Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [124]
Apart from a few busted boards, the damage is minimal, and we assemble the rest of the walls without incident. Mills roughs out roof boards while I install the windows and tune the doorjamb. The windows were salvaged from my beloved New Auburn house, and it warms my heart to see them put to use. And they bring the structure alive—when I stepped back for the standard moment of appreciation, there was something about the light on the panes that took it from a bunch of boards to a coop. When we knock off there’s still much to do—tarpaper the roof, install the insulation, mount the roof vent, put facing on the interior walls—but before we quit we cut scrap plywood and nail it over the roof.
Meaning, tonight our chickens snooze in a coop. Sure, it’s still sitting in the driveway blocking the garage door, and it’s not really finished, but as dusk falls I lure the layers near by shaking a pail of feed, then I sprinkle a trail of it up the cleated gangplank of the door, and sure enough—after much clucking and nervous head-dipping—the Barred Rock pecks her way up the plank and into the coop, where she stands blinking at the new digs. I have to cheat a little with a couple of the other birds, give them a boost, but in short order they’re all in place. I rig a divider between the two little doors and then haul the meat chickens over two by two, stuffing them in the second door. When everyone is in place I distribute feed and water, and then before I go into the house, where the kitchen light is now a yellow square in the dark I stand awhile and just listen to the sound of them shuffling and settling.
The mornings are cool now, and knots of color are appearing against the green slope of the valley. I called the farm today and no one answered, and then I realized Mom and Dad were at “convention,” an annual assembly of the Friends at a farm an hour due west of here. For four days they will gather on gray wooden benches inside a large white barn to pray, sing hymns, and give testimony. Even this far removed I can feel the peace of it, the cars motoring in slowly while the mist is still clearing the hills, everyone parking neatly in the mown hayfield and making their way to the barn, Bible cases in hand. There will be some lingering and visiting in the yard up until ten minutes prior to service, at which point all but a few stragglers or parents with crying babies will be in the barn and on a bench, sitting in quiet meditation. Prepare your hearts unto the Lord, the Bible says, and so it is.
We always opened with a hymn, and it was a great joy to sing at convention, to hear all those voices raised. Even given our constrained ways and hymns titled “We Thank Thee, Lord for Weary Days,” the sound of a few hundred open throats does grow you some wings. I remember most of all the older women, the ones with mysterious steamship bosoms and black stockings, and how purely their voices soared. I can’t read music per se, but I retained enough from Mrs. North’s piano lessons to tell when we were going up and when we were going down. John and I learned to harmonize simply by sitting beside each other and trying to hit notes that seemed to blend. Sometimes they were by the book, sometimes not. But by the time our voices changed brother John and I could manage a serviceable descant as the ladies headed for the rafters.
Anyone who had professed was free to participate in prayer and testimony during the first portion of the service. The bulk of the meeting consisted of sermons from the workers, who rotated through in fifteen-or thirty-minute increments. There was one two-hour service in the morning, another in the afternoon, and a shorter, more gospel-oriented service in the evenings. Mom was realistic about having six or eight kids ride a wooden bench for four