At first I thought it might be a dream.
Chickens squawking.
Mary in her nightclothes. Sliding out of her bed.
I wiggled away from Ethel, who always slept in the middle. We told her it was because she was safest between us, but truly it was because the middle of the bed was the worst position to occupy, and neither Nan nor I wanted it. Mary’s bed was empty because she was tiptoeing out of the room. It was not a dream.
The chatter of the chickens became louder, and I was truly awake. I leaped from bed and followed my sister down the stairs and into my parent’s bedroom.
“Mother, someone’s in the hen coop,” Mary whispered.
My mother did not need to hear this twice.
“Michael, wake up. Michael!”
“What is it?” he asked, still mostly asleep.
My mother was already out of bed, tugging at him. “Someone’s in the hen coop.”
“How do you know?”
“Michael, get up!”
Father dragged himself from bed.
Mary ran to the window and peered into the blackness. Again, I was right behind her.
Our breath fogged the rain-speckled glass, and I couldn’t see farther than a clump of grass growing next to the sill. But the chickens sure were streaked over something.
My mother lit a lamp as my father stumbled out of the bedroom in his trousers and shirt, fumbling with his cuffs. Not even thieves deserved less than his best. She handed him the lamp and he opened the door, holding the lamp up to the dark night. Mary and I cowered behind him, craning to see. We jumped at the sight of the men in our yard, as if we’d all just now fully woken up. There were two of them, huddled in the dark. Each of their fists was wrapped around a hen’s neck, making it difficult for them to unlatch the gate and make a run for it.
“Hey, you there!” my father shouted. “What do you mean by coming to a man’s house in the middle of the night and stealing his chickens? What kind of citizens are you?”
Mother pushed us aside. “Michael!” she shrieked. “They’re stealing the hens! Go out there and stop them!”
“It’s raining.”
“Give me that lamp.”
My mother snatched the lamp from his hands and ran out into the spring night in her bare feet. The hens laid eggs. Eggs we ate. Every day.
“Drop those chickens!”
At the sound of my mother’s shouts, the hounds started in, snarling and barking from their pens. This considerable noise livened up the thieves, and they struggled harder to untangle themselves from the hen coop gate. One of the men dropped his hen. The other tripped over it.
I could feel my brothers and sisters gathering behind me, those that were free from a crib.
“Now then, Anne!” my father shouted. “Let them have one chicken. The boys are most likely just hungry.”
This sent my mother into a mighty frenzy.
“NOT A SINGLE HEN! NOT ONE SINGLE HEN!”
The O’Donnells lived nearly three quarters of a mile away, but they surely were sitting bolt upright in their beds at this very moment.
My father threw his hands in the air as if this was all too much. “Come now, citizens,” he called out to the men. “Do you see the trouble you’re causing here?”
The men saw it, or at least they heard it: My mother screaming. My father shouting at her to return to the house. The dogs barking. The babies crying. And of course, the chickens squawking up a feathery storm.
The men rolled out of the henhouse on top of each other without a chicken in hand. Picking themselves from the wet ground, they lumbered off between the trees and into the dark night while a rogue hen squawked off in the opposite direction behind the barn.
My mother took off after it.
“Anne!” my father called.
We stood in the doorway, a crowd of us now, and stared out into the rain where my mother had disappeared around the side of the barn. The hens settled. A whistle from my father quieted the dogs. The babies kept crying—whistles didn’t work on them. None of us moved.
About ten heartbeats later, Mother stomped into sight, chicken in hand, and I realized with a happy pang that I had never doubted her. She splashed through a yard of muddy puddles over to the henhouse, where she opened the gate with ease, tossed in the hen, and latched it shut.
We backed away from the door as she approached, her presence so large and commanding, it needed the entire doorway, doorframe to doorframe, to allow her through.
“To bed, all of you.”
In a flash, I was under the warm blanket curled up next to Ethel, the only one of us who was still fast asleep.
Mary had Richard tucked into bed with her. Arlington had stopped crying, too.
But I couldn’t sleep. Not even after my frozen feet had warmed. Instead, I watched Mother turn the corner of the barn over and over, her nightgown whipping in the rain and the chicken firmly in her grasp.
I could tell my sisters weren’t sleeping either—Nan snored if she was sleeping and Mary cleared her throat if she wasn’t—and I wondered if they too were swollen with a strange joy over the memory of our mother striding out from behind the barn.
I fell asleep with excited tears in my eyes.
But I woke later to the coughing. Coughing that didn’t stop.
Not for a long time.