An adolescent shriek woke her. Cockerels, she thought, cockerels, with a wry twist to the word. She lay in the dark listening. There was no use in covering her head; the screaming still came through. The soloist was suddenly submerged in the chorus. Fifty young roosters, their voices high, uncertain, breaking, guttering, and beginning again.
She heard the hiss of sheets and felt her husband’s heat moving away from her. “Christ!” came his voice in the dark. She moved an arm until it touched his back; she rubbed softly at the jutting bones of his spine.
“I’m sorry,” she said. He didn’t move.
“Do it today! I’ve had enough!”
She pulled her arm back to her side.
“I’ll have to wait until she’s gone to school.”
He was silent. The roosters crowed on, a cacophonic tremor that rang through the walls. She snatched a robe and tiptoed out of the room.
The kitchen clock said five thirty. She went to the feed sack by the door and poured a measure of grain into the plastic basin. She slid her bare feet into the rubber boots next to the sack and opened the kitchen door. Dew was falling. The chilled touch of the air wet her face and hands and her robe. She could see the faint shape of the garage where the roosters were cheering, whistling, crowing, chortling in ferocious competition.
A golden-haired woman in a white apron clucking on the doorstep and scattering corn from a bowl to the plump, busy red hens who ran toward her, chuckling. The picture together with the phrase had done this to her. She grunted, the sound merely a shake in her skull bones. She was too close to the roosters now to hear anything else. She opened the garage door and the alkaline stink came out. She pulled the string and the light went on. They were all standing in the straw on the floor waiting for her. The din went up a notch. Wings beat among the reptilian heads stretching at her. She dumped the grain into the long feeding tray, spread it across the full length. The warm bodies moved softly next to her legs;
