Red hens in the red dust
They was scratching in the yard and I was watching them. It’s the way they scratch about and peck at what’s moving there but they ain’t even watching the ground or if they are they keep it secret and their eyes, Shelagh, that one, she scratches about and with her eye I don’t know if she’s looking at what’s moving there getting scratched up and maybe pecked at or if she’s watching me with that thin glass eye that the sun don’t seem able to pick a bright spot on. Pecking and peeking, like a pecker with a peephole but you won’t rouse me on that.
They ain’t so much like ladies neither, spite what ma says like what they’ve got old feather knickerbockers or whatever, that ain’t even a word what’s used except for ice-cream anyway. It ain’t what they ain’t knickerbockers, just ladies don’t wear that nature of article no more, you don’t see none around on clotheslines flying in the sun and if you did you probably wouldn’t even bother to take them or maybe you would just to have an old lady there amongst your secret stockpile like a wise old woman keeping the younger flightier ones in step and telling when the weather would turn and always knowing about how to get rid of the stains excepting that it probably wouldn’t work and whatever herbs or whatever they might say to mix up and take it would only make you sicker or come out in spots and all the other articles would come out all polka dot or turn yellow and maybe need to be thrown away or burnt in the bonfire when there ain’t no one else around.
And they’re all dusty too and would be the kind that would drag themselves in the dust and try and sell you little charms and if you couldn’t help but spit on them or something then they would lay a curse on you and that would be it and nothing would go right. So I don’t think they’re like ladies so much but then they are and ma is always on the nail. And that ain’t so much a turn of phrase but then I don’t say too much about that.
Shelagh, that one, a red hen with the red dust all brocaded around her bockers, like she’s come from Mars all flown down on her clipped wings somehow or maybe that’s why her wings are so small and rubbish because on Mars maybe things are different and little stumps are enough to rise you into the air and fly around and just keep on going and just come right out into space and then just pick a spot and fly at it or maybe just set right down on a passing comet and peck about at that until it’s time to jump off and fly down to the earth with space goggles or maybe a whole little helmet made out of a cut off plastic bottle. It’s in North Carolina where they’ve got these pockmarks in the earth where all these rocks have fell from space and that’s where those plants grew, the only place, and they reckon the seed to have come straight down on the rocks from space. The ones what eat flies. So I guess there they’ve got these plants and the red hens and just flies for them to fight over. Maybe the hens wouldn’t even peck there. Maybe they’d just flap about with their stumps and fly graceful like swallows chasing the flies. Or maybe in UFOs. The hens would come down.
She don’t look so much like a alien though and there’s none of her sisters or mothers or aunts or nieces or daughters or nothing has tried to nor none of the boys zap me with a space gun when I come and wring their necks. If I had a friend I’d race them, nick their heads off and race them in a line and see whichever one would run over the line or get the farthest without no head. And the blood just gets sucked up in the red dirt and then you cain’t even tell where they’ve run ‘cepting that there are more flies there for a while and then the other hens peck the maggots up and that’s that.
Shelagh’s ma warn’t so much like her. That’s often the way what my ma said. That one generation don’t resemble the last so much as the one before. Or fifteen hundred before like in the case of my brother. He don’t but grunt like a caveman but then he’s got one on me who don’t make no sound but I can whistle and blow words like the wind what no one else can hear. Or understand. This ain’t what my family was used to being like says my ma, but they ain’t no presidents lined up snaking back into the past neither so I don’t know what ma would think to expect. Leastwise I’m bright though I keep it well hid or they’d work the ass off me like they do my cousins but Bo is like the eye of that chicken, no sign of brightness there. You could stick a taper right through the eyeball of that slow-limbed suck and set light to it and still there wouldn’t be nothing shining out of that dumb skull of his. It’s an aspect what he’s got natural but what I’ve had to learn, for to have the lights out but somebody home. Or not home in his case. Less n what he’s just plain a master at it and me the apprentice.
I wouldn’t never kick the hens and never have and never would, ‘cepting that they was on fire or something, red flames licking their red feathers, and that being the only way to stop the fire. Kicking a hen won’t do you no favours in the long run and if it’s eggs you’re after then you’d better not kick them even when they get one over on you and they know it and they know that you know it but they make out like they don’t which is even worse than them dancing around in victory. Like they don’t expect nothing less than to get one over on you and it’s not like it’s even an event, not even worth raising their necks up enough to give you an arrogant chin, which they don’t even bother to do. But they know. If there’s something special that the wind blows in, like a thought or something, or special power that the wind blows in and you can feel it coming for a while and you can sense like it’s coming and then just when it’s going to blow in and touch you and make you feel like an Aztec priest or something and you’re ready to close your eyes and just take it and then that hen skits across and gets to the wind before you and sucks it all up for itself and uses it just to improve its pecking when you could have used it imagine anything and see through the air into another time or place and see an Aztec priest dripping in blood and then change and transfigure and then you’re the priest holding up the heart that’s still beating and all the people are bowing down to you and instead it’s just a hen pecking about and you’re left empty and beaten by a hen and it knows it and it knows that you know it but it can’t even be bothered to show off about it since it figures it’s so lordly over you. Times like that sometimes I don’t even want to kick it. I’ll just tot it up for when it’s dinner time one day and ma says fetch me a chicken Bub and I’ll repeat to the hen all its transgressions on this earth and then I’ll despatch it only with the axe and all its blood shoots up out of its neck with its life and all its power and into my mouth it shoots and when I swallow it I get all that power that it stole off me all in one go.
Bo ain’t safe to be let in the pen. He’s worse than a coyote getting in the pen. He’s got the intelligence to catch one but don’t know what to do with it once he’s got one. He’ll hold them there and hold them up before his face and they’ll let fly with their legs maybe more in fear than in a wish to maim and scratch at his face like it’s the dirt and soon it’s running with blood and red like the dirt but he’s just biding his time and then he’ll strike and get a toe between his teeth and nibble it and nibble it away bit by bit until that’s a toe gone and then he’ll wait for the next one and the hen ends up with no toes and even if it’s a layer there’s nothing left but to wring its neck. So I don’t let him near the pen and I’ve gone so far as to lay traps in case he shakes off his watcher or breaks out of his own pen and shakes off the captivity of his own pen and immediately comes down here and just exchanges it for captivity in this pen where there are things that he can get and ruin. He’s no use round here but ma dotes on him like a sowless piglet that needs suckling and he stays in his pen most of the time and accepts sweetmeats from the kitchen and wipes grease over his bib and gets befouled for the day. So you might guess but what ma would be mad at me if I laid the kind of traps that would take off his toes or a whole foot and so my traps are the kind that don’t leave no trace. There are pebbles that come from the stream upstream, little blue ones, that have special properties that I make use of. If you lay them in a configuration and stretch some part of your own self across there when you’re laying them and the wind’s coming in from the east when there are black clouds stretched out east where the wind’s coming from, thin clouds, and the sun is shining on the top of them so that they’re shining bright and looking even blacker, then that will be a magic thread that stretches across the pebbles and if someone so much as treads across the line they form then the wind will tell you of the transgression wherever you are on this earth and give you enough time to get to the pen before Bo nibbles the toes of your best layers. Trouble is once that trap is sprung then you have to wait for the same conditions to lay down the trap again and there’s months what it can go round here without those conditions and anything else, one laid down in any other conditions, just ain’t reliable. You might as well pin down a toad by its hind legs and ask it to croak if anything comes near. Won’t happen. So don’t waste your time.
I personal don’t hold with keeping too many cocks about not close to the hens, it keeps their mind off the job of scratching and pecking and, if the good lord allows, any subsequent laying. I know there’s some round here like nothing better than keeping a few there watching mean from nearby so’s the pen cockerel keeps on his toes with preening and showing and quivering his red comb like jello all in the sun, all wobbly and strange, looking out for the big herd of henless cocks scrapping and waiting for their chance at the dams. There’s a sport this way for fighting them, rearing them mean and keeping that way right up to setting them down in the ring, maybe wearing a pair of silver spurs, like Dwayne whose cocks always wear a pair of silver ones that his granddaddy won on a wager and that it’s said was crafted from the silver found in the hills somewheres-about, not round here, by some prospectors one time sometime a long time ago. Silver spurs but with mean cutters made of steel or some such, I ain’t never seen them close to on the grounds that I don’t hold with fighting cocks, as I said, it don’t do well to have them so close to the hens like that, and I cain’t hardly have two distant pens on the grounds that Bo could then reap havoc in one pen or another while I’m busying myself working in one or the other, what’s to stop him going to the one where I’m not at.
I was thinking one time that maybe I’d set one there, make my own silver spurs out of twisted barb and whatever and set him there waiting for Bo to come on down escaped from his pen and set to trying for a nibble at these toes, and getting himself a surprise there when he gets scratched as he’s habitually used to getting done, ‘cept it’s silver spurs what get streaked down his face rather than plain old toe talons and that boy is so dumb he wouldn’t notice till n what his face would near enough just plain drop off in strips from all the scratching, him being too dumb to even feel it. I don’t know if he does feel that stuff or if he likes it somehow, or if he just likes getting pampered by ma when he turns up blooded like that. I don’t know how he would look liberated of all his skin, like the Aztec folk what would get skinned and they’d just set there and take it, not even let out so much as a whimper, such were the folk in those days, better n what folk are these days, round here at least, and then the priests would dress up in their skin and walk around and posture some and who knows what else, communicate with their gods, like the god of blood and death and another of corn and another of rain, all necessary to them as I guess they was farmers too. I don’t know if Bo would be allowed to carry on living like that, with just his face gone, and his skin on his face peeled off and just his muscle underneath showing if the blood would stop, and no eyelids or nothing so I suppose his eyeballs would dry out some and maybe cause him to lose his ability to see things. I don’t know if a body can carry on fit to live in that state or if it’s a violation of some godly principle. But it would be an improvement on that boy, as he’s nothing special to look at as things currently stand.
My cockerel, Mister Sandman as I call him, he’s not so much of a gentleman and that’s just par for the course round here. Most folk round here they want something they just go ahead and take it, they don’t stand in line waiting for it to be give them, where they could be waiting all day and jobs and work to be done on the farm which ain’t going to do themselves. You might say he’s a southern gentleman just as much as any round here and I doubt you’d get much argument just so long as there weren’t no ladies around to hear, when other laws tend to hold out and all manner of nonsense is spoke, little of it bearing much relation to what might be considered the holy truth, or is it whole truth, it is truth of some kind, or rather it is not, if there’s a lady around what some boy is trying to turn to thinking one thing or another. That’s the thing, people think it’s the doing but it’s not. Once a girl has set to thinking a thing then she will do a thing but the thinking always comes first. There’s no sense trying to get them to do a thing without them first having thought what they need to think. Not unless the likelihood of them thinking the thing and subsequently doing the thing is struck to nothing, in which case I suppose the doing of the thing is all that’s left, and that is all there is. In which case Mister Sandman is perhaps more of a gentleman than some of the folks round here as he is always gentle enough with the hens.
There are all manner of things said about cocks and hens as you might imagine, I don’t hear them what they say but I have my way of knowing what they say by seeing how their lips move and such like, the movement of their slack jaws as it’s said, and it turns out they don’t tend to consider me even a witness since I cain’t write neither, not to their reckoning leastwise, and things get said what would not have got said if things weren’t this way. A body can turn out and say what’s on its mind if it reckons there to be none around what would stand as witness to what has been said and not have the tendency to repeat anything of what has been said. In this way have I witnessed through not witnessing what goes on around these parts and in such a way have I seen fit to judge what goes on around here and given my judgement on the way things are. Things might be said one way in one circumstance and then right away in another circumstance that same thing is turned around and given another face and it’s like there are different worlds here where depending on the circumstance things are one way or the other. And which is no different for me. And even though I don’t come out and say things the opposite of what I might at some other time originally have said, this is perhaps largely on account of me not coming out and saying anything, and in my mind I know that I am not an inviolable truth walking the earth that is always one way and no other, and in this way and in others I am like the wind itself.
I would not say this to no other person but I am instructed by things other than a school mam, ma never sent neither one of us, not me nor Bo to school, and no one came and kicked up a fuss about that, being glad I suppose that we was off their hands and under some other roof, mostly the sky, which is the roof of the earth, as it turned out. A school mam would not have had no joy from neither one of us I wouldn’t have thought, and as I said they warn’t none come knocking on the door for to take us off and educate us neither one. And such was my instruction left to whatever might avail, the wind as I have said with its power and magic which the hens are of a mind to skit across and steal, and other things which instructed me in ways that I doubt no school mam would have been capable of. I could say that the coyote taught me cunning and the yellowhammer taught me zeal but this would be a lie and in truth my instruction is of a wholly different order, such as is hidden from mortal men far as I am aware.