Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

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.

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.

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: Girl 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.