Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Currently I have this hen figured for an agent, likely one of several whose work I was not meant to see, nor ever fully to understand. A week or so later, as I climbed the hill from our mailbox one ponderously green afternoon, having checked to see whether I had been asked yet to a college up north and in town (I had not), I saw in my periphery, laid out true across the front yard, a wide and fetching compass rose. The cardinal points of this compass were vacant, I will allow, unless you want to count nail-ridden boards and the odd rat lookie loo, but the ordinals there were well-enough represented: Brown Dog, as I remember it, held the southeast position; Ginger Snap, the southwest; Cooper held the northwest position and promised, by his quick musculature, that he could cover the northeast as well. That would have been Blackie’s spot, had the pines not claimed him years before.

The center of this compass was a perfect bloom of leghorn white.

The chickens, by which I mean every one of them who had survived their captivity, and their sores, and the snake snacks, and my grievous experiments, now held perfectly still, and I had never seen them do that except when roosting on the diagonal lattice I had built, with my own unsteady hands, against the wall where once repaired my father’s books. For a moment I thought, or hoped, that each bird was lost in an intense consideration of where it might like to travel next. To this day I sometimes think that, or hope it, when I flap past maudlin and find the alternatives too awful to consider.

Alternative one is that they had not thought the problem through. Id est , they were chickens, and so were, whatever their gifts of wanderlust and courage, inherently stupid. Hence they were bound to perish, in the American fashion, almost as soon as they stepped foot in a front yard so foreign to them it might as well have been another continent. (And has it not recently been confirmed that the colonists at Jamestown, from which sprang Richmond, from which sprang Goochland, from which sprang Jefferson, from whom sprang our country and western pride, once resorted to cannibalism, and gobbled at the flesh of a fourteen-year-old girl (and here I cannot help but think of the young Tanya Tucker: “Then a man of low degree stood by her side”) so as to retain a foothold in this exotic lawn, and follow the sun across it, looking always for nuggets of gold, as opposed to animal crap, so that other little girls might be eaten along the way?)

Alternative Two is that they had thought the problem through, as they had all problems prior, and at last dug Old World claws into New World dirt in order to enact an end to the tradition that had sent so many of their cousins out west to comb the continent and die while the cocks who drove them onward grew richer and harder by the mile. (And how many frozen dinners were needed in those passes, Donner and otherwise, to ensure that we could hold and grow waxed Los Angeles, and hairy San Francisco, and pierced Portland, and damp Seattle, and tanned if flaccid San Diego? How many? )

Some of these chickens, in their unmoving attitudes, seemed almost to regard me; others, more generously, did not. For a moment I froze myself, in a personal regard of them. Then, gently as I could, I laid the mail on the gravel before my feet. (Another torture-gift, that mail, not invented, as is too often claimed, but certainly popularized by Mr. Franklin, and I would not be surprised if he had a hand in the American gravel business as well.) I made no discernable crunch by this action, but a single hen head twitched, near the northwest declension of the bloom, and turned suddenly from a disregard to a regard of me. (or was it the other way around?)

That was all the dogs required. They collapsed upon the rose’s center and began to kill. I ran into the midst of this mêlée and began yanking hens out of hounds’ mouths, thinking not to save souls here (I confess it) but only livestock, which clawed containers of souls (or not-souls) I threw up one after the other onto the cool tin roof, and tried to keep a running count of, until I saw, peripherally, that these more elevated birds did not care to be detained from their trip and were willfully, even joyfully, jumping back down.

I did my best to bat this Wilbur or that Orville back up into the air, but the jumpers soon overwhelmed me. They leapt in pairs, or in trios, and at least once I saw a quad, and then there were not enough of them left to make a quad, or a trio, or even a pair, and the last solo leap happened well back behind me, to be caught up and disposed of by Cooper, while near the compost heap I battled Brown Dog and Ginger Snap, who in turn battled each other, over the rights to a formerly fat fryer who had already become, by the nails and beaks among us, a torn and irredeemable corpse.

Our town mower, which I pushed later in a trance and a bother, was days in disposing of the evidence. It rendered the feathers into dust easily enough, but it had a tougher time with the flesh and the bone. The buzzards pitched in where they could, and did away with the occasional hunk of chicken meat and sorrow, or with an infarcted yard rat we would none of us miss, but after a week or so (was it the rat blood? was it? ) we saw no more of these flying garbagemen. Buttfucker alone survived the cataclysm, by what luck or cleverness I will never know, and was allowed (by the dogs? by the family? by the fungus below?) to roam the yard as if he still had hens left to dominate. By his further actions, and inevitable demise, you would almost think he believed that.

Pace my fading father;

Pace his infested yard;

Pace what designs those chickens might have had for, or on, their own little pecked-at lives;

Pace what plans my father might have made for my personal poor story, and I have since drawn out for his;

Pace those lowly snakes;

Pace the high-hat buzzards, and the suicide turtles, and the doper rats;

Pace the Lord our Jesus;

Not everyone in this scenario needed to die.

Not everyone.

One morning, a week or so after the hens had flown, I got it into my head to make eggs. I would argue that I was simply hungry, but in truth it did not seem proper to me that anyone else in the family should consume the last leavings of those birds I had cared so incompetently for. I suppose that might pass for a kind of hunger.

I set some butter in the skillet to brown, and then, on the lip, I cracked open the first of these eggs (or was it the last?), and felt its innards glop through my fingertips as they waited on a yolk they intended to cradle, so as not to see it burst in the pan. What they felt instead was a sudden simple sharpness, and I pulled the shell apart and took a step backward as butter and egg white splashed out of the pan and onto the floor. I saw then, a-fry in the goo, not a yolk at all but a half-formed chick, pleasantly asleep on her side in this bubbling hell, and I think I stood and stared at that too long.

I took the skillet out back and flung its contents, still sizzling, up onto the coop roof. Then I threw the skillet up there too, and I cursed my mother, and I cursed my father, and I cursed the undead dirt I shook upon, and I vowed never to break another egg again.

This text was set in Christ knows what by who knows whom.

I like for there to be a note on the text in the books I read, so that I might learn something about the typeface employed, if I enjoyed it (the typeface, I mean), and a little of its history, and possibly its designer’s, though I tend to grow sad when it strikes me that the author probably did not write this particular passage (alone, perhaps, among all the others in the book), and so may have had no say whatsoever in the typeface, and the whole operation starts to smell like plagiary.