“Ruth, my love,” I read, and my voice shook only on the first word, “if you are reading this beside the road, with a buggy and a crowd, then I know what has happened, and I am sorry. I should have said it plainly to the boy while I was alive. I was a coward about it. I hope the hens are well.” Fifty cars sat idling along Route 340. The balloons on the banner of Courtney turned in the breeze. Sam had come down off the porch step and stood with his hands hanging, his straw hat crushed in one fist. Next to me on the buggy seat, the hen man from Strasburg sat quiet and gentle, with his gray beard on his chest.
“The farm,” I read, “is held in a preservation easement with the Lancaster Farmland Trust, signed in 2015. It may be used only for farming. No store, no house, no drive through, no sign of any kind except for farm products sold by the farmer who lives upon it. Ruth holds the lifetime right to live and farm here, and she alone can sell eggs at the end of the lane, as we have done since 1968.” I lowered the paper. Courtney lowered her giant scissors. “That is not possible,” she said. “I checked the deed. I checked everything.”
“You checked the deed,” said Elam Stoltzfus, in his dry, gentle voice, coming up beside the buggy on his cane. “You did not check the easement. It is recorded under a separate number at the courthouse in Lancaster. Abe asked me to keep it quiet, in case you ever needed to be surprised.” He took out his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. “Mrs. Esh, your drive through coffee shop is a violation of the easement. The Trust could demand its removal at your expense. And the sale of the hens, without the consent of the owner, is theft, whatever the price.” He nodded to the man beside me. “Mr. Brooks has agreed to return them, free of charge.”
A sold sign on an egg stand and a sealed envelope in a buggy brought sixty hens and a broken family home to Lancaster County.
The retired schoolteacher from Philadelphia who had bought my sixty hens for three hundred dollars climbed down from the buggy with great dignity and took off his hat. “Mrs. Esh told me everything on Thursday,” he said, in a voice that carried across the road. “I want you all to understand that I am a law abiding man. I was told the owner had passed away. I would never have paid for stolen birds.” He turned to Courtney. “Young lady, I would like to be certain you understand the seriousness of what you did.” Courtney, red from the neck up, stood with the scissors pointing at the ground, and the crowd of drivers, most of whom I had known for years, said nothing at all.
Then Sam stepped forward. He took off his hat and held it against his chest. “Mother,” he said. “I let her. I knew about the hens, and I let her do it, because I did not want an argument. That is the truth.” His voice cracked. “I let her say you were moving to Willow Valley. I let you go to the dawdy house and sit alone every night. I am so ashamed. Father is looking down from heaven, and he is ashamed too.” I put out my hand, and he took it, and he cried the way he did when he was a boy of seven, and had lost a calf.
Courtney did not weep. She stood very straight, with her shoulders back, and then, to my astonishment, she began to untie her apron. She folded it into a neat square. “Mother Ruth,” she said, “I have been a fool. I thought that the farm was a thing to turn into money. I did not see that it was a way of life.” She laid the apron on the ground. “I will take the sign down myself, today. And I will go to the church and tell them the truth.” It was the bravest thing I have ever seen a young woman do, and it did not make up for the hens, but it made me think that perhaps the farm might make a farmer of her yet.
The hens came home that afternoon in a borrowed truck. Sixty brown hens, clucking and indignant, tumbling out of wooden crates into the yard. They scattered to every corner of the pen, scratching at the dust, shaking out their feathers, with the air of a congregation returning from a long trip. I sat on an overturned bucket in the sun and watched them for an hour. Mr. Brooks sat on a hay bale nearby and ate a slice of the pie of my sister.
The next Saturday morning, the egg stand reopened. The SOLD sign was gone. The old board that Abe had painted, Brown Eggs $3 Dozen, was back on its post. Courtney had repainted it, carefully, with her own brush, and she had changed the three to a four, because, she said, the price of grain had gone up. She stood behind the honor box in a plain cotton dress, and when the first car pulled up, a station wagon full of tourists, she walked out and handed the driver a dozen eggs in a paper carton. “God bless you,” said the woman. “Thank you,” said Courtney, in a small clear voice.
I have not given up on that girl. She works the hens now, on weekday mornings, in rubber boots, with a bandanna on her head. She learned to candle an egg and to spot a sick bird. She still makes the best coffee in Lancaster County, and every Saturday she brings out a thermos and pours a cup for each customer at the stand, for free. People come from three counties for it. Sam builds the shelves. I sit in the chair of Abe under the maple tree, with a hen in my lap, and I watch my family learn to be a family at the end of the lane.
There was a postscript to the letter, which I read that night in the dawdy house, with the lamp turned low. Ruth, the hens like it when you sing to them. Sing the old hymns, the slow ones. They are the only choir I ever trusted. I laughed out loud. The next morning I walked into the henhouse with a pail of grain, and I began to sing Abide With Me, in my cracked old voice, and sixty brown hens turned their heads and listened. I swear that one of them closed her eyes.