Sitting at the kitchen table—not the round oak table she would like to have, but an interim table, an artificial table, an immoral table from the fifties, with chrome legs and black curlicues baked into its Formica top—Charis drinks her herbal tea and attempts to focus ori the day ahead. The mist makes it more difficult: it’s hard for her to tell the time, despite her wristwatch, when she can’t see the sun.
The most immediate decision to make is: who will have breakfast first, herself or the chickens? If she does, the chickens will have to wait and then she will feel guilty. If the chickens do, she will be hungry for a while, but she will have her own breakfast to look forward to while she is feeding them. Also the chickens trust her. They are probably wondering where she is, right this minute. They are worrying. They are reproachful. How can she let them down?
Every morning she goes through this minor tug-of-war, in her head. Every morning the chickens win. She finishes her tea and fills a pail at the sink, then goes to the kitchen door where Billy’s work overalls are hanging on a wall hook. She pulls them on, stuffing her nightgown down the legs—she could go upstairs and get dressed, but it might wake Billy, who needs his sleep because of the strain he’s under—and kicks off her slippers and slides her bare feet into Billy’s rubber boots. This is not the most attractive feeling: the rubber is chilly, and damp with old foot sweat. Sometimes there are wool work socks to put inside the boots, but these seem to have wandered off somewhere; and even with the socks these boots would be cold, and way too big for her. She might get some boots of her own, but this would violate the accepted version of reality, which is that Billy feeds the chickens. She picks up the water pail and waddles out into the yard.
The mist is less threatening when you’re actually in it. It gives Charis the illusion of being able to walk through a solid barrier. Dripping grasses brush her legs; the air smells of leaf mould and damp wood, and of wet cabbages, from the halfdozen of them still in the garden. It’s the autumnal smell of slow combustion. Charis breathes it in, breathing in also the ammonia and hot-feather scent of her chickens. Inside the henhouse they’re making the sleepy crooning cooing sounds that show they are at ease, a sort of broody, meditative humming. Now they hear her, and change to excited cackles.
She unlatches the wire gate that leads to their enclosure. Charis’s first idea had been to let the chickens range free, totally fenceless, but there turned out to be a cat and dog problem; and also the neighbours, although tolerant of the chickens in general, didn’t much appreciate having stray ones in their own yards, scratching up their flower beds. The chickens don’t like the fence and try to get out, so Charis always closes the gate behind her before opening the henhouse door.
Billy built the henhouse himself, working with his shirt off and the sun on his back, whacking the nails in. It was good for him, it gave him a sense of accomplishment. The house tilts a little but it does its job. It has one door for the hens, a small square one with a ramp going down, and another for the humans. Charis opens the chickens’ door and they crowd and strut and cluck down their ramp, blinking in the light. Then she goes in by the human door, opens the metal garbage can where the chicken feed is kept, and scoops up a coffee tin of feed, which she takes outside and scatters on the ground. She prefers to feed the chickens outside. The book says you should let the straw litter and the chicken droppings build up on the henhouse floor because the heat of decomposition will keep the chickens warm in winter, but Charis does not think that food eaten under such circumstances can possibly be healthy. The cycle of nature is one thing, but you shouldn’t confuse the different parts of it.
The chickens cluck hyperactively, mobbing her legs, making small fluttering hops, jostling and pecking one another, giving out yelps of anger. When they have settled down and are feeding she carries their water container outside too and tops it up from the pail.
Charis watches the chickens eat. They fill her with joy, a joy that has no rational source, because she knows—she has seen, also she remembers—how greedy chickens are, how selfish and unfeeling, how cruel they are to one another, how they gang up: at least two of them have naked scalps, from being picked on. Nor are they placid vegetarians: you can start a riot among them just by tossing them a few hot-dog ends or scraps of bacon. As for the rooster, with his eye of an insane prophet and his fanatic’s air of outrage and his comb and wattles flaunted like genitals, he’s an overbearing autocrat, and attacks her rubber boots when he thinks she’s not looking.
Charis doesn’t care; she excuses the chickens everything. She adores them! She has adored them ever since the moment they arrived, flowering out of the feed sacks in which they travelled, shaking their angels’ feathers. She thinks they are miraculous. They are.
Inside the henhouse, she rummages through the straw in the boxes, hoping for eggs. In June the hens were bursting with eggs, laying two a day, huge milky ovals with double and triple yolks, but now, with the declining angle of the sun, they’ve fallen off badly. Their feathers and wattles are duller; several of them are moulting. She does manage to find one egg, an undersized one with a pebbly shell. She slips it into the breast pocket of her overalls; she will feed it to Billy for his breakfast.
Back in the kitchen she takes off her boots; she leaves the overalls on, because she’s cold. She slides another stick of wood into the stove, warming her hands. Should she have her own breakfast first, or wait and have it while Billy has his? Should she wake him at all? Sometimes he’s mad if she does, other times he’s mad if she doesn’t. But today is a city day for her, so if she wakes him up now she can get him fed before she catches the ferry. That way he won’t spend the morning asleep, and blame her later.
She climbs the stairs and walks gently along the hall; when she gets to the doorway she stands for a moment, just looking. She likes looking at Billy in the same way that she likes looking at the hens. Billy too is beautiful; and just as the hens are the essence of hen-ness, Billy is the essence of Billy-ness. (Like the hens, too, he is a little frowsier now than when she first encountered him. This also may have something to do with the angle of the sun.)
He lies on their mattress, the sleeping bag pulled up to his neck. His left arm is flung across his eyes; the tan on it is fading, although it’s still dark, this arm, and pelted with short golden hairs, like a honeybee covered with pollen. His short yellow beard shines in the white room, in the strange light from the mist outside—heraldic, the beard of a saint, or of a knight in an old picture. Or like something on a stamp. Charis loves to watch Billy at such moments, when he’s quiet and still. It’s easier to maintain her view of him that way than when he’s talking and moving around.
Billy must sense her flashlight gaze on him. His arm moves away from his eyes, the eyes themselves open, such blue! Like forget-me-nots, like mountains in the distance, on postcards, like thick ice. He smiles at her, uncovering Viking teeth.
“What time is it?” he says. “I don’t know,” says Charis.
“You’ve got a watch, don’t you?” he says. Don’tcha. How can she explain about the mist? Also that she can’t take the time to look at her watch, because she’s looking at him? Looking is not a casual thing. It takes all her attention.
He gives a small sigh, of exasperation or desire, it’s so hard to tell the difference. “Come here,” he says.
It must be desire. Charis goes to the mattress, sits down beside Billy, smooths back the hair on his forehead, hair so yellow it looks painted. It’s still amazing to her that the colour doesn’t come off on her skin. Although her own hair is blonde as well, it’s a different blonde, pale and bleached-out, moon to his sun. Billy’s hair glows from within.