“Then you aren’t losing anything.”
One of the workers smirked.
Briggs folded his arms.
“You planning to raise invisible geese?”
“I’m planning to take the eggs you just ordered thrown away.”
The worker laughed.
Harold shook his head.
“Clara, you amaze me.”
“That a yes?”
“They’re trash.”
“So I can take them.”
Briggs gestured toward the trench.
“Take every rotten one if you want. Save me the trouble of burying them.”
Clara did not move.
“I want you to say it clearly.”
His amusement faded slightly.
“What?”
“That you are giving me the discarded eggs.”
“Good Lord.”
“Say it.”
Briggs looked toward his workers.
“Did you hear that? She wants legal ownership of garbage.”
They laughed again.
Clara remained still.
Finally Briggs threw up one hand.
“Fine. The broken eggs in that trench are yours. I don’t want them, I don’t want them brought back, and I don’t want to hear complaints when your barn smells like death.”
Clara nodded.
“Thank you.”
She turned toward her wagon.
Briggs called after her.
“You’ll need more than one basket.”
“I know.”
“You actually mean to take all five hundred?”
Clara glanced over her shoulder.
“You said they were mine.”
Harold smiled.
“They are.”
By noon, half of Willow Bend knew.
By sunset, nearly everyone did.
Clara Whitmore had hauled five hundred broken goose eggs home from Harold Briggs’s garbage trench.
Some said poverty had finally made her foolish.
Others said grief had.
One man at the general store bet two dollars that not ten birds would hatch.
Another said the smell would drive Clara off her own farm before May.
Clara heard none of it that first night.
She was too busy.
She cleared the small storage room connected to the barn.
She scrubbed the floor.
She dragged in two old tables.
She sealed gaps around the windows with cloth.
She set a cast-iron stove near the wall.
Then she began sorting eggs.
The worst went immediately into a discard bucket.
Eggs with exposed membrane.
Eggs leaking fluid.
Eggs crushed along more than one side.
Eggs that smelled wrong.
By midnight, seventy-three were gone.
Four hundred twenty-seven remained.
Clara heated water and cleaned her hands.
She prepared melted beeswax.
For some cracks, she used the smallest possible amount, brushing the wax carefully across the broken line.
For others, she used thin strips of clean tissue paper coated lightly in wax.
She knew too much sealing could block the shell’s natural pores.
Too little would allow the egg to dry.
No book sat open beside her.
No expert gave instructions.
She worked from memory, instinct, and observation.
Every egg received a mark.
Small crack.
Medium crack.
Sealed.