I guessed that was really good. One of the other sexers said, "Billy Morita." He shook his head admiringly.
"How many can you do an hour?" "A thousand, ninety-eight percent accuracy."
Another sexer said, "Hey, yeah, you kids could light our cigarettes and bring us coffee."
I looked to my father to see what he thought, but he was staring into space, in another world. "Okay," I said.
So when they started working again, Sammy and I kept busy bringing them coffee, scratching their backs, lighting their cigarettes in the break room, and so on. Our father saw we were having fun. I could tell once that under his mask he was smiling. Our father was the only one who didn't ask us for anything, but we brought him things anyway. We always brought him coffee when it was the freshest and hottest, and when one of the hatchery assistants bought doughnuts, we saved our father a jelly one, because we knew that was his favorite.
There were several incubators and hatchers where the eggs stayed warm until the chicks were born. When they opened the incubators, we got to look in and see hundreds of thousands of white eggs. The warm air rushed out—the temperature had to stay at around ninety-nine degrees. On another day we got to look into the hatchers and see hundreds of thousands of yellow chicks. As soon as the chicks were born, the sexers hurried to separate the males from the females. The sexers worked for twelve hours in a row, and then they slept while a new batch of eggs warmed. They would wake up a few hours later, when the new batch was born.
The sexers got paid half a penny for each chick. Most of them had gone to school in Chicago or Japan to get this job. Chicken sex-ing was invented in Japan. Then a Japanese man came to Chicago and started a school to teach Japanese Americans how to sex chickens. That's where my father had learned, before he and my mother opened their store. He'd worked at a hatchery before I was born, but the work at that hatchery was seasonal, and once I was born, he needed to make more money.
The inoculators were all white women. They stuck needles full of medicine into the female chickens, so the females wouldn't get sick and die. Angel was kind of the inocula-tors' boss. Angel was a big burly woman with bandages around her ankles because she said standing all day hurt her legs.
The first day we visited, Sammy and I shyly watched her work. Finally, I had to ask her something.
"Does the needle hurt them?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Does it hurt the chicks when you stick the needle into them?"
"Honey, do I look like I can talk to chickens?" I didn't know how to answer that. She softened. "I don't think it hurts them unless you accidentally break their neck. That happens sometimes."
I looked into a garbage can and saw a couple of limp chicks inside. Sammy started to look inside too, but I pulled him away. I couldn't do anything about the chicks, but at least I could protect Sammy from seeing them.
I took him into the back room. Even in there, we could hear the racket from hundreds of thousands of chicks chirping. We watched TV until my eyes hurt. Then I dressed Sammy in his soldier pajamas, and I put on my pajamas with the lace collar that my mother had made for me.
When all the sexers came in to sleep, most of them looked at Sammy and me and smiled the way Lynn smiled at us when she thought we were being delightfully immature and young. One gray-faced old sexer said to me, "Good night, Miss Lacy." He laughed as if he were quite funny. I smiled politely. The grown-ups didn't even change clothes. They just got in their sleeping bags and fell asleep. All of us slept in the same room together. Except for the gray-faced old sexer, no one even said good night to anyone else. I think they were too tired.
My father got to sleep for only four hours before it was time to go back to work. When I saw him getting ready for work, I said, "How come you have to get up now?"
"Because the chickens are ready now," he said.
I went back to sleep. It was storming outside; the hatchery manager had told the sexers that there was a tornado warning. I liked being in a warm room, any warm room, when it stormed. I wished Lynn could be with us. Maybe I would not like the storm so much if I had to lie in a hospital room, even if I was warm and my mother was with me. Just as I was drifting off I heard shouting from the main part of the hatchery. I searched the wall for the light switch but couldn't find it. I couldn't even find the crack from under the door. In a minute, though, I found the door and opened it. Outside was completely dark, but several people were shouting.
"Get a flashlight!" yelled one man.
"Why didn't the backup go on?" said another.
A flashlight came on, and I followed its light to the incubator room. The hatchery manager's face screwed up into one big scrunched-up frown. I saw my father in the dim light and walked over to him. He and the other sexers had taken down their masks. Their room was dark. My father put an arm around me.
"What happened?" I said.
"The power's out, and the backup generator's not working. If the incubators cool off for too long, they may lose part of the hatch."
"You mean the baby chicks will die?"
"Or come out deformed."
"Should I call Mr. Lyndon?" called out a man.
Everyone fell silent.
Finally, the hatchery manager said grimly, "Not yet."
"Who're we going to get to fix the generator at this hour?" Another silence.
The hatchery manager went to a phone, and we could hear him talking softly. After awhile all he was saying was 'Yes, sir," over and over. We all sat in the incubator room so our heat would keep the room warm. Before long we heard a siren in the distance. Then a sheriff entered with the man to frx the backup generator.
"Power's out all over the county," said the sheriff.
My father sent me to bed. I lay next to Sammy in the total darkness. Mr. Lyndon must have been a pretty powerful person to get a man to fix his generator and get a sheriff's escort in the middle of the night. That's what I was thinking about as I fell asleep.
In the morning the storm had ended. I lay in bed until Sammy woke up. That took several hours. I just lay there and thought about every single thing I could think of that had ever happened to me. It was the longest I ever stayed still in my life. I thought about the Chinese lady in Iowa who could take her teeth out, about driving to Georgia, about a boy at school who was kind of cute. I thought about Lynn being sick. For everything in my life, I would ask, Why? Why didn't the Chinese lady have teeth? Probably it was because she didn't brush them enough. I asked myself why we had to move to Georgia. It was because my father needed to work at this hatchery so he could support us better. Why did I kind of like that boy? Because he was kind of cute. And why was Lynnie sick? Why? There was no answer to that.
Later that day I stole a couple of male chickens and set them down in the field. "Be free!" I said. Sammy and I walked across the street, to a pecan grove, and picked up nuts from the ground. Sammy had crazy bizarre teeth like rocks, and he would crack the nutshells so we could eat the insides. I remembered when we first arrived in Georgia and I saw all the mansions and all the fruit and nut trees. I thought almost everything would look beautiful like this pecan grove. I thought that there would be mansions and orchards everywhere and that nuts and fruit would fall down and roll through the streets whenever the wind blew the trees. I thought that maybe at first nobody would like Lynn but that once everybody got to know her, she would be the most popular girl in her class and be homecoming queen someday in high school. And I still thought this might be possible for her.
On Halloween night my parents brought my brother and me to visit her in the hospital. I was dressed as a fairy godmother. I pulled glitter off my dress and threw it over Lynnie and said, "Kira-kira!" She was thin and pale, with circles under her eyes. The glitter fell in a sparkly rain all around her. She smiled.