The Turkeys We Walked Home

Four O’Clock

At about half past three, I saw Halvard’s pickup come down his driveway again.

This time he turned toward my place. He pulled into my yard and parked along the fence by the pasture gate, and turned off the engine, and just sat there.

I walked out. He rolled down his window. “Afternoon, Gretta.” “Afternoon, Halvard. Thank you for this morning. For the road.”

“Mm.” He looked past me at the turkeys. “They all home?”

“All three hundred.”

“Good.” He was quiet a minute. “I was in my yard at eight this morning. I saw a car stop at your gate. I saw a woman get out and open it and leave it open.”

I did not say anything. “Thought I’d sit here a while,” he said. “If that’s all right.” “It’s all right,” I said.

The kids came out and sat on the top rail of the board fence along the yard, all three of them in a row. Junie had a pan of Signe’s bars on her lap and was sharing them out. Pax gave one to Halvard through the truck window. Halvard thanked him.

At five minutes to four, Brandi’s car turned in at the end of the drive.

She came up slow. I watched her eyes go to the pasture first, before anything else. I watched her see it: three hundred white turkeys at the feeders, the gate chained shut, the grass trampled flat where they had come home.

Then she saw the kids lined up on the fence. And then she saw Halvard’s pickup, and Halvard getting out of it.

She stopped the car and rolled down the window. Her face had gone a funny color.

Halvard walked over slowly. He is a big man, even at seventy three, and he walks like the ground belongs to him, which most of it around there does. He stood by her window with his hands in his coat pockets.

“Afternoon,” he said.

“Hi,” Brandi said.

“I live across the road,” Halvard said. “Halvard Moe. I farm that ground there.” He nodded at his field. “I was in my yard this morning at eight o’clock. I saw you open that gate.”

Brandi opened her mouth.

“I’m not asking you anything,” Halvard said. “I’m just telling you what I saw. Those birds walked half a mile into my stubble. These three kids and their mother walked them home. Three hours. Across the road. They got every one.”

Nobody said anything for a long moment. The turkeys muttered behind us.

Brandi looked at me. I think she was waiting for me to yell at her. I think part of her wanted me to, because then it would have been a fight between two women, and she would have known how to have that fight.

I did not yell. I just stood there by the gate.

“I thought,” she said, and stopped. “I didn’t think they would go that far.”

“You didn’t think they would come back,” I said. I said it quietly. It was not a question.

She looked down at her hands on the steering wheel. And then she said something I do not think she meant to say out loud.

“He talks about this place all the time,” she said. “This farm. These birds. Like it’s the best thing he ever did. I just wanted him to see that it wasn’t.”

I want to be fair to her. I believe that was true. I believe she was jealous of a turkey pasture, which is a sad thing to be jealous of.

But there were three hundred families in that green notebook. There was a widow in town who eats one small hen for a week. There were my three kids, who had walked half a mile through cornstalks to fix what she did. Being jealous is a reason. It is not an excuse.

“Kids,” I said, “go get your bags. It’s four o’clock.”

They climbed down off the fence. Ellery got her backpack from the porch and walked past Brandi’s window without looking at her and got in the back seat. Pax did the same. Junie went last. She stopped by the pasture fence and looked through the wire for the little hen with the sore leg.

“Bye, Halvard,” she called. Halvard the man said, “Bye, Junie,” and then realized she was not talking to him, and laughed out loud, the first time I had heard him laugh in years.

Brandi did not get out of the car. She did not say anything else. She backed around in my yard and drove away down the drive with my children, at about five miles an hour.

Halvard stood next to me and watched her go.

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” I said.

He got back in his pickup and went home.