If there is any animal dumber than a chicken it is a turkey.  Turkeys will stand out in a rainstorm with their beaks pointed toward the sky and drown to death.

We had a great big Tom turkey.  He didn't drown in the storm, but I wished he had.  

He mostly stayed in the granary.  That is a shed where my Daddy had bins of shelled wheat and corn and where he kept his ground-up feed for the cows.  The turkey liked it in there because he could eat his fill everyday and not have to work for it.

When I had chores to do in the cow barn, I had to pass by the granary.  The turkey waited until I was almost to the barn and then he came swooping out of the granary, the red wattles under his neck swinging, his long head and sharp beak stretched out to peck at me as I ran as fast as I could to the barn.

Daddy said, "If you don't run, the turkey won't chase you."

It was awful hard just to keep walking calmly toward the barn door when that great big bird was trying to peck my arms and legs.

I had to run!

One time Momma said, "I'll stand here on the back porch and watch until you are safely in the barn."

As I walked to the barn, I kept looking back and sure enough, Momma was watching from the back porch.

I was almost to the barn and just about to step inside, when that turkey came flying out of the granary and pecked me on my leg.

Momma came running off the porch with a broom in her hand and chased that turkey half-way down the driveway, hitting him in his tail feathers with the broom whenever he slowed down.

Daddy opened the barn door and pulled me inside.

I was crying.  Daddy sat me up on a feed sack and rolled up my jeans.   There was blood on my leg.  I heard Momma come into the barn.

"Well, he got her a good one on the leg this time," Daddy said.

Momma reached up into the medicine cupboard that we kept hanging on the wall in the cow barn.   She got some nice thick salve from a green can and put it on my leg.  It was the same medicine that Daddy put on the cows udders to heal their cuts.  It felt very cool and made the cut on my leg stop stinging.

"We are going to have to invite that turkey to come to dinner someday." Momma said.

The next Sunday, on the drive home from church, I asked, "Are we having roast beast for dinner today?"

Momma turned around and looked back at me.

"No," she said, "not today."

She turned and smiled at Daddy.  "Today, we are having a very special dinner."

And we did!  We had roast turkey with stuffing inside it.  We had mashed potatoes and gravy.  We had corn and hot biscuits with honey.  And we had apple pie for dessert

I guess that turkey must have run away because I never saw him again.