Throughout that spring and summer she worked alongside or separate from Norman, caring daily for the long pens of laying hens they’d built into what had once been the basement dairy of the barn, the pens stretching outside in wired runs on the south-facing open slope, dividing the several hundred hens by breed: Rhode Island and New Hampshire Reds, Barred Rocks, Plymouth Rocks and Silver-laced Wyandottes. Daily gathering the eggs in baskets and carrying them to the house basement to candle them and pack them in straw in wooden crates which twice a week were driven to the depot in Randolph where they were shipped to Boston; daily also working in the brooder house newly built according to plans from the agricultural school at the university in Burlington, raking the litter and spreading pine tar on young fowl wounded by others, clipping beaks when she found the warrior bird, culling the sick. She talked to the hens as she went among them, a low fluttering tone of speech half-directed at them and half to herself. She knew them all and would wring a neck when egg production dropped off. Six times a year the brooder house was emptied: young hens joining the laying flock, the young cocks packed two dozen to a crate and shipped south for the live market.

Most of the chicken they ate themselves was stewed, old hens eating more than they laid. Tough meat cooked slow and wet and well seasoned until it fell from the bone, made sweet with patience. Eaten in spring with dandelion greens or fiddleheads or asparagus and sometimes the small dense morels Norman would carry back from the woods, cradling them in his cap held in his hands; in summer with garden vegetables and sometimes great fried slices of the puffballs that would spring up in the pastures like brilliant white boulders; in fall and winter with the great Hubbards or Irish potatoes stored down basement along with carrots and parsnips packed in crates of sand. Always something good to eat and work enough to keep them both long-muscled and hard, both young and fresh enough with strength so that even the long stretching summer days, light by four and still light at half past nine at night, were not long enough. And they could not make a baby. After the fourth miscarriage they stopped speaking of the problem or what might be the cause and went through that spring and summer with the first true remove about them, a slight skim of distance walked with both through everyday, neither willing or able or even conscious to admit to themselves or the other that this was happening to them. Still coming together in the night, both still endless with appetite and it was not then, at the end of the day as dark and sleep came over them, but during the day that both carried the small discontent of attendant fear.