Against the Country (29 page)

The chickens had to fetch me mine. Almost without my noticing, these fluffy and white little leghorn hens had formed themselves into the vibrant georgic community Mr. Jefferson had long ago promised and promoted, shooting eggs out their anuses at a pretty pace and gathering for jocular corn klatsches before and after each moonlit mealtime. True, there were setbacks: I began to find open sores beneath the wings again, which caused me to worry that I had made of their rooster too much of a brute, and I was helped along in that suspicion one moonless night when my mother sent me out to fetch a few eggs, and I kicked around the coop yard for my nemesis and, not finding him there, stepped in through the coop-house door and immediately felt his barb penetrate the outer knob of my right ankle to the bone. But in general these birds seemed to have adjusted quite well to their situation, and I observed that when not eating, or laying, or being raped, or volunteering for one of my aeronautic experiments, they banded together in an ongoing project of their own, such as I imagined might lead on to cathedrals.

Understandably, then, I watched them, and they watched me, and I saw them see me hobble out to take a peculiar pride in the constancy with which they pecked,
as a village
, at the wire just behind and to the east of their feed trough (being an oil barrel sawn inexpertly in twain, which required their jumping inside of it to eat, which resulted in an adorable defecation
upon their own food), where I soon discovered that their teamwork had loosened a flap of mesh I might easily have sewn back up (there was, after all, that remainder of correctional wire on the side porch), except that I wanted to see if these pioneers could succeed, partly out of a wish to be entertained, I will allow, but mostly because I needed to know whether an escape in (and from) our shared context was possible that did not demand a suicide’s sarcastic surrender to it.

I might have gone to my mother then, and explained that I had experimented upon the rooster and,
as an unforeseen consequence
, had radically oversexed him, who was now using his hens so hard and so often that they were bleeding again, from where he “grabbed aholt and rode” (as I was myself, by the by, profusely at times, from the gouge just here on my ankle), and that the situation (to repeat, of my own making) had by all appearances become so dire that the hens were at this stage conspiring openly in an effort to free themselves from their side-yard prison and establish what I could only assume would be a vast underground railroad for chickens. That might have been the wiser course.

Instead, out of pride, or the fear that abides, I sought to solve the problem by less familial means: I shooed the rooster off any hen I saw him on, and I kicked him with my good leg as he tried to remount, and I kicked him even harder when it finally occurred to him to drop the pretense and come directly after me. No substantial lessening of assaults was achieved by this stratagem, and if anything the offender’s libido was only heightened. When next I tried to “flip the script” on this perp, and work
with
him as opposed to
against
him, in an effort to “establish trust,” so that we might “make some progress here,” and “transition him back into society,” he took all my pats and pets and coos to be signs of a weakness, and one evening, as I bent to pour corn down into the feed trough/oil barrel/chicken toilet, I felt him suddenly, and furiously, aholt at my back pockets.

Is it possible, in all honesty, to rehabilitate a chicken?

I say that doubts in this area will settle in after one of them attempts personally to rape you.

Is it moral to blame a monster for being a monster when you know that you yourself have made him a monster?

Well, that “know” there is debatable, I would even say highly, as is the “moral,” and certainly also the “you” (either one), and our priority here, really, is to think about the flock and, moreover, our hero first responders (with their kicks and their corn, and their wounds and resentments, and their possibly put-on country pride), whose duty it is to protect the hens’ sacred way of life and, theoretically, their one slim shot at democracy, which trust will brook no dissent or unseemly agitation.

By this route, or thereabouts, I reached the conclusion that I had no choice but to kill Buttfucker the rooster, and throw his carcass up onto the coop’s tin roof, where all the dead things went in their time, to be disposed of by the enormous buzzards who were never long away from our property.

I had come to think of these buzzards as dear friends, with their bald pink heads, and their crooked red necks, and that dingy black livery beneath the threadbare gray boas they insisted on wearing, reminding me always of queeny old butlers who had abandoned their posts decades ago but still skulked about the manor to pass judgment on anyone who disintegrated within. What a joy it was to watch them dine cooptop, in their immense silence, upon whatever frog, or mole, or turtle, or rabbit, or groundhog, or possum, or family of field mice, or neighboring cat, or barb-addled fawn, had lately come to be chewed to death by the dogs in the yard and wrested away from them once the sweet odor of redemption had become too much for our delicate mother to bear.

How the chickens felt about that scent, and the imperious visitors it brought to their roof, to perform whatever Parsee funeral rites were going on up there, I cannot say. They attended, these chickens, to their business, which was escape at all costs, regardless of any smell or looming betters, and I must allow that I drew some energy from their clucky resolve. A part of this energy (too much, by my current calculations) I spent worrying that the rooster’s execution, while clearly called for here, might deprive his ass-workers of their initial motivation to flee, and so put an end to the Great Experiment altogether.

Also there were fewer of them. I first hypothesized this, or
surmised it, one afternoon at the high school, during the discussion of a poem by William Blake (and what of his drawings?
why were we never shown the drawings?
) that landed on the fearful cheat-rhyme of “symmetry.” Had there not been somewhat less of that in the coop yard of late (the rhyme, I mean, not the cheating), and so a lack of equilibrium (at least to
my
eye), which naturally I compensated for by remembering back to the first time those birds had been made to bleed, and why? This was a general impression, in that I had taken no roll call, but I became convinced that the flock was indeed diminished, and for a time my thoughts rose up and circled that possibility.

If rape was required for the eggs to come out fertilized, so that there might be made more chickens, was it not equally possible (by the old magic of
universal balance
? or by the much newer
conservation of energy
?) for a hen to be
mmped
away entirely? Not
mmped
to death, you understand (and left in the yard to be gathered around and laughed at, and pitied a little, and tossed up onto the tin for the buzzards to eat), but disappeared entirely? annihilated? gone? If so, by what right did I obliterate the obliterator, whose purpose it was to grant life while simultaneously destroying it? By whose authority did I rank my experiment over his?

I had scarcely begun to keep count of the Orvilles when one morning I entered their yard to find them gathered at the loosened flap behind the feed trough, pecking desperately now to widen it, with even the rooster leaning in for some succor. They stirred but a little as I opened the gate and stepped in and shut it. Out of renewed habit, I raised my right shoe so as to stomp Buttfucker’s beak down into the clay, but he only extended his feathered neck and gave my sole a pleading peck, by which I knew that something truly unholy was afoot here.

I searched the interior of the coop but encountered no more than orphaned eggs in the cantilevered roost I had built with my own glad hands, under the usual duress, against the wall
where once had leant my father’s books. (And was it not in the juvescence of the year that Christ the Tigger came? Why, then, do I remember this happening in late springtime, with too few of the trees pushed down?) Peering out into the coop yard, and finding the chickens still bunched together in the southwest corner, I was reminded immediately of a prize fight, which my father always relished on his television set, and I knew then to check the opposite corner, the northeast, for blood.

What I saw there, as I rounded the southern side of the coop house, hoping to come upon a compassionate Referee but resigned to the fact that He had not likely attended this match, was the usual revelation: A long black rat snake had slithered in through one of the hexagonal holes in the mesh and, with a young hen lodged in his dislocated jaw, could not well make it out the way he had come. Nor could he turn now and exit frontways through the infinite other holes at his disposal. I cannot swear that this was the same snake who had chased me away from the blackberries all those bushes ago, or who had entered my home to wrap himself around a fringed fagot while I paused in my chewing and hastened to look. His eye, though, seemed to indicate that we two were well acquainted, and so I told him, in plain American, to wait right there.

I ambled up to the side porch then, and fetched my father’s axe. On the way back down I debated how best to solve the dilemma. The snake was currently out of sight of the chickens: I could halve him back there, and throw his carcass, and the hen’s, roofward from that vantage, and the flock would be none the wiser. The buzzards would descend, and enjoy their meal, and their meal’s meal, with the chickens never knowing that it was their
motivation to flee
being disposed of up there. The Experiment, that is, would continue. Alternately, I could yank the snake out into the coop yard and dice him up, still wriggling, in front of all the others, so that they might properly see, and be released from their fear and my science.

That I chose the latter in no way excuses the fact that it never once occurred to me to lift that blacksnake up, and swing him around my head for a turn or two, and toss him out over the wire, so as to let what was, after all, but a fellow gourmand go fed and free.

Two of my dead father’s stories stand out for me today, due mostly to the animated pleasure he took in their retelling. He was not directly a character in them, that I can discern, nor does either bear much more than a loose analogical link to the tale I hope, yet again, to be quit of here. The first concerned a young man who had yanked every hair from his body, one by one, and so was urged to see a psychiatrist until he was diagnosed with the fatal brain tumor that had obviously been the trouble all along. My father took no interest in what the poor man had to say to the psychiatrist but wondered only
How long would that take, do you think, to pull out every hair?
The second concerned an experiment in hygiene conducted at a “famous university,” in which volunteers’ anuses were painted in the morning with a special dye, and then a fancy blue light was shone on these subjects at day’s end, revealing their hands and clothes and faces to be absolutely awash in fecal matter. What my father wanted to know was
Can you imagine if that was your job—to paint all those assholes?

In time, thanks to his no-less-indelicate ministrations, I had tales of my own to tell. (
SON
:
Girl I know just tried to remove her eye with a butter knife
.
FATHER
:
Which?
SON
:
Girl by the name of
____.
FATHER
:
No—which eye?
Your
TRUE COUNTRY SON
would have known to say, in that jam,
Well, she only ever had the one
.) Yet I must admit to being less clear on my
point than he ever seemed to be on his. Long before I had reached my maturity I understood that the debate between town human and country human was as nothing compared with the debate between settled human and nomad. My father had chosen a stupid way to settle, is all, and then had spent the rest of his life on the trivial matter of how his children would choose to settle after him.

Those chickens, on the other hand, might well have been nomads. For all I knew, their efforts at the flap had been predicated not on a desire to flee the kingsnake at all (for that was what he was called now, suddenly, in his martyrdom, “kingsnake,” who had clearly, and selflessly, warded off our destruction for years by eating the rats (
That poison doesn’t really work; it just makes them angrier
), and scattering your more worrisome serpents (
The next thing you’ll see, believe me, is two copperheads
), and patrolling the crops (
It’ll be up to the dogs this summer, and you, to keep the deer out of the corn
), and guarding (was he talking about the deer again? or did he mean from mere humans?) those blackberry bushes not legally even on our property) but on an understandable wish to seek no place to begin with, and each place besides, and to map out by careful claw every nuance of their continent, and cluck forth its awful song, and claim an ownership over all and Nunavut, though perhaps I am getting ahead of myself here.

I paid little mind to the chickens after I had demised that snake to their roof, beyond feeding them, when I thought of it, and stealing their fetuses for the family to eat. Weeks went by before it finally occurred to me that by killing their killer I had done nothing to improve the cock-to-hen ratio in the coop yard, and had conceived of no plan, beyond beheading the rooster (who had already been granted two stays for crimes he did not commit, and was I country enough, really, to insist that he be executed anyway?), by which to lessen what insults a hen might receive beneath wings I no longer took much pleasure in
grooming. Occasionally, of a weekend, I would hear a squawk, and would make my way back to the coop, there to discover a chick being disabused of the notion that those blue skies above were an apt metaphor where she was concerned, and I would slap the cock off her, and stand watch for a while, and quickly grow bored. To be blunt, these birds seemed less panicked, and so less banded together, and so of less interest to me.