Paul grew alarmed. Why wasn't she drinking? Did that mean it would be soon? Or was she sick inside? He stopped pumping and gave himself up to bittersweet worry. It could be this very morning, and then he'd have to stay home from school to help dry off the colt and to see that Misty was a good nurser.
"Paul! Maureen!" Grandpa's voice boomed like a fog-horn. "Put Misty in and come help me feed." He stood there in the barnyard with his head thrown back, shrilling to the heavens: "Wee-dee-dee-dee! Wee-dee-dee-dee!"
The call was a magnet, pulling in the fowl—wild ones from the sky, tame ones from the pasture. Geese and ducks and gulls, cocks and chickens and guinea hens came squawking. Above the racket Grandpa barked out his orders. "You children shuck off this corn for the critters." He handed them a coal scuttle heaped high with ears. "I got to police the migrators. Dad-blasted if I'll let them Canadian honkers hog all the feed whilst my own go hungry."
Faster than crows the children shelled out the corn until the scuttle held nothing but cobs, and at last the barnyard settled down to a picking and a pecking peace.
Grandpa scanned the sky for stragglers, but he saw none. Only gray wool clouds, and an angry wind pulling them apart. "Looks like a storm brewing, don't it?"
Paul laughed. "You should've been a weatherman, Grandpa, 'stead of a hossman. You're always predicting."
"Allus right, ain't I? Here, Maureen, you run and hang up the scuttle. I can whiff Grandma's bacon clean out here, and I'm hungry enough to eat the haunches off'n a grasshopper."
It was a bumper breakfast. The table was heaped with stacks of hotcakes and thick slices of bacon. Grandpa took one admiring look at his plate before he tackled it. "Nobody," he said, "not nobody but yer Grandma understands slab bacon. Over to the diner in Temperanceville they frazzle all the sweetness outen it so's there ain't no fat left. Tastes like my old gumboots."
Grandma beamed. If someone had given her a string of diamonds or a bunch of florist flowers, she couldn't have looked more pleased. "Clarence," she asked in her best company voice, "will you have honey or molasses on your hotcakes?"
"How kin I have mo' 'lasses when I ain't had no 'lasses at all?"