Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

And so we have want of angels, those among us who wish to die, apparently, yet find ourselves unequal to the task. We have want of country-strong ones who will ride that gas pedal for us, and cut the brake line, and blow us straight to heaven. Or else we have want of town-minded ones who will slow us down a smidge while they push that stalled Lincoln off into the creek bed below (or was it a Ford?) and convince us to take up Proust. Certainly we have want of higher beings who will help us decide whether we are country people at all or are only just pretending to be, under a hypnosis, self- or otherwise, and whether there exists a difference between these concepts large enough for us to consider it here. At minimum we have want of a passable excuse for the delay.

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?