Barnyard Pilgrimage

The truck door hung open and Sam left his legs on the seat where they were. “Too much gravel,” he said, and laid his crutches across his knees like a fence rail. He looked out the windshield at the feed barn, its tin roof streaked orange with rust, the loose stones of the lot going grey to the door. “I’ll wait.”

Gran didn’t argue. She never did about that. She climbed down, boots crunching, and went to talk to the man about scratch grain and layer pellets, and Sam watched a starling walk the ridge of the roof and pick at something in the tin. He did not hear the thump behind him in the truck bed. He did not see the small brown shape drop over the tailgate and cross the lot with her stiff, busy walk, head bobbing, straight for the split feed sack by the barn door where the good grain had spilled.

They drove the three miles home with the wipers going. Rain had started to needle the field where the road dipped low, and the creek under the plank bridge — the bridge that was really just two boards Sam swung himself across on good days — ran fuller than it had that morning. Gran carried the sacks to the barn one at a time. Sam sat on the porch step and counted the hens out of habit as they came to the fence for their supper.

He counted again.

“There’s five,” he said. His voice came out flat. “Gran. There’s five.”

She stood in the barn door with a sack on her shoulder and looked at the birds a long moment. Then she set the sack down slow.

“Biscuit,” Sam said. He was already reaching for the crutches. “She’s not here. Biscuit’s not here.”

The rain answered for both of them. Gran came across the yard and crouched by him, her knees popping, and she smelled like wet wool and grain dust. “She’d have been at the barn,” she said. “Come out for the spill.”

“Then we go back.” He had the crutches under his arms, was hauling himself up before she could stop him, the metal shaking against the wet board. “We go back right now, she’s out there, we just go —”

Gran put one hand flat on his chest. Not pushing. Just there. “Look at the road, Sam.”

He looked. The headlights he could see in his mind were already pointing at brown water where the low field met the drive, the creek swollen over its banks and spreading, the plank bridge somewhere under it. You couldn’t drive it. You couldn’t walk it. In the last of the light the field wasn’t a field anymore. It was a lake with the tops of the fence posts sticking out like the backs of animals.

“A hen won’t last a night out in the open,” Gran said, quiet. “You know that. In the wet especially.”

“If I’d got out of the truck.” The words came out small and mean. “I’d have seen her. I’d have counted. If I just got out —”

Gran didn’t tell him it wasn’t his fault. That was the thing about Gran. She let a true thing stand.

It rained the whole of the next two days.

Sam stopped going to the window. His mother would be coming Friday with the new leg braces, the ones that stood you up straight and locked at the knee, and before all this he had been keeping a plan folded small and private in his chest: the mailbox loop. Down the drive, across the plank, to the crooked mailbox on its post and back — the one lap of the whole place he’d never once done alone on the crutches, and he was going to do it, walk it clean before Friday, so that when his mother stood there with those cold metal things in her hands he could say he didn’t need them. He’d walked the loop. See. He wasn’t broken.

Now the plank was under a river and the loop was gone and so was the bird, and the two things had folded into one thing in him, and the one thing had his name on it.

He didn’t finish his eggs Wednesday. Didn’t touch the toast Thursday. Gran didn’t push. She set a plate near him and took it away cool and said nothing, and once, moving through the kitchen, she set the braces against the wall by the door where he’d have to see them, the leather straps hanging loose, the steel dull in the porch light coming through the glass.

He turned his face to the wall and looked at the knots in the pine boards until they swam.

Everyone had stopped saying Biscuit’s name by then. That was how you knew. When a thing is only lost you say its name all day — have you seen, did you check, maybe she’s under the. When it’s dead you go quiet around the shape of it. The hens were five. The field was a lake. His legs were what they were. He lay in the dark and listened to the water come down and did the arithmetic that always came out the same.

The phone rang Thursday at dusk. The wall phone, its long yellow cord, Gran answering with the receiver tucked to her shoulder. Sam heard her side of it from his room.

“Oh — Ruth. Yes.” A pause. “Where.”

Something in the way she said where got him up on his elbow.

“On the lower field. In the open water.” Gran’s voice had gone careful. “You’re sure it was — no. No, ours went missing Monday, at the barn.” A longer silence, and the rain filling it. “Which way was it headed?”

Sam had the crutches. He was in the kitchen doorway, hair stuck to his forehead, before he knew he’d moved.

Gran was looking at him. She said into the phone, slow, watching his face: “Straight-line. Not to your barn. This way.” And she set the receiver back on its hook without saying goodbye.

For a second neither of them spoke.

“Ruth saw a little brown thing,” Gran said. “Out on the flood at dusk. Walking. Not circling, not toward any shelter.” She wet her lips. “Coming here. Into the water.”

Sam’s mind did a thing it hadn’t done in three days: it moved. A hen can’t see far. A hen can’t smell a trail home. Everyone had said so — she’d wander in rings and be gone. But three miles off, in the drowned field, a small brown shape was not wandering. It was pointed. It had crossed most of the distance a boy couldn’t cross in a truck, and now it was walking straight at the one water everybody knew you didn’t cross, the creek gone to a river, wings out for balance, and it was not turning back.

It was doing the exact thing he wouldn’t. It was going into the water.

“She can’t make the creek,” Sam said. His throat had closed to a straw. “Gran, she can’t, it’s too —”

“Maybe not,” Gran said. And then, because she didn’t lie: “Maybe she can.”

He didn’t sleep. He lay on top of the blanket with his clothes on and listened past the rain for something that wasn’t rain, and near two in the morning, under his window, below the yard fence where the chicken wire ran, he heard it.

A scratching. And then a call — not the soft evening burble but the loud, cracked, over-and-over sound a hen makes when it wants the whole world to come, thrown up at his dark window again and again.

He was at the glass with his heart going like a fist on a door. Down in the yard, on the far side of the wire, low against the mud in the wash of the porch light, was a soaked shape no bigger than a loaf of bread, and it was calling up at him.

He got the crutches. He got to the door. Gran’s room was dark; her breathing came slow and even through the wall, and he did not wake her, and later he could not have said why, except that this was his.

There were two ways down.

He knew the first one in his body. Down onto his backside, crutches dropped, and crawl — hands and hips down the three porch steps and out across the yard on all fours the way he’d crossed a hundred wet mornings, low and slow. But the yard was churned to soup and Biscuit was outside the wire, and to get her he’d have to reach up over the fence from down in the mud, arms only, a five-pound wet bird, and he might not lift her, and if he couldn’t lift her she’d stand out there in the cold on the wrong side of the wire calling until she couldn’t.

The second way stood against the wall by the door.

He looked at the braces a long time. The bird crossed a river, he thought. And his hands were already on the cold leather.

He’d watched his mother do the buckles enough to fumble them by feel — foot in, strap through, pull, the knees locking with a sound like a door latch. He got them on sitting on the floor of the dark kitchen with his tongue between his teeth. He got a crutch. He got the other. He put his weight down into his heels the way they’d told him and he hated and never done alone, and he pushed himself up the doorframe, and he stood.

The yard came at him sideways.

He went down off the bottom step before he’d got three feet — the mud took the crutch tip and slid it and there was no one to catch him and he went down full into the cold of it, face and hands and the whole front of him, the steel of the braces ringing against a stone. The wind went out of him. The rain came down on the back of his neck.

Biscuit called.

Sam got a hand under himself. Then the crutch. He was shaking, all of him, and the mud held his knees like it wanted them, and he got the other crutch planted and he pushed, and his arms burned, and he came up out of the muck onto his feet again with the water running off his chin.

He walked. It was nothing anyone would have called walking. It was a lurch and a plant and a drag, and a lurch and a plant, the braces locked and stupid under him, the porch light throwing his crooked shadow long across the wire — but it was upright, and it went forward, and it did not stop, wings out for balance, straight-line, this way, into the yard he swore he wouldn’t cross.

He reached the fence standing. He hooked one crutch over the top rail to hold himself and he leaned down over the wire with his free arm and Biscuit came up into it, cold and light and soaked to almost nothing under the wet feathers, and he lifted her — five pounds felt like fifty and he lifted her — up and over the chicken wire and against his chest, and she stopped calling. She pushed her filthy head up under his chin and stopped.

He stood there holding her in the rain with his knees locked and his whole body going and did not go anywhere for a while.

He didn’t hear the door.

Gran was on the porch in her nightgown, one hand on the frame, looking out at the boy standing crooked and plastered in the middle of the yard in the braces she’d set by the door, a bird tucked hard against him. Her mouth was a little open. She didn’t call out. She didn’t come to catch him or say careful or say his name. She stood and she looked and something moved across her face and settled, and she never in her life said one word to him about the braces — not that night, not the next day, not ever.

She held the door.

In the morning the rain had thinned to mist and the field was still a sheet of grey water with the fence posts standing in it, and the plank bridge was still somewhere underneath, and Sam did not try the mailbox loop. He didn’t say a word about it. There’d be a day for the loop or there wouldn’t.

Biscuit had slept the night in a towel-lined box by the stove, and by first light she was up on her feet in it, complaining, herself again, and there under her in the towel were two eggs, still warm.

Sam picked them up in one hand, one and then the other, careful, the warmth of them going right up his cold arm. He got the crutches under the other. And he came into the kitchen slow, egg-hand out ahead of him to keep them safe, and Gran was at the stove with her back to him.

He didn’t wait for her to turn around and not look. He came all the way in where the light was.

“Gran,” he said. “Look.”

And he let her watch him carry them to the table.