1. First Love
I was a bright young cock when I first met the terrible
dark eyes of my true love.
I was a Rock Red, the offspring of a Rhode Island
Red cock and a Barred Plymouth Rock hen. I had, from my mother,
the Rock’s salt-and-pepper body. From my father, I had the
Red’s chestnut hackles, which were the huffy feathers around
my neck, and black sickles, which were the long plumes arcing high
of my rear. I was a river of plumage: autumn-red neckfeathers flowing
down into the rough waters of spotted bodyfeathers ending in a waterfall
of black sickles. I wasn’t the usual Rock Red coloring, but
there were so many crossbreeds in our history that my parents could
not have been pure. We could not have known what flowers crosspollinated
with what weeds in our genealogical garden, and I could not have
cared.
When I was young, I had a seven-point comb, red
as a bruise, and a healthy double burn of wattles. Wings clipped,
I spent my days on fencetops. I lived on a small farm in whose coop
I had been born, to whose narrow perches I held fast, and beyond
whose borders I wanted, impossibly, to fly. I let my thoughts wander
into the labyrinths of corn fields or drift into the tangles of
trees and the ligaments of power lines. I was a lonely young cock—solitary
by circumstance, meditative by reflex.
Most cocks never had to travel for love. Love—whether plumply
domestic or severely industrious—came to them. Hens were trotted
out to cocks, or cocks were introduced into coops. Neither way happened
to me.
I fell in love somewhere else, somewhere far from home—the
Sweetachewa County Poultry Farm in Eureeker Fatts, Ohio. Nowhere
else could I have experienced the humiliation so essential to romantic
love. Anywhere else, and I might have holed up with a beautiful
hen and situated myself in a low sink of everyday complacency: the
dull eggs, the spastic chicks, the territorial struts. I guess that
would have been okay, too. I don’t really know.
When I saw her at the Pen—“the Pen” was what the
residents called Sweetachewa (pronounced “Swee-TATCH-oo-ah”)—I
almost didn’t recognize her. I had seen her only once before,
and so I had to imagine a lot about her, such as the shape of her
breasts and the smell of her rump. In my mind, she had stood out
as an ethereal vision in a white cloud of hens, but in the sunken
compound, trotting out ragged formations with her flock, she seemed
a bit tired. My true love moved like a wig in a whirlwind, and I
suddenly doubted my feelings. I had made a terrible mistake.
The worry soon fell from my mind as a nit from my feathers. Like
all of us, she was scared of the Pen’s uncertain horrors—whispered
maniacally in the language of wheel and blade and cage and wire—but
she was not so scared that she couldn’t take charge once in
a while and lead the defense against chaos, drain her fear into
the clench of her claws and the squeeze of her scream, and I knew
this had to be love.
Love? I can’t explain it. I don’t know if it’s
wise to reveal any of this. I don’t think it will ever hurt
anyone, but I can’t say that makes any difference. Of course,
it depends on whom you count as “anyone”—and on
whom is doing the counting.
The first time I saw her, a truck was cresting the hill at the north
end of our farm. Trucks cresting the hill had become an almost daily
occurrence. Our flocks were thinning from attrition, and a tractor,
two horses, and a trailerload of select equipment had already been
sold. Men came to squint at the borders and whistle at the weather,
to kick tires and slap pigs, to shake irrigation hoses and smell
palmfuls of soil. As often as not, they drove of with a wave. The
truck’s gray hulk peeked up into the morning blue of the sky
and then dove back into its burrow. The sun was rising above the
corn field. I flapped toward my fence. It had been a dry summer.
Even this early in the morning, there was the foretaste of heat.
The back bed of the truck was enclosed in arching ribs of metal
and was feathered to its wire walls with white hens. Lurching and
whining to a stop, the big-jointed, hunchbacked truck was overtaken
by its own dust cloud. The road was a good distance from the pens.
I clung to my rail. Scattering, the other cocks and hens shed downy
feathers which hung in shapely drifts and then floated like snowflakes
to the ground.
The man banged out of the main house and came out to the road to
meet the driver. While they talked, I took my time. Despite the
distance, I could distinguish among the passengers, locked and sealed
in the steel cage of the machine. Blades of early sunlight slipped
through the guts of the truck and cut a world of black wings.
Where feathers and dust seemed to be caught in hanging sunfire,
Ruth was crying out against the jerking and jostling in that crowded
box of a truck. I lost the sound of her voice in the raucous. I
lost her figure in the shifting shadows. Was that still her? I shuffled
down the rail for better perspective. No, she was two down, six
over. Or had she moved? There weren’t a lot of distinguishing
characteristics at that distance. I tried again. But, no, I had
to find her. She was the one. And there she was. Six down, two across:
see where the metal frame was dented? See how she struggled to get
her head out for a little air? Well, those eyes, those terrible
eyes. What else was there to notice?
Actually, her eyes weren’t terrible yet. They were black,
pellet-black. I guess that wasn’t so unique. . . .
I guess I didn’t have much else to do on that farm but wait
for a hen like Ruth and pretend that love was an accident of the
senses. Every morning, I would be released into my pen to discover
yet again that it was not my turn to get a shot at the hens. Every
evening, I would roost in a solitary stall.
I was the youngest back-up cock, whose purpose was
to compensate for the veteran cocks who neglected seven to ten hens
in favor of one or two regulars. But I never got my chance. So I
ran in circles. I leapt from rails. I crowed. I was young, and the
weeks seemed like years. I called to hens in other ranges and was
answered with teases or rebukes. I ached and twitched and convulsed
with abandon.
I rammed into the warped side of my stall.
I nearly knocked myself unconscious.
I stared up at the gray soil of clouds.
Ruth was cream-feathered. She had a rose-blush comb that toppled
rakishly whenever she cocked her head. Beneath the grin of her beak,
her slim red wattles dangled and slapped and flagged as pretty victims
of her whims. She was compact, firm-muscled, radiant, sleek as a
porcelain teapot. Her breast was pronounced; her shanks were the
tough color of pumpkin skin; her hocks were sturdy; her fluff was
discreetly accommodating. Her modest sickles were gathered in a
tight bundle, the inferior partner in an imperfect symmetry with
her neck. Ruth had been ingrained with the provincialism of her
small farm and was, originally, innocent of her place in the world
and defensive of the values she mistook as her own. This would be
arrogant of me to say, were the description not equally true of
me at the time. Ruth had the strength of will to act on her beliefs,
and it would take nothing less than her experience in the Pen to
break that will and to undermine those beliefs. Even after the Pen,
she was capable of a certain tone of voice—assertive and reproving—that
I never was. I envied her that measure of self-satisfaction.
The finer distinctions of her character may have enhanced her attractiveness
to me, but I was first stunned by her sexual beauty.
Ruth was a Leghorn. All the hens in the truck were Leghorns. Leghorns
are good egg-layers, but they are also temperamental. They insist
on attention and then turn their backs. They are considered, even
by sympathetic breeds, to be noisy. And with the noise from a truckload
of Leghorns, we would have never made contact.
The driver slammed the door and shifted the grinding lug into gear.
The hens shrieked as if their carriage had burst into flame. I flapped
and crowed and watched the truck depart. The truck dipped and rose
and dipped again. Its dust cloud settled in a wave, like wheat chaff
behind a harvester.
The racket of garrulous hens diminished, and my spirits dampened.
By midmorning, I had recovered, but my daily routine was soon interrupted
by a second truck: smaller, grungier, less impressive, as all-purpose
as a dwarf mule. Bucking and groaning as it backed toward the pens,
our metal mule wasn’t resisting its master’s commands;
it only doubted its ability to obey them.
This was our truck. I wanted our truck to go wherever Ruth’s
truck was going. I didn’t know her as “Ruth” yet,
and I could not have known whether her eyes were terrible or not.
Only later would I look into them, watch their darting movements
still over time into a placid wariness, watch them soak up light
and give away nothing. The more pain they saw, the more their power
seemed to grow.
“I suspect you’re out for these ‘terrible dark
eyes’ for the effect they’ll have on you,” said
my broad-chested father, warning me from the top of his bitter post
in my mind.
In death, my father had become spiteful, eloquent, and richly, crimsonly,
obscenely handsome.
“Beware the wish to be changed, Johnny. Look at what change
has wrought upon your poor father, who, like any young cock, could
never have been prepared for such an onslaught as your mother has
directed, and who, like any young cock, could never have been expected
to secure in advance the habits of mind that would have enabled
him to protect his sanity during the years of deprivation and hostility
and manipulation.”
“Oh, stuff your father’s words in your earholes, dear
Johnny,” responded my mother, emerging from her expansive
coop, its decadent walls pushing against the limits of my skull.
Her round body was dotted in a black and white pointillism, which
smeared into gray as she—the red kerchief of her comb flapping
in the wind—darted in a line as severe as a furrow to confront
my father. Death had not emboldened my mother or purified her insecurity,
but it had enlivened her manner of speaking by leavening the vulgar
dough of her opinions with the yeast of metaphor.
“Nothing but the manure of your father’s lies, dear
Johnny, will make quite so fragrant a bedding under which you may
hide your flaws from yourself.”
Growing up, I could never tell whether my parents harbored prejudices
against the nature of love or rather cultivated, as one might have
cultivated plots of parsley or lemongrass, prejudices against each
other.
“Johnny,” said my father, reclenching his claws around
the thin neck of the rail, “I have never given you reason
to doubt the quality of the standards to which I aspired, and to
which I long ago gave up expecting you to aspire, and I have never
widened, out of pride or in sport, my narrow judgment of your worth.
But I have paid attention now and then over the years, and I know
you like to layer the world over and again with words: painting
a simple thing time after time until it resembles nothing so much
as the paint itself—”
“Johnny,” interrupted my mother, scratching violently
for attention, the speckled sleeves of her wings whipping like laundry
on a line, “love is nothing to mock and nothing to want merely
for the boasting of it. Love is a changing thing. It is both threat
and promise.Never believe in yourself so much
you neglect the demands of the world, and never oblige the world
so much you neglect the needs of yourself. Honor your father, remember
your mother, and let neither of us catch your shadow in the old
yard again.”
I spent lifetimes gripping what you might call a ledge—wings
folded as tightly as human hands against my sides, neck craned forward,
eyes dipping into the darkness of vertigo—and peering into
the well of my own ignorance. I stood mute above the throat of mossy
stones. I stared long and hard and forgot myself and lost my balance
and never regained it, never stopped falling, flightless and tumbling,
absorbed by darkness but never absorbing it back—suspended
in the murkiness of incomprehension. Embalmed alive and kept cool
and left forgotten. A dropped wish.
A lullaby. I remembered it as I was being loaded into the truck.
My mother might have sung it to me.
Hens with the roosters
Cows in the barn
Grandpa’s at the neighbor’s
Spinning his yarn.
Horses in the stable
Sheep with the herd
Mama’s with Papa
Don’t say a word.
I was a bright young cock back then. I was.
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