The Turkeys We Walked Home

The Slow Middle

It took us a little over three hours to go half a mile.

Turkeys stop. They stop because there is corn on the ground. They stop because a tom wants to strut. They stop because one hen in the back decided to sit down, and when one sits, five more think it is a good idea.

Every time they stalled, I would shake the bucket and throw another handful, and the kids would close in a few steps, and the whole white mass would sigh and start moving again.

Twice the flock split. The first time, about forty birds peeled off toward the slough, where the cattails were, and Pax had to go wide around them through the wet ground. He came back with mud to both knees and a grin on his face, pushing them in front of him like a sheepdog.

“I got ’em,” he called. “Did you see? I didn’t even run.”

“I saw,” I said. “You were perfect.”

The second time, a tom got it into his head to go back toward the corner of the field where the kernels lay thick. Ellery headed him off alone. She stood her ground with her stick out and talked to him in a low voice, and he turned and went back to the others like he had meant to all along.

I watched her and my chest went tight. She was fourteen and she had seen her stepmother open that gate. She had told her not to. She had been told no. And here she was, quietly fixing it.

The Road

The worst part was the township road.

It is gravel, and on a Saturday in November it is not busy, but it is harvest season, and grain trucks run it from the farms out east to the elevator in town. A truck coming around the curve at forty miles an hour into three hundred turkeys is a thing I did not want to think about.

As we came up toward the field approach, I heard an engine start in Halvard’s yard. His old blue pickup came down his driveway, turned onto the road, and stopped crosswise in the middle of it, about a hundred yards east of the approach. He put his flashers on and sat there.

Then he got out and walked to the other side and stood there in his barn coat with his hands in his pockets.

He was blocking the road for us. He had not said a word. He just did it.

I sent Pax and Junie ahead at that point, by way of the ditch, to go back to our yard and stand at either side of the open gate. When the leaders came up the drive, they were to step in close and turn them through. Pax took Junie’s hand and they went.

“Walk,” I told them. “Don’t run. You are the gate crew.” Junie looked back at me over her shoulder, so serious. “We’re the gate crew,” she told Pax.

Over here the stubble ran right up to the road across from my yard, and the red barn and the open gate stood plain in the low light. Ellery and I brought the flock up to the edge of the gravel. The leaders stopped there, the way turkeys do at anything new, and looked at it. I threw a handful of pellets out onto the road. They went for it.

And then the whole flock poured across, three hundred white birds on gray gravel, in no hurry at all.

Halfway through, a grain truck came over the hill from the east. I heard it gear down. The driver saw Halvard’s pickup and the flashers and the old man standing in the road, and he stopped, and sat there with the engine idling.

I found out later that it was Burton, who hauls for a farm east of us. He waited the whole six or seven minutes it took. When the last bird was across, he lifted two fingers off the steering wheel at me, the way people around here do, and eased on past.

Halvard nodded at me once, got back in his pickup, and drove home.