It was the summer of 1979, one of those long hot days when the sparkle of summer vacation had long worn off and tired mothers ordered their progeny to "get outside and play." Back then, that meant literally going outside and finding something to do sans electronics or equipment. I was eight. My nephew, Clint, was spending the day with us. He was four years my junior and more like a little brother then than now.
It was the shank of the afternoon, and we had already exhausted a half-hearted game of "H-O-R-S-E." Neither of us had progressed past "H." We sat on the fence by the road and bet which color car would pass next; we poked around in ant hills with sticks. Each envoy into the house ended with my mother shooing us out of the cool, lemon-Pledge-scented living room and into the hot, breeze-free outdoors. As the heat pressed down, we finally flopped on our backs in the front yard, bored past arguing and worn out with childhood altogether. Today, two kids lying prone in a front yard would at least illicit a phone call. Back then, it was no biggie.
My dog, Charlie, observed our visitor before we did. Clint and I were, after all, staring at the sky with frustrated eyes and furrowed brows. Mine was a frantic dog, so his sudden stillness was unusual. Sitting up, we saw what interested Charlie, and our uneventful summer ended at once. Had a spaceship landed on the lawn, we could not have been more surprised.
Coming up the driveway with a light snick-snick of talons was an ugly, scrawny mess of black and white feathers, a lopsided red shear of comb and waddle, and two intelligent, spiteful golden eyes. Granted, I have never personally known many chickens in my life, but I don't believe they typically make eye contact with dogs or humans. This one did. Turns out he was a Dominque rooster, which my family pronounced "Dominecker." He might have been a poor specimen of the breed, but what this rooster lacked in looks he made up for in spirit -- a vindictive, fearless spirit.
The rooster highstepped into the short grass and made a beeline for our dog. Although our backyard butted up against a cattle pasture, Charlie had never met a chicken. He was naturally intrigued, provoked to the point of a living statue. The rooster went beak to nose with him, unblinkingly commenced to stare the dog down, then proceeded past him. Clint, who was also typically frantic, sat breathless and sweaty at my side. After a silent moment, the spell lifted, and we both sprang to our bare feet. Charlie seized this opportunity to give chase.
That summer, my parents had an ongoing argument about our perpetually wet basement. Mom was convinced our house's foundation was cracked. Dad, perhaps sensing the cost and bedlam such a reality would provoke, had shoveled out a spot at the corner of the house to reveal what he surely hoped would be sturdy, solid concrete. A pile of soft earth still stood at the edge of the house; the argument remained unsettled.
The rooster, as though he carried reconaissance information, gathered up his feathers and ran straight for the moist dirt. Charlie followed, but he was outpaced by a chicken, who, once he hit the dirt, began to dig. I'm not talking about the kind of scritch-scratching observed around a coop. I mean digging as though he had tiny spades strapped to his talons. Clouds of dirt flew behind him, blinding Charlie as an afterthought.
Right away, it became clear that, although Charlie held all the cards in this fight, for some reason he wasn't about to attack the rooster: bark, yes; bite, no. When the rooster dug, Charlie dug. When the rooster rested, Charlie rested. My dog was as stunned as we were. Perhaps he didn't wring the rooster's neck because he had been just as bored and didn't want to end the diversion.
Clint and I ran around the yard like a firecracker had jumped up our shorts, screaming "There's a chicken under the house! There's a chicken under the house!" Elderly neighbors puttering in their yards were either uninterested or stone deaf, for none even glanced in our direction. Mom, inside behind the roar of our single window air conditioner, couldn't hear thunder and so was completely oblivious to the loud, dirty, public display in her own front yard. All the while, dog and chicken burrowed together a long tunnel downward and sideways, along the foundation.
Clint believed adult notification was required, but we were loathe to leave the scene. Finally, as the duo sheared the roots of Mom's azalea bushes, we slammed into the kitchen and screamed our news. "Granny, did you know there's a chicken under your house?" Clint asked. At four, he unfortunately had already earned a reputation for spinning wild yarns. His chicken statement was not beyond his usual narrative realm. Mom dismissed him several times in pursuit of the dirt we'd tracked on the avocado-green linoleum. When Clint's story did not waver after several retellings, she finally looked at me for verification. "Come on, Granny, you're gonna miss it!" Clint yelled as he leaned out the storm door.
Clint and I raced back to the dig site; Mom took her time. Perhaps she believed our boredom had pushed us into the dangerous territory of parental practical jokes. But Charlie, chicken and dirt remained as we'd left them -- all stock still like a picture postcard. The rooster seemed unconcerned; Charlie kept jockeying for a better position from which to do still nothing. Mom was thunderstruck.
She stared at our tableau for a moment, then said not a word and went straight to the house and called my father. His shop was a couple of minutes away, but she seldom called him during the day to intervene into matters at home. Usually, she phoned him only when a situation involved snakes, bats or damage to the car. On this day, an agressive, digging chicken warranted such a call. Sure enough, in a few minutes my dad rolled into the driveway and emerged from his pick-up covered in concrete dust and sweat. No one had to lure him in our direction.
Dad grew up on a small farm. Although his knowledge of horses, mules and dairy cattle was complete, he was no chicken man. Whatever his farming duties had been, they were most certainly not the wrangling of poultry, as we soon discovered. His first theory, that the chicken was in fact dead of a fear-induced heart attack (hence the lack of movement), exploded when the rooster leapt to its feet and commenced to cantering around the yard.
Charlie followed the rooster, with a great flurry of clucking and barking, and we followed Charlie, announcing loudly to my parents our whereabouts whenever the duo paused: "The chicken's under the clothesline," "The chicken's under the forsythia bush," "The chicken's on the breezeway." That bird seemed to have preternatural knowledge of our property's boundary lines; he never strayed beyond our fence.
During sprints through the front yard, I began to pick up that somehow my parents' best-laid plans of chicken and men were degenerating into a familiar fight about the foundation. She had rejected Dad's suggestion that Mom drop a clothes basket on the rooster while he rushed him into a corner of the garage. The leaky basement was a hot issue on my mother's mind, and a conversational line need not be drawn straight from the chicken to the crack.
Amid all the shouting and yelling and crowing and howling, my sisters arrived home -- along with most of the husbands in the neighborhood. It was nearly suppertime, and the level of activity at our house had reached a level even the most disinterested neighbors could not avoid. Dad began to follow us about the yard, as if his proximity to the problem would force a sensible solution. No dice, but we did have a good-size chicken train going on by then: one perplexed father, one curious teenager, two ecstatic kids, one spastic dog and one wily rooster. Mom went into the house, and she emerged triumphant that she'd found "a home" for our guest. My grandmother agreed to offer him asylum on their small farm, and Mom was less than thrilled to learn that the bird remained to be caught.
Our neighbor across the road wandered over to offer assistance. Unfortunately, he knew less about chickens than even my dad, but the pair of them brought up the rear of our party. They mulled over blindsiding the bird with a tablecloth over the head or somehow tapping into Charlie's obviously lacking skills as a sheepdog. Finally, they combined prior ideas of herd and capture and decided to arm themselves with brooms, corner the rooster in the garage, then subdue him. They were right to arm themselves; the rooster made it clear by Dad's fifth or sixth try that he would not go quietly into that good night. Finally, Mr. Edwards jumped at just the right time and apprehended our rooster. This would have been the end of the line, except neither Dad nor Mr. Edwards had thought past capture. We had nothing to put the chicken into for transport.
In a display I have never seen repeated, Mr. Edwards voluntarily held onto that rooster while Dad devised a plan. Our neighbor was a small, wiry man with a nervous twitch and a nose-clearing tic. He was already hot and sweaty from catching the hateful bird. Now, he stood dripping from fear and humidity in our tiny, stuffy garage while our rooster beat him with his wings, clucked and bawk-bagawked at him, all the while fixing Mr. Edwards with his ruthless, amber stare. Perhaps a fellow chicken had suggested eye contact could hypnotize humans. It seemed to have just the opposite effect on Mr. Edwards. Although he managed to contain the bird for a full five minutes while Dad scrambled, our neighbor sneezed and convulsed and hopped and twitched, all the while punctuating his movements with the cleanest repetition of oaths he could imagine: "Oh, my stars!"
Since our family didn't own a vessel for chicken transport -- or a cage of any kind -- Dad acted fast. He came back to the garage with a big cardboard box. It had no top, but it was the only box he could find on short order. He overcame the missing top with a series of crisscrossed strips of masking tape. He had opened the bottom of the box, so he theorized to Mr. Edwards that he could drop the box over the rooster, quiet him down, then seal up the bottom of the box. The rooster would think the strips of tape were a cage and wouldn't try to jump out of the box. Done, and done.
Amazingly, the first and third step went without a hitch, and Mr. Edwards quickly went back across the road to retire into a nervous breakdown. However, the bird didn't quiet down. If possible, he grew louder, more furious, and the glee Clint and I had felt at first now coldly progressed into genuine fear. With every crow, he seemed to be looking up at us, saying, "Just you wait until I get out of this box."
Dad put the rooster's box in the bed of his truck, my sister jumped up front, and I hopped in the back. It wasn't far to my grandmother's house, so we all assumed we were in the last chapter of this very odd afternoon. Dad backed the truck around and pulled out onto the highway.
At this precise moment, either the chicken realized the tape was not a cage, or his carefully plotted revenge scheme came to fruition. The rooster jumped straight up into the air through the masking tape and the truck's sliding rear window, then landed on the gearshift just after Dad dropped it into first gear. He slammed on the brakes, and both he and Jayme jumped out of the cab. I cautiously peeked through the rear window and saw the vengeful rooster perched on the round gearshift knob. He had us, or so he thought.
A clever bird brain is still a bird brain, and since roosters have little parental intuition, he could not have known the limits of a father during life's little hiccups. The chicken could not have known how badly Dad did not want to retreat home to my mom and admit that he'd been defeated by a bird, not to mention he would have to go through the whole capture scenario again, this time in the middle of Hwy. 421.
Dad ordered Jayme to close her window and get in the back with me. Dad got back in the cab, rolled up his window, carefully slid the rear window shut, and proceeded to drive all the way to my grandmother's house in first gear, both hands squarely on the steering wheel the entire way. Since we surely couldn't have been going more than 20 m.p.h., a string of honking cars quickly amassed behind us. Charlie, determined not to give in, chased us the entire way.
The rooster was oddly silent, his head cocked to the right while he glared at my dad, who refused to take his eyes off the road. This was Dad's last, best chance. We arrived at Momaw's house, and Dad came roaring out of the cab, leaving his door wide open. The rooster didn't leap out and run away as hoped. Dad had to poke him with a garden rake to dislodge his fearsome grasp, then knock the feathers out of the cab so we could make the drive back home.
All summer long, the rooster literally ruled the roost at my grandparents' farm. He was crafty and plotted his "Dawn Patrol" attacks to occur at just the moment our mutual guard was down. On Sunday afternoons, we'd all be out visiting in the side yard, talking about church or something, and out would come the chicken and jump onto anyone who seemed relaxed. He flogged each of us at least once in turn; oh, yes, he got his revenge. The rooster seemed to take particular joy stalking my grandfather. Papaw stooped down to pick green beans, and, wham! Here came the rooster! He stretched out in his lounge chair with a wet hanky on his head to listen to the Cincinnati Reds on the radio, and, wham! Here came the rooster!
Finally, in August, my grandmother had enough. She was a pink, plump and perpetually smiling bundle of all things sweet and sturdy. One day, she watched from the kitchen window while that cunning bird attacked my Papaw, who was trying to start the lawnmower. Mamaw marched outside, grabbed the old rooster by the heels, swung him head-first onto a maple stump in the yard, and whickety-whack: no more rooster. Like any good farm girl would, she plucked and cleaned the him: waste not, want not. As a thoughtful gesture, the next time my mother visited, Mamaw pulled a plastic bag out of her deep freezer. "What's this?" Mom asked. "That's your rooster," Mamaw said with a twinkle.
We all knew he had it coming. Mom took the package home and put it in our freezer -- and there it stayed. As much as we all hated that damn bird, none of us could bring ourselves to eat him. It was a dishonorable thing to do. It was enough to destroy such a worthy opponent; there was no need also to devour him.
Charlie may have held a different opinion.
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