So long as Louis the rhinoceros survived, Paul felt he could himself continue. He dreamed of the pair of them living together in some peaceful, rural landscape. He told Louis of these dreams and it seemed to him that Louis listened very carefully. They should have no worries, there would be no threat, those days would not be hungry days anymore. But by then, it could no longer be denied, there was something very wrong with Louis. Paul’s poor friend was beginning to have foot problems. A sloughing of his hooves, they had a certain softness and flakiness about them, bits hung off. Louis no longer made the deep singing well sound, he barked rather, and made hoarse squeaks that could be heard from one end of the boulevard to the other, from the Temple to the remains of the Bastille, very nearly demolished. “I am,” said Paul, before that building, holding his tummy, “a ruined castle myself.”
At night back in his room at the end of the day he took off his own shoes and regarded his own feet, he stroked them and carefully washed them in some vinegar, all the time thinking of Louis.
On the day when King Louis XVI, grandson to the king who refused a second rhinoceros, was apprehended at a small village called Varennes, attempting to flee the country, Paul detected swellings on Louis’s forelegs and neck.
Then there were cannons firing at the Tuileries Palace and people shot in the gardens and the palace stormed, and people hacked people to morsels, screaming servants plunged from high floors. In the morning there were thick clouds of flies.
Then there were skin ulcers. Small blisters around Louis’s eyes and ears, under his belly also. Flies in his pen too. Paul looked into one of the rhinoceros’s eyes, Louis was not smiling now but appeared to have a fog about him, he wondered what his friend was thinking, the beast was such a mystery in those days, so hard to read.
By the time France had declared war against Austria, and the king and his family had been imprisoned in the Temple, just a few minutes’ walk from the rhino’s pen, Paul noted with distress that Louis had difficulty breathing. Meanwhile Paul’s own body was changing, it reduced, it thinned out, his skin hung loose in places, there were many more wrinkles than before, there were stretch marks all about him. He had more skin than he needed. But despite it all, despite the dangerous times, and the deaths that occurred almost daily on the streets, Paul was in those days healthier than he had been before. No one came to visit him in his room anymore, he was forced to abandon it, he cried at leaving the peacocks on the paper. He rented a room of sparse, ordinary furniture from a family on the Rue du Bac, it had plain whitewashed walls, but every day, without fail, he took the journey across the river to see his friend on the boulevard.
With this new family, Paul Butterbrodt entered a period of comparative domestic happiness. The family treated him as any other human creature and made no fuss. At first he was offended, but in time he grew used to it. The family were haberdashers and had found in those new days a business making tricolor cockades. From time to time Paul was invited to earn a little money, or reduce his rent, by working beside them. In the family there was a maiden aunt, a root of a woman in her late thirties with some hair on her upper lip and deep, dark eyes. There were many moles on her skin. She sat next to Paul while he worked on the ribbons, she liked to listen to the stories of his tour around European cities, such stories as other members of the family called unpatriotic. She would be entranced by his description of the sweet things his parents had made, the rest of the family warned against such subjects and even, when Paul insisted on sharing these histories, shouted and threatened to report him. The maiden aunt, Charlotte she was called, said she would take it upon herself to make Paul a good citizen. They sometimes sat together on a bench by the Île Saint-Louis looking at the Seine, Charlotte tutoring Paul on what was appropriate.
Everyday she said to him, “Citizen Butterbrodt, what are you thinking now?”
She worried for him and told him so, she gave him extra food. The extra food that she gave him was in fact her own meager rations, she was starving herself for Paul. That extra food Paul in his turn brought to Louis.
Charlotte had always been the dependable person in the family. She was the one who looked after her parents when they became ill and useless, she was the one who never asked for anything for herself but kept quiet and serious and practical. The rest of the family came to Charlotte not with their secrets, never with their longings, but when they wanted something fixed, or when they had an illness, or when they had run out of money. She perhaps kept her money close to herself, hoarded it a little, but who could blame her, how else could she protect herself when the ailing elderly years came? No, if she was a little tight, she could hardly be blamed for that. Charlotte was simply Charlotte, a woman of no surprises, who had over the thirty-seven years of her life grown a little strange looking. A little bumpy here, a little hairy where hair did not generally grow on females, along the jaw line, on the upper lip, down her arms, private, soft hairs of a long-endured loneliness. She was just Charlotte, she never required thinking of very much, she took up little space. The world could change, France could turn itself upside down, but Charlotte, save for a little hair growth, or a sprouting of moles, would always remain Charlotte. Only then, quite suddenly, she wasn’t. There was in the house this newer Charlotte, louder than before, asking for things, giving opinions. Even demanding. Ever since the new tenant had come to the house, Charlotte had become difficult. She had moods that she had never had before, she laughed. The other members of her family did not recall hearing that laugh before, what an oddly alarming noise it was, at first they could not tell where it was coming from. She cried, this new Charlotte, the old Charlotte did not cry, Charlotte was a dry husk, but there she was shedding wetness. Charlotte, in late 1791, had become a little moist.
Charlotte was often now not at her desk or in her tiny room, often she went out. She spent money. She went out with Paul Butterbrodt, sometimes even when there was much work to be done. Once, at her insistence, she had gone with Paul to visit the rhinoceros. Paul was very uncomfortable at the idea and put off the day as long as he could, but the woman would not let the matter drop. So she came along. Barely noticeably, she shook her head at Louis, Paul supposed she wanted to tidy him up, but she was thinking, “What a thing to love. That creature, so far from home, is ridiculous on Paris streets. It will die soon, surely it will die soon, for such a thing cannot live long, and then I will comfort him.”
Louis in his turn was very restless, he struck the floor with his hurting hooves, he stayed in the corner, and would not be encouraged out of it. No, the visit had not been a success. Paul would not take her along another time, though she often asked, he did not like her sitting with Louis, it was not right, she did not belong there. So Charlotte stayed home and waited for him. Whenever Paul came back from Louis, Charlotte always found him distant and moody. Only after an hour or two did his looks soften, then, with her gentle encouragement, he might tell her again the story of his life, and, on rare miraculous moments, he might pick up her creased clawlike hand and pat it, with great and undoubted fondness. Once, oh once, he even kissed it. Paul Butterbrodt considered, looking at this gnawn woman, that if his hunger were to take human shape, and he felt the pain to be a person in its own right, then this woman was what his hunger should look like. And, indeed, sitting next to her he did feel a little fuller.
Throughout December of 1792 Paul, still feeding the unhappy creature, noted in his friend a terrible increased buildup of oral plaque. Struggling to help in any way he could, he gave Louis his own bed blankets, and, in turn, Charlotte gave Paul one of hers. On the twenty-first of January, 1793, while so many people had congregated on the Place de la Révolution, formerly the Place Louis XV, while the Rue Saint-Antoine was lined with soldiers, while drums were beaten, when suddenly there came a great deafening cheer, a roar that sounded as if it were made by some single creature of immense proportions bellowing at the earth, Paul was with Louis. Paul heard the crowd’s exclamation at the beheading of Louis XVI while he sat in
tears not for the king, but for his ungulate friend, who in reaction to the unusual wave of noise passed a profuse and watery diarrhea.
There followed a period of terrible respiratory problems, the sound of Louis’s labored breathing was hard for Paul to bear, and then Charlotte waited long hours for Paul to come home. Paul too was suffering from a cold, he let his own nose drip, he did not look after himself, Charlotte often told him so, wrapping her shawl around his neck. The great creature on the boulevard, its skin hanging down, seemed to be suffocating under its own weight.
On the thirtieth of July, 1793, Paul Butterbrodt early in the afternoon lumbered happily off to the boulevard, it was a pleasant sunny day, with pollen in the air, he went as usual to his greatest friend in the world. But his friend was not there. He found only traces about the pen, thick puddles in the straw. A portion of the pen’s fencing was badly dented. There was a terrible new smell.
Louis’s keeper, no longer so pleasant smelling in those days, was not present, in fact he was getting himself considerably drunk at Café Robert around the corner and would not return to his property until he was certain that Paul was no longer there. A stable boy had been left all on his own to deliver the news.
“Where’s Louis?” Paul asked.
“He’s gone, Citizen.”
“When will he be back?”
“He shan’t be, Citizen.”
“I must go to him. Tell me, quickly now, where he is? Is he very ill? Oh, poor Louis!”
“Well, he’s not well, Citizen. I’m afraid, no, he’s not.”
“But where is he, boy?”
“He’s all over the place, Citizen. Poor fellow. He’s not in one location, but, sorry to say, many. He’s come apart.”
“Speak plainly, oh tell me! Tell me!”
“I hate to tell you, but I fear I must be the one, I must do it, they said. I was given extra for it, though I’d just the same not have the food. He’s dead, sir, all dead. This morning it happened. Just here. They were quick about it, but he is big, and not easy to get to. That skin is very thick.”
“LOUIS!”
“I am so sorry, sir. I am.”
“LOUIS! LOUIS!”
“Please sit down, sir, gather yourself. You’ve had a shock.”
“LOUIS! LOUIS! LOUIS!”
“You are so miserable, aren’t you?”
“It is all too much to bear! Too much altogether!”
“We knew you’d take it bad.”
“Oh! God!”
“Steady, steady!”
“I am burst.”
“Please, please now, it had to be done.”
“Had to? Had to? Why did it have to?”
“He wasn’t making any money.”
“Money! Oh! Money!”
“He was costing, you see, rather than making.”
“Where, please, I beg you, tell me, where is he now?”
“I was trying to say before. He’s, how to put it, not all together. He’s in different places. He’s been sold, sir, to different people. Believe me, sir, I am sorry. Meat, sir.”
“MEAT!”
“They’re calling it horse, sir. I should’ve said.”
Paul, trying to catch his breath, reading the signs properly in the soiled hay now, looking with hopeless eyes, understanding the smears, reading the history in all the mess, could be heard wailing up and down the Boulevard du Temple, bawling, inconsolable. Huge bellowing sounds he made, more animal than human. He quietened after a while and sat on one of the old boulevard benches and would not be distracted by anyone, he just sat there in a stupor, looking ahead vaguely. After a half hour he stood up, and proceeded to march up and down the boulevard, repeating the same sentence over and over.
“Louis!” he cried. “Louis! Louis!”
Paul shouted his message, pausing only to fill his great lungs. People tried to shut him up, he wouldn’t even look at them, he marched on, pounding the boulevard floor.
“Louis! Louis! Louis!”
Then everyone left him alone. Only Charlotte, who had been fetched by the stable boy, wept beside him, begging him to come home. He shrugged her off, to her entreaties he only replied, “Louis! Louis! Louis!”
They arrested him, only when Paul’s wrists had been bound did he quieten a little. They took him to the prison of La Force, and there, until his trial and even until he was put on the slide beneath the guillotine blade, he was heard muttering to himself only ever the same word over and over. When he saw among the crowd a wraith of a woman, with moles and some little hairs on her top lip, a skeleton in a greasy dress, tears in her eyes, just before the final moment, he said only, “Louis. Louis. Louis.”
When it was over, and the crowd dispersed, the woman stayed there, she stayed through the day, seemingly unable to move, people knocked into her, she did not appear to feel them. At last from deep inside her came a sound she had never made before, nor one she would ever make again. A strange broken scratch of a noise.
Happy Chicken 1942–1944: A Memoir
Joyce Carol Oates
I WAS HER PET CHICKEN. I was Happy Chicken.
Of all the chickens on the little farm on the Millersport Highway, in the northern edge of Erie County in western New York State in that long-ago time in the early 1940s, just one was Happy Chicken, who was the curly-haired little girl’s pet chicken.
The little girl was urged to think that she’d been the first to call me Happy Chicken. In fact, this had to have been one of the adults and probably the Mother.
Probably too it was the Mother, and not the little girl, who’d been the first to discover that of all the chickens, I was the only one who came eagerly clucking to the little girl as if to say hello.
Oh look! It’s Happy Chicken coming to say hello.
The little girl and the little girl’s mother laughed in delight that, without being called, I would peck in the dirt around the little girl’s feet and I would seem to bow when my back was lightly stroked as a dog or a cat might seem to bow when petted.
The little girl loved it, my feathers were soft. Not scratchy and smelly like the feathers of the other, older chickens.
The little girl loved hearing my soft, querying clucks.
Early in the morning the little girl ran outside.
Happy! Happy Chicken! the little girl cried through small cupped hands.
And there I came running! Out of the shadowy barn, or out of the bushes, or from somewhere in the barnyard amidst other, ordinary dark-red-feathered chickens. A flutter of feathers, cluck-cluck-cluck lifting in a bright staccato Here I am! I am Happy Chicken!
The Grandfather shook his head in disbelief. Never saw anything like this—Damn little chicken thinks he’s a dog.
It was a sign of how special Happy Chicken was, the family referred to me as he. As if I were not a mere hen among many, a brainless egg layer like the others, but a lively little boy-chicken.
For the others were just ordinary hens and scarcely distinguishable from one another unless you looked closely at them, which no one would do (except the Grandmother, who examined hens suspected of being “sickly”).
Truly I was Happy Chicken! Truly, there was no other chicken like me.
My red-gleaming feathers bristled and shone more brightly than the feathers of the hens because I didn’t roll in the dust as frequently as they did, in their (mostly futile) effort to rid themselves of mites. It wasn’t just that Happy Chicken was young (for there were other chickens as young as I was, hatched from eggs within the year) but I was also far more intelligent, and more handsome; your eye was drawn to me, and only to me, out of the flock; for you could see from the special glow in my eyes and the way in which I came running before the little girl called me that I was a very special little chicken.
The yard between the barn and the farmhouse was cratered with shallow indentations in which chickens rolled and fluttered their wings like large demented birds who’d lost the ability to fly. Sometimes as many as a dozen chickens would be roll
ing in the dirt at the same time as in a bizarre coordinated modern dance; but the chickens were not coordinated and indeed took little heed of one another except, from time to time, to lash out with a petulant peck and an irritated cluck. When not rolling in the dirt (and in their own black, liquidy droppings), these chickens spent their time jabbing beaks into the dirt in search of grubs, bugs. Stray seeds left over from feeding time, bits of rotted fruit. Their happiness was not the happiness of Happy Chicken but a very dim kind of happiness, for a chicken’s brain is hardly the size of a pea; what else can you expect? This was why Happy Chicken—that is, I—was such a surprise to the family, and such a delight.
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