Thirty Six Pullets for Miss Edna

The Bus Kids

Orene’s pickup came up the gravel drive at one o’clock that afternoon, slow, with the crates stacked in the bed under a tarp and three kids squeezed in the cab beside her, all of them grinning through the windshield.

Behind her came two more cars, a minivan and an old farm truck, with the rest of them. Parents dropping kids off. One of the fathers got out and stayed.

The kids came piling out in T-shirts and sneakers. It was warm already, the first real warm Saturday of the year, and the dogwoods along the ditch were just finishing.

Every one of them was carrying a wire crate.

Red pullets. Black pullets. Little half-grown hens with their combs just starting to turn pink, crowded together and talking that low worried chicken talk they make when they have been in a truck.

Miss Edna came down off her porch in her faded blue flowered housedress and the gray cardigan she wears every day of the year, no matter how warm.

She did not say a word. She just stood at the bottom of the steps and looked at them coming up her drive.

Kenzie was in front. She had a crate in her arms with four red pullets in it, from the dairy sisters, because she did not have birds of her own to bring. She walked right up to Miss Edna.

“These are yours,” she said. “There’s thirty two more.”

Miss Edna held out her hands. She did not seem to know she was doing it.

Kenzie opened the crate and lifted out one young red hen and set it in Miss Edna’s hands, and the hen settled right down against the front of her cardigan like it had always lived there.

Miss Edna held it against her chest. She put her cheek down on top of its head for a second.

Then she looked up at all of them standing there in her yard with their crates.

“Well,” she said. “I reckon we’d better get to work.”

The Run

We worked all afternoon.

I had on my gray T-shirt and old jeans, my hair in a ponytail, and I stretched the welded wire. You have to pull it tight against the corner post, then staple it, then walk it down to the next post and pull again. I had borrowed a fence stretcher from the father who stayed, and he and I did the long sides together.

The kids did the staples. Some of them were good at it. The red haired boy had done fence with his granddad and he was better at it than me. The little ones mostly held things and handed things.

Orene held the level on every post we hung the gate from. She would not let us hang it until the bubble was dead center.

“I’ve been driving a bus for twenty two years,” she said. “I know what crooked does to a thing over time.”

The dairy sisters carried the tin and we screwed it down across the back half for shade. One of the brothers from the river family climbed up on a sawhorse to hand up screws and nearly fell off twice.

Miss Edna sat on her porch step most of the afternoon with that first red hen in her lap. She would not put it down. She hummed while she watched us. I heard “Blessed Assurance” and then “In the Garden,” over and over, the way she does when she is shelling peas on a Sunday.