Heartbreak

Some farmer I turned out to be, crying like a baby over broken eggs. I candled each egg, all sixteen, just in case she’d gotten it right and there was an embryo inside any one of them. Unfortunately, there weren’t going to be any chicks. I’d been warned, “You’re going to have to break her heart and destroy the nest, and it won’t be pretty.” I get a lot of warnings about my chickens: game breeds are too aggressive, game chickens aren’t smart enough to be mean, you have to clip their flight feathers to keep them tame, never clip their flight feathers or they’ll never trust you, they’ll destroy the garden, they’ll weed the garden, you get used to the way they flap after they’re dead, you never get used to the way they flap after they’re dead, they taste good, they taste terrible… But I wasn’t prepared for the noise my beautiful Sussex made when she discovered all her eggs were gone.

I am a biologist. I know things. Chickens are feathered reptiles that chew their food internally and produce adaptive immune cells in a specialized organ called a bursa. The pulmonary circuit allows double circulation of blood through a four-chambered heart that separates blood that is oxygen-poor from mixing with blood that is oxygen-rich. What I didn’t know was that the sound of that heart breaking is universal. It sounds like loss and despair and horror and disbelief, all at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever apologized so sincerely in my life.

I really am sorry, Ginny. The nest was built in a bad location and you’d have been eaten by a fox before any of those eggs hatched. It hasn’t been an easy summer, old girl. You watched your clutch mate get torn apart by dogs and all your girlfriends get carried off by hawks or eaten alive by bacteria until you were all alone. Make friends with the pullets – they’re not so bad really; you were young once, too. On the upside, I probably got Hantavirus crawling under the outbuilding to destroy the nest, so at least you’ll get to watch me die of pneumonia.

The universe took revenge on me by putting a nail in my tire on the way to the dump, where I intended to leave the rotten eggs. I had to turn around and put on the spare, mosquitoes gleefully pushing aside the gnats bathing in my sweat to feast on my guilty blood. As a result, the trash is still waiting to go out, and the eggs are producing gas in a hot utility room. Certainly I’ll be haunted by chick spirits and hydrogen sulfide all night. The cockerel in the exclusion pen will crow bright and early, reminding me that I was going to kill him before I felt so bad about myself.

Because while I can look into the face of a desperate college student and tell them, “No, there isn’t any extra credit I can give you to save your grade and your scholarship, you moron,” I can’t bear to look at a chicken that’s lost two weeks of hard work and hope. But I can hope Ginny’s tiny brain forgets all about her troubles by morning, when she finds split cherry tomatoes and bits of popcorn on the lawn. And I can hope that I won’t ever have to hear her heart break again.