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chickens grew up mean. The cocks jumped on my back every morning and every night. They dug into my skin through my shirt and pecked my head. Horny yellow beaks pierced my scalp and made my hair streaky with little lines of blood. Tamar did not go out to the broken-down barn. She spent a morning out there fixing up the pen, then she said: “This is your project, Clara. You’re eleven now. These chickens are your first grown-up project, you think of them that way.”
    Is an eleven-year-old a grown-up? What would my father have thought of the grown-up project idea?
    I do have a father. Everyone has a father. It’s a law of nature. But I couldn’t tell that to Tamar.
He doesn’t exist
, she said.
You don’t have a father
.
    Chickens were not my idea. An animal of any kind would not have been my idea of a grown-up project. It’s true that I wanted a grown-up project. It’s true that I had complained to Tamar about not being given credit for no longer being a child. But chickens were not the answer I had envisioned.
    “Tell me about my grandfather, and when you’re done, tell me about my father,” I said to Tamar a few months before the chickens arrived.
    Hope springs eternal. It was my hope that if I occasionally, without warning, sprang the words—
grandfather, father
—on Tamar, she would be so startled that answers would spring unbidden to her lips.
    “Nope and nope.”
    That was her response. That was a Tamarian answer.
    “I’m an adult now,” I said.
    “You’re eleven.”
    “In many cultures that would be considered nigh to adulthood.”
    “Nigh but no cigar,” Tamar said.
    She smiled. She liked the sound of that. I left her in the kitchen with a can of tomato soup and her can opener. I left her neither laughing nor chuckling. It could be said that when I left the kitchen after being told that I was nigh but no cigar, Tamar was
chortling
.
    Three months later the chickens appeared.
    In the beginning I tried to walk into the barn tall and stern, like I was in command. I carried the feed bucket in my left hand and the water bucket in my right, swinging them from side to side so that the water sloshed. Still, they attacked.
    “Get off of me!” I yelled. “Get off of me, you devilchickens!”
    Then I tried to look like a man. I made my voice deep. I intoned.
    “Get the H away from me.”
    Sometimes I even said the word. Get the HELL away. Butit didn’t make any difference. The cocks just looked at me with their beady eyes and didn’t move.
    I named the meanest one CJ Wilson.
    Why didn’t I tell the old man about the real CJ Wilson either? I could have told him. He would have listened. You might think that I knew all the old man’s secrets and he knew all mine. You would be wrong. Even now I wonder what secrets I never found out about the old man.
    The first day of school last September, CJ Wilson corrected the teacher when she said his name at roll call: Charles Junior Wilson.
    “It’s CJ,” he said. “Don’t call me Charles Junior.”
    Winter comes right after Wilson.
    “Clara Winter,” said the teacher.
    “It’s Clara
winter
,” I said.
    “That’s what I
said
.”
    She gave me a look. She was impatient. I could tell. After school CJ grabbed my leg as I walked past him on the school bus.
    “Nice skirt,” he said. “Nice skirt, Clara
Wipe.”
    Then he flipped my skirt up so that my underwear showed. He hated me because Tamar is the Justice of the Peace of the Town of North Sterns and CJ’s father had to come to her court at our house. Drunk driving.
    “Good-bye and good riddance,” Tamar said when CJ’s father was gone. She was sitting at the kitchen table, which is her courtroom. Being JP is a part-time job. It takes about five hours a month to be JP of the Town of North Sterns. Tamar holds court wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She doesn’t have a gavel. She says they’re not essential.
    “How are those chickens of yours?” she said.
    “Fine.”
    “You getting any more