The Turkeys We Walked Home

The Tuesday Before Thanksgiving

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, we loaded the birds into crates before daylight and hauled them to the locker plant two towns over, in Halvard’s stock trailer behind my pickup. My appointment there had been booked since the previous January.

They work fast. By Monday the birds were back at my place, cleaned and chilled and bagged, each one weighed and tagged, filling three borrowed chest coolers packed with ice in my garage.

Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday, the families came.

They pulled in one after another with coolers and cardboard boxes. I checked them off in the green notebook. Ellery ran the scale tickets. Pax carried birds to the cars. Junie sat on a bucket by the garage door and told every single customer about the hen named Halvard.

“She’s not for eating,” she told the family from the lake. “She’s retired.”

The widow from town got her small hen, sixteen pounds even. The young couple hosting their first Thanksgiving got a twenty two pound tom and a list of instructions from me on roasting a fresh bird that never needs thawing.

By Tuesday at four o’clock, every name in that notebook had a line through it.

The First One

Well, two hundred ninety nine names. I had held one bird back.

Before anyone else came on Monday, before I even opened the garage door, I had picked out the best tom in the cooler, twenty six pounds, and put it in a cardboard box and set it on the seat of my pickup.

I drove across the road to Halvard’s place. He was in his shop, working on a grain auger with the big door open to let the light in.

I set the box on his workbench.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Your bird,” I said.

He looked inside, and then at me. “I didn’t order one.”

“I know. It’s the first one out. It’s paid for.”

He got out his billfold anyway. I put my hand over it.

“Halvard,” I said. “You stopped the road.”

He looked at me over the top of his glasses for a long time. Then he put the billfold back in his pocket.

“My daughter’s family is coming for Thanksgiving,” he said. “Twelve of us. She was going to buy one in town.”

“Well,” I said. “Now she doesn’t have to.”

He walked me out. At my pickup he looked across the road at the little hen by my waterer. “She really name that bird after me?” he asked.

“She did.”

He shook his head. And then, for the second time that month, he laughed.

After

Halvard the hen is still in my pasture. She has a little coop to herself now, and in the spring she will have company when the new poults come. Junie checks on her every day she is with me. She brings her the ends of the bread.

The spring latch is still on the gate. You have to pull it back with one hand and lift with the other. Every time I open it, I hear it click shut behind me, and I think of Corey on his knees with a drill, and Pax with a flashlight in the daylight.

I think about the low sun on all those white backs moving across the stubble, and my oldest daughter out on the far side in her green hoodie with her stick held out, never once running.

And I think about my littlest girl with her face red and her knees shaking, carrying a fifteen pound hen the last hundred yards home, because the hen could not make it on her own and nobody had asked her to.

Every family got its bird by the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. And Halvard got the first one free.