The Pup Who Flushed the First Rooster

“I want to tell you something,” she said, very low, “and I want you to let me get through it.”

I turned off the water.

“Thirty years ago this fall,” she said, “I walked the opener on this farm. Duane put me on the end of the line, by the fence, because he thought it was the safest spot. A friend of his swung on a low rooster. He didn’t see me.”

She did not look up from the pan. She just kept cutting the bars into neat squares.

“I took most of the load in my left shoulder and some in my cheek,” she said. She touched a place high on her cheek, just under her eye, where I had always thought she had a little freckle. “That one’s still in there. The doctor in Sioux Falls said it was safer to leave it.”

“Freda,” I said. “I never knew.”

“Nobody tells it. Duane carried me out of that field to the pickup. Drove me to the hospital in Mitchell with his hand on my head the whole way. He has never once walked a woman on his land since. Not me, not a niece, not you.”

She set the knife down and finally looked at me.

“He doesn’t think you’ll scare the birds, Kelsey. He never thought that. He just couldn’t say the other thing out loud. So he said something stupid instead, every year, for nine years.”

I stood there with my wet hands. I thought about every October. Every crockpot. Every time I had stood at this window and watched the line walk without me.

“He should have told me,” I said.

“Yes,” Freda said. “He should have. It wasn’t fair to you, and I told him so, every one of those nine years, in that bedroom upstairs. He wasn’t wrong to be afraid. He was wrong to make you pay for it.”

She picked the pan of bars up off the counter.

“But I watched him go down on his knee for your dog this morning,” she said. “And I have not seen that look on his face since before that day. So I think maybe you’ve done what I couldn’t.”

She took the bars into the porch room. I stood at the sink for a minute alone. Then I dried my hands on the towel and went in after her.

Lunch was different that year. Not loud different. Small different.

Roger pulled out the chair next to him for me before I could find one on my own. Keith passed me the chili first, before he took any himself. Conrad told the story of his runner twice, and both times he gave the credit to Penny, who was lying under the table with her chin on my boot.

Merritt asked me what I fed her and how I had taught the give. I told him. He wrote it on a napkin.

Duane did not say much. He never did at lunch. But he reached down under the table once, when he thought nobody was watching, and I saw him slip half his ham sandwich to Duke, and then the other half to Penny.

After lunch the men went back out for the afternoon walk on the west quarter. I went with them. Nobody said a word about it. Tanner just handed me a box of shells from the dash of the pickup and we fell in together.