birdie drama - part 2

Ok, so this is part 2. If you’re just signing on, go back and read part 1 first. Also I put in names of folks- only not their real names. Cause, well…

     The chick didn’t die that day. And it didn’t die the next. By the third day, the kitchen reeked of the acrid scent particular to chicken excrement. It was around that time that Alexandra decided to reintroduce the bird to the flock. Where only two days before, the chick’s head had been a mess of bone and tendon, its scalp was now covered with a heavy plate of scab. How quickly the young things heal, I thought, looking at the bird, trying to calculate how long it would take my own skin to scab after such a wound. Meanwhile, the chick found the box to be terribly boring and declared its indignation vocally. It was time.

     When dusk came, Alexandra tucked the tiny thing into the henhouse next to its mother and siblings who were already sleeping in their warmth of feathers. Chickens are blessed with a deficit of short term memory. In the morning, the birds would wake and remember nothing of their separation. They think their whole world had always been, and would always be, the way they found it upon waking. It’s like the rest of us, believing that our happiness or sadness is everlasting, so that we’re always surprised at the change.

     The next day I went straight to the coop, certain that I would find only two baby peeps scavenging in the dirt. But no, all three of them were there. The runt’s scab was starting to grow feathers. She ducked and ran with her siblings, squabbling over the tastiest grubs. The only evidence of the trauma was her size. In the three days, the other babes had doubled in size, whereas the runt seemed to have shrunk.

     The chicken coop was next to the unfinished barn, and I stopped for a moment to see how it was coming along. Alexandra and the carpenter were standing in the sunny spot between the beams. Their faces were drawn. The carpenter looked like he wanted to hit someone. He sucked in his breath. “There’s nothing wrong with the way I hung the windows.” I backed away quietly.

     On my way I passed Kelvin, Alexandra’s lover, a man 20 years her junior.
      “You don’t want to go over there. They’re fighting again,” I warned him. Kelvin shrugged and lowered his head, but he kept walking. The path back to the house was ablaze with orange leaves and autumn sunshine. The air smelled like clear skies and brown mud that I could taste on my tongue. It was hard for me to imagine anyone living here being stressed about anything.

      When I went back inside, Dee was doing the dishes with her dog Sammy contentedly gazing at her a few paces away. Dee was the healer who lived upstairs. She radiated positive energy. “How is it going out there?” she asked pleasantly.
      “The barn looks beautiful,” I said. “Though I’m not really sure if it’ll be done before the goats get here. And I sort of think the carpenter is going to kill her.”
      “That sounds exciting.”
      “Um,” I said, looking at her washing the metal bowl on the counter. “That bowl had chicken shit in it.” Dee looked up at me, then back at the kitchen sponge in her hands.
      “Oh”

     Just then Alexandra burst into the kitchen, in a flurry of emotion. Despite the warm indian summer, she was dressed in two winter coats and a big fur hat. “Oh no oh no oh no oh no”
      “What is it?”
      “Keith Clearwater just told me that Tim told him that the neighbors are angry. They think the barn is too tall and obstructs their view. It’s my land! But I think they’re going to call the building inspectors on us. I knew it was too tall! I kept telling John that he was building it too tall.”
      “Oh dear.” Dee said, putting the sponge in the dishwasher. “What will happen if they call the inspectors?”
      “I didn’t get a permit! I thought the barn was small enough that no one would notice! I was originally going to build it on slats like the chicken coop, so we could wheel it around if we wanted. But John said it was too big for that and needed a real foundation. I shouldn’t have listened to him. Now he says they’ll make me tear the whole thing down.” She sat down then stood up again. “I have to go over there and explain it to the neighbors. They have to let me keep the barn! The goats will be here in two days. What will I do???? Lara! Will you help me charm the neighbors?”
Her daughter, Lara, was curled up on the couch under a poncho, reading a textbook. “Do I have to?”
      “Do you have any healing techniques, or advice for stress?” Alexandra turned back to Dee.
      “Well, you could do this breathing exercise,” Dee said with the calm of a yogi. “Just breath in for eight… and hold for five…”
      Meanwhile, Kelvin slipped into the house with a rooster tucked under his arm. I don’t think anyone saw him go into the closet and turn off the light.
      “Tim says I should just go to the building inspectors myself and give them money for a permit after the fact,” Alexandra was saying. She held up a bunch of cut herbs to her nose and inhaled deeply.
      “I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t really trust Tim.”
     Tim is Alexandra’s former lover; a man who broke her heart, moved into the house next door and took up with another woman, one of her friends. Every day, Alexandra looks out the kitchen window and watches him drive around his yard in a giant green tractor. “That’s my tractor,” she told me the first week. “I gave him that tractor.”
      “Lara, hurry up!” Alexandra turned to her daughter again.
      “Mom. I really don’t want to go over there.”
      “You have to help me. They’ll like you. You’re cute. Just talk to them about how great goats are.” She breathed in and held her breath, visibly counting.
      “Let me take the dogs out first,” Lara fled to the backyard.
      “Also,” I said. “Don’t freak out. But we need to buy the electric fence today.”
Alexandra nodded vigorously. “Right, right.”
      “The electric fence and the hay,” I pressed further. “Before the store closes.”
      “Mom!”
      “What?”
      “Why is there all this glass out here? Mom. I’m bleeding!”
      “You’re bleeding? Why is all that glass there? Sometimes I have no idea what to do with Kelvin. He just leaves plates everywhere!”
      “Keep the dogs away.” Lara shouted from the back porch. Mom! You have to look and see if the dog has any glass in her mouth? Is her mouth bleeding?”
      “Lara can we please, please just go next door to talk to the neighbors?”

      Just then, Kelvin stepped out of the closet. The rooster lay limp and very, very dead in his arms. Lara and Alexandra hadn’t noticed. They went upstairs to look for bandaids. I could hear Alexandra pleading with her daughter to hurry up.
      I crept closer to Kelvin and the rooster. “Why did you kill it in the closet?”
      Kelvin’s voice was hushed as if he’d done something sacred. He always spoke with an upturn at the end of his sentences, as if he was asking a question. He was in his thirties, but he had a childlike quality about him that made him seem ageless. I listened, spellbound.
      “I take him into the dark, into the closet? So he’ll go to sleep. Then I just hold him? Upside down in my arms so that all the blood rushes to his head, and I just slowly… slowly squeeze his windpipe.” He demonstrated with his hand. “I’ve done it enough times- that I can feel- when the spirit leaves it.”
      “I can’t believe I missed it,” I said.
      “Oh! You can do the next one!”
I looked at the dead bird in his arms and tried to imagine feeling its heart beat against my own. I didn’t answer.

      Twenty minutes later, Alexandra had abandoned visiting the neighbors in favor of rushing to the farm store. She dashed out of the house in a flurry of forgotten keys and returned trips inside to get lists and more warm clothes. Just as we were about to get in the car, she turned to see Kelvin hunched primally on the front porch, pulling black feathers out of the limp object on the ground.
      “You slaughtered one?” Alexandra said sounding confused. “When? Wait, is that the big black one?”
      Kelvin looked up, “…umm, yeah?”
      For a second I thought she was going to cry. He had slaughtered the prettiest, biggest black rooster of the bunch. Not the mean orange that had attacked the baby. It was the wrong rooster. I stood there awkwardly while she struggled to pull herself together. “Well, they – they” she cleared her throat. “That’s not how to take the feathers- you’re supposed to boil… You know they really need your help over at the barn. I’m so stressed out, the builder is mad at me and the neighbors are going to call the inspectors, and the goats are coming the day after tomorrow. I really, really need your help over at the barn.”
      “Um, ok. Sorry?” He stood up, leaving the rooster where it was, and ran over to the barn. The dead, half-plucked bird stayed there on the floor of the front porch for the rest of the day.