The Turkeys We Walked Home

Why I Did Not Pick Up the Phone

I know what some of you are thinking. Call the sheriff. Call a lawyer. Call Corey and make him deal with his wife.

Here is the plain truth. My kids live half of every week in Brandi’s house. I was not going to make them stand in a courtroom and pick a side.

Corey and I were married fifteen years. We divorced two winters ago. It was not a war, just a slow quiet running out, and we both decided early that the kids would not pay for it.

He kept his job selling farm equipment at a dealership in town. I kept the farm, because it was my grandparents’ land and because I was the one who did the chores at five in the morning. We split the kids down the middle, Monday through Wednesday with me, Thursday through Saturday morning with him, and every other Sunday.

Corey married Brandi last year. She is thirty three, pretty, quick, and from the first day I met her she looked at this farm the way some people look at a dog that bit them once.

I never understood it until later. Corey built the turkey operation with me, years ago. He welded the first roost shelter out of an old hay rack. He hung the brooder lamps. And apparently, at his own supper table, he still talked about it like it was the best thing he ever made.

That Saturday was supposed to be his day with the kids. But fall is the busy season at the dealership, with combines down and parts on order, and he got called in. So Brandi dropped the kids at my place at eight and said she would be back for them at four.

Instead, she walked to my pasture gate, unhooked the chain, swung sixteen feet of steel all the way open, and drove away.

Tracks Across the Gravel

Pax came out of the house pulling on his boots with one hand and holding a granola bar in the other. He is eleven and built like a fence post, all elbows and shins.

Junie came behind him. She is eight, still small enough to ride on my hip if I let her, with her hat pulled down over her ears. She looked at the empty pasture and her face crumpled.

“Are they dead?” she asked. “Did a coyote get them?”

“No, baby. They just walked off. Turkeys are nosy. When a gate opens, they go see what is on the other side.” I crouched down to her. “We are going to go find them and bring them back. All of us. Okay?”

She nodded and wiped her nose on her mitten.

I went into the machine shed and came out with four long sticks. They are old fiberglass sorting poles, about six feet long, the kind cattle people use. I have had them since the year we started. You do not hit a turkey with them. You just hold them out.

I filled one bucket half full of grower pellets and handed Ellery a coffee can with a lid, also full, so she could rattle it.

Then we started looking for tracks. It was not hard. A flock of three hundred turkeys leaves a trail like a parade went through. There was a wide flattened path through the grass in the road ditch, droppings on the gravel, and feathers caught on the barbed wire across the road.

They had crossed our township road and gone through the gap at Halvard Moe’s field approach. Halvard’s corn had come off a week before. His combine had left the stalks standing short and broken, and everywhere between them lay the kernels a combine always misses.

To a turkey, a picked cornfield is a church supper.