Heywood Fetcher

by W.H. Harrod

  ~A Tale of Two Chickens

  Having two stories about chickens lingering amongst Heywood’s shrinking brain cells was in no way a comfort to him. Since those stories survived the test of time, they have a right to see the light of day just as much as the other stories.

  Heywood’s reluctance to revisit the incidents related to feathered fowl food providers might be due to the violence factor surrounding this so-called domesticated branch of animal husbandry. To start with, there is nothing domestic about it at all, and as the story progresses, the readers will begin to understand.

  A little background first, though. Heywood could not recall a single blue collar household, residing within a half mile of the area of the small country town he lived in, not having chickens. If you didn’t raise chickens that usually meant your family enjoyed a level of income that allowed you to purchase store-bought eggs, as well as chickens already cleaned and dressed. Even the poorest of families could manage to raise a couple of chickens. The only real difference about raising them in town was you had to have a fenced yard or at least a fenced enclosure. They would eat just about anything: table scraps, bugs, grass, earthworms, slugs, any kind of old fruit and berries. With but a half dozen laying hens, a family could have all the eggs they needed, and when the hens finally did quit laying you fried them in a skillet for dinner - that being the midday meal and not as city folk claim the evening meal which every country boy knows is supper.

  Unfortunately, Heywood’s mom ignored his and nearly everyone’s warning that keeping a rooster around was both unnecessary and counterproductive if you ever expected to be able to sleep in on the weekends. In Heywood’s opinion, there was nothing ruder than being awakened by a testosterone boosted rooster at sunrise on a morning one didn’t have to get up and go to school. Heywood personally made it a point to stay close to home one earlier summer weekend morning to watch his dad take a hatchet and dispatch one particularly disagreeable feathered menace. That rooster must have lived for that special moment at the very beginning of the day when Mr. Sun began to show signs of rising in the eastern sky. Heywood recalled being so repeatedly traumatized by this creature’s pathetic rendition of the very simple refrain, cocka-doodle-do, that he often lay awake dreading the inevitable screech he knew was forthcoming. Schrock-cra-cra-bra-brooble-broo, he swore, is what that stupid rooster shrieked every single morning. He got so desperate that he hung out by the chicken pen mimicking, over and again, what he considered to be the correct version of the only thing that stupid bird had to say, hoping the bird would take the hint and do it right. Somehow, this little incident got back to the grade school principal who called him in to inquire if he had finally gone completely nuts. They could say things like that back then. The principal seemed somewhat relieved when Heywood assured him he had no delusions of actually being a rooster and was only trying to teach the rude, slow-witted creature how to do his job.

  It seemed, according to most of the so-called professional clinicians Heywood ended up talking to during his youth that he might be in possession of what medical professionals now call an “attention deficit disorder.” Back then the old codgers that came to town every Wednesday to park their dusty pickups around the courthouse square to sell produce and eggs plus buy bootleg whiskey would simply say, “That boy’s different.” Heywood expected that by giving it an official name, “attention deficit disorder,” doctors could charge a lot more money to tell a parent their kid had it.

  Keeping the preceding paragraph in mind, it should not be that difficult for the readers to develop some level of understanding as to why it became necessary, in Heywood’s mind at least, to do what he did. What he did, Heywood always argued, was not entirely his fault or of his own design. He was certainly complicit. He’d admit that. But there were others to blame. Heywood had a history that was widely known in the community, and adults had a pretty good idea of how he would respond to various stimuli. On one particular occasion the stimuli was a brand new Red Rider BB gun. Heywood admitted it was not an overnight decision on the part of the adult component of his family to finally shut him up after he lobbied for at least a couple of years to have Santa Claus deliver into his little hands the cause of so much potential mayhem. But they did. And what he did then was go wild game hunting.

  Fortunately, being a kid with such a vivid imagination, he didn’t have to go far to locate all the big game he needed. In fact, he only needed to look as far as the chicken pen. To anyone else the inhabitants of the pen were mere chickens, but to Heywood they were “lions, tigers, and bears.” But he had to play it cool for a while. He did all the usual stuff first, like shooting cans, tulips and anything else that bloomed, a big noisy piece of tin, even train boxcars that went past his house a couple of times a day. Then one day his parents must have had a memory lapse and left him home alone while they went to buy groceries.

  As Heywood later recalled, he took all of three minutes to decide on putting a ladder up to the side of the garage so he could climb on top of it to get a clear view of his planned target area - the chicken pen. It was still early in the day which meant the tiles on the roof were not yet scalding hot. He was smart enough to find some long pants as he had gotten his knees skinned up real good the last time he got up on the roof to scout out an idea that was finally going to become a reality.

  Heywood checked around as soon as he got on the roof to see if anyone had spotted him. He couldn’t trust the nosey neighbors as they apparently had some kind of neighborhood warning system operating of late. Seems the entire neighborhood believed it was now to their advantage to pass along reports on Heywood’s whereabouts whenever he went outside of the house, for any reason. If he actually left the yard, some kind of emergency signal system made sure all the neighbors knew about it immediately. A bit much if you asked Heywood which they never did, of course. Those crazy people acted as if he wandered about with a gun, maybe a gun exactly like the gun he held in his hands right then?

  Heywood scanned the entire neighborhood from his lofty rooftop perch and saw not a single individual out and about to set off an alarm announcing the nutty kid they all feared was afoot and actually carried what looked to be a firearm. He later recalled the relief he felt as he turned his attention to the proposed task at hand - to add some weight to that stupid rooster’s rear end in the form of BBs, and he had a lot of BBs to make sure he got the job done.

  Moving over to the side of the garage roof that sloped down towards the chicken pen, or what Heywood considered enemy territory, he quickly espied the targeted varmint. His pulse quickened as thoughts of what awaited his long time tormenter raced through his mind. Heywood had visions of a certain rooster doing a dance as he loaded his rear end with BBs. Later he officially recognized that particular moment as his first truly spiritual experience.

  The first shot went way wide. He must have been so engrossed in his mind’s image of a particular rooster’s eyes popping out as one of the tiny bronze pellets penetrated his feathers and lodged itself into his back side that he jerked the trigger. Not a single bird paid the slightest attention to the sound of Heywood’s trusty Red Rider’s first sorry attempt. He knew he needed to calm down and get relaxed before expending the next BB. That’s just what he did. He took a couple of deep breaths, slowly raised the weapon, took aim at the widest part of his target’s posterior, and squeezed the trigger ever so slowly.

  Glory be! Heywood whispered, mimicking his uncle, the preacher’s favorite saying. All of the long months of built-up resentment towards a single recalcitrant rooster fled Heywood’s consciousness. He was free! That stupid rooster must have jumped six feet in the air, and Heywood caused it. Soon, all those inglorious moments he’d experienced as the foil of that feathered fiend would be but a bad memory. He slowly cocked his newest and now most trusted friend a third time making sure he did nothing to cause his scampering-around-in-circles adversary to move out of the target area. He aimed Old Reliable, that being the name Heywood gave his BB gun during the mere s
econds that had transpired since the amazing initial event, looking only at the widest part of his target’s posterior. This time there was no chance of him blowing the shot. Slowly he squeezed the trigger.

  Heywood only wished he could find the words to convey the elation he experienced as his favorite target launched itself straight upwards while shrieking some kind of rooster SOS plea for help. That’s when Heywood decided to take a minute to reflect on his good fortune. Maybe there is a God after all, he told himself. Maybe he had been too hasty in warding off his uncle’s plea to go with him to the church and assure the salvation of his mortal soul. The moment of magnanimity was brief for his favorite target ran through the chicken door his dad had cut in the side of the henhouse and disappeared from view.

  Now what was he to do? Heywood had at least another hundred BBs in his pocket to use on that rooster’s back side. He couldn’t open the henhouse door and fire away at a cornered rooster. That wouldn’t be the sporting way. The critter had to have at least some room to dodge his relentless BB attack. He had a sure enough quandary on his hands.

  Heywood sat there atop the garage roof gazing down expectantly towards the small chicken pen, still not sure how to proceed. If he remained on the roof much longer he risked being discovered by his parents upon their return from the grocery store. If they found him there with his Red Rider, he would be in a real pickle. He had to think of something fast. He turned his attention to the remaining feathered fowl presently loitering down below in the pen. It took less than twenty minutes, at most, for Heywood to empty his entire reservoir of BBs into the rear ends of every chicken dumb enough to stay out in the open. His heart was all aflutter as he hurriedly descended from the roof after having finished his mission. This had been a very successful safari.

  During the days that followed, Heywood practically gloated in private at his coup. He had gotten away with the chicken hunting expedition. He did not intend to act rashly and repeat his earlier triumph too soon. He would be the soul of patience. If he did it right, he could expect to go on future feathered-fowl safaris long into the future.

  But alas, things did not go exactly as he hoped. As a matter of fact, things went really, really bad within a couple of weeks. He didn’t think his little feathered fowl hunting plan far enough into the future. Afterwards, it was easy to recognize his shortsightedness. He should have recalled that his mom periodically chose a couple of hens that were no longer contributing to the production of eggs as unwilling participants in her biweekly Sunday skillet fried chicken dinner main course. Imagine her surprise after plucking off the feathers and finding the chickens’ backsides embedded with multiple BB pellets.

  Heywood long afterwards could still recall the shriek she let out for the whole neighborhood to hear. He also recalled with much trepidation her next words, “Heywood, you come in this house right now!”

  What was he to do? He was busted. His only recourse was to walk inside and take the punishment like a man. And that’s what he did.

  It was a frightened and penitence-seeking child that presented himself to his angry mother that long ago day. Heywood knew what was in store for him. His mother, as usual, would order him to stay right where he was while she went outdoors to break a small limb off of one of the several trees that surrounded their house. Then she would come back inside to give him several good (and exceedingly painful) whacks on the back of his bare legs as he hopped up and down, restrained only by her firm grip upon the collar of his shirt.

  Then, when she felt satisfied her son had surely learned his lesson, she would let go to watch Heywood, screeching in agony, run outside to finish his loud and hopefully convincing crying. Only this time it didn’t go off as usual. Heywood, anticipating the remote possibility of this particular event transpiring, and being what he considered an industrious young man, days earlier took a stepladder and went around the entire house cutting off every low hanging limb he suspected she would try to break off and use as a switch. Heywood counted four complete circuits made by a desperate and befuddled arm flailing, fire-breathing woman seeking out one of the, heretofore, plentiful small limbs she had always before found so easily. Finally she stopped running, revealing a helpless woman dismayed at not being able to find her usual implement of torture - the likes of which had always been so readily available before.

  What happened next, Heywood, unfortunately, had not anticipated. Her eyes opened wide as the reason for her present dilemma became apparent. “Heywood!” she screamed as she hurriedly made her reentry into the house on her way to the bedroom seeking out a suitable replacement to allow her to go forward with her plan to beat his backside until he wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week. It didn’t require a genius to figure out what she would be looking for in the master bedroom, the bedroom where his father kept all of his very large and menacing looking belts. Heywood’s plan had failed and he was out of there.

  Heywood didn’t stop running until he was a quarter mile away at the meeting place where most of the kids in the area congregated to participate in their daily hijinks. A big walnut tree beside a small creek with a deep hole where water pooled throughout most of the summer marked the spot. Heywood stayed there for the rest of the day swearing to himself that he was never going back home knowing, for sure, the severest form of punishment would be waiting. It started to get dark in the woods, and Heywood was getting pretty hungry. Plus, he didn’t think he’d ever really totally discounted Skeeter Sadler’s tale about him being abducted by aliens at this very site so they could suck out part of his brain to get information to help plan an invasion. Also, his dad would probably be home by then, so he surely wouldn’t let his mom kill him, he figured.

  It’s amazing how a mom’s attitude can change after it gets dark and a child is nowhere to be found. That’s what Heywood learned that day when he quietly slipped back into the well-lit home to find his mom worried sick and awaiting his return. She displayed none of the earlier anger. That had disappeared as soon as his whereabouts could not be determined. Heywood knew he had amazingly dodged a very big butt whipping. Unfortunately, his dad, who returned home at about the same time from having looked the town over trying to find Heywood, caused Heywood to wish his mom had gotten hold of him first after all. His dad didn’t waste time going in search of low hanging limbs as he had a big wide belt on his person. Every time that belt made contact with Heywood’s rear end, he swore out loud that he would never again shoot the chickens, cut off tree limbs, get up on the garage roof to shoot or throw things at anything or anybody, refuse to go to church, or tell the whole town how his aunt, who was also the wife of his nemesis, the evangelical preacher who wanted to save him from the devil, was a vicious, neck wringing, chicken murderer.

  This brings up the second chicken story. It is one thing to fill a chicken’s rear end with lead, but it’s another thing to murder them. On those occasions when various, so-called professionals invited Heywood into their offices for the purpose of inquiring into the nature of his questionable cogitation processes, he felt compelled to relate to them specific crimes that he had repeatedly witnessed that very possibly altered his ability to assimilate data rationally. Namely, his aunt’s blatant disregard for the feeling of the witnesses of her all too regular murderous raids upon the flocks of free ranging chickens she always kept on the farm. Heywood knew of what he spoke as he saw it firsthand. To this day he retained harrowing visions of headless, bleeding chickens running amongst screaming children as they scampered out of the way. His aunt didn’t just murder a single chicken. She would appear, seemingly from out of nowhere, grabbing unsuspecting chickens and ripping off their heads with her bare hands, leaving them to run amongst the kids flapping their wings wildly while the blood gushed forth from the holes where their little innocent heads used to be. What kind of lesson did that impart to children who only wanted to run around the yard gleefully playing a game of tag? What if one of his stupid cousins, who also witnessed the frequent chicken massacres, decided that ripping hea
ds off of little kids would be more fun than tagging? Heywood knew it bothered him. There were a couple of cousins that probably could have done it, too.

  Needless to say, Heywood’s uncle, the slow-footed bible thumper who only wanted what he said was the best for Heywood, was down on his knees praying for his sinful and simple minded nephew to see the light, lest he otherwise be consigned to purgatory. He usually ended his short talks with Heywood by asking him if he wanted to go to heaven.

  Heywood told him that certainly not for the next hundred years or so and maybe never if whoever was in charge kept allowing people to kill each other in all those nasty wars or die for lack of food, catch diseases that had no cures or even let people like his aunt rip chickens’ heads off in front of little kids. This usually caused the reverend to pray even louder. Heywood never took personal offense at his uncle’s frequent pleas for the salvation of his slow-witted sinful nephew’s soul. His uncle was a good and, Heywood believed, a well-intended man. Heywood had already determined at an early date that a kid was going to need some luck to make a go of it in this crazy world. And if, in fact, his uncle had the ear of the creator of the universe, then by all means go ahead and put in a good word for one of his very curious and often confused children.

  What lessons did Heywood learn from these two seminal events relating to feathered fowl? That’s easy. Always shoot the neighbors’ chickens and never go to your aunt’s house if you’re wearing feathers because she might rip your head off and leave you flopping around in the yard.