The Influence(22)

It was another bad day for egg harvesting—he collected exactly ten—but whatever was wrong went far beyond poor egg production. The chickens themselves seemed…different. If he told anyone about it he would sound crazy, but several times he thought he caught some of the hens peeking at him from behind a wall of the coop. Watching him. Spying on him. That made no sense, of course, was probably not even possible, but it creeped him out nevertheless, and he hurriedly fed the fowl and collected all the eggs he could find before bailing.

He was afraid of the bees, so he stayed away from them. They’d survive for a day without being scrutinized, and if Lita and Dave weren’t back by tomorrow evening, he’d check on the hives the following morning. He was also afraid of the horse and goat, he was embarrassed to admit, and without his cousin or her husband around to run interference for him, he threw the hay over the fence in the horse’s general direction and dumped the feed in an area where he knew the goat would find it. He had no problem watering the garden.

Along with instructions, Dave had left him a list of the customers who might come by during the week to pick up their standing orders, and one of them arrived that afternoon, Ben Stanard, the old man from the grocery store. He was no less hostile out of his natural environment, and Ross actually experienced a small sense of satisfaction when the store owner demanded twelve dozen eggs and he told Stanard he could only have six.

The old man glared at him. “My order’s for twelve.”

“Sorry.” He felt like smiling, but he didn’t.

“Where’s Dave?” Stanard demanded. “Let me talk to him.”

“He and his wife are out of state right now. Family emergency. I’m in charge until they get back.”

“We had a deal.”

“I’m sorry, but there’s a production problem. I have no control over that.”

The store owner frowned, spit on the ground, then walked over to the handtruck where Ross had stacked the egg cartons. “This is bullshit,” the old man growled as he loaded them up in his SUV. “Dave’s gonna hear about this!”

This time, Ross did smile. “Have a nice day!” he called out.

Lita called in the evening. She sounded tired. The funeral, she said, was going to be held on Wednesday. She thought they would probably be back by the weekend. It was only a preliminary estimate, but with the life insurance and the assets, and the fact that Dave was his parents’ only child, she said they could be getting something close to a million dollars.

He was silent, stunned.

“Are you still there?” she asked.

“A million dollars?” he said incredulously.

“They had a lot of insurance.” There was sadness in her voice but also an audible relief, and Ross realized that, egg problems or not, Lita and Dave would probably now be in the position to have the ranch they always wanted.

“So what’s happening there?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”

He described his day.

After Ben Stanard had left that afternoon, Ross had gone into the cellar on the side of the house to do inventory. There were more eggs stored there than he realized (he probably could have given the store owner his full order), and quite a few jars of honey. He told Lita now that he wanted to sell at the farmer’s market on Thursday—if she and Dave would trust him with the truck—and she gave him permission to go ahead, though he could tell that she didn’t care one way or the other. He understood. There were far more important things on her mind at the moment. He didn’t want to bother her with details, so he assured her that everything was fine here at home, then told her to make sure she got enough sleep before he hung up.

In the morning, he forced himself to check out the bees. In his note, Dave had said that if Ross carefully followed all of the instructions, the bees would neither swarm nor sting, and, indeed, that was the case. He was too untrained to be able to extract honey or even tell if honey was being produced, but the bees themselves were fine, and that would suffice until Dave returned to take over.

Again, the chickens acted odd, and this time one of them actually pecked his ankle. The pain was immediate and much greater than he would have expected, and instinctively Ross reacted by kicking the animal, sending it squawking away, flapping its prodigious feathers. He felt bad about that until he looked down at his ankle, pulled up his pantleg and saw blood, a trail of it dripping down his skin and into his sock. Angrily, he looked up, but the attacking bird had blended into the pack. Good thing for it; because he would have kicked the animal again if he could find it.

Ross tossed out the rest of the feed, dumping it in a pile rather than sprinkling it across the yard, and postponed egg collection until he washed off his wound and put a couple of Band-Aids over the surprisingly deep gash. When he did return to the yard, he found only two eggs, one unusually small and one extraordinarily big. Neither looked like anything that could be sold, and though he didn’t really want to touch them, he picked both up and took them to the root cellar, leaving them in the basket. Dave could check them out when he returned. Maybe he could figure out what was wrong.