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The
Great Chicken Massacre
This happened last summer, but I am only getting around to writing
about it because it seems all of a piece with the terrible
year we had. Starting in
the spring time a lot of people we knew died, and it went on an on until we
felt we were walking through a mine field.
Mothers of friends died, mostly suddenly.
An old friend of the farmer’s, a new friend of mine, the janitor at
my school, my brother-in-law’s parents within a month of each other, ten
deaths by the middle of the fall. The
chicken story happened in July and
though it’s only chickens that died, it seems to represent some horrid truth
about the summer of 2006.
In the spring time of 2005 one of our old hens started sitting on some
eggs, and we were pretty excited, being new to the chicken business
(our flock consisted of a very randy, irritable but beautiful rooster
which was given to me by a friend and three old ladies, Buff Brahmas, who had
been show chickens but whose 4-H owner had outgrown them), so when three of
the eggs hatched and turned out to be two roosters and a hen, we decided to
keep both roosters.
By that time Spike, the original rooster, had been sent up the road; I
should say that our chickens are bantams
and the chickens up the road are full sized, the friend who kept them
needed a rooster and we gladly consigned Spike to the equivalent of a
woman’s prison, where he flourished until a year later when he died of, I
assume, exhaustion.
I named the hen Susie after one my grandmother had and she and her
mother, Aglaia, supplied us with eggs until last spring when Susie began to
sit on some eggs which were, we assumed, hers and her mother’s.
Meanwhile I had found a charming chicken house at our local Agway and
bought it without consulting anyone, leaving the farmer to fetch it home in
the truck and set it up in the back yard (we live across the road from the
farm, not on it) and as soon as the eggs (six of them) had hatched out we
installed the mother, the grandmother and the babies in it.
The coop has a little wire yard attached to it, but we let the chickens
out during the daytime and shut them in at night.
Like the rest of the east coast we have coyotes in town and are careful
about small pets and the chickens are also prey to hawks foxes owls and
raccoons, which we have in abundance.
Every year for 17 years I have gone to sing for a week with the
Berkshire Choral Festival, and this July I was set to sing Verdi’s Requiem.
So off I went to the Berkshires and a week of rehearsal.
The Requiem is difficult, rewarding, harrowing, and being immersed in
it for a week is the kind of experience that changes you.
I felt that I was in the middle of some terrible beautiful truth about
the universe - forgive the purple prose, but like a sunset that is too
colorful to be in good taste but is nevertheless real, that was the
experience.
I arrived in Sheffield on Sunday.
On Tuesday morning, at breakfast, my cell phone rang.
It was the farmer, and he was terribly distressed.
He had not shut in the hens, and during the night something had gotten
into the hen house and eaten three of the babies, eaten the mother hen except
for her feet, and left Aglaia stunned, standing in the yard unmoving, her head
terrible wounded, one eye shut.
Well, things like that happen when you keep animals, and I listened and
told him it wasn’t his fault and went back to my music.
He, however, went into the back yard and buried Susie’s feet and one
of the dead chicks who had not been eaten, and sat by Aglaia for hours, until
he finally persuaded her to take sips of water from a teaspoon, thus saving
her life. The farmer has more patience than anyone I know, and he never
gives up.
That night he set up a Hav-a-Heart trap near the hen house, and caught
a very large possum, who came back for the second act.
What did you do I asked. I
shot it, he said, five times. Five
times? One for each victim, he
said. It’s a vendetta.
Did I mention that he’s Sicilian?
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