Shake Ya Tail-Feathers:
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By C. “Rascal” Hansen
So, we had our coop. Now all we needed were living, breathing chickens.
The three of us went over to Donny’s house and logged onto the internet, which in that era of “dial-up” was still a significant undertaking.
Donny had bookmarked the McMurray Hatchery website. We quickly filled out the online order form. I paid for the chickens with my mom’s Visa card, which she agreed to let me use. The order of four chickens cost $2.73, plus $5.00 shipping and handling.
Donny received an email confirming our purchase soon after. It notified us that within 5 to 7 business days the four baby chickens would be delivered to our town post office.
6 days later I found Donny sitting on my deck waiting for me when I arrived home from school .
“THEY’RE HERE!!!! THEY’RE HERE!!!!” Donny screamed.
“Where are they?”
“GT’s. I called the post office during lunch and they said they were in, so we picked them up after school.”
“Were they all alive?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’re fine. Hurry up, we have to go to GT’s. I’ll get my Mom’s van,” and with that, Donny bolted across the street to his house.
When he returned with the van, he stopped just long enough for me to dive in, before peeling off down the block. He bobbed his head and bounced up and down in the drivers seat. I had not seen him so wound up since Debra Soskin kissed him on the cheek in seventh grade.
GT was in the garage when we reached his house. He was hunched over a large cardboard box with a heat lamp shining into it.
Donny informed me that the box was the “brooding pen.” The “brooding pen” was where the baby birds would reside until they were mature enough to be transferred to my house.
I could hear the chicks’ staccato chirps when I entered the garage.
Donny and I stood beside GT, and peered into the box. I studied the chicks, crowded around a small saucer of feed.
They were roughly the size of my fist. Only one of the chicks resembled the stereotypical, yellow fluff-ball that provided the inspiration for the Peeps marshmallow candy. The others were an ugly, mottled black and brown.
There were also five of them.
“I thought we only ordered four?” I asked.
“We did. They must have goofed at the hatchery, because the invoice said we only ordered 4, too,” GT explained.
He also described how the tiny birds had come jammed in a cardboard container that was half the size of a McDonald’s Happy Meal box. Thin slits were cut into the sides to provide the chicks with minimal ventilation.
GT reached down and scooped out the “Peep.” The other four chicks scattered to opposite corners of the box when he did.
The baby bird in GT’s hand battled to free itself.
“Be careful. They’re fragile.” Donny admonished.
“She’s fine. Chill the F out,” GT snapped.
He held the bird close to his lips and cooed in its ear. Within a few seconds the chick quit straining.
GT opened his hand. The chick nestled down into his open palm. GT asked if I wanted to hold it.
I cupped my hands. GT slid the chick into them. The bird began to squirm as soon as it slipped from GT’s grasp.
I tried chirping like GT to pacify it. This didn’t work, so I gently stroked the top of its head with my index finger.
After a few seconds I lobbed the agitated chick back into the cardboard box. It tumbled downward, and landed on its feet.
The chick glanced up at us, and then scurried to join it companions huddled around an upturned jar lid filled with water.
“Idiot, you can’t just throw them around like that,” Donny scolded.
He dropped to his hands and knees to inspect the chicks’ overall condition.
“Are you sure this light gives off enough heat? We can let them get too cold,” he continued to nag.
“Jesus, it’s fine. They’re just birds,” I said.
“Just birds? How would you like it if someone left you to freeze your naked ass off in a garage when you were a baby?”
“That’s totally different.”
“No, it’s not,” Donny argued.
“Guys, it’s fine. I measured the temp in the box earlier. We’re golden,” GT interceded.
Donny stood up. He paced around the box. “Ok, but you might want to bring them inside tonight. I checked the weather and it’s supposed to get cold.”
“We’ll see,” GT rolled his eyes at me. “God, you’re like a freakin’ Mom.”
“What’s wrong with that? These are pretty much like our kids,” Donny said.
“Oh no, F that. I’m not raising kids with you. That is just disturbing,” I shouted.
“Yeah, I don’t even want to think about it like that. It would ruin this whole deal for me,” GT agreed with a disgusted frown.
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The chickens resided in their homemade “brooding pen” for almost a month before we moved them to my house. By that point they had grown to the size of pigeons.
Donny brought the chickens over to my house a few times before "move-in" day. He believed these prior visits would prepare the birds emotionally for what he thought could be a traumatic transition.
The coop at my house was situated behind my garage where I used to have a large vegetable garden. The area had a six-foot high fence around its perimeter that I had designed to keep marauding deer out of my sweet corn patch.
We agreed it would serve as an effective defense against foxes and stray dogs on the prowl for a free chicken dinner.
On the day of the official relocation my Mom stood by nervously while we released the chickens into the garden. She kept looking over her shoulder, convinced that at any moment a squad car would pull up the driveway to give us a zoning violation.
She also voiced concerns that our Chocolate Lab, Duke, might break into the chicken enclosure and injure the birds.
“What if Duke gets in there and thinks they’re pheasants, like when she is hunting?” she asked. “She might try and retrieve them like a duck. That would give those poor birds a coronary, aren’t you worried about that?”
“Why?” Donny said. “I mean she hasn’t ever tried to eat the cat, has she? Rascal can just tell Duke they’re cats.”
My Mom and I broke out in laughter, and I went into the garage to assemble the tools necessary to Duke-proof the garden fence.
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We bestowed names upon all five of the birds. The black and white Barred-Rocks were Mary and Jane. The white Leghorn was Whitey. My Mom gave the exotic orangish-brown Araucana the distinguished title of Rory Calhoun.
The fifth bird, of unknown breed and origin, was simply Pat. In spite of her unassuming name, Pat was quite an impressive chicken. Jet black, with long, arcing tail-feathers, she weighed almost twice as much as the other birds.
A month and a half after the move to my house Whitey, Mary, Jane, and Rory started producing eggs.
The fact that Pat did not lay eggs became a topic of fierce discussion between Donny, GT and I.
Donny insisted the problem was mental. He proposed that Pat may not have adjusted as well to the move as her companions.
He insisted that if we had only been more accommodating Pat would be kicking out eggs the size of softballs, and at twice the rate of the other chickens. GT and I were comfortable asserting that Pat was probably just a “late-bloomer.”
A few weeks later Pat proved all three of us wrong.
It was a Wednesday night. I was doing my homework when the phone rang. My Mom answered it. It was Donny. She came into my room and handed me the phone.
“Yeah, what do want?” I said.
“Dude, you won’t believe this, but today, I heard Pat crow,” he said with urgency.
“No way,” I said incredulously. “Only roosters crow.”
“I know.”
“So, what are you implying? That Pat is having a sexual identity crisis?” I mocked.
“I don’t know. It’s possible. Maybe ‘she’ is really a ‘he.’ I mean what if she is a rooster and gets all the other hens pregnant?”
“I guess I’ll have to check the yolks real carefully when I make eggs for breakfast from now on,” I laughed to myself.
“Dude, that’s not F-ing funny.”
“Calm down. I’m sure you were just hearing shit.”
“Fair enough. But if you don’t believe me, meet me in the chicken yard before sunrise and I’ll bet you $5 dollars we hear Pat crow.”
“You got a deal.”
“Good, see you before sunrise,” There was an abrupt click as Donny hung up the phone without warning.
“Crazy bastard,” I muttered to myself as I the set alarm on my watch to go off fifteen minutes before sunrise.
My beeping alarm woke me the next morning at 5:45 am.
Donny was waiting for me in the driveway when I finally shuffled out the door. I cursed under my breathe, having hoped he would not show up.
I greeted him with a barely audible grunt.
“How’s it hangin’ A-hole,” he responded.
We slowly walked over to the chicken yard. Donny tapped my shoulder when I reached to unlatch the garden gate.
“Wait, don’t go in there, otherwise he might not crow,” Donny whispered.
I glared back at him. “So you’re convinced she’s a....” An echoing rooster crow interrupted me mid-sentence. “Dammit!” I shouted.
“Haha, where’s my five dollars, biaatch.”
“Well, I guess looking on the upside of things, we don’t have to change his name.”
“It’s Pat!” Donny whined, imitating the androgenous Saturday Night Live character from the 1990’s.
We spent the next twenty minutes listening to Pat’s early morning revelry. Once the sun rose Pat continued to crow, though less frequently.
When it was time to get ready for school I paid Donny his money and we parted ways.
Later that morning I could still hear Pat crowing as I ate my Frosted Flakes in the kitchen.
I talked with my Mom about Pat before leaving for school that day.
“So, it appears Donny was right, wasn’t he,” she stated.
“Yup,” I answered, my mouth filled with cereal.
“Well, I heard HIM crowing at 3 this morning. It woke me up and I couldn’t fall back asleep. I’m not too happy about that.” My Mom put special emphasis on the word “him.”
I apologized, and mentioned how surprised I was that I had managed to sleep through the noise.
She told me I had one week to find Pat a new home, otherwise she would do it herself, even if it meant selling him to KFC.
Luckily, GT’s father knew a farmer that was willing to take Pat, as well as promise that he would not to turn him into pot pie.
So, in accordance with my Mom’s ultimatum, we delivered Pat to the farmer that weekend.
The farmer greeted us in the driveway when we reached his house. He was wearing patched overalls and white, rubber boots caked with mud and manure. He had a tangled nest of grey hair that was stuffed under a navy blue stocking cap.
He studied Pat with dark, deep set eyes that reminded me of little black beads. “Yahh, look’s like you guys done a nice job of raising that bird. Geez, sure is big."
The farmer fished a cigarette out of his pocket, lit it and then led us to the barn.
Inside the timber-frame out-building there were 3 dozen hens milling about in a wooden pen. A pair of red roosters were perched above them on a metal pipe that spanned the pen.
“You can let him go now,” the farmer told GT when he opened the door to the pen.
“Kick some ass, boy,” GT whispered.
I stroked Pat’s shiny black feather’s one last time.
GT set Pat on the ground. He looked up at us, clucked, and hopped into the pen.
After pausing for a moment, he sprinted in the direction of the rooster perch.
Pat flapped his wings and launched himself into the air as he neared the roost. He careened into nearest of the roosters.
The startled bird tumbled from its perch.
Pat adjusted his weight on the narrow pole. He charged at the the remaining rooster like a tight-rope running defensive lineman.
The rooster did not even attempt to hold claim to its territory. Instead, it parachuted down into a group of hens feeding below.
Alone on his new perch, Pat puffed out his chest and let out a crow that assured GT and I, he would fare just fine without us.
Copyright©2008 Richard Hansen. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. Rascal Hansen is a trademark of Richard Hansen.