Chickens by Lori J. Williams

Sexing the Chickens

It is difficult to tell whether a baby chick is male or female. Even today, computers can’t do it without human help. An experienced “sexer” divides the chicks, as hens are needed to lay eggs. No one wants more than one rooster. And even one is not necessary unless you plan to produce your own baby chicks.

Hearing that a younger woman, just starting to raise chickens, forgot to ask that they be sexed, and received only two females and ten males, my grandmother laughed at her: her foolishness, her ignorance about sex and chickens. My grandmother kept chickens, knew about chickens.

Baby chicks, bought at the farm store to keep in the brooder house, wobble unbalanced on tiny legs, easily frightened. They catch cold easily. They drown trying to drink water. They crush each other. They are fragile. And cheap. Buy extra.

Egg Money

On the farm in the old days, women were allowed to keep the profit from the chickens, their “egg money.” Men didn’t want to bother with chickens. My great aunt, a widow with no children, kept chickens long after she had rented out her land for farming. When people asked why she continued to raise chickens, she said, “They are company for me.”

Chickens, like any other livestock, require care every day: feed, water, protection from predators. My grandparents never stayed overnight when they traveled to visit our house an hour away, always saying, “We need to go home to feed the chickens.” But it was my grandmother who fed the chickens. They were hers. A reason never to go anywhere far.

Flogging

My cousin Larry screamed when the rooster came after him, bringing Grandma running to the chicken yard. I saw a feather tornado, wings pinwheeled with dirt; I heard Larry’s five-year-old cries. Grandma shooed with her broom, “Get away, get off him,” pulling Larry behind her, safe. A rooster attacks with his wings and spurs, clawing and flapping, “flogging” his target.

Aggression comes out naturally in a rooster. He protects his flock, fends off other roosters. I didn’t know about cock fighting as a child, but watching the rooster showed how this violence would work, why men would think of letting roosters fight each other and betting on it.

Inside the farmhouse, Grandma cleaned the scratches on Larry’s arm, bandaged him, gave him a piece of pie. Larry and Gary sat at the kitchen table, eating their pie, listening to Grandma plan her revenge.

“I am gonna kill that rooster,” she said. “And stew him.”

She killed the rooster for Larry, to protect her grandson. When she was ready for the killing, Larry and Gary weren’t there, but she called me out to watch.

Would she have killed a rooster for me? I didn’t think so. I learned on the farm about being a girl, being a boy. Who cooks, who is cooked for. Who is defended, who is left to fend for herself. Young chickens are best for eating, but she cooked that old rooster anyway, stewed, with dumplings.

Killing Chickens Is Women’s Work

“Be ready, now, for what he’ll do when I cut off his head,” she said, holding the chicken firmly by the neck with the axe raised high, her muscled arm paused just long enough for her to nod at where I should stand, distant enough to avoid the arc of blood soon to come. Her arm came down and the head dropped to the side. The comb and the eye, red and open, made me stare. I wanted to help my grandmother, get her approval, but I didn’t know why I’d been invited to this. I stood straight, arms rigid, heart thudding, watching.

“Now lookee here,” she said, tossing the body lightly as it landed on its feet. The feet, the headless body, took off. It ran. Impossible, for a headless animal to run, and yet it did. I saw it clear the corner of the farmhouse and thought to run after it, but I couldn’t move.

“How did it do that? Is it just roosters that can?” I asked. I was ten, dressed in yesterday’s pink shirt and shorts, my blue Keds dirty from running with my cousins. They weren’t here to watch this. It was just me and Grandma.

“Naw, they can all run, after the axe. Oh, here he comes,” she said, stepping back as the body with legs came around the other side of the house, a complete circle, but staggering now, twitching. It fell, flopping in the grass, blood dripping, then finally still. She poked it with the axe head.

“I got you, Mr. Rooster. You won’t bother little Larry no more,” she said.

I watched as she took the axe to the water spigot, rinsing it, drying it with an old towel. Tools must be cared for. They hold value on the farm, the practical things.

Approaching the dead chicken, I leaned over to stare at its head, then stepped over to see the body, its mottled feet curled in, sharp parts still. Nearby, I heard the hens in the chicken yard, separated with wire fencing and a swinging picket gate, clucking now more softly. I saw them cluster near the chicken house door. Rooster or no, their task didn’t change. They laid eggs.

Mother Hen

Hens are good mothers. Hens may eat their own freshly hatched chicks. Both of these are true.

Feed

Chickens eat non-digestible things—rocks, bits of shell, sand—that stay in their gizzards as grit. The gizzard breaks the chicken’s food down. But otherwise, they eat store bought feed, or scratch corn, and drink water. It doesn’t take much feed to raise a chicken. “That’s chicken feed” means something cheap, lacking value.

When my grandmother fed them, the chickens gathered around, made their soft sounds, pecked the ground around her for corn. They could be comforting then, listening to her voice.

Cowardice

When afraid or startled, chickens squawk and flap wildly. Hens will peck at your hand—hard, with sharp beaks—if they are sitting on an egg that you try to take, “broody” as my grandma said. But hens are submissive, and they will back down from humans.

I feared the chickens, a little, when I collected eggs with my grandma. She would tell me to reach in for the eggs, even if the hens were broody in their nest boxes. Sometimes the hens would peck me, quick knuckle pain. Grandma just lifted and tossed any hen blocking her grasp of an egg. The eggs were brown or white, cradled in straw, still warm from the hen. Sometimes dirt or shit clung to the eggs. We placed them carefully in the egg basket made of yellow-coated wire, wiping them off later.

People who are afraid are said to be “chicken.” A common schoolyard taunt of my childhood: “He’s too chicken to climb that tree.” Often he, rarely she. Being branded a coward mattered more to boys.

Were those chickens happy with their free range of the chicken yard? They walked calmly, pecked at dirt or weeds. They moved around each other, a flock. Their feet stepped one two, one two, claws steadying them. They knew which chicken was most important—the pecking order. But they didn’t seem to know much else. Many things scared them. They died easily and stepped over each other (or continued pecking at the dead one).

It Tastes Like Chicken

People who don’t eat meat because of the “cute” factor (big cow eyes, adorable lambs) sometimes eat chickens because they are ordinary, common, not so cute. The plastic-wrapped pieces of chicken or frozen tenders at the store seem separate from actual living creatures.

When Grandma’s neighbor bought some peacocks, a pair wandered down the road to my grandparents’ farm. Grandma talked about them just as if they were chickens. “That pea hen is roosting on my roof,” she said. When the male walked around the yard, fanned his blue-green-gold tail, she laughed at him. I believe she would have eaten him without a second’s thought.

My mother taught me how to cut up a chicken. It was cheaper, she said, to buy a whole chicken and cut it up. I stood by her at the kitchen sink, the mottled pink chicken body held in her left hand, the boning knife in her right. I smelled the raw chicken flesh, heard the knife snick as she sawed at the joints joining thigh or wing to body. She showed me how several times, saying it was something a woman needed to know. But the market for chicken meat changed, and now whole chickens cost more than pieces.

We ate the rooster that Grandma killed, stewed with dumplings. I didn’t see Larry eat any, but my grandmother pulled at the meat with her false teeth, chewing, chewing.

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

The old-fashioned chicken house was dark, musty, with bits of dust and feathers floating in the air, straw crunching, chicken droppings giving the whole an ammonia whiff. The roof was low. A door shut them in at night so that foxes or roaming dogs wouldn’t kill them. The chickens came in at night, sat in their wooden nest boxes on straw, slept, home to roost.

My cousins and I played in the chicken yard when I visited the farm. We dug holes in the dirt to make forts. There was a tree, with shade, and room for chickens to roam around their house. All the games we played were boy games: building forts, throwing things, pretending to be Batman and Robin. I was allowed to play their games, but they wouldn’t play any of my girl games: creating playhouses, families, pretending to be characters from books.

The outhouse stood in the chicken yard, although the farmhouse had indoor plumbing and a bathroom after 1968. But my grandfather refused to use the indoor toilet, preferring to do as he’d always done. He walked outside to the outhouse, day and night. My cousins and I got in trouble because Grandpa fell into our forts when he walked to the outhouse in the dark. We were told to stop digging holes, building forts in the chicken yard, playing games like that.

Don’t Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch

“Your grandma likes boys, favors boys,” said my mother.

“What do you mean? How can you tell?” I asked. We had been talking about the unequal attention I’d noticed given to my cousins versus me. I wanted to know why Grandma didn’t warm to me, praise me.

“Do you see how she fusses over your father when we visit? She makes his favorite food, worries over how hard he works. She doesn’t act that way toward her daughter who lives just up the road.”

Then I understood the order of things. What had seemed merely actions—giving Dad the best piece of meat, paying attention to men’s talk, repeated mention of her son—were revealed as preference, a belief that boys were more interesting, more important. Grandma talked the same about her father, her brother. I remembered also how she hovered over my boy cousins. I was the only granddaughter, but she seemed to take me for granted. I could stand by to help her cook or watch her kill a chicken. I could make myself useful. I couldn’t, though, change how she felt toward me. I was a girl. That was all.

The eye of the chicken appears almost reptile-like. Their heads turn in sharp jerks. It’s difficult to tell if they are looking at you or past you. The eye of the dead rooster held still, a momentary pause. I could look, I could see, if I was brave enough.

Lori J. Williams has published in The Hudson Review and won first place in their 2021 Short Fiction Contest. She earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University and now lives in Urbana, Illinois. She teaches composition, literature, and humanities at Parkland College. Find her at lorijwilliams.com.

17 August 2023