Thomas the turkey broke his wing.

I found him on his back, stunned and not able to turn over. He was holding his head at a funny angle, and my first thought was that he might have broken his neck.

I helped him roll over, and he stood right up, but his wing was hanging oddly.

I’d seen him earlier, standing on top of the water heaters that have been waiting on the porch to be installed now for a year. (I had enough money from the tax refund to buy them but not to install them. Then when we had money, the plumber had a waiting list we never got on. This spring I said I’d either get them installed or bake them a birthday cake.) We’d been storing the 50-pound bags of sweet feed and laying pellets on top of the boxes to keep the chickens and turkeys out of them. Thomas had never jumped up that high before.

The boxes are at least three feet tall and the porch is about that high off the ground, so Thomas fell six feet and landed on his wing. Since he weighs about as much as those bags of feed, that was lots of impact on those little bones.

All the vets’ ads in the phone book said they were closed, but I called their offices anyway. Most referred me to the emergency vet in Chesapeake. I’d called them about goats before, and they seemed clueless about farm animals. Finally one vet’s answering machine referred me to a pager number, and they returned my call to say they were still open and could work us in.

“How did he break his wing?” the woman at the vet’s office asked.

“I’m pretty sure he fell off of the porch,” I told her.

“How could just falling from a porch break his wing?” she asked.

I had images of myself being led away in handcuffs, screaming “I didn’t do it! I never pushed him!”

I thought of how clumsy the turkey was, how we threw food out into the yard just to watch him galumph over like an ostrich with one short leg, how we laughed at the way he fell over when he got into scuffles with the roosters over those laying pellets. Maybe this woman wasn’t too familiar with domestic turkeys.

We loaded the turkey into a pet carrier. He’s so big that we had to take the crate apart and reassemble it around him. It took both my husband and me an “oof” and bent knees to lift him into the back of the Jeep.

At the vet’s office, a bird in a cage grabbed a strand of my hair through its cage, but wouldn’t speak. A little fluffy dog on a retractable leash trotted over to a giant chocolate lab lying in the floor with its head resting on its double-jointed paws. The lab lifted its head, which was bigger than the fluffy dog, and scared it back into its owner’s lap. The office dogs lorded over the tethered ones that they were naked and leashless and dove after the treats the office workers tossed to the yappier patients waiting to be seen.

It was easy to spot my accuser among the office staff. She was older than the other perky young women in smocks with kittens on them. She barked short commands to the worker she was training, and snatched a file folder from the hapless woman’s hands, flipped it over and sighed heavily, as though preventing her trainee from labeling it incorrectly wore her completely out.

As I filled out forms for Thomas, she nearly spit at the new employee as she corrected every keystroke the young woman entered.

I felt great sympathy for the trainee, and smiled at her with my eyes wide when the older woman turned her back, hoping to convey a silent “hang in there.” She didn’t notice and kept her mouth tight as she tried to create the turkey’s new patient file. The drill sergeant grabbed the stapler out of her hands to show her the RIGHT way to attach a form to the inside of the file.

I imagined high-fiving the trainee as she entered the paddy wagon with me, watching through the back doors as the paramedics wheeled the older woman’s sheet-draped body away. I would have testified on her behalf.

The vet said that Thomas had arthritis. And gout. She wrapped tape around his wing and taped his wing tight to his body and said he needed to keep that on for about a month. Seventeen dollars on the credit card, and we were done.

Thomas is kept in a pen now and is back to his old ways, stealing feed from the rabbit that shares his pen and gobbling at us when he thinks we should feed him again.

I haven’t seen any news items about a veterinary assistant going postal, but I expect it any day.