“I want to bring the chickens!”
“Okay, we can bring one chicken,” said Lucy. “It can bring the blessing back to the rest of the flock.”
“Five!”
“The priest will allow you to bring only one chicken,” said Lucy. “It’s the rule.”
“Five!”
“One, Wyatt. One is all we can bring. It’s the rule. We have to follow the rules.”
“Five!” He arched his back and spit in Lucy’s face.
“No spitting, Wyatt,” said Lucy. “That hurts my feelings.”
He spit at her again.
Owen walked down the stairs. He’d heard all of it, of course. It was impossible to miss.
“Hey, buddy,” Owen said. “How about three chickens?”
Wyatt instantly relaxed. He stopped arching his back, he stopped spitting, even his face went from red back to normal, seemingly on a dime. He looked up at his dad and said, “Okay.”
Lucy looked at Owen like she wanted to strangle him. “How are we going to get three chickens to the church and then down the aisle to be blessed?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged.
“They can’t just walk around, Owen,” said Lucy. “There’s going to be a million animals inside that place. It’s going to be a madhouse.”
“Wyatt and I will figure it out, right, Wyatt?” said Owen. “It can be like a science project.”
*
Susan Howard was peeking out from the window in the church tower, having a moment.
She’d arrived at the church before seven to get everything arranged, had set out the programs she’d had printed up, put out the brand-new guest book she’d purchased for the event so they could have a record of who attended so the new members’ committee could follow up with a phone call and a visit. The day promised to be unseasonably warm, which Susan thought was nice, a pop of Indian summer late in October after two and a half weeks of nonstop rain. It would be enough to coax some of the fence-sitters out of their homes, she thought. Snow was just around the corner.
Susan liked being a deacon at St. Andrews—she enjoyed teaching Sunday school, once she got the hang of it, and she liked having a base from which to launch her rockets of community enlightenment—but there was no getting around the fact that St. Andrews attracted a certain sort of person. A certain sort of family, actually.
Not the Jesus freaks, to be sure. The true believers went to Sunny Valley Community Church, which was a half-hour drive away and had an active youth group that drew families from all over. The people who ended up at St. Andrews weren’t the believers, they were the behavers. Decent people who’d been forced to go to church as kids and now did the same to their offspring. Parents who viewed attending church as a way to uphold a certain kind of conventionality, a clean-your-plate-obey-your-parents-write-your-thank-you-notes mentality. Susan and Rowan Howard’s kids didn’t clean their plates, obey their parents, or write thank-you notes, and Susan was proud of those facts. When her daughter, Charlotte, showed a people-pleasing, girlish glee in filling out her Common Core worksheets, writing her numbers and letters neatly inside the boxes, Susan nearly pulled her out of Beekman’s public school. She would have, too, if she and Rowan had had the money for private school—something Waldorf-y, filled with Weston Price moms still breastfeeding their six-year-olds—but they didn’t. The only thing Susan’s children lacked were rich grandparents.
Susan had been elected deacon of St. Andrews two years earlier. She chaired meetings of the garden committee—where five old ladies tangled with two moms fresh from Brooklyn over whether or not to pull out all of the nonnative species in the church gardens—and she policed the Friday-night sorting party for the annual tag sale, cracking down on women who seemed to think that volunteering to organize the donated items was their chance to cart off all the best stuff. No one could say that Susan Howard didn’t pull her weight. She did her dharma to the staid, traditional God of St. Andrews, and she didn’t complain.
But today’s service was going to be different. It was progressive, it was community focused, it was decidedly non-species-ist. It was everything Susan wanted St. Andrews to be. She felt a little like she imagined a new pope must feel, the thrill of shaking up an ancient institution from the inside, from a position of power, but with humility and selflessness and grace.
Susan snapped out of her reverie and hurried down the stone steps. Rowan and the kids and the three baby goats would be arriving any minute.
It was time for her to pass out some skirts.
*
Lucy had solved the kids-in-white problem by putting Wyatt in one of Owen’s white T-shirts, which drooped down nearly to his knees. Wyatt wouldn’t even think about putting on the tights, and he refused to wear a belt, but he was all in white, at least, except for his light-up Spider-Man sneakers. He looked like a member of a doomsday cult.
Claire’s wagon would have come in handy, Lucy found herself thinking as she watched Owen duct-tape Wyatt’s rolling belly board to the bottom of a big cardboard box. Wyatt had traced three circles on the top of the box and looked on with hand-flapping excitement as Owen cut them out with a big serrated knife. (“It’s knife time!”) Lucy found some old rope in the garage, and Owen taped it all together so that Wyatt could walk in front of the box and pull it along behind him with, ideally, the chickens’ heads poking out of the holes in the top. Lucy didn’t think they’d pop their heads out of the box, but Owen and Wyatt were convinced they’d want to check out the excitement.
When they got to the church, Owen stuck the box of chickens next to a tombstone and then chased Wyatt around the graveyard for a bit. When they came back over to Lucy, their legs were splattered with mud.
“By the time I noticed the mud, it was too late, and he was off and running,” Owen explained. “We’ve still got that old beach towel in the back of the car. I thought it was best for him to burn off some energy before all that sitting quietly inside a church.”
“Fair enough,” said Lucy.
Susan Howard walked over carrying a pile of skirts.
“Owen, the men are wearing skirts during the service as a show of solidarity with Colleen Lowell,” she said.
“I’m not going to wear a skirt, Susan,” said Owen.
“Please. For me. Just run into the bathroom and slip it on.”
“Not gonna happen, Susan.”
“You can wear it over your pants if you want. I won’t object.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Lucy?” Susan looked at Lucy with that fierce intenseness of hers, the intensity that made the mommies of Beekman move mountains on her behalf.
“I can’t make my husband wear a skirt, Susan. That’s not how our marriage works.”
Susan sniffed the wind and headed off in search of her next prospect.
*
Claire had tied the llama to a lamppost and she was eyeballing the other animals, trying to see what sort of lineup would be the most dramatic, when she noticed the bees.
“Bees, Blake!” Claire shrieked. “Blake! Bees! Bees!”