Thirty Six Pullets for Miss Edna

So I could not just bring Miss Edna a few of my own hens. I did not have any. I have not been allowed to have any for nine years.

When I got to her place she was standing by the old pen with a feed bucket in her hand, like she had walked out to feed them and just stopped.

The pen was made of chicken wire on cedar posts her husband set in 1994. Chicken wire keeps chickens in. It does not keep dogs out. I had told her that before, gently, and she had said the pen had done fine for thirty years.

It had done fine for thirty years because Lamar’s wife kept those dogs on a run.

The dogs had dug under the wire at the back corner, where the ground stays soft from the downspout. You could see the hole. You could see the claw marks going down into the red clay.

Lamar Dooley’s place sits across the road and a little east, on about eleven acres. He is fifty nine. He works for the county road department, running a motor grader, and he is a good hand at it.

His wife passed in January. Her name does not belong in this story, but I will say that she was a kind woman and that she taught Sunday school to my Kenzie when Kenzie was five.

The two dogs were hers. Big yellow dogs, part Lab and part something with long legs. She raised them from pups and kept them on a cable run between two pecan trees, and walked them down the road every evening.

After she died, the cable run came down. I do not know if Lamar took it down or if it just broke and he never fixed it. Either way, by February those two dogs were running loose up and down our road.

They chased the mail carrier. They chased my truck. They got into a neighbor’s trash twice a week. Nobody said much, because everybody knew why.

Then on that Tuesday morning, at daybreak, they found Miss Edna’s hens.

I walked with her across the road to Lamar’s, because she wanted to go and I was not going to let her go alone. And that is how I was standing on his steps when he told her to pen her birds or quit griping.

When we got back to her porch, she sat down in her rocker and put the feed bucket in her lap.

“Miss Edna,” I said, “I’m calling the county. Animal control will come out. There’s a leash law.”

“You will not,” she said.

“He has to pen those dogs.”

“Shea.” She looked at me over her glasses. “That man buried his wife three months ago. Those are her dogs. If I call the county on him, they’ll come take them, and he’ll have nothing of her left that breathes.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

“I’m not going to do that to a grieving man,” she said. “And you’re not going to do it for me. Promise me.”

So I promised. I did not like it. I sat on her porch step and I did not like it at all, but she is 82, and they were her hens, and it was her call to make.

We got the four survivors out from under the porch with a broom and a little scratch feed. Two red hens, one black one, and a little speckled bantam that had belonged to nobody in particular for years. Edna carried them into the coop house one at a time.

Then she picked up a rake and started raking feathers.

I took the rake away from her and did it myself. She let me. That told me more than anything she had said.