500: An Anthology of Short Stories
Chicken Feed

Bertie was furious. No. Enraged. Yes, she felt that was a more appropriate word for her emotional state. Mightily enraged! And it was all Rose’s fault.

“I warned you not to listen to Leonard’s preposterous promises, didn’t I?” she asked-shouted at the younger Rose sitting in the window seat, looking for all the world like a wilted flower. Rose suppressed a sigh, continued to stare at the wide open ground surrounding their isolated farmhouse. Nobody in sight for as far as the eye could go.

“I explained, heckled, complained that all Lenny was doing was window dressing, that he only wants to bed you, but you turned a deaf ear to all my warnings,” Bertie continued. “And where did it get you, hmm? Tell me that, why don’t you?” the older woman dared the younger one, knowing that Rose would remain silent.

“Bertie,” Rose said, surprising the woman so much that her eyebrows shot up comically into two black arches of disbelief. “His farm is adjacent to ours; it only made perfect sense to me that we should allow his livestock to join ours and have them all graze together on the land,” Rose stated in a mild tone.

She never lost her composure, not even during the time when a fully grown bull had charged her when she had strayed into his territory. To this day Bertie wondered how Rose had managed to make the maddened bull veer away from her at the very last second. Bertie supposed Rose would take that secret to her grave.

“Your brain must be addled, girl,” Bertie said rudely, compounding her insult by referring to Rose as “girl”. She didn’t know why Rose’s presence often brought the worst out of her.

“No, I’m as sharp as that there hatchet you have in your hand,” Rose contradicted Bertie, yet again surprising the older woman so much that she gaped open-mouthed at her. “Leonard could help us run the farm without the need for us to pay him. I thought it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Rose claimed.

“Until the snake sank his fangs into you and got you preggies. Now he has a legitimate claim on our ancestral land!” Bertie hissed, bringing the small axe down hard for emphasis on the body of the chicken she was chopping up for dinner. There was the tacit insinuation that Rose had made a monumental fool of herself.

“Allow me to put a kernel of truth you’ve overlooked in a capsule for you, Bertie,” Rose said with such vigor that Bertie stopped her hacking of the bird carcass. “Have you forgotten that our land isn’t worth chicken feed? Leonard’s farmstead, however, is a veritable gold mine. He will do the gentlemanly thing and marry me.”

It was then Bertie understood why the bull had veered away from Rose on that incredible day. He had recognized a threat greater than himself. Rose was no flower; she was all thorns.

Leonard had never stood a chance against her.