Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [112]
In perhaps the saddest funny moment so far, I am throwing bread on the lawn when poor Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets overexcited, rears back to take a hefty stab at a crumb, misses, and jabs her bill in the dirt. She literally has to back up and tug it free. As penance for laughing right out loud I give her an entire slice of cinnamon raisin bread—I figure she can aim at the raisins with the rest of the slice as backstop.
When we left the church after Jake’s funeral we carried a big box of cards, and they’ve been coming in the mail daily ever since, so on a Sunday we all gather at the farm to write thank-yous. Barbara with her tax accountant sense of organization is in charge, and she has us ranged around the kitchen table in stations to handle everything from slitting the envelopes to noting the contents to writing and stamping the notes in return. As each card makes its way through the system, we read it, often checking the return address to place the person. There are a lot of Oh!s as we recognize old familiar signatures, while other times it takes a group effort to match the name on the return address with a person. For all we would give if this day could be taken away, the net effect of all these envelopes circling is that the afternoon slides into a sustained conversation in consideration of all that is good in this world, and when the last stamp is affixed, Mom pulls out the pan and starts popping corn.
Three days later I am back at Jed’s, ripping out fence line. A while back when he heard I was scavenging steel posts, Jed told me he was going to be reconfiguring the field north of his house, and I could have the posts if I’d help pull them. When he called last night to see if I could help today, we both knew it wasn’t about the posts. I’ve got to be in Madison—four hours south of here—by evening for purposes of researching yet another writing assignment, but I knew I had to do this first. We’re working in the deep grass at the border of the field. The hot weather has been holding pretty much unabated—90 degrees again today, with humidity to match. The sweat is running off the bill of my cap and my shirt is soaked through and streaked with rust from the posts, which have been in the ground for decades. We’re working smart for once. Jed is in his skid steer, and I have a chain. I sling the chain around the post, give it a couple of wraps, and then hold tension on one end while hooking the other over the skid steer bucket. You can crank and yank on posts like this all day long and get nothing for your trouble but a sprung back, but the skid steer plucks them from the earth as easy as a straw from a malt. We move quickly from post to post, all along the edge of the forty. As soon as they clear the earth, I unwrap the chain and chunk them in the bucket. We’re working right out by the road, and at one point two of our longtime neighbors—Big Ed (who used to work at the feed mill) and Gerald—pull over on the shoulder and we visit. Big Ed asks me about my pigs, and I tell him about our stash of bakery bread. “Oh, that’s the best thing to feed pigs,” he says. “Bread and withit.”
“Withit?”
“Yah,” says Big Ed, his eyes twinkling. “Bread and whatever comes withit!”
The talk is light, with no mention of the trouble, but when Jed lost Sarah, these two men were always showing up just now and then at the right time, and when they drive off it makes me feel better knowing they’ll be circling in the long days ahead. We go back to pulling posts. At one point we have to work around a telephone pole, and when I give it half a wrap of chain and raise a quizzical eyebrow in Jed’s direction, he tilts his head and grins. It is the blessing of dumb work done close to the earth—one gritty minute at a time, we move forward.
When the last post is in the bucket, Jed says there are a few stacked out behind the shop, down where Big Mama the giant pig is living out her retirement. He’d rather not go down there, he says. The first time he