The Woefield Poultry Collective (25 page)

Eustace was out the door in an instant. He nearly dragged me with him because my hand was still in his pocket. Something to the left of Bertie caught my eye. When I realized what it was, I was tempted not to get out of the truck.

The guy who drove Prudence home got out of his truck and walked up to Bertie like he was scared she would run away, but I think she was too tired. He wrapped a piece of dirty duct tape around her head and neck to make a lead rope and halter. I was impressed because he was making do with what was at hand, which Mr. Lymer says is part of having leadership qualities.

“Do you want me to get her halter?” I asked. “She’s got a new one.”

He looked at me funny and said, “Are you okay?” Like he thought I might be sick or something.

“I’m okay. But Seth isn’t. Are you a doctor?”

“I’m a vet,” he said. “Whose sheep is this?”

“Well, I guess she’s Prudence’s. We all sort of take care of her though.”

Prudence walked up and the vet said, “So you do have a sheep.”

“It’s quite an interesting story,” she said, but he put his hand out the way my dad does when he wants to say stuff and no one’s allowed to say anything back.

After that, he only talked to me.

“Let’s bring her into the light. And if you have a proper halter you should go get it.”

But I didn’t go because I didn’t want to miss anything.

The vet stopped leading Bertie when he saw Seth and said a swear. I’m practically inoculated against swearing now, since I’ve heard so much of it.

“That’s Seth,” I told the vet. “He lives here. With Earl and Prudence. I’m staying here too right now.”

“In the treatment center?” he said.

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

Still holding onto Bertie’s lead rope, the vet knelt and put his fingers on Seth’s throat. Seth made a noise like he was going to throw up and the vet took his hand away really fast.

Earl, who was standing in the shadows, said a couple of swears and the vet jumped because I don’t think he knew Earl was there.

“He going to be all right?” Earl asked.

And the vet said that he was a vet, not a detox expert, and that we should take better care of our patients and his main concern was the sheep.

Earl just shook his head like he was sad and said hell if he knew. I can say hell because it’s in the Bible and also in
Left Behind
.

Prudence bent over Seth and was saying something. I think she was trying to get him up.

“You probably have the wrong impression,” she said. At first it seemed like she was talking to Seth, even though he was sleeping. But I think she was really talking to the vet, even though he wasn’t listening. He’d pulled Bertie over into the light on the side of the house and was looking at all the parts we had covered up so they wouldn’t get dirty.

I told him how she got some cuts when we sheared her.

“I see that,” said the vet.

“Earl and Seth got cut too. She kicked them, especially when we put the medicine on her feet. Earl couldn’t breathe.”

The vet, who was tall and smelled nice, like a perfumed cowboy, called her a poor old girl. But he didn’t sound as mad.

When he finished looking her over, he told me to hold her while he went to get something from his truck. When he got back we were all standing around. Well, except for Seth, who was still sleeping in the driveway.

The vet put some stuff on Bertie’s cuts and gave it to me and said I should dress her wounds twice a day and they weren’t that bad and it
was probably best to let them heal in the air instead of covering them with feminine protection pads and I should clean them before I put the medicine on.

“What about her feet?” Prudence asked.

He ignored Prudence and told me we should keep the booties on for another few days.

Prudence asked how much we owed him for the medicine and the vet told me he’d think about it. Then Prudence said she was surprised to hear that he carried anything other than bovine growth hormone in his truck.

He just kind of snorted and told me that some people should focus on running their businesses and they could start by getting the clients off the ground in the parking lot.

Then Earl said it was time to put Bertie to bed and me, too.

It was an extremely full and interesting night.

She was leaning over me when I opened my eyes. It was like a dream, or a nightmare, one in which my usual hangover, Phil the Fucker, was joined by his psychotic older brother, Bruiser, who’d just completed three tours of duty in Iraq and come back nursing a grudge and a raging case of PTSD.

“Seth?” she said, quietly.

I couldn’t figure out how she got so tall and my bed got so low.

Bits and pieces of the night before started coming back to me, unwelcome as a case of the clap. I remembered yelling at a bunch of old people. Prudence was there with some guy. He had a big truck.

“Seth?” she said again.

I tried to focus on her face. She smelled nice and looked pretty. Her brown eyes were soft, so maybe she wasn’t too mad, but it was hard to tell through the fog of pain.

“Yes?”

“We have to talk,” she said.

“About last night,” I croaked, reaching for some plausible excuses. Bad seafood, negative interactions between small amounts of alcohol and completely legitimate allergy medicines. Artistic temperament. Low blood sugar.

That’s when I noticed that I was on the floor. Not on the linoleum floor in my bedroom, but on a wood plank floor. I looked to the side and saw a piece of sky beyond the roofline. Patches of light pierced the gray. It was either dawn or dusk.

“Am I on the porch?”

“Yes. Look, I have something I need to say to you.”

“Why am I on the porch?”

“Because you wet your pants. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Okay,” I whispered. If it was possible to drown from fucking shame there’d have been nothing left but the last few bubbles right about then.

Wetting one’s pants is no kind of self-esteem builder.

“Seth, I’ve made some mistakes. All with the best intentions, of course. But I want to apologize to you most of all.”

“Why? I’m the one who got loaded after you said no more drinking.”

She patted my leg and I felt like I was a palliative case who’d been hanging on a little too long.

“Am I fired?” I asked.

“I haven’t decided yet. Your jeans are in the washing machine and when I get home from the farmers’ market we’re having a house meeting. We have a lot to discuss.”

“Is it morning?”

“It’s five o’clock. So, yes, it’s morning.”

“I’m not sure I can—”

“You can go to sleep until I get home. But then I want you at that meeting. You need to be part of this discussion.”

She stood and I was left staring at her ankles, which were nice, and then at nothing when she walked away.

I closed my eyes and prayed for death to take me.

Sometimes when you wake up in a new place you don’t know where you are right away and it’s a creepy feeling. But when I woke up at Woefield, even though it was really early, I knew exactly where I was.

Sometimes at my house I get confused because I dream I am somewhere else and when I wake up I’m disappointed that I’m not. So in some ways, waking up at Woefield was like a dream come true.

I didn’t get why Prudence was asleep on the little couch across from me. She had her own room.

She looked funny because her mouth was open and her legs were hanging over top of the arm of the couch and her bare feet were poking out from under the blanket and there were papers with numbers written on them and lists all around her. She’d started writing after I told her the interesting news that Earl has a famous brother and she asked his name and I remembered because it rhymes with Earl’s name, which means they probably got teased when they were at school. Prudence went on the Internet and looked Earl’s brother up. As she was reading she kept saying, “no way” and “oh my god.” When she was done she printed off her radish recipes and fact sheets for the farmers’ market.

I tried to be really quiet. I thought about putting my blanket on her feet, so they wouldn’t be so cold, but I was worried that might wake her up. She went to bed really late. I went outside because I was excited to see my birds right away. When I kept them at home, I used to go outside to see them as soon as I got up. I missed doing that after they went to Woefield, even though I came over really early lots of times.

I went into the coop and opened the door of the henhouse. When I walked back past the porch, I heard a whistling noise and it turned out to be Seth. He was sleeping on some garbage bags on the floor of the porch and there were some old blankets over him. He looked extremely terrible. I don’t think I ever saw anyone look that terrible.

At first I thought he was sleeping, but when I went a little bit closer, he opened his eyes. I nearly jumped back from how they looked. Plus, he smelled bad.

“Sara,” he said in a low, devil voice that didn’t even sound like him.

I stayed quiet. I was back to wondering if he might be a child abuser because of how sick he looked. And how he smelled.

“It’s okay,” he said.

That was nice, so I tried talking to him.

“Are you sick?”

When I asked that question his skin changed from yellow to white and he told me wait by putting up his finger. So I did. Wait, I mean.

A minute or two later, he said, “Sara, don’t ever drink.”

I already knew that, so I just nodded.

“How are the champions?” he asked. I knew he meant my birds. Also, I could kind of tell that he didn’t want to be alone, probably because he was scared from being so sick.

I sat on the first step of the porch. I didn’t want to sit any closer because of the smell.

“They’re good,” I said.

He said he was glad.

I didn’t say anything and neither did he for a while. I just watched my birds start coming out of their little house into the chicken run. They looked especially nice in the morning.

“Sara,” he said, after a while. “Dude, I think I’m okay. I’m going to get up and go in the house to pull myself together. You should go see your birds now.”

I didn’t turn to look at him, because it seemed like he might need privacy.

“Okay,” I said. And I went back to my chicken coop.

Mornings at Woefield are definitely nicer than they are at my house. Especially when Prudence got up and asked me to help her sell radishes at the farmers’ market.

I admit that I wasn’t as fresh as I’d have liked the day of the farmers’ market. And I also admit that my wares weren’t as comprehensive as some of the other vendors.’ But I hoped that the sheer variety of my radishes, plus the added value of the radish recipes and informational flyers, would help make up for it.

Sara and I arrived at six-thirty to get set up. We’d have been there earlier, but I discovered that my Round Black Spanish and my Chinese Whites were barely developed. They had big tops and almost no roots. It was a bit of a blow as, according to the information on the seed packets, they should have been ready. Worse, even my Easter Eggs, Snow Belles and Champions were a bit … scrawny. They looked like little red worms clinging to the end of a plant. The only radishes that even looked like radishes were the Cherry Belles and the French Breakfast. I considered not pulling the other varieties, but the table would have been absolutely barren if I’d only had the two. I guess I didn’t thin them enough or maybe the radish beds are too shady.

I scoured the raised beds for other crops I could bring, but all I could safely cut was a sprig or two of Italian flat-leaf parsley and a few stalks of baby swiss chard. I asked Sara whether we had enough eggs to sell and she said they’d only laid three the day before because of all the excitement and that we ate the rest at breakfast. She suggested I could sell some crafts. I told her I appreciated her suggestion but we only had an hour before the market and I was pretty sure
most crafts, such as knitting and crocheting and making jam and so on, would take more time than that.

With no other options, I washed the twenty or so radishes and the small pile of extra radish greens and bundled them into a corner of the cooler. Sara looked inside and asked where the rest of the stuff was.

“This is it,” I told her.

“But that’s not very much,” she said.

“Sara, we are just getting started. By the end of the season our table will be overflowing with fresh organic produce.”

“Oh,” she said. Then she found an egg carton and put the three fresh eggs in it and put that in the cooler.

I put two more empty coolers in the truck to give the impression of abundance. As we drove out of the yard I cast a somewhat longing look in Bertie’s direction. I’m not saying I wanted to quickly butcher her, after all, old mutton is no one’s idea of delicious, but maybe I could milk her or something. Then I looked toward Seth’s window. Would it be weird to sell his old heavy metal records at the farmers’ market?

In the end I took a deep breath and went with what we had.

When we got the market, which was held in a dirt parking lot beside the baseball diamond, I backed the truck in. That process took longer than it did for Sara and me to arrange the radishes and the three eggs. I left the two empty coolers in the back of the truck to suggest that I had a lot of other produce I would be bringing out when the time was right. Maybe people would think, when they saw our paltry display, that we were sold out?

We put the swiss chard and the parsley in water glasses flanking the small mound of radish greens and the five complete bundles of actual radishes. Sara ripped away most of the egg carton so it didn’t look so empty. I fanned out the radish information at the front of the table. Sara wrote out the names of the varieties on stickers and put them on sticks that lay on the table. We couldn’t attach them to actual bundles because then people might wonder where the China Rose and Icicles were. It would have been embarrassing to admit that all we had were French Breakfast and Cherry Belles.