My Gentle Barn (3 page)

“It’s all your fault!” I yelled that evening as my mom hurried around the kitchen preparing dinner. “You’re the one who’s making all my animals die.”

“Don’t you talk to your mother that way,” my father called from the living room. A moment later he appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “You apologize right now.”

“You keep sending them away and making them die!”

“That’s it. Out you go,” my father said, and he grabbed my arm and ushered me out the back door and locked it after me.

It was freezing outside and nearly dark.

“You’ll see,” I shouted at the locked door, my breath making white puffs in the air. “When I grow up I’ll have a huge place full of animals and I’ll show the world how beautiful they are!” I would heal all their hurts and they would heal mine, and anyone who was lonely could come be with us and be healed too.

Bursting with anger and tears, I ran around to the side of the house, where the big sliding glass window glowed orange with the warmth inside. I could see my dad laughing with my mom, then my little brothers running into the dining room and sitting at the table.
I hate them
, I thought.
I hate my family
. I bent down and pushed the icy snow aside until I found a rock small enough to fit in my hand but heavy enough to break glass. I lifted the rock up and took aim, but then something stopped me. And that something was this thought:
They’re not worth it
.

I dropped my hand and the rock fell back into the snow. Those people inside were a family I lived with, but clearly I was not a part of them. I was not a part of the orange, warm glow. I was not a part of the
laughter and joy. I was alone, on the outside looking in, and I would need to figure out how to live this life without their love.

I made a decision when I was eleven that proved to my parents yet again what an odd child I was, and it pushed me even further from the center of my family’s warmth. I came home one day from school very upset. There had been a chicken at school who had sat trembling in a cat carrier in the corner of the room as the screaming kids ran around playing. I knelt down next to the carrier and glanced around, hoping the teachers wouldn’t mind, then I gently brought the terrified chicken out and cradled her in my lap. “It’s OK, girl. You’re all right.” As I petted her and told her how beautiful she was and reassured her that she was safe, she finally began to settle down.

But soon the principal came in shouting, “Don’t pet that chicken!” She ran over to me and whisked the hen out of my arms. “We’ve got to get it to the slaughterhouse.” She stuffed the chicken back in the cat carrier and rushed out of the room with her. In that moment my whole world changed, for I suddenly understood that it wasn’t a coincidence that
chicken and rice
had the same word in it as
chicken that clucks
.

At dinner that night, still upset, I announced my decision. “I’m not going to eat animals anymore.”

“OK, dear,” my mom said. “Now, please eat your chicken soup. It’s getting cold.”

“Didn’t you just hear me? I’m not going to eat the chicken soup. I don’t want to eat animals anymore.”

“It’s not an animal. It’s soup,” my dad said, and my brothers started giggling.

“It
was
an animal, and I’m not eating them anymore.”

My mom sighed. “Fine. But I’m not going to make you anything special.”

“OK,” I said. I would make do with pasta and lettuce.

After a couple of weeks, my parents realized I was actually serious about this, and they started panicking. “You’re not going to get enough protein,” they said. “You’re going to get sick, and you’re not going to grow.”

If being short was the price to pay for not eating my friends, so be it.

When I was fourteen—still not eating meat and getting quite tall—my dad announced we were moving to California. He’d gotten a prestigious job in Los Angeles, and we were moving in the middle of the school year. Simon, our beloved family dog, would come with us. But my parents tried to convince me that my blue parakeet, Puff—who’d become my closest friend alongside Simon—should not make the trip.

“A bird can’t go on an airplane,” my dad said.

“Yes, she can. I asked the vet.” And I brought out the cardboard carrying case I’d gotten as evidence.

Both my parents tried to talk “sense” into me, but I was having none of their “logic.”

I looked each of them in the eye and said, simply: “If she’s not going, I’m not going.”

Apparently I’d become a force to be reckoned with, because they both finally gave in. Puff would make the trip with us.

On the day of our departure, the whole family sat in the huge, noisy airport dressed in our travel clothes and looking like we were going to temple. Our carry-ons and packages took up a whole bank of benches, but I kept the box that held my parakeet carefully balanced on my knees, and I spoke softly through the air holes, reassuring Puff that there was nothing to be afraid of. People were racing every which way, and the loudspeaker was going off every two minutes, yet I could barely make out what the scratchy voice was saying. After one such announcement my dad said, “That’s us,” and he and my mom jumped up
and started gathering our bags and packages and reining in my brothers. As I stood up, I saw a blue blur fly in front of my face, and my stomach sank. I weighed the box in my hands, and it felt very light. Then I saw the hole in the side of the carrier. Puff had chewed her way out.

“Come on, Ellie,” my mom said. “They called our plane.”

“I can’t,” I said, and held out the empty box. “Puff is gone.”

“Oh, Ellie, she’ll be fine.”

I looked up at the high ceiling of this enormous, crowded airport, and I burst into tears. “I have to find my parakeet!”

My dad stopped and circled back to us. “What’s going on? We’re going to miss our plane.”

“I’m not going without Puff,” I said.

“Puff?” my dad said, as though he’d never heard the name before.

“My parakeet flew away.”

“It’s a bird,” my dad said. “It’ll be fine. Let’s just go now.”

“No!” I yelled, and I started sobbing uncontrollably. “We have to find Puff. I’m not leaving her.”

At this point, a man who worked at the airport came up and asked what the trouble was. I explained as best I could through my tears, and the man ran off, then reappeared a moment later with a long ladder.

“I think she went that way,” I said, and the man headed toward the far wall with the ladder, and I ran after him across the airport.

I spotted Puff on the ledge just below the ceiling, and the man set up the ladder and extended it to its full length. By now a small crowd had gathered around us and watched as the man climbed up the ladder.

“This is absurd,” my father said.

The man climbed right up to where Puff was perched and reached toward her. But millimeters from his grasp, she let out a small squawk and flew off along the high ceiling in the opposite direction.

The man took down the ladder, and off we flew after her, with
my parents trailing us, yelling, “Forget the bird! We’re going to miss our plane,” and me screaming that I wouldn’t leave without her. And now the crowd was running after us too and calling, “Let her keep the bird!”

At the opposite side of the airport, the man again extended the ladder up to the ledge below the ceiling, and as he got close to her, I held my breath, and there was a hush in the crowd, like everyone was reaching with him toward my parakeet. Even my parents had stopped yelling for a minute.

But again, Puff escaped his grasp and flew back toward the opposite wall, chirping and squawking along the high ceiling.

Down the ladder came, and off we all ran across the airport, the man and me and my parents and my brothers and the crowd. And one more time, up went the ladder and up went the man, and again a moment of hush.

“Puff,” I said quietly, and I closed my eyes, almost like I was praying, “please, please let this nice man bring you back to me.”

As he reached toward my parakeet, she extended her wings, but then she folded them back in. And the man closed his hand around her.

He climbed down the ladder, parakeet in hand, and the crowd applauded. We put Puff back into the box and taped over the hole. “Thank you so much,” I said, and I hugged the man. “Thank you for saving my bird.”

My mom grabbed my arm, and off we ran, this time toward the plane.

Disheveled and out of breath, we boarded the plane at the last possible instant. But Puff was with me, and she made the move with us to California.

Puff and Simon and the countless other animals who passed through my life helped me get through the social inferno of high school. It
was a religious all-girls school within a tight-knit Jewish community, and I was the new kid in the middle of ninth grade. Not only was I an outsider to this community, but I was an alien to this faith. I had never understood the god my parents prayed to, never understood how standing and sitting in temple and swearing to obey narrow, rigid rules connected us to something bigger. The only thing that connected me to something outside my humanness was the warm, honey-hay scent of a horse’s breath or a blue iris poking up through the snow in spring or a field full of butterflies.

My feelings about God and religion were sealed one Saturday during that first year in Los Angeles. I was walking with my mother to temple, and a dark fluttering drew my eye to the gutter. On the pavement a pigeon was flapping, lopsided and frantic. When I picked her up, my mother said, “Ellie, put it down. You don’t know where it’s been.”

“But she’s been hit by a car,” I said. “We have to get her to a doctor.” The vet was nearby and I thought the pigeon just might make it if we took her straight there.

“We have no time to take it to the vet,” my mother said. “We’ll be late for temple.”

My mother’s words didn’t compute. Wasn’t the purpose of temple to help us be good people? Why would I go sit in a building to learn to be good when the opportunity to be good was right here in my hands? “Wouldn’t God want us to help this hurt bird first?”

“No,” my mother said. “Put that bird down and let’s go.”

“No,” I said, and I planted my feet on the sidewalk. My mother stormed off to temple to learn to be good without me, and I walked with the pigeon to the vet. The poor bird was in horrible shape and didn’t make it, but I could live with myself for the decision I’d made.

After that I found as many excuses as I could on Saturdays—sore throats, menstrual cramps, whatever I could think up—and went to temple only when my mom called my bluff.

Those first couple of years in Los Angeles, I spent most of my free time isolated in my room. I’d get home and Puff would fly to me and climb all over my head and give me parakeet kisses, and the awkwardness and angst of my day would be lifted. But all lives eventually come to an end, and the life spans of small animals tend to match the size of their bodies. Two years after our arrival in Los Angeles, Puff died, and I was inconsolable. I couldn’t stop crying, even at school. All day, one girl after another asked what was wrong. Some instinct kept me silent. “I’m fine” is all I would say, but they could see I wasn’t fine. Their questions finally wore me down and by the end of the day, I revealed the source of my pain.