Escape from Baxters' Barn

by Rebecca Bond

  To Burdock it had felt like he was a pair of boots that didn’t fit anyone.

  Now a year and a half later, in the chilly blue of early morning, the gray cat stepped out of Baxters’ barn. He threaded through the tall grass fringing the building and carefully arranged himself on one of the discarded tires heaped along the pasture fence. Burdock knew the tires would catch the first morning sun and their black skin would heat up nicely. He settled his chin on his large paws and closed his eye.

  If sleeping—and disappearing—were Burdock’s goals, he didn’t achieve either. Before long the animals were let out to pasture and soon the big draft horse Pull crunched nearby on his jumbo-size feet. Then he saw Burdock.

  The horse had never paid special attention to the solitary cat, but things were different now, so when he spied Burdock lying in the sun, he wanted to talk.

  “Burdock,” he intoned, his voice dark and smooth. “How are you doing?”

  Burdock lifted his head to answer when he caught sight of Dewey rounding the corner of the barn.

  “Look,” he whispered.

  Pull turned and together their steady gazes followed the man as he moved up the hill to where a few old apple trees crowned the slope. Here Dewey stopped and looked down on the farm as if appraising the place.

  “What do you think he has in mind?” asked Pull.

  “What do you mean? We know what he has in mind, don’t we?” answered the cat.

  “I mean, do you think he has a plan worked out already? Do you think Dewey’s been thinking about this for a long time?”

  Burdock raised a whiskered eyebrow. “I don’t know. Does it matter? What are you getting at?”

  “I’m just saying people can surprise you,” sighed Pull. “Listen, I’m sure I’ve never told you this, but before Tug and I came here we worked on another farm. It was a big place and we worked under a hired man named Hal. He was very capable, and kind to us, and we really liked him. Everybody liked him. We felt lucky. So we were as surprised as anyone when Hal ended up pocketing the money he was supposed to be spending on expensive veterinary medicines. The farm only figured it out when a few animals died.”

  Pull’s remembering face was sad. It was strange for Burdock to see enormous Pull looking forlorn.

  “And, as it turned out,” Pull continued, “Hal had been stealing for a long time. That’s what made me the angriest. All that time we thought he was our friend and I had grown to trust him.” Pull snorted a disparaging blast of air through his nose. “It’s a very strange thing to lose trust in someone you had faith in. You just want to believe your friends are on your side.”

  Burdock wasn’t used to thinking about things like this. He hadn’t really had friends or family to rely on and trust. But everything Pull said made sense.

  “What about Dewey?” Burdock asked. “Do you trust him?”

  Pull’s eyes met Burdock’s. “Dewey has never felt like a friend. Trust him? No. Though really, after what happened with Hal, I’m not sure I’m ready to trust anyone.”

  Burdock regarded the horse. The cat felt vaguely honored that Pull talked to him openly like this.

  Burdock and Pull looked back up the hill at the figure in the trees. Dewey was shaking the branches forcefully, jerking the gnarled limbs back, and letting them go with a snap. With one final terrific jolt, there was a moment of still silence before a salvo of apples came thundering down like stones.

  4

  Fluff’s Escape

  A big storm was coming.

  By four o’clock that afternoon, the first beads of rain had started to fall, and most people had made their last preparations and were heading inside.

  “Batten down the hatches,” Noreen Claussen, the town clerk, called gaily as she screwed her gas tank cap back on at Gus’s Gas. She had a new roof, and she liked a good storm.

  Mrs. Frisk, who lived over the post office, hummed as she made a lemon meringue pie.

  Jeff Townes, who ran the auto parts store, sat in his favorite chair, reading the newspaper, and watched the weather channel.

  Rosie Carmine worked on her wedding dress, delighted to be home early.

  There was nothing more to do but tuck up inside and await the tempest that was forecast to gather strength through the night and hit peak force tomorrow, Saturday, in the evening.

  As Dewey was herding the animals back into the barn for the night, walking behind them on the short stretch of road and hollering whenever anyone strayed to nibble the long grass, Fluff the sheep made a break for it.

  Burdock was the only one who didn’t witness it. He was in the back garden under a rosebush.

  But all the other animals watched.

  “Baaa!” Fluff bleated, bolting down the embankment and racing across the grass. It hardly seemed she had her eyes open, the way she barreled through a shrub and tumbled into a ditch. And still, after righting herself, she went headlong through the laundry, unwittingly pulling down clothes, snapping off clothespins, even somehow managing to festoon herself with a pair of Dewey’s long underwear. Until, without a break in her stride, she hotfooted around the corner of the house and was gone. The last Dewey saw of her was her heels kicking up and several divots of lawn flying away.

  “Oh, a rat’s behind!” Dewey yelled now. “Where the devil is she going?!”

  Figgy glanced at Nanny and let out a snort. Tick giggled. Even the big horses looked entertained.

  “No one can accuse her of piddle-diddling,” whispered Tug appreciatively. “She’s taking action.”

  But Dewey was not pleased. He hastily corralled the other animals into the barn. Then he went after Fluff.

  Under the rosebush, hidden from outside view, Burdock was in his favorite hideaway. He was making a rare attempt at grooming when a flash of white went galloping jauntily by. Then Dewey thundered past.

  Burdock wasn’t sure what to make of the situation. Was everyone just fleeing? Had it come to that? No, this seemed more like one of Fluff’s impromptu endeavors, for which she was well known. Still, Burdock wondered briefly if she might actually get away.

  He peered out between the rose branches and watched.

  Despite the piles of sausage and potatoes he ate, Dewey was fast. Steadily he closed the distance between himself and the sheep and when he was close enough he launched himself forward like the football player he had once been, tackling Fluff and dropping her to the ground.

  “BAAA!” she bleated indignantly, but Dewey wasn’t letting go.

  Without much gentleness, he dragged Fluff back to the barn. He grabbed fistfuls of wool and simply yanked her along. The sheep’s feet scrabbled in the dirt to keep up.

  Burdock crept behind them to the barn, thinking Dewey seemed more volatile than ever.

  “Now, that was lively!” said Figgy, after Dewey had penned Fluff, stormed out, and slammed the doors.

  “It just sort of happened,” panted the sheep. She took a long drink of water from her pail and shrugged. “I saw the barn doors and I was suddenly afraid to go back in. I hadn’t really thought it through.”

  “Oh no?” said Figgy.

  “Don’t tease her, Figgy,” Nanny said and glowered at the pig. Figgy pretended not to see.

  “Okay,” called Nanny, “meeting’s in ten minutes!”

  5

  How Can We Get Out?

  “So what all do you think?” asked Nanny. “Let’s hear everyone’s ideas.”

  It was early evening. The rain coming down made a gentle pattering on the tin roof. The animals had reassembled and roll had been called. Inside, the barn had the nice earthy smell of sweet hay, musky horse, molasses oats, and wood.

  On the left side of the barn’s central aisle were the pens of Mrs. Brown and Pull and Tug, their heads and shoulders visible above the stalls’ half doors. On the right side was Nanny and Tick’s pen, next to that, Figgy’s, and then Fluff’s.

  Burdock perched on a coil of ragged rope that lay discarded in the wide central aisle of the barn.

&
nbsp; “Thoughts, anyone?” said Nanny again.

  No one said anything.

  Burdock glanced to the left and the right as best as he could without moving. He didn’t like being seated where everyone could focus on him. It made him feel as if more than his presence was required, as if he would be expected to actually talk, and he hadn’t thought of one intelligent thing to say.

  Except for the rain, it was quiet in the barn.

  Pull shifted his ponderous weight in the straw, breaking the stillness.

  “Well,” said Nanny.

  Even though it wasn’t yet night, the barn lay in darkness under the approaching storm’s gray coat.

  “The way I see it,” ventured Pull, clearing his throat and beginning slowly in his deep, grainy voice, “is since we don’t know for certain what Dewey’s plan is, we need a plan ourselves—an escape plan.”

  “Oh, Pull, good idea!” said Fluff admiringly.

  “Oh please,” snorted Figgy. “We all know that much.”

  “What I mean is,” said Pull, “we need a way to get out of the barn. We’re all closed in our stalls at night and the barn doors are locked.”

  Locked? wondered Burdock. He had never realized this.

  “Really?” asked Nanny. “How do you know that?”

  “You can hear it,” said Pull. “Every evening, when Dewey leaves, he closes the doors, right? And first you hear that horrible creaking he never fixes, and then you hear a clunk, like some heavy kind of—well—board, or brace, is being dropped into place.”

  “Hmm . . . ” said Nanny, thinking. She turned to Burdock. “Burdock, love, I know it’s wet out, but might you go check please?”

  Burdock picked himself up from the coil of rope, made his way down the aisle, and slipped out the small, jagged hole in the door. With the rain coming down more thickly now, he crouched under the overhang of the roof and peered up.

  Of course Burdock had seen the doors many times before, but he had never really looked at them. Sure enough, a heavy oak bar slotted down into two L-shaped grips, one on each of the tall wooden doors, locking the animals inside.

  Burdock returned through the small hole and settled back down on the pile of rope. “Just as Pull said,” he confirmed, then gave a full description.

  “Well, if that’s not grist for the mill,” said Tug.

  “It’s certainly not good,” sighed Nanny.

  “I just hope,” said Mrs. Brown in a near whisper, lifting her head up above her stall door, “that we can get out before Dewey”—her voice became nearly inaudible—“does what he’s intending to do.”

  “Agreed,” said Pull. “But hope is not a plan. We need to think. I say we get cracking. I’ve liked it here well enough until now—though I will say the feed seems not to be as good quality lately—”

  “Or as plentiful,” added Tug.

  “Or as plentiful,” agreed Pull. “But everything’s different now. Yesterday morning, Burdock heard Dewey say, ‘It has to be the barn,’ which sounds to me like his mind is made up. And I would say Grady is the smarter one here—certainly more level-headed—and might be able to stop Dewey, but has anyone seen Grady since yesterday?”

  “The truck is gone,” said Figgy.

  “Right,” emphasized Pull. “It’s been gone since yesterday. Grady never goes away overnight. Have you ever known Grady to not be here for even a night?” Several animals shook their heads. Burdock tried to remember if he’d seen Grady since the kitchen argument, and decided he hadn’t.

  “It seems pretty obvious to me,” continued Pull. “Dewey is going to burn down the barn. It’s likely he is planning to take us down with it. And let’s be straight: I, for one, have no intention of dying here.”

  It was a chilling thought that silenced everyone.

  On the roof, the rain continued to drum steadily and the constant patter high above the animals’ heads reinforced the very outline of their home.

  Burdock looked up into the darkness at the beams of the high peak. Until now this structure had always seemed like such a thoroughly permanent thing.

  “So, then, how do we get out?” asked Nanny.

  “We could try to leave during the day,” suggested Tug.

  “I thought of that,” said Figgy, “but first, as you know, all the pastures have mighty powerful electric fences. Second, if Dewey did catch us trying to escape, he’d find us and haul us back, and who knows what he’d do then, and so third, I think we need to escape when Dewey couldn’t possibly think it. He’s always mucking around during the day. We have to just vanish in the dark so he’ll never know we’re gone.”

  “Vanish?” asked Fluff, incredulous.

  “Escape,” said Figgy irritably, “I mean escape.”

  “But how can we get out?” Nanny asked again.

  “Well, yes,” agreed Pull. “That’s the big question.”

  The meeting ended with no clear plan. As soon as the gathering was over, Burdock slipped away up the corner staircase to the hayloft. He didn’t usually come up here—the air here was gritty with hay dust—but with the rain battering down he wasn’t going outside, and he wanted to be someplace where he could be alone and undisturbed.

  He had an odd feeling fizzing on the edges of his brain and as he tucked into a pocket between two hay bales he let himself think it: he could escape.

  It was dumb, Burdock knew, that he hadn’t thought of this before. But the truth was it had taken Nanny asking him to go out and check the doors for him to realize it: unlike the others, he was not trapped in a stall or locked in by the barn doors. Nothing really was preventing him from walking away from Dewey, the barn, his life here with the other animals. Burdock the cat could go it alone.

  6

  Nanny

  As predicted, rain pelted down in torrents through the night, pounding like thousands of hammers on the roof, cascading in sheets off the edges. On the ground, all around the periphery of the barn, water smacked down with such force it carved out trenches, which filled with more water, which only amplified the sound of more rain bucketing down.

  At six the next morning, when the sky usually would have started to lighten, it remained dark as charcoal. The storm was really just beginning. The full brunt of it was still forecast for tonight.

  Burdock awakened and made a few exploratory stretches. He was hungry. He would go to the feed room—sometimes he caught mice there.

  As he descended the narrow corner stairs, Burdock suddenly heard on top of the steady rain a series of unfamiliar sounds: a scrabble, a few clunks, and an abrupt loud thump. Then, “Oof!”

  What on earth? Burdock crept down the remaining stairs and angled his whiskered head cautiously around the corner.

  “Nanny!” he gasped, spying the goat standing proudly, if a bit shaken-looking, in the central aisle. “How did you get out of your pen?”

  “I jumped!” answered Nanny, giving her body a good wriggle back and forth. Bits of hay and dust drifted down from her coat.

  In the night, Nanny had had a thought. I’m a goat, she thought. It may not seem like much of a revelation, but in a way it was.

  Until now, Nanny didn’t do all the naughty things that goats elsewhere are notoriously known to do. She didn’t chew the bumpers off cars or munch through tin siding like it was lettuce, she didn’t bash posts with her powerful horns, and she didn’t jump fences. But she was a goat. And goats can jump.

  “You jumped?” asked Mrs. Brown, who was awake now too and looking in wonderment over her stall. “That must have been the small earthquake I just felt.”

  “I crashed into your wall,” said Nanny.

  “What’s going on?” came the sleepy voice of Figgy. Her pink snout pushed through her pen’s cracks. “Whoa! Nanny! Look at you. How’d you get out there?”

  “I jumped,” said Nanny again. If you were looking for it, you would have seen just a slight raising of her tufted chin.

  “How unruly, Nanny!” exclaimed Figgy with real appreciation.

 
“Here,” said Nanny. “I think I can do it again. Let me show you.”

  Burdock stepped to the side, well out of the way as Nanny backed up to Mrs. Brown’s stall, ran a few steps, and sprung up over her pen wall. Just for a moment Burdock thought she wouldn’t clear it, but only Nanny’s hoofs clacked on the top rail and she landed successfully, albeit with a thud, in the hay.

  “Mama!” came Tick’s voice. Then a laugh.

  In a moment, Nanny was back in the central aisle, striking the boards of Mrs. Brown’s stall.

  “Very graceful,” said Figgy. “Well done!”

  By now the horses and Fluff were awake too.

  “No way!” exclaimed Fluff. “Let’s all do that!”

  Before the others could explain that sheep are not springy like goats, there was a scrabble of hooves and Fluff’s expectant face appeared briefly above her pen’s edge. Burdock could tell she really thought she was going to make it.

  She didn’t. There was a crash, followed by a dull but significant crunch in the hay; it sounded like a bag of feed had been dropped from a not inconsequential height.

  “Oooch,” came a faint voice from the depths of the straw.

  “Oh dear, you okay in there, hon?” asked Nanny, moving forward to peer into Fluff’s pen.

  “Just fine!” called Fluff gaily.

  Figgy snorted. Tug chuckled. And Tick bobbed up and down, up and down, finally falling back in the hay and giggling a bright, bubbling laugh. He hadn’t really laughed in a few days, and it felt good.