Thirty Six Pullets for Miss Edna

May

By the middle of May every one of those pullets was laying.

Miss Edna has the cooler full every morning now. Two dozen a day, some days more. She has started setting a few dozen back for the families who brought the birds, and she will not let them pay for those, and they have quit arguing with her about it.

The light bill is paid.

Every one of those nine kids has been back to see their hen. Some of them come every week. The dairy sisters come on Saturdays and help her clean the coop house. The red haired boy brought his granddad over once, and the two old people sat on the porch for three hours talking about laying mash.

Lamar keeps the dogs on the cable. When he walks them in the evening, before it gets dark, he walks them on the far side of the road.

Sometimes on his way back he stops at the end of Edna’s drive and leaves four dollars in the coffee can and takes a dozen eggs.

He does not need a dozen eggs. He lives by himself and he does not cook much. Miss Edna knows that. I know that. Everybody on our road knows that.

Nobody says anything about it.

A while back I asked Miss Edna if she was still mad at him for what he said that Tuesday on his porch.

She was sitting on her step with Kenzie, the red hen, in her lap. That hen follows her all over the yard now like a dog.

“Shea,” she said. “I was never mad. I was just tired. There’s a difference.” She stroked the hen’s back. “He was grieving. Grief makes a man say things. That don’t make what he said right. But it makes it something you can forgive.”

She looked across the road at Lamar’s place.

“Those children did what I couldn’t,” she said. “They didn’t fight him. They just showed him what it looked like. He had to stand there and see it.”

I think about that a lot.

I think about my girl holding that bus rail with both hands. I think about nine kids I barely knew walking up a gravel drive with their arms full of chickens. I think about a grown man standing at a gate with his hand on the latch, not sure he was allowed to come in.

The old chicken wire is rolled up behind Edna’s coop house. She will not let me haul it off. She says her husband’s posts are still in it.

And the blue cooler sits at the end of the drive every morning in the sun, full of eggs, with my daughter’s purple sign taped to the front.