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had the beginnings of her mother’s build—just give her another five years—but was dressed in shorts and a halter top. She, too, was smoking a cigarette. The last of the three was a scrawny, rusty-headed boy, maybe twelve years old, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and jeans and holding a Daisy pellet gun. None of them seemed to realize it was a mid-March day with a windchill in the teens.
    “Watch out, kids, it’s the game warden come to take you good-for-nothings to jail,” said Mrs. Barter unhelpfully.
    The henhouse was a rectangle of dry dirt as large as a boxcar, with a chicken-wire fence about four feet high around it. In the back, an outhouse had been repurposed to provide the hens some shelter. Inside the pen, there were two dozen or so Rhode Island Reds. They all seemed to be engaged in the act of pecking one another’s rear ends. The sour, grainy smell of chicken shit hung in the frozen air.
    “I’m looking for your husband, Mrs. Barter.”
    “You’re new around here, ain’t you? What happened to that bumfuck Devoe?”
    “Warden Devoe was transferred to Washington County.”
    “Good riddance.” She took the cigarette from her lips, squashed it against the fence post, and tossed the butt into the pen, where it was quickly snapped up by one of the chickens. “Will you look at those goddamned bird-brains? It’s like they got nothing better to do than peck each other in the ass.”
    “Can you tell me where your husband is, Mrs. Barter?”
    “Oh, he’s inside, sleeping it off. Give me a minute to finish with these chickens, and I’ll get him.”
    “I shot a fox,” said the red-haired boy. He pointed to the nearest tree line. “It came out of them woods. I bet it had rabies.”
    “Hold on, kids. Let me tell the story,” said his mother.
    I glanced at my watch. “If you could just get your husband, Mrs. Barter.”
    “This fox thing is pretty fucking funny, though.”
    Her son, Travis, she said, was out with his pellet gun, breaking beer bottles, when the fox walked right past him. That’s how they guessed it was rabid.
    “A person can get rabies,” remarked the teenage girl with the baby. “You start foaming at the mouth. They give you this big-ass shot in the stomach for it.”
    “Now, the fox wandered right up to the henhouse as if no one else was around,” continued the mother.
    “That’s when I shot it,” said Travis, puffing up his chest.
    “Well, that fox took off like its tail was on fire,” said Wanda Barter with a broken smile. “Then we look inside the pen, and damn it if my rooster t’weren’t lying there dead! Davy Crockett, Jr., there killed Foghorn Leghorn!”
    “It must have ricocheted off the fox,” said the boy.
    “Mrs. Barter,” I said impatiently. “If you’ve got a rabid fox around here, you’d better keep your kids inside, at least for the time being.”
    “You ever try to keep a child indoors in the middle of springtime?”
    Springtime? My nose was getting frostbitten. “Can you go inside and get your husband for me?”
    She turned to her teenage daughter, the one with the baby. “Let me have one of your smokes first.”
    That was when I heard an ATV engine growl on the far side of the house. Before I could take two steps, it was already racing away, the sound receding into the distance as it rocketed up one of the fire roads that stretched all the way from the farm to Hank Varnum’s property.
    One of the children must have sneaked away to alert him.
    “I guess Calvin woke up,” said Wanda Barter, blowing cigarette smoke through the gap in her teeth. “Too bad you missed him. If you want to leave a card, he’ll call you back.”
    There was no other word for it: I’d just been outfoxed.

6
    I n the Gospels, Jesus says, “The poor will always be with you.”
    I didn’t realize He was speaking about me personally.
    Until my mother divorced my father and spirited me away to suburbia like a stolen child out of Irish folklore, I lived in a series of