Where the Red Oak stood

Chapter 6

Chad woke to the sound of the girls playing. It seemed they were right outside his bedroom door, running and laughing. From the window came bright sun rays, casting a dancing light on the roof of his room. It must be well past ten, he realized. He got up and dressed himself. Before he went downstairs he greeted the girls, who were indeed playing some combination of hide and seek and tag on the upper floor. The kitchen was empty, as was the laundry room. He grabbed an apple from the fruit basket and went out onto the porch. Behind the fence surrounding the fowl-run, he caught sight of Frankie, picking eggs.

"G'mornin', Frankie!" he greeted. "Where's Ray?"

Frankie looked up. "Oh, good morning to you too, Chad. Ray has traveled into town, he should be back in a while."

Chad walked towards the fence. "To town? To do what?"

"He didn't say." Frankie pulled her hair back - some had gotten out of the bun she always put it in. "He does that sometimes. He is probably just running some errand. Was it something you wanted to tell him?"

"Not really. He been down to Lucy?"

"Yes, he has." Frankie left the enclosure to the fowl-run. "She was a lot more energetic today, he told me, and the swelling was almost gone, by the sound of it. Seems like she was really lucky, thank the Lord."

"Yeah, thank him", Chad agreed. Though he had not been especially worried since yesterday, it was still a relief to hear that everything seemed to be going in the right direction. "Ya need help with anythin'?" he offered.

"Well, Ray told me to wake you up so that you could be given chores, but I thought it better to let you sleep until you woke. But you would be a darling if you could bring water to the cows. Would you mind?"

"Not at all. Just to be sure... Ya want me to carry the water all the way down there, to the far back of the pasture? 'Cause... it's quite a long way, if ya don't mind me sayin' so."

Frankie gave him a smile. "No, of course not, that would be murderous. There is a tub next to the gate, you will see it. If you could fill the tub, that would be great. You can use the buckets over there." She pointed at a stack of buckets beside the water pump.

"Will do, ma'am", Chad said, lifting his hat ever so elegantly. Frankie laughed and left for the main building with the eggs.

As Chad went to do his task, he found himself brooding on what Ray might be up to. Not that it sounded especially mysterious, if he was indeed running errands. Yet it was something with the way Frankie had phrased it that made him wonder. He poured the third bucket into the tub and went back to the water pump to get more. By the time he returned he still had not let go of the subject, but he had yet to figure out if it was worth it, being suspicious. Running errands was not an unusual occurrence, after all.

Then his thoughts were brutally interrupted, as the sound of something big and heavy closed on him. He looked up... and found the cows running towards him. And that was not just one, three or five cows, but a whole herd of them, fifty at the least, if not close to sixty. Chad was no stranger to cows - for most part he found them quite charming - but it had one exception, and this was one such exception. He knew how it was. Horses avoided you if you were in the way, but when it came to cows... When cows were charging, they were charging.

At first Chad could only stare. Then adrenaline kicked in, but in his hurry to get out of the pasture he tripped and fell, face first, into the ground. This close to the gate there was not any grass to soften the fall, so all that met him was dry mud and stones. Something thick and warm immediately began to pour from his nose, and judging by the pain in his hands, they had also taken a serious blow. That made no matter. The herd was storming towards him, hooves hammering, antlers swaying, bodies a wall of tons upon tons. Panic took him, and it was pure survival instinct that made him crawl towards the gate, fingers digging into the ground, feet kicking behind him.