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By Root 363 0

stars, tears are streaming down my face because I know what is coming, but he takes it absolutely and resolutely home. Then there is the terrible closing of the casket, and we leave the church. At the cemetery little Sidrock says loudly, Jakey drowned and now they are burying him, and you can feel the collective instinctive move to say shush! but then the ebb on the heels of it as we know it is a time when the truth should be left as it is. When the service is complete and we prepare to leave, John steps to the casket and draws flowers from the bouquet, handing them to the children as they file by. I carry the vision of his fingers, thick and grease-lined, passing the slender stems one by one to the tender hands reaching up, toward the sun beating in the sky.

Our meat chickens have arrived. They came in the mail, peeping in their perforated box. In order to hit the price break, we’re splitting a batch with our neighbor Terry. With the coop still not done, I have built a small crate that I have placed in the garage atop an old piece of linoleum to keep the concrete clean. With the pump house already occupied by the layers, the garage is the only space available that we can seal up tight and varmint-proof. I rig a heat lamp, and first thing the next morning I discover the drawback to my plan: the things smell awful. I leave the door open during the day, but by day two the smell has already penetrated the cement blocks. Out of kindness Anneliese has not inquired, but I have told friends she has every right to ask: Which came first, the chicken or the coop?

We’ve begun to free-range the layers, dispensing with the tractor and just turning them loose. They love the new freedom. They run and swoop. They flutter and hop. They get all chesty and pushy and face each other down in pecking matches, neck feathers flared into a fright wig muff. They scratch and chase flies and dandelion fluff. They did this in the chicken tractor too, but within a few hours everything was tramped down. I’d pull the tractor ahead ten feet and they’d be happy again, but soon everything would be flattened and I’d have to skid the whole works again. Now they have the wide world at their disposal, and they can’t wait to tear it up. Two of the hens discover an anthill and scratch at it with great exaggerated motions like they’re going for a major peelout. When they unearth a scatter of white eggs from the hill, their beaks jackhammer the earth like zigzag sewing machines. When I fed them apples in the tractor I had to slice the apples up to get them started, and even then they’d peck at them just off and on. Now when they range under the apple tree they drive their beaks deep into the wormholes and peck fresh white craters into the apple meal. Poor little Shake-N-Bake lags behind, wobbling as she does and having to sometimes come to a full stop before gathering herself and plunging forward again, but eventually she winds up under the apple tree, and just as I’ve seen her do with a cucumber before, once she picks an apple she stays with it, hanging in there even after the other chickens have charged off after grasshoppers. She’s smaller than the rest, no doubt due to the fact that it’s harder for her to eat.

When she does chase off after the other chickens she’ll get four or five good strides in and then go into a tumbling veer, like someone reached out and pushed her from the side. The thing that really gets you when it’s a fun group sprint across the yard is how fully she believes that she can run with the crowd; she never gets hangdog or stops, she just collects herself and goes bounding off as if this time she’ll be the smoothest bird in Eau Claire County. And it isn’t always veering. Occasionally one of her legs will straighten explosively and she’ll shoot a foot and a half into the air. It really is something to see. Sometimes when she’s doing her dangedest to hang with the pack her earnest ping-ponging schizophrenic hopscotch is so over the top I find myself laughing out loud. I mean no disrespect, but honestly it’s like watching a fast-forward