Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates

sound that was inhuman and soothing. Then he got dressed, stepped into his overalls, into his boots, and went out to the kitchen. The floor creaked. Gusts of cold air rose from it. Duke, sleeping behind the stove, shook himself awake and whimpered around Jesse’s legs as if questioning him—why were they here? What was this place?
    Outside, the birds sang in a maniac chattering as the sun rose. Faster and noisier. A frenzy of callings. Jesse listened to them, as if transfixed by their bright, staccato notes. The birds were almost screaming a human language; if he listened closely, very closely, he could almost hear words. He worked the hand pump and splashed water onto his face, sucking in his breath with the cold. He made himself coffee. In a while he would hear his grandfather getting up—the creaking of the old bedsprings, the creaking of the floor. In the country people moved, silently, unspeaking, against a background of noises—the chattering of small birds, the cries of crows, of owls, the sound of the wind, a dog’s distant barking. A car, passing along the road, was a surprise.
    One day a car had turned up the lane and a man and a woman came to see Jesse. They were from the Niagara County Welfare Board, the Department of Child Welfare. They asked Jesse questions about his life here; they looked around, prudently, with smiles. They asked Jesse about school. Why wasn’t he going to school? Was he still in pain? He was alone in the kitchen because his grandfather had walked out when the man and woman came in, not excusing himself, just walking out to show his disapproval of visitors. Jesse had been very nervous, left on his own. He had never spoken to adults like this, people who wanted him, who had something to say to
him
, plans for
him
. He said that his shoulder still hurt and that he wanted to stay home for a while. He would go to school in the fall, he promised. In the fall. Wasn’t that soon enough?
    They left and his grandfather came back in the house. He never asked Jesse what they had wanted.
    Most of the time they did not speak.
    But Jesse felt that they were together in their silence, flowing the same way with the passage of each day, time itself a tangible element that carried them forward, always forward, away from the past. He helped the old man with everything. His arms and shoulders and chestached from the heavy farm work, but he thought that this kind of pain was good for him; it made him sleep, it pitched him at once into a deep, dreamless sleep, which was healing. Time itself was healing. He woke every morning at four-thirty or five, and then the day would begin for him and there was no staying in bed, no going back to sleep. It began by jerking him awake so that his heart hammered as if sensing danger—had someone awakened him? taken hold of his shoulder to shake it? But it was good to sleep so heavily and good to wake up, good to work so hard.
    There were two things on the farm that Jesse hated, though: the chicken coop and one of the barns. The chicken coop was a long, low structure, kept in fairly good condition, but Jesse hated the chickens and their clucking and their stink, the awful crusts of their droppings everywhere—on the ground, thick on their roosts and the dirt floor of their coop, everywhere. They were nervous, filthy things. They moved like women, tiny, feathered, dumpy women. He hated their bleary red eyes, which were sometimes diseased or surrounded by tiny grublike worms, he hated their quick, stealthy walk, their dirty feathers, their perpetual hunger. When he went out to feed them they rushed upon him, wings fluttering, their eyes darting, darting, their scrawny little feet rushing them inward, to him, as if he were the center of the world for them, existing only to toss out feed. Brown hens. White hens. Jesse stared at them in disgust. When he walked out anywhere, on any task, the chickens converged upon him, clucking and excited. A few of the bolder ones would peck at