Three Children and a Pot of Soup
That September I had signed the papers to sell my cow herd. Sixty head of Angus cross cows, thirty-one years of my life. The note at the bank had gotten heavy after three dry summers and my right shoulder had a tear in it. The dispersal sale was set for the second Saturday in November, circled on the calendar by the phone.
Our two kids were grown. Matt was thirty and an engineer in Kansas City. Beth was twenty-eight. We had two empty bedrooms upstairs with their old trophies still on the walls, and I had just that year gotten used to the quiet. I was fifty-five, and I had decided I was finished being needed.
Marie came back to the kitchen door and looked at me across the girl’s head.
“Owen,” she said. “We have two empty bedrooms and a full pot of soup.”
She did not ask. That was how I knew it was not a question.
“Come in,” I said to the deputy. It came out rough. “Get that baby out of the cold.”
The little one woke the second Rick tried to hand him over.
He did not know where he was. His eyes went wide at the ceiling and the strange faces, and then he screamed, the real kind, with his whole body, for his mother. Marie held out her arms and he kicked her. Nothing anybody said reached him.
So I took him out on the porch in my barn coat.
I held that hot, shaking body against my chest at the porch rail, where you could see right down the road to the Mercer place going down. The roof had fallen in, and the pumper from the volunteer department kept laying a gray rope of water on the flames.
“There’s the big truck,” I said into his hair. “They’re putting it out.”
He screamed.
“They’re good men. I know every one of them.”
He screamed some more, and then he hiccuped, and the screaming broke down into sobs. I walked him up and down the boards. I cannot carry a tune and have been asked to stop in church, but I heard myself humming the first line of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” very low, and around three o’clock by the kitchen clock he quit crying and put his wet cheek against my neck.
I had not held a child that small in twenty-five years. I was surprised my arms remembered how.
When I came back in, the kitchen smelled of ham and navy beans. Marie had set out three bowls with the good spoons, the ones we kept for company. The girl was eating with her rabbit propped against the sugar bowl.
“Are rabbits allowed at the table?” she asked.
“This one is,” Marie said.
“He’s Mr. Buttons.”
“Then he’s welcome.”
I lowered myself into a chair with the baby on my chest and found I could not stand up without waking him. Rick told me the rest at the counter. Danny had been standing in the front yard in his socks with the baby in his arms and his sister by the hand and the dog, a brown mutt named Pepper, circling his legs. He had gotten all three out through his bedroom window and onto the porch roof. His mother had gone back in for something, and the firemen had pulled her out of the kitchen doorway.
“What’s wrong with the boy’s hands?”