Three Children and a Pot of Soup
“Mr. Mercer. I’d like to help with the cows. Mornings, before school.”
“You’d be up at five. And it’s gates and the bucket until the doctor clears those hands.”
“I’m up anyhow.”
“Then I’ll need you at the barn door at five, boots on. And you call me Owen. Mr. Mercer was my dad, and he’s been gone eleven years.”
One side of his mouth turned up. It did not last, but I saw it.
Dana Mercer was in the hospital five weeks.
We drove to see her the first Sunday, an hour and a half to the burn unit in the city, Danny up front with his hands pressed under his knees.
She was thirty-one and looked like a girl, her arms bandaged to the elbow. She worked second shift at the processing plant and had rented the Mercer place because it was all she could afford. There had been no husband for a long time.
When the children came in, she cried without any sound.
Josie climbed up on the bed. Tommy reached for her arms, and she could not hold him, and I will not forget her face when she understood that. Danny stood at the foot with his hands behind him.
“You got them out,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You were supposed to be asleep.”
“I know.”
“Come here.”
She could not hug him, so she pressed her forehead against his chest, and I turned and studied the wall. Marie put her hand on my back.
Later in the hall, Dana had a nurse wheel her out to find me. She sat there in her bandages with her chin up.
“Mr. Mercer, I’m not asking you for anything. I know how it looks. I won’t be a charity. I’ll pay you for every sock.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “I’m not keeping your children. They’re yours. I’m holding them for you. I’ve got a barn full of cows and a boy who turns out to be good with them. I don’t want a dime. I want you to heal your hands.”
Her face crumpled. “He’s been the man of the house since he was nine. He’s never been a kid. I don’t know if he knows how. Don’t let him be a little man, Mr. Mercer. Let him be twelve.”
“Yes, ma’am. And it’s Owen.”
The first Tuesday in November I sat in the back row of the church annex in the county seat with my arms crossed and a folder of forms, a man who had not been in a classroom since high school.
The teacher, a gray-haired woman named Judy who had raised eleven foster children, said a child who has been responsible for other children too long does not know how to put it down.
I wrote it on my hand with a pen.
On the way home Marie drove. At the stop sign at the edge of town she said, “You wrote on your hand. What’s it say?”
I held it under the dash light. In my cramped handwriting it said, let him put it down.
I called the sale barn that Thursday from the pickup. Marge, a friend of thirty years, answered on the second ring.
“Marge, I need to pull my name off the dispersal.”
“All sixty? Owen, you told me in September you couldn’t do another year.”
“I know what I told you.”
Through the windshield I watched a skinny boy in too-big muck boots come out of the barn with a bucket in each hand.
“I got help,” I said.