So I Thought We would Just Go On Like This Forever

So I Thought We Would Just Go On Like This Forever

The Chicken Chronicles

©2009 by Alice Walker

Chapter Seven

So I thought we would just go on like this forever, happy, drowsy, eating grapes; but no. Guess who had to go and enter the picture?

Death.

I was not prepared. Are we ever?

It is painful even to think about.

I had come down the hill in all my cheerful innocence, expecting everything to be the same as it had been the day before. ( Good Morning, Girls, it’s Mommy!) Impossible, of course, but there are many days when we don’t think about “impermanence” or how “Everything must change,” a phrase I always hear in Nina Simone’s voice. Like the child that I still am I count my chickens every time I see them; and that is what I started to do. Feeling almost instantly that somebody was missing. Sure enough, no matter how many times I counted, trying to reach nine, I only got to eight. Eight. Where was chicken number nine? My heart was in my mouth. This is an expression I never hear these days, and I certainly don’t hear myself saying it. Still, there it was. I knew something awful had happened.

The flock, by now, seemed over whatever the shock had been, and were most curious about what I had brought them. Today, sunflower seeds, with big yellowing petals still attached to the circle of seeds. They didn’t know what to make of this at first, but one or two pecks and behold, out popped big crunchy seeds, that, from their perspective, might have been hiding, so cleverly does the flower protect its seeds from the eyes of birds.

I went inside their house, looking at everything carefully: their nests, the roosts, the floor. Way at the back of the coop I saw her: her black and gold feathers, the flecks of orange on her wings. It was Babe. I tried to pick her up, but couldn’t. Her head was wedged between the outside chicken door and the floor. Someone, closing the door while she was trying to look out or get out, closed the door on her lovely head. I went outside, opened that door, and lifted her body out into the sunlight. There was a lot of blood, now dried, some of it running down the side of the chicken house.

She was heavy. In her few weeks with me she had gained weight. But there was also, on my part, an instant understanding of the expression “dead weight” for she was not just heavy but leaden. The buoyancy of life had left her entirely. And she was stiff and hard. Her feathers the only thing still shining and seeming to have life. Her poor head was crushed, but the rest of her was intact.

What to do?

I took her in my arms and expressed my sorrow. I am so sorry, I said. You met such a frightful fate and I was not here with you. I hope it was quick and painless; that you did not suffer. I looked for a place to bury her. It happened that I was having a new septic system installed for the guest cottage – a tiny wooden tee-pee like dwelling I lived in before building my house. There was a deep hole waiting to be filled, piles of clean earth all around it. I knew I had to place her deep to keep the bobcats, raccoons and coyotes from finding her, and so chose this spot. I dug a deeper small hole inside the larger one and laid her there, covering her gently with prayers for her journey. Who knew this would hurt so much?

And it isn’t as if I’m vegan, as Wikipedia claims. I’m just an ordinary run of the mill mostly vegetarian person who still eats chicken soup when I’m sick and roast chicken when I can’t resist. But I could not have eaten Babe. Though a neighbor, like many folks in this part of the country, thinks he could have, and that not to eat her was in some sense a waste. I don’t agree. Nothing good that goes into the earth is wasted, is my thought. Look what magical things come out of it! I have never understood why people choose to be buried so that they don’t touch the earth. It seems short sighted.

I limped back to my stool in the corner of the chicken yard. I blamed myself. For, isn’t this what mothers do? The day before, following a book on chicken raising, I had done something that might have caused Babe to rush to the chicken door that leads outside, rather than to the door, always open, that leads into the yard. According to my book, I was supposed to keep the chickens in the chicken house and yard for at least two weeks, without letting them out into the garden or the unfenced space around their house. This was to make sure they knew where they lived, and could return there, and to keep them from straying off into the woods, which they would do, since chickens are known to follow any bug anywhere, completely forgetting where they live and are loved or who is waiting impatiently there. I did this. The day before Babe’s death the two week period ended and I happily opened the never before opened door to the wide world outside their chicken yard and, with cracked corn and human clucks, showed them how to descend a ladder that extended from that door. They were excited to be free. Who wouldn’t be?

Together we went over to an arbor covered by grape vines and wisteria. Wisteria getting the upper hand. In the shade. And, bugs without number, just beneath the moist wood chip covered ground beneath the canopy. The chickens were in Paradise. I was too. There’s a nice wooden bench to sit on and I sat watching them enjoy their freedom. Overjoyed as they were they would occasionally, Babe and Gertrude Stein especially, come over and hop up on my lap or shoulder, just to thank me, I guess. We stayed out for an hour, which seemed long enough, and then I coaxed them back to their house with corn and more clucks. They were reluctant to leave but came willingly enough when I threw in a few grapes. Rufus and Agnes of God tried to hide around the other side of the chicken house, but of course I could still see them. Which they didn’t seem to believe.

Before leaving the chickens I sat for a quarter hour holding Babe; her resplendent black and gold neck in the crook of my arm, the festively feathered rest of her snuggled comfortably in my lap. This may be the last time, this may be the last time, this may be the last time, it may be the last time, I don’t know. This old song that my parents and grandparents sang in church comes back to me now. It was a sad song, melancholy to a child, and even though we attended a funeral almost every month, sometimes twice a month, I was too young to understand the deep compassionate sorrow in their voices. They were people who had been through a lot together, and, because of poverty, the young people were leaving the countryside to go North, or to live in the cities. The community they’d built was coming apart. There was as well much sickness and disease. And some of the old people died after long, mostly invisible to the world lives of sacrifice and hard work. Yet, in this song, they were honored in the singing of people who knew them, appreciated and loved them. This may be the last time, it may be the last time, I don’t know.

Maybe when a human came and mistakenly opened the outside door she’d come through for the first time only the day before, Babe had rushed toward the light. Perhaps she dreamed of more bugs and cracked corn and grapes, more snuggles in the arms of a warm, soothingly breathing, human. Maybe the door closed on her head so quickly she had no time to think of anything else. I hope this is the case. She’d probably never experienced a headache, so maybe she didn’t experience her pain as “pain.”

On one of his tapes, my teacher Jack Kornfield talks about what we are likely to think about as we’re dying. The most important question we will ask ourselves – having long given up asking such questions of others –is “Did I love well?” After all, we’re the only ones who could know. I think an acceptable answer is: I loved as well as I could.

What helps me with Babe’s death is that the day before, not knowing the future, I sat with her on my lap, stroking and admiring her. It delighted me that her experience of being a chicken on earth among humans was a loving one. That she ate only the best food, slept in a clean chicken house, had a nest ready for her and her eggs, should she ever happen to lay any. If someone had tried to tell Babe about the cruelty done to chickens by humans, and she could understand the language, she would not have believed them. Her experience, until a human accidentally closed the door to the outside world on her head, was that we are ok. Decent creatures to have in the service of chickens. For that, too, is how she had experienced humans.

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I Have a Persistent Thought About My Mother’s Thumb
The Chicken Chronicles, Chapter 6
©2009 by Alice Walker

It is just her thumb. I recognize it because I loved it so well, along with all the rest of her. But the reason I see it now is because of the chickens. She ordered them from a catalog, the postman delivered them to our mailbox at the side of the road, way in the middle of Beautiful Countryside, Georgia, and she carried the brown cardboard box carefully down the hill to our house. It is the moment of her opening the box that I notice her thumb. There is a deep scar on it, where she almost severed half of it with the butcher knife.

Sometimes, looking at the block of knives I use in my kitchen I am wryly amused: there is a knife for boning meat, a knife for paring fruit, a knife for chopping vegetables, a knife for slicing bread. There are knives I never use except to open jars. Who knows what they’re really for. But in our house, when I was a child, there was only one knife, the butcher knife, a ten inch blade screwed into a chunky brown wood handle, and it was used for everything. So she may have cut her thumb nearly off while cutting a hard cured ham that swung in the smoke house, or cutting kindling for starting the kitchen fire, or cutting a rope for tethering the cow... But cut it to the bone, she did. And then, because there was no doctor, and because she was learned in the ways of folk medicine, she put her two pieces of flesh together again using clay from the dirt daubers that built their nests under the eaves of our house, soot from the chimney, and spider’s web. Having applied these medicinals, she wrapped her bleeding thumb - which she had washed as well as she could in cold water from the spring - in a clean cloth, and gone on about her work.

What I see is the tenderness with which she lifts the lid of the box, already having rigged up a low wattage light bulb (we have recently acquired electricity) for heat, and how she kneels there, with the warm light bulb just where the sun would be, as the two dozen yellow chicks, with their bright orange beaks, fumble and stumble over each other, their just born faces gradually adjusting to the fresh air, the warmth, and the light. She’s not a talker, my mother, but she offers a few encouraging words of welcome, praise, concern. Did all of you make it? How many lost on the journey? Let’s move them out. How hungry are we?

She will raise these chickens, as well as chickens we have from hens and roosters already established in our yard, and with their help - their eggs and their flesh - she will feed her family of ten.

And something else will happen between my mother and her flock. I see this, now that I am old enough to see her so much better: She will sit with them when we are at school or at church and endless work has prevented her from leaving home, and she will enter the peace that I have found with Babe and Gertrude &Co., that elusive “eternity”- for someone so busy as she - that meditation has always been.

***

Perhaps You've Seen Her?

Perhaps You’ve Seen Her?

The Chicken Chronicles
©2009 by Alice Walker

Chapter 5

Perhaps you’ve seen her? A photograph of her, maybe on a We’Moon Calendar? She is an old woman, round, comfy, wearing a dark colored headscarf – so maybe she’s in Turkey, or Egypt or Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq - sitting under a tree or maybe she’s on a bench that’s against a wall. Outside anyway and she’s gazing in complete peace at a flock of geese in front of her. They have those long, dark, graceful necks that one could, really, stare at for days. Just at the necks and the beaks and the feathers – best not to wonder about their livers. But there she is, and peace is with her. How is this? That is the mystery I have fallen into with my/our chickens. I sit in the corner of the chicken yard on my little green stool, Babe in my lap, Gertrude S. in my lap, and I’m there. Eternity. How long have humans and non-humans been carrying on this way?

I think of being taught formal meditation. It was in New York City and there was a lot of traffic and a lot of horns blowing. Constantly. To duck into one’s own “eternity” seemed impossible. It turned out, it wasn’t at all. But one thing our teacher stressed was that we must shut any animals out of the room while we sat. I did this. My cat, Tuscaloosa, used to being near me, had to entertain himself at least twice a day for up to half an hour. Whenever he did manage - while I was meditating - to get out of the kitchen where I’d sequestered him and leap into my lap, it was a shock. I thought I understood.

But now, sitting with chickens, I begin to wonder. It feels so natural. It is like another recent discovery I’ve made with Surprise, my present cat, and Miles, my companion’s dog. Surprise, unlike Tuscaloosa (black warrior, in Choctaw) is an escape artist from any confinement, and she will find me wherever I have secluded myself. Having found me, quietly meditating on cushion or bed, she will not rest until she is in my lap. She will remain there, perfectly still, until meditation is over. It appears to me that she is meditating too. But who knows anything at all about cats? Miles will lie nearby, in complete silence, until I open my eyes or stretch or make some other movement or sound. Then he will stretch, do a couple of downward dogs, and yawn also. Done.

***

Four Brown Eggs! Yaay, Space Nuts!

Four Brown Eggs! Yaay, Space Nuts!*

The Chicken Chronicles

© 2009 by Alice Walker

Chapter Four

So I strolled down the hill to see the girls; as I try to do every day. It’s been raining a lot, with wind, and I’ve spent more than a little time sleeping. Glorious. I called out to them, as I do: Hi, Girls, it’s Mommy. They rushed to the fence, as they always do, and I counted them, as I always do; then I informed them, which they’ve heard before, that I was going to get a special treat for them. Today it was apples. I went over to a tree, shook it, and brought the apples back in my basket and tossed them across their straw littered and scratched up yard. I picked some outrageously healthy kale that seems about to swallow its bed, and tossed that in too. I then took up the rusty metal spatula that I use to scrape away poop: from food cans and water dispenser and especially from the “porches” to their nests inside, and I opened the people size door that leads into their dwelling. Their house smells sweet; which amazes me every time. It smells sweet because of the hay that covers the washable concrete floor and fills the nests, and because of the lumber used to build everything, and because their poop is basically from fruit and vegetable matter. I treasure the poop and always praise and thank them for it. In the spring, after winter composting (maybe two winters because chicken poop is so hot) it will go on the vegetable beds. We have a working team here, I often tell them.

Well, yes, ok. I imagine them responding. But what’s with the tasteless worms you’ve got crawling out of your shoes? It is incredible to me that they’ve never seen a worm, yet because my shoelaces resemble worms they will peck at them until they occasionally untie both my shoes.

So there I am with my rusty spatula, scraping their poop off their porches, and from inside their nests as well, when what do I see: four small light brown eggs. I can’t believe it. Perfectly formed, clean as a whistle. A bit of straw and a tiny wispy feather stuck to one egg, but that was it. Yaay, Space Nuts! I cried. They all crowded around the door as if to witness my response. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I said, letting a favorite feeling, astonishment, wash over me. This is the best gift of all. You have given us these four beautiful eggs. What wonderful people you are. Chicken people, I stressed, to discourage any thought of human arrogance. They seemed pleased.

But who was responsible? Not the Ameraucanas, because the eggs were not green or blue. Maybe the Barred Rocks, Rufus and Agnes, whom I took to be roosters? Or maybe the youngish looking Rhode Island Reds?

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Back on the green stool in the corner of the chicken yard, earlier in the summer, I am noticing what chickens, with plenty of space and good food and fresh air, like to do.

--

*“Space Nuts.” I coined this expression – and use it a lot - to apply to the human race. Here we are hurtling through space so fast we’re not even aware of it, and doing some extraordinarily unhelpful things. Fighting each other, murdering the planet, eating extremely bad food, lying about everything, and so on. Then there are the good things: We try to stop war, we take care of Mother Earth as best we can, we pay attention to what goes into our precious, once in this lifetime, bodies. We honor Truth. Yaay, Space Nuts!

Or sometimes instead of Yaay Space Nuts! One would say Aw, Space Nuts. Or simply “Space Nuts” and the intonation of the voice would do the work. Former President Bush was a Space Nut. One would not say Yaay. Just: Space Nut. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, Amma, Jesus, Buddha, John Lewis, Rudolph Byrd, Beverly and Valerie, Garrett and Che would be Space Nuts and we would say “Yaay.” Etc. Etc. Maybe this expression replaces the earlier much used “My people, my people!”

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What Do Chickens Like To Do?

The Chicken Chronicles

©2009 by Alice Walker

Chapter Three

They like to take naps! I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Not only do they like to take naps, they like to take naps together. They especially like to take naps in the afternoon when the weather is hot. This summer there were many very hot days: one hundred and five to a hundred and ten. I’ve learned the trick of jumping in the pond with my clothes on and leaving them on to dry. Cheap air conditioning. Or, I will lie in a hammock in the shade with a wet towel for a sheet. Or lie in the bathtub filled with cold water, reading. The chickens, though, burrow into the earth as far as they can, kicking aside the straw, and they will make a circle of their special friends, and they will slowly nod off. It is enchanting to watch them do this. There will be the most sumptuous quiet; as if the whole world feels drowsy. It would be difficult to imagine war and terror anywhere on earth. It is too hot, in any case, to think of it.

They also like to preen themselves; for this they will fluff out their feathers and peck around under them, shaking out loose feathers, dust and vermin as they go.

I placed our chicken house on a slight slope, facing east so that sunlight floods the upper ventilation windows in the morning and splashes across their ascending and descending ladder and their tiny front door. A maple I planted fifteen years ago gives shade over their dining area; when it is very hot, they congregate here; filling up the roosting sticks and slipping and sliding each other around the slippery tops of the garbage (food storage) cans. Sometimes pecking at a bit of mash, or scratching for bugs around the water dispenser. They love to scratch, and they have powerful legs. If you’ve ever seen or done the dance called “the funky chicken” you can easily visualize the movement. It is no-nonsense, serious, and has a rhythm. I love the way our dances used to imitate the creatures we were obviously fascinated by: chickens, dogs, fish, and of course a long time ago, jitterbugs, among others. Jitterbugs must have been thrilling to watch! Scratching with an intense authority that I find wonderful, chickens’ eyes are so sharp they see dozens of edible critters where I see none at all. And gobble them up.

They like to sit on my arm. But they have no sense of what their hard feet and claws feel like, consequently I’ve received more than a few scratches. What happens is they’re comfy for a moment, maybe two, but then they see a bug, way off at the other end of the yard, and they’re off, launched from my arm without any kind of good-bye. I had never understood well enough the use of the gauntlets that falconers wear. But until I can find a pair I will endeavor to wear denim sleeves. But what would throwing down the gauntlet mean, in this context, I wonder?

They like to eat and their favorite thing may be fresh corn, which I give them chilled and on the cob. I tell them it’s chicken popsicle. But they also like grapes. And they especially like Chardonnay grapes, much more than Pinot Noir. I So agree with them. There’s no comparison, really. Where we live the landscape is overrun with vineyards, with every kind of grape imaginable, but overwhelmingly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Twenty-five years ago when I moved to this valley there were three small vineyards and many pastures full of sheep. I miss the sheep and the pastures. My land is deliberately under-graped. The chickens and I make do with three grape vines, two of Chardonnay and one Pinot Noir. I pick the grapes, smell and admire them, and fling them through the fence, eating a few before doing so. They also love pears and apples, collards and kale, lettuce and eggplant, but not figs. Here we disagree. I love figs. They remind me of my father, who, with his rich color and slow to ripen sweetness resembled a fig himself. Soon there will be persimmons. I’m excited but a bit edgy. They may not like them. But how could they not like persimmons? Persimmons are orange, a fabulous color. I love persimmons. The mushier the better. They are the American mango. And how about the pumpkin left over from Halloween?

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