Free Little Joe by Sandra Neil Wallace Page A

her lip. “They go to good homes. And she always has a whole bunch more.”
    Then the rains came. Gushes so heavy they splashedacross the windowpanes, blurring anything Eli wanted to see outside.
    “He doesn’t have Spider out there, Eli. Or you.”
    “It’s pouring rain.”
    Hannah rested her head on Eli’s elbow. “You like rain.”
    It was true. In the summer Eli’d face the sky, open his mouth wide and taste the fat, warm raindrops caught on his tongue. When there was no school and wild blueberries to pick and nothing to worry about. Not like now, when it was ice-cold and damp and his bull calf was bawling.
    “The slicker under my bed would fit you,” Hannah said. “The one covered in rainbows.”
    “I’ll be all right.” Eli felt for his flashlight underneath the bed. Tater stood up and shook, then tiptoed around to where Eli’d been. He circled twice, slumped down into a ball and sighed, resting his chin on Hannah’s stomach.
    “Can I stay and snuggle with Tater?”
    “If you don’t go telling Pa I’m gone.”
    “I won’t. I can keep a secret.”
    “And don’t take my pillow.”
    A clap of thunder boomed so deep it crept into Eli’s stomach.
One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand
, Eli counted.
Four thousand. Five thousand
. Then another boom.
One mile away
, he thought. The thunder was getting closer. The light on the front porch flickered a fewtimes, then finally sputtered out. Little Joe continued to cry. Slowly, Eli walked down the stairs, his fingers covering the beam of the flashlight so Pa wouldn’t see. Then he put on his chore coat and headed for the fields.
    The whites of Little Joe’s eyes were showing when Eli reached the pasture. And he was wet. Sweaty coils of steam rose from his coat after all that mooing. On his own by the gate, the bull calf hung his head low as he bawled between muddy knees.
    “There, boy,” Eli murmured. He opened the gate and grabbed the halter. “Everything’s okay.”
    But Little Joe’s hair was so damp, Eli had a hard time gripping the halter. He decided to lead the bull calf with two hands and keep the flashlight in his pocket.
    They headed up to the barn through a dark, wet thickness, Little Joe’s bawl sounding more like a
baa
as they climbed. Eli was certain there wasn’t a moon, but it was pouring too hard to look up. Every time he tried, heavy drops of rain caught Eli by surprise, making him blink back the sting.
    When they got to the pen, there was no trace of Fancy. Or what had been. Pa’d bleached everything. The floors were stone gray and bare, except for the trickle of rain moistening a corner.
    Eli put Little Joe in the pen anyway. The bull calf sniffed the bare walls and the manger where hay used tobe. Eli hurried to the hay mow. He poked the hole in the ceiling hard with the butt of the hay fork to get some out. He ran with it to the pen and shook it over the floor.
    Little Joe kept bawling.
    Eli cut open a square of sawdust covered in plastic and shoveled that in, too.
    Little Joe kept bawling.
    Eli ran to the tack room to find something that smelled like Fancy. He grabbed a bunch of blankets and spotted the currycombs in a bucket.
    Spider climbed to the top of the stanchion wall. She wrinkled the
M
on her forehead and yowled in between Little Joe’s bawling as Eli spread the blankets over the pen.
    Then Spider climbed down the wall to be with her calf.
    “See this, boy?” Eli showed Little Joe the currycomb he’d brushed Fancy with.
    For the first time, Little Joe stopped bawling.
    Eli brushed Little Joe’s poll with the comb, then the side of his neck, where the bull calf was still breathing heavy. “You should’ve never let me halter you,” Eli said. “None of this would’ve happened.” But Eli knew full well it would have. The next day. Or the next.
    Exhausted, Little Joe closed his eyes and stopped fighting sleep. He let his front knees buckle, then his back legs, and got down on the ground and gave in to the