Thirty Six Pullets for Miss Edna

“Pen your birds or quit griping, Edna,” Lamar Dooley said through his screen door. “Those dogs don’t know a property line. Neither do chickens.”

Then he shut the inside door on an 82 year old widow standing on his porch steps in her housedress, with chicken feathers still stuck to the hem.

I was standing one step below her. I had driven over from work in my rubber boots, and I had my hand under her elbow because her legs were shaking. Not from fear. From the walk.

She did not say anything back to him. She just turned around, let me help her down the steps, and started across the road toward her own place, slow, the way she does everything now.

“Miss Edna,” I said. “Let me go back up there.”

“No, honey,” she said. “He heard me. That’s all I came to do.”

That was a Tuesday morning in April, a little after eight. The sun was barely over the pines, and the dew was still on the grass in her side yard, which made the feathers stick to everything.

There were feathers on the clothesline poles. Feathers on the porch rail. Feathers stuck in the wet clover all the way from her old pen down to the ditch, where the dogs had carried some of them off.

Edna Crump has lived in that little white farmhouse on our road in Banks County, Georgia, for sixty two years. She came there as a bride. Her husband farmed a little and drove a feed truck, and he has been gone since 2009.

For thirty of those years she has kept laying hens, and for thirty years she has sold eggs out of a blue cooler at the end of her gravel drive. Four dollars a dozen. A coffee can with a slot cut in the lid.

People leave the money and take the eggs. Nobody has ever stolen from that can that I know of. On our road, you would not want to be the one who did.

The egg money pays her light bill. She told me that once like it was a small thing, but I knew it was not. Her Social Security covers the rest, and just barely.

She called me at the poultry house at 7:40 that morning. I manage four broiler houses for a grower about six miles from us, and I had just finished walking the second house when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

“Shea,” she said. “I’ve found thirty six.”

She was not crying. She was counting.

“Thirty six what, Miss Edna?”

“Hens. There’s four left. They’re up under the porch and they won’t come out.”

I told my assistant I would be back by ten, changed my boots in the truck the way we have to, and drove straight there.

That is a rule of the company I work for, and I want to say it plain because it matters later. Anybody who manages a broiler house for an integrator is not allowed to keep backyard birds of their own. Not one. It is a disease thing, and they mean it.