The Night the Feed Store Burned

Chicks in the Spring

They broke ground on the new Teague Feed & Seed on the first Saturday in March, and by the end of that day, nearly two hundred people from Calder Ridge and the surrounding county had shown up to help.

Nobody organized it, exactly. Pam Ridley started a sign-up sheet at the 911 center. Earl, Wade’s sponsor, brought his welding rig and three men from his home group. The co-op donated the concrete. The Methodist women ran a lunch tent and the Baptist women ran a pie tent, and there was a long-running and good-natured argument about which tent was better that went on for the entire spring. Rick Ostrander drove down from Jefferson City on a Saturday in April and spent the whole day wiring the new office himself, to code, with three separate smoke detectors and no space heaters anywhere.

Dale Huckabee came the second weekend.

He came alone, without saying anything, and parked his truck at the end of the row and walked over to where Wade was cutting lumber on a sawhorse. Nora was close enough to see it happen. Dale stood there for a while, watching Wade work. Then he held out his hand.

“I said some things,” Dale said. “On Front Street. And at the café. I was wrong.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry, son.”

Wade looked at him. Then he put down the saw and shook his hand.

“Hand me that tape measure,” Wade said, “and we’ll call it even.”

Dale handed him the tape measure. He stayed till dark that day, and every Saturday after that. He also donated every nail, screw, and bolt in the new building from his hardware store, and refused to take a dime. Later that spring, when Wade filled out an application for a full-time position at the hardware store on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Dale hired him on the spot. Wendell grumbled about being robbed of his best employee. Then he and Dale worked out a schedule between them, the way old men in small towns work things out, over coffee, without ever admitting they were doing anyone a favor.

Wendell did not go back to sleeping on a cot. Nora made sure of that, and so did Pam Ridley, and so did half the women in the Methodist and Baptist churches, who began taking turns inviting him to Sunday dinner until he finally gave up and started going to both. He moved Biscuit back into his house on Hickory Street. She slept on the foot of Marjorie’s side of the bed, and Wendell said it made the quiet easier.

And Wade walked. He walked every night, the way his sponsor had told him to, through the dark streets of Calder Ridge. But now, when he passed the Ridge Café at midnight, the porch light was on. When he passed Pam Ridley’s house, she waved from the window. When he passed the hardware store, there was a thermos of coffee on the bench out front with his name on it in Dale Huckabee’s handwriting. Some nights, Earl walked with him. Some nights, Nora did. And some nights, very late, when he passed the new feed store going up on the corner of Front and Mill, he found Wendell Teague sitting on the new wooden porch with Biscuit at his feet, unable to sleep, waiting for him. And the two of them would sit there together in the cold without saying much, an old man and a young man out in the dark, until it passed.

The new Teague Feed & Seed opened on the third Saturday in April. It was a little bigger than the old one, with a steel roof and a brand-new loading dock and an office in the back corner with large windows and no cot. On the front porch there were three new rocking chairs and a coffee pot. Over the door, Wade had hung a wooden sign he had carved himself in shop class at the high school, where the teacher had let him use the tools after hours. It said TEAGUE FEED & SEED, EST. 1952 on one line, and REBUILT 2026 on the line beneath it.

And in the front window, under a row of glowing heat lamps, in a big galvanized tank, there were chicks.

Hundreds of them. Peeping and tumbling over each other in the wood shavings, yellow and brown and speckled. On opening day, every child in the county came to look at them. The little girl in the pink snowsuit, now in a pink raincoat, stood at the edge of the tank for nearly an hour with her nose pressed to the galvanized rim.

Nora delivered the mail that afternoon. She brought it in through the front door the way she always had, and set it on the counter, and Wendell Teague looked at the stack and pushed one envelope back across the counter to her.

It was addressed to her. It was from Wade.

She opened it on the porch. Inside, on a sheet of notebook paper, in a careful, uneven hand, he had written four lines.

Miss Nora. You always did think the best of people. I heard Mr. Huckabee say that to you on Front Street. He meant it as a bad thing. I don’t think it is. Thank you for thinking the best of me. — Wade.

Nora folded the letter carefully and put it in the inside pocket of her mail carrier’s jacket. Then she sat down in one of the new rocking chairs on the porch of the Teague Feed & Seed, beside two old men she had known her whole life, and drank a cup of Wendell’s terrible coffee, and listened to the chicks.

Deciding Again

It is easy to decide who someone is. It takes one blurry video, one old record, one confident voice on a crowded street. It is much harder to look at the evidence that does not fit, the broken glass and the burned hands and a frightened voice on a 911 tape, and decide again. Wade Corliss ran toward a fire to save a man most of the town assumed he had tried to rob, and then he stayed silent because he knew exactly how the story would be told. Calder Ridge rebuilt a feed store that spring, but what it truly rebuilt was its willingness to think the best of people. That is a habit worth keeping, because the person you have already made up your mind about may be the one who walks toward the fire when no one else is awake.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are products of the author’s imagination.