grade.

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