by Ben Metcalf
Is it possible
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.
Redemption
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.
My father’s axe
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.
BOOK SEVEN
King
Assumption
Copperhead
No truths here
Compass rose
They leapt in pairs
Pace/Eggs
A note on the text
A note on the people
A note on the dogs
King
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: Gir
l 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.
Still and all, I would surely have said something at dinner one night about how we needed more hens, and been told that there were not funds enough on hand for that, and argued, despite a dispassion any town or country fool could pick up on, that there was clearly enough corn on hand to make a trade, and that even chickens deserved better than the septic death this ignorance condemned them to (and been told that I was exaggerating again, and agreed that I did have that tendency, and admitted that the hens seemed oddly less bothered by their sores this time around), had I not been preoccupied just then with the suppurative wound my right foot had recently sustained, in an increasingly common moment of distraction, from that same axe I had used to slay, and so rob us all of, the king.
Assumption
Do I lie here? It is possible, even likely, that I received my wound the spring previous, and so had healed, at least in the physical sense, by the time I betrayed all those chickens? Or had I yet to suffer this injury, and so possess no real excuse for my failure to stand between these birds and their oblivion? What else might I lie about here, or remember wrongly, which is anyway the same thing?
I recall that the trucks began to turn over around this time, one after the other, on the perfectly negotiable curve in front of our house, the inevitably drunken pilots inside seeking comfort in our grass and, where they could make it, the room off the side porch, while we called the volunteer rescue squad, and said who we were, and had no need to say more. Yet the apotheosis of these wrecks, as I recall just as clearly, was when an entire dump truck of state-bought sand tipped over in that very spot, and the stupefied driver climbed out the side window/sunroof, and we laughed and laughed because my sister had made a crack about how we now owned beachfront property, and that would have happened during the Ice, and the Ice had long receded by the time of the chickens.
These were the days as well of hunters parking pickups along the ditch to the north of our land, and setting up lawnchairs and coolers in the truck beds while the short straw took the hounds around back, behind those woods that hid our father’s unpurchased pond, and said something sad into a walkie-talkie, after which a whistle was blown to summon the dogs (our own being tied up on these occasions and evincing a touchingly desperate fascination with the scene), who then ran happily through the trees toward their masters, flushing does and fawns out into the field that fronted the road, all of whom were then laid low, along with the occasional dog, by gunmen who never raised, that I saw, one hemisphere of ass up out of those sagging lawnchairs.
But that also would have been in the winter months, and was too common a sight anyway for even a selective memory to assign to a particular year, let alone to a short span of months. And the Assumption (or that particular Holy Night I most associate with this period, when my faith and fervor were at their hormonal apices, and my unsanctioned communion with the land was at its most perilous height, and I had become humble where the land had wanted me humble, and smug where the land had wanted me smug, and abstemious where the land had wanted me abstemious, and profligate where the land had wanted me profligate, and I trusted more in Bible than in bile, though these were often enough the same thing): When did that occur? when exactly?
I know by my calendar that The Mother of God is sucked up into heaven each year on August 15, nine days shy of my birthday, except that it felt no worse than spring when those chickens (and I) suffered as they (and I) did, and we drove (short a disintegrating father) along the cool road to the west one starry night, and up the hill that held the hamlet, so as to park in the gravel parking lot and be astonished by the glow of candles stuck into the ground and shielded from the wind by white paper bags, which intrigue lit our path to the church door, where we were met and handed candles of our own, with doilies around them to catch the wax, so that we might illuminate by flicker the glorious cavern within.
Do I fabricate now what I felt then, with that soft candle in my hardened hand, as I climbed (briskly? painfully?) the stairs to the choir loft, where I knew there still to be seats, and looked up into the rafters above, and down onto the congregation below, and felt the Holy Ghost surge into me where before It had merely licked at my sides? Did I not wonder then why It had done neither that foggy morning when I went out to chop wood, and paid too little attention to my task, and let the axe glance off the rounded barkside of an already split segment and lodge, the far corner of the blade, so neatly in my shoe? Did I not stare down at where the axe had entered, near the tip, and pull on the handle and feel, admittedly, a tug but no pain? Did I not toss my implement aside, and kneel down to examine that tear in the upper? (Was this a boot? Was it a slipper? A boot, surely, but can that matter now, since said boot was not availed of a perfectly affordable steel toe?) Did I not pull the hole apart and look down into it, and was I not at once struck in the face by a warm geyser of my own blood?
I hopped up to the house then, and screamed to my brother that I had murdered myself, and this formerly prophetic being, who was by this point merely magical, and blessed with the knowledge that no matter what happened to the rest of us he and his seed would find a way to survive (which, I agree, is magic enough), responded that he was “busy” watching television. (should I call him today (he is bless’d still!) and ask which program? Should I? I should call him.) In time he left Good Morning America and found me in the bathtub, which was by then painted red, to match my eyes, the second toe on my right foot split brutally from pristine nail to half-cloven metatarsal. “Wrap that up in something,” he said, “and I’ll drive you in.” I thought he meant to Richmond, but he meant only to the county clin
ic, where a medic numbed my toe, and reconstituted the spread-out knuckle, and sewed the little piggy back up while my disinterested savior looked on.
I spent the next two months, as was ordered, with my foot elevated and kept dry, and we watched, late at night, The Benny Hill Show and, in the afternoons, General Hospital and, where we could get it to come in, Soccer Made in Germany. We also watched, because our Anglophilic mother always insisted, Breakfast at Wimbledon. (Vitas Gerulaitis! Or had he asphyxiated by then? And why was the breakfast not “made” at Wimbledon, as opposed to the soccer, in Germany? Might not this simple difference account for at least two world wars?) It was during this period, so late in our life together, that I learned my mother was the absolute best person in the world to watch television with. I have not encountered her equal since, and I expect I never will. Her comments hugged and enhanced the words from the set, and the gestures on it, and never once ran over either, and we watched all of Brideshead Revisited together (I suppose I could look up now when that first aired in Virginia, and be done with this charade of not knowing, except that I refuse to cheat where I might not appreciate the answer) while she explained, by her side notes, and her own delicate gestures toward the screen, and those throaty little laughs, what subtexts even a literate country boy (who had himself, quite recently in her memory, walked around with a teddy bear in his arms, and had just now done a ridiculous injury to his foot that demanded he be coddled and looked after, though our family could not afford to put up with that for as long as the Flytes) might miss out on: being, primarily, homosexuality among “creative” young types, which, she made it comfortably clear, she was open to having a frank and nonjudgmental discussion about, though how does one confess to one’s mother that one wishes she had been special enough to produce something so interesting as a homosexual, one truly does, but this angel had passed over her, and her boy was but a boy, interested in homosexuality, as was Waugh (and as was she, if she only stopped to think about it), largely for its value as a literary trope (for which see the sixth through the eighth parts of my third attempt to end all this), and so was unable to grant her recourse to that convenient sin by which she might believably make her protagonist long for redemption via the joyous sacrifice of natural desire that was, and remains, her Catholic Church.