illustration by Judith Huey
© 2001 - All Rights Reserved

Ginny cracked the first egg, and blood poured out. She dropped the shell onto the counter and wiped her hand on her apron. She’d seen rotten eggs before, and even fetal chicks, but never blood. She cracked another egg  into a different bowl. That egg spilled silver fluid, thick like mercury. She looked at the remaining four eggs in the basket and wiped her hand again.

"Ramey!" she called, pushing open the screen door.

Her husband looked up from mending the wagon. "Yeah?"

She pulled up the hem of her dress and walked toward him, dust puffing around her ankles. It had been a dry season. Ramey had been tinkering with the wagon for hours, and it didn’t look any closer to being whole now than it had when he started.

"Tell me where you got that speckled chicken."

Ramey wiped his forehead. "I was wondering when you’d ask that. Why bring it up now? I got her, that’s all that matters."

"I figured you stole her, but I didn’t say anything, because at least you were trying to put food on the table. But now I want to know, because there’s something funny about her eggs."

"Funny how?"

"Just tell me where she came from, Ramey." Ginny wished she’d brought a wooden spoon to smack him with.

He inclined his head toward the ridge of Shine Mountain. "I was setting traps up there and found a little shack, empty, and a lot of dead chickens in the yard. The speckled hen was the only one alive. I shoved her in a  sack and brought her home." He kicked at the dirt sullenly, like a spoiled child. "I thought you’d be happy."

"There’s no empty shack up there. Who’d you really steal her from? Old Man Whatley?"

Ramey stood, a lean, stringy man. "I found her, just like I said."

"Supposing there was a shack, why didn’t you tell me about it before?"

"You really want to know? When I went back up the next day to check my traps, the shack wasn’t there, or the chickens, or anything, just dirt."

"You were drinking." Ginny’s voice was sharp as a new plow blade. "You didn’t know where you were."

"Don’t I have reason to drink? Every time I look at that hill..." He stuffed his hands into his pockets.

"Babies die," Ginny said harshly. What right did he have to moan and wail and drink himself into seeing things that weren’t there? She’d carried the children and birthed them, all dead, one with too few fingers, one with no eyes, others she didn’t want to think about. He’d dug the graves on the hill, sure, but she’d made the markers, out of sticks and twine.

"Four in a row is a lot to die," Ramey said. "More than a man can bear." He looked at the burying hill with its one still-fresh mound.

"We bear whatever the Lord sees fit to visit on us," Ginny said. She bit her tongue to keep from saying more. She wanted to tell him it was his fault, with his inbred family, his idiot sister drooling in his parents’ back room, his dirty blood. Ginny’s family never had bad babies. It wasn’t her body at fault, but flinging that in Ramey’s face wouldn’t help anything.

"Let me see those eggs," he said.

She took him wordlessly to the kitchen where he cracked the eggs. One was rotten, but the stink burned the hairs of Ginny’s nostrils like no rotten egg ever had before. The next was full of a thick white syrup. The third had a half-formed chick inside—but Ramey pointed to the tiny six-fingered hand sprouting from one wing. "God in heaven," Ramey said. He cracked the last egg into the same bowl.

Golden dust sifted across the fetal chick and into the slimy fluid. Ramey whistled. "Is that gold? Real gold?"

Ginny shook her head. "I don’t know."

Ramey swept the dust off the chicken and strained it out of the other mess.

He rinsed it in a basin, and the tiny granules gleamed. Ramey poured the damp gold sand into a mason jar and said he was going to town. He was more excited than Ginny had ever seen.

Ginny let him go and made herself some dinner, but she didn’t have much of an appetite. She went to the coop and looked at the speckled hen. It stared at her with unnatural attention for a moment, then turned its gaze to the strutting rooster. The other chickens snoozed or scratched at the dirt outside, but the speckled hen simply sat. Ginny approached warily and lifted the hen off her nest. There were already four more eggs. She replaced the bird gently, without disturbing her brood, and went to do some wash.

The next morning she found Ramey asleep in the back of his wagon with a half-empty bottle of whiskey beside him. There was a dress in the wagon, an impractical blue thing she’d never have occasion to wear. She reached into his overall pocket and found a wad of paper money, more than she’d ever seen in her life. She put it back.

She went to the coop and found the rooster, dead. He was a bloody mound of flyblown feathers, pecked to death. The hens scratched dirt around him, apparently untroubled by the carcass. Ginny went into to the coop and looked at the speckled hen. She hadn’t seen the hen eat, or even move, since Ramey brought her home. Ginny lifted the bird. Two more eggs.

"Did you do it?" Ginny said. "Did you get tired of the rooster trying to climb on you, and kill him?" She looked into the hen’s black eyes, then put her down. The hen flapped her wings and lowered her head, instantly asleep.

Ramey stumbled into the house as the sun broke the ridge over Shine Mountain. Ginny put a plate of scrambled eggs before him without speaking.

"My head’s thundering," Ramey said, pushing the plate away. "It was real gold, Ginny. I bought you a dress, but my stomach turned over when I woke up and I sicked up on it. It’ll wash out." Ginny took his plate and scraped the uneaten eggs noisily into the slop pan. "Ginny, say something! We’re rich! Be happy!"

"Why?" She banged the plate down. "Because you can buy whiskey instead of drinking ‘shine? Because you have an excuse not to work, to be drunk and underfoot all day? You’re spending the money already. What if there’s no more eggs full of gold, just rot and nastiness? And the rooster’s dead, something killed it. I’ve got reasons enough to be unhappy."

"We can buy a new rooster, Ginny."

"We can’t buy everything. There are lots of things money can’t do."

"I haven’t heard yet of a thing money can’t buy."

"Babies," Ginny said. "You can’t buy me healthy babies."

Ramey reddened and stood up. He lurched unsteadily toward the bedroom, and didn’t come out all day.

The next morning the speckled chicken had another new egg. Ginny filled the basket and took them inside, Ramey dogging her steps eagerly. "Seven eggs," he said, and cracked the first one.

By the fifth he was cursing, and half Ginny’s dishes were fouled. Pus filled one bowl, ashes another. The other eggs held a clump of gray hair, shards of fingernail, and a tangle of dead worms. The fifth egg was lighter than the rest, and when he cracked it a greenish gas dispersed into the air.

Ramey held the last egg. "Here we go." He took a deep breath and cracked the egg.

Ants, spiders, and shiny beetles poured over his hands. He shouted and shook the insects off. Ginny methodically smashed all the bugs she could reach with the heel of her hand.

"Damn it, damn it," Ramey said. He stalked off, probably after his bottle, leaving her to clean up his mess.

The next morning Ginny went out to the coop, and Ramey followed. When Ginny lifted the hen, there was only a single egg. It was twice as large as normal, golden, and covered with tiny gleaming facets like a cut diamond.

"Thank you, Lord," Ramey said, reaching past her for the egg.

The hen flapped out of Ginny’s hands, startling her. It pecked savagely at Ramey. He pulled his arm back, shouting, his hand bloody and torn. The hen flapped and settled back onto the egg.

"I believe she wants this one to hatch," Ginny said.

Ramey whimpered and went to the pump to wash his hand. Ginny followed.

There were dozens of beak-holes in his skin. "I wonder what sort of thing will be born?" Ginny said.

Ramey looked at her like she was a stranger, maybe a trespasser he needed to run off with his shotgun.

Ramey rose that night, trying to be quiet, but Ginny woke instantly. He dressed and slipped out. Ginny followed a few seconds later, picking up a sickle Ramey had absentmindedly left in the house. She reached the coop in time to see him twist the hen’s head around. He’d caught the bird sleeping, and he threw her dead body to the floor.

"Son of a bitch," Ginny said, and Ramey turned, startled.

"What you doing with that sickle?" He squinted at her in the gloom.

"That was plain stupid, Ramey. How are you going to get more golden eggs if you kill the chicken?"

He laughed nervously. "Aw, Ginny, she attacked me. I had to do it. Besides, this egg’ll be enough, along with the money from the other one. We can buy... lots of things. Anything you want."

"Don’t touch that egg, Ramey, or I’ll cut you."

"Now listen, Ginny—"

"You listen. That egg’s going to hatch, and you’re not going to ruin it the way you ruined everything else that ever tried to be born around here."

He narrowed his eyes. "I don’t need you," he said. "I’ve got money now, and I can leave. We’ll see how long you last by yourself."

"Go then." She stepped toward him, lifting the sickle.

He looked longingly at the egg, then shrugged. He eased past her, and a moment later she heard him harnessing the mule to the wagon.

Ginny thought about putting the egg with another hen’s brood, but instead she wrapped it in cloth and hung it by a piece of string between her breasts. She buried the mother hen on the hill with her babies.

Ramey didn’t return, and a week later she felt the egg stir against her skin. She put it on a pillow and watched it crack.

One tiny hand popped through the shell, and then another. The fragments fell away to reveal a palm-sized baby boy, perfect, with brassy gold skin. Ginny dipped a rag in fresh milk and dripped it into the baby’s mouth.

She sat up all night, and the baby grew. He was as long as her forearm by morning, and he drank a whole gallon of milk in that time. He wanted solid food by the afternoon. By the time Ginny fell asleep, exhausted, he was crawling and trying to chew on things.

Within a week he was tall as a twelve-year-old, wearing Ramey’s clothes, with a head full of whitish-blond hair. His eyes were blue, flecked with yellow. He didn’t speak, but he understood her, and he helped pick greens and dig potatoes and haul water. Ginny cried at night; she finally had a baby, but he’d grown so terribly fast. How long before he went away? He didn’t feel like her own child. Warming an egg wasn’t the same as carrying a baby in your body, so while she recognized him as a miracle, he didn’t fill her emptiness.

By the end of the month he was a grown man, wide-shouldered and given to working with his shirt off. He ate enough for two men and did the work of ten. His golden skin darkened from working in the sun, and Ginny found herself staring at him more and more often. She began fixing her hair, and even thought about cleaning the blue dress and trying it on.

Once he reached the apparent age of about twenty, he stopped growing. One night he left his pallet in the kitchen and came silently to the bedroom, lifting the sheet and crawling in with Ginny. She touched his skin and whispered a welcome.

That went on, and the next month her blood didn’t come, though she’d always been regular as the moon. She touched her stomach and thought of his golden seed growing in her, and of the beautiful bright children she would bear for him.

Mr. Whatley came once to tell her Ramey was dead, killed outside a bar in Redsburg. He’d flashed a lot of money around, and somebody murdered him for it. Ginny thanked Mr. Whatley, and said was getting along fine on her own.

Her golden lover hid in the chicken coop while she talked to her neighbor; he liked it in there.

Ginny’s stomach ballooned quickly and she ate more than she had during her other pregnancies. At four months she’d swelled so big she could barely move. "The baby will be fine," she told herself. "It’s so big and healthy and hungry already." Her silent lover cared for her more tenderly than Ramey ever had.

In the middle of the night, five months pregnant, her water broke.

Premature, she thought, despairing. Drops of blood spattered on the wooden floor, and she felt lightheaded. She made it to her bed and fell in, calling weakly for her golden boy.

Her lover knelt between her legs while she sweated and heaved and pushed. She felt something pass, too fast, and then another something, and another.

The baby’s dead, she thought. I’m birthing it in pieces. She stared at the rough ceiling of her house. She heaved and felt three more clumps come out between her thights.

She closed her eyes and wept. It was her body at fault all along, not Ramey’s. It had to be her; she couldn’t imagine that her golden lover had defective seed.

Then she heard her lover laughing, his first sound, full and throaty and joyful. She lifted her head.

He held out his hands. He cupped six eggs, golden and faceted, blood-flecked but gleaming like jewels.

Ginny was too exhausted to scream. Her lover wrapped the eggs in a clean dishrag and tied the bundle gently. He paid her no more mind than she would have paid to a brood hen. He left the house without looking back, without closing the door, leaving Ginny in her own sweat and blood.

She thought of her babies on the hill. She wondered if Mr. Whatley, or anyone else, would dig a hole there for her.

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