By its smell, some wild parties had died here. There was an odor of false sincerity and lust masquerading as love. A wind blew up between the floorboards redolent of chickens under the bungalow who spent nights running crazy from diarrhea induced by pecking the bathtub liquor that seeped down through the fake Oriental linoleum.
Anyway, once we had hunched in out of the sun and slunk through a cold pork-and-beans-on-bread lunch, with white oleomargarine greasing it down the ways, my brother and I found a desert creek nearby and heaved rocks at each other to cool off. That night we went into town and found a greasy spoon and read the flyspecks and fought off the crickets that came into the café to skinnydip in the soup. We saw a ten-cent James Cagney gangster movie and came out heading back to the chicken ranch delighted with all the mayhem, the Great Depression gone and forgotten.
At eleven that hot night everyone in Texas was awake because of the heat. The landlady, a frail woman whose picture I had seen in every newsphoto of Dust Bowl country, eroded down to the bones but with a fragile sort of candlelight hollowed in her eyes, came to sit and chat with us about the eighteen million unemployed and what might happen next and where we were going and what would next year bring.
Which was the first cool respite of the day. A cold wind blew out of tomorrow. We grew restive. I looked at my brother, he looked at Mom, Mom looked at Dad, and we were a family, no matter what, and we were together tonight, going somewhere.
“Well…” Dad took out a road map and unfolded it and showed the lady where he had marked in red ink as if it was a chart of our four lives’ territory, just how we would live in the days ahead, just how survive, just how make do, sleep just so, eat how much, and sleep with no dreams guaranteed. “Tomorrow”—he touched the roads with one nicotine-stained finger—“we’ll be in Tombstone. Day after that Tucson. Stay in Tucson looking for work. We got enough cash for two weeks there if we cut it close. No jobs there, we move on to San Diego. Got a cousin there in Customs Inspection on the docks. We figure one week in San Diego, three weeks in Los Angeles. Then we’ve just enough money to head home to Illinois, where we can put in on relief or, who knows, maybe get our job back at the Power and Light Company that laid me off six months ago.”
“I see,” said the landlady.
And she did see. For all eighteen million people had come along this road and stopped here going somewhere anywhere nowhere and then going back to the nowhere somewhere anywhere they had got lost from in the first place and, not needed, gone wandering away.
“What kind of job are you looking for?” asked the landlady.
And it was a joke. She knew it as soon as she said it. Dad thought about it and laughed. Mother laughed. My brother and I laughed. We all laughed together.
For of course no one asked what kind of job, there were just jobs to be found, jobs without names, jobs to buy gas and feed faces and maybe, on occasion, buy ice-cream cones. Movies? They were something to be seen once a month, perhaps. Beyond that, my brother and I snuck in around back theaters or in side doors or down through basements up through orchestra pits or up fire escapes and down into balconies. Nothing could keep us from Saturday matinees except Adolph Menjou.
We all stopped laughing. Sensing that a proper time had come for a particular act, the landlady excused herself, went out, and in a few minutes returned. She brought with her two small gray cardboard boxes. The way she carried them at first it almost seemed she was bearing the family heirlooms or the ashes of a beloved uncle. She sat and held the two small boxes on her aproned lap for a long moment, shielding them quietly. She waited with the inherent sense of drama most people learn when small quick events must be slowed and made to seem large.
And strangely, we were moved by the hush of the woman herself, by the lostness of her face. For it was a face in which a whole lifetime of lostness showed. It was a face in which children, never born, gave cry. Or it was a face in which children, born, had passed to be buried not in the earth but in her flesh. Or it was a face in which children, born, raised, had gone off over the world never to write. It was a face in which her life and the life of her husband and the ranch they lived on struggled to survive and somehow managed. God’s breath threatened to blow out her wits, but somehow, with awe at her own survival, her soul stayed lit.
Any face like that, with so much loss in it, when it finds something to hold and look at, how can you help but pay attention?
For now our landlady was holding out the boxes and opening the small lid of the first.
And inside the first box…
“Why,” said Skip, “it’s just an egg…”
“Look close,” she said.
And we all looked close at the fresh white egg lying on a small bed of aspirin-bottle cotton.
“Hey,” said Skip.
“Oh, yeah,” I whispered. “Hey.”
For there in the center of the egg, as if cracked, bumped and formed by mysterious nature, was the skull and horns of a longhorn steer.
It was as fine and beautiful as if a jewelsmith had worked the egg some magic way to raise the calcium in obedient ridges to shape that skull and those prodigious horns. It was, therefore, an egg any boy would have proudly worn on a string about his neck or carried to school for friends to gasp over and appraise.
“This egg,” said our landlady, “was laid, with this design on it, exactly three days ago.”
Our hearts beat once or twice. We opened our mouths to speak. “It—”
She shut the box. Which shut our mouths. She took a deep breath, half closed her eyes, then opened the lid of the second box.
Skip cried, “I bet I know what’s—”
His guess would have been right.
In the second box, revealed, lay a second fat white egg on cotton.
“There,” said the lady who owned the motel and the chicken ranch way out in the middle of the land under a sky that went forever and fell over the horizon into more land that went on forever and more sky over that.
We all bent forward, squinting.
For there were words written on this egg in white calcium outline, as if the nervous system of the chicken, moved by strange night talks that only it could hear, had lettered the shell in painful half-neat inscriptions.
And the words we saw upon the egg were these:
REST IN PEACE. PROSPERITY IS NEAR.
And suddenly it was very quiet.
We had begun to ask questions about that first egg. Our mouths had jumped wide to ask: How could a chicken, in its small insides, make marks on shells? Was the hen’s wristwatch machinery tampered with by outside influences? Had God used that small and simple beast as a Ouija board on which to spell out shapes, forms, remonstrances, unveilings?
But now, with the second egg before us, our mouths stayed numbly shut.
REST IN PEACE. PROSPERITY IS NEAR.
Dad could not take his eyes from that egg.
Nor could any of us.
Our lips moved at last, saying the words soundlessly.
Dad looked up, once, at our landlady. She gazed back at him with a gaze that was as calm, steady, and honest as the plains were long, hot, empty, and dry. The light of fifty years withered and bloomed there. She neither complained nor explained. She had found an egg beneath a hen. Here the egg was. Look at it, her face said. Read the words. Then … please … read them again.
We inhaled and exhaled.
Dad turned slowly at last and walked away. At the screen door he looked