The Child Was Inside the Fence
The small white house was probably less than 10 yards from the well-fenced chicken coop but for a small child the distance offered a universe of adventures. The little cinder block house had a front door to the south and back door to the north, but the chicken coop was to the east, sharing the space between Adam’s grandparents’ house and the barn with a large vegetable patch where granny Lucille grew all the family's vegetables—corn, tomatoes, eggplants, squash—as she raised the hens which supplied the family eggs.
Adam, not yet in elementary school, had only one chore, feeding the chickens, which he did every morning and evening, on weekends anyway. Lucille gave him a pail of dried corn kernels, halfway-ground to meal, and sent him to enter the chickens’ fenced yard and scatter the corn.
The front yard was magic, the grass in spring overgrown with daffodils, whose onion-like stalky leaves were always cooler than the air, a cheerful solace on a hot summer day. But to feed the hens Adam left from the back door, which came off an enclosed back porch, an addition to the original house. Really more of a back-and-side porch, it completed the circle of rooms, each opening onto the next, with no hallways, from kitchen, to dining room, to the bedroom granny Lucille shared with her husband Horace, to the living room, to the second bedroom that was Adam’s and his mother’s, to the one bathroom, and then the enclosed porch, which had a washer and a dryer, past a back door to the outside and another to the kitchen. The long enclosed porch was a laundry room, a mud room, the completion of the circle of the house, and the room where Lucille prepared the pail of feed and send Adam out to the chickens.
Lucille’s family were poor country folk, even before the Depression. But she’d always worked, a big-boned hefty woman who had the stamina to turn out overalls and jeans in the factory. Five days a week she watched, with her steady gray eyes, through her cat’s eye glasses, a sewing machine turning pre-cut pieces of denim into men’s pants. At night and on weekends she was free to tend to plants, animals and her family.
Adam had fruit trees—plum, pear, and cherry—and a four-post grape arbor against the house on the same side as the chickens. Willow trees bore fruit as well, both switches that could be used to punish a naughty child and cicada shells, exoskeletons, like nature’s tiny toy soldiers or plastic dinosaur figurines. Cicadas may have been smart enough not to cross the fence into the chicken yard, but cherries were tossed into it by the breeze, like little poultry-sized apples.
From her kitchen window, Lucille rolled out a pie crust and watched as Adam carried his pail toward the coop. She always canned her fruits and vegetables for the winter—stored on the unheated enclosed porch. She made jellies, preserves and jams. Her 20 hectares were so fruitful that she could spare a few cherries that blew into the chicken yard.
Lucille had married well, in a way. Horace was one of three brothers—the other two twins—who came from a Chattanooga family that had promised to settle something for the sons. Her first house, where her children had grown up, was only two rooms, with an outhouse, a pot-bellied stove, up on blocks with the wind whistling under the floorboards. The small cinder block house with its 40 acres of farm (and a tobacco allotment) was a step up, but Horace could only buy it when his parents passed away and left the three brothers their inheritance.
Horace wasn’t much of a talker. A small but handsome man, with dark hair and well-formed features, he took long walks and read the Bible in a rocking chair. He also worked in the textile mill but had few friends and less conversation. When Lucille decided it was time to take a husband she had to make the arrangements. She was a genie of practical wisdom. A faithful weekly congregant, she’d spied Horace at church and made sure when he realized it was time to take a wife that she’d be in his path.
They lived far out in the country, near Damascus, Pulaski, Carthage, Athens, Lebanon, Paris, Smyrna, Normandy—the state had small cities and towns that sported names from around the world. Lucille’s minister—who’d had only a year of divinity school at some small Nashville college—was a big reader, and liked to retell stories and drop names in his sermons. Lucille enjoyed hearing tales and learning new words, even if she had no ready way to follow up on what it all meant. But she named her animals after them, with roosters Priam and Hektor and hens Hecuba and Penny.
Biting her lip, she continued working on her pie, crimping the flat sheet of dough around the pyrex pie pan and then adding the filling she’d made with her cherry preserves. Just as she began adding a latticework of strips of dough to the top, she looked out her window to see how Adam was progressing.
The child was inside the fence, tossing handfuls of golden feed to the flock. When halfway through his pail, the oldest rooster decided the child was something else, another rooster, or maybe a fox or cat, in disguise. With a war-like cry the fowl attacked, flogging the startled child, who dropped the pail and shrieked. Granny Lucille didn’t drop her pie as she bolted for the back door.