I convinced the trumpeter beside me (a recent recruit from shop) to cut his lip gruesomely on his braces and spend the rest of an afternoon spitting blood down into his mouthpiece. In time the teacher stopped us in our playing, and said that the trumpets sounded “gurgly,” at which point we pushed all the music stands aside, so that she might properly see, and the boy sitting next to me opened his spit valve and produced a lake of crimson gore so large I was forced, as were several others in the vicinity, to lift my feet. Once the deluge had reached our stands, the flies tied to mine, already straining at their hairs, set upon it in dreadful unison. Our teacher flew out of the bandroom then, hand over her mouth, and did not return to us the following semester.
I must tell you, or tell someone, that at times in the process of leashing a fly the wings would come off and one was left, in the patois, with a “walk.” This unfortunate was normally let loose to explore one’s desktop until, say, a teacher tossed a graded paper down onto it—
“On The Tempest”
A–
Watch those run-ons, and please no more profanity.
— and realized what it was she had just seen (or had she?), and so turned back around, and lifted the paper, and out of human instinct used it to euthanize the pitiful thing that crawled underneath (would that Lear could have come to my aid there, with its “as flies to wanton boys” zinger, but we were not yet acquainted with that play, nor would we be by graduation), my profit on this being the demerits she then dramatically wrote out for me, which forced me to stay after class and explain that although I had admittedly done harm to the fly, and would have to answer for that in Act V (or would I?), I was at least willing to allow it what life was left to it, whereas she had robbed it even of that, and so of the chance (who can say?) to find a mate who did not mind the lack of wings, and possibly even found the look attractive, indicative as outer damage can ofttimes be of inner character, and had decided to make fly babies with this particular one, to the exclusion of all others, but could do no such thing now with the perfectly lifeless smudge we could each of us see before us, right there, on the lip of my desk. I continued along this line until she had torn up my demerits and was weeping so profusely I had to remind her to write me out a tardy slip for the period our intercourse had cut into.
But it is of the birds at home I now wish to speak.
Americans about it
True, I had succumbed at school, and happily, to the rural way, or perhaps it was only the southern, and could boast of numerous people repulsed by my actions there (such as when a principal sought to expel me for having shown my “rear” to a carload of honking Protestants riding behind my slow schoolbus: this man had said, during what he took to be our exit interview, “There’s a time and a place for everything,” which I argued was high school (time) and schoolbus (place), but he resisted this logic and insisted on a face-to-face meeting with my embarrassed mother and infuriated father (or was it the other way around?); I warned him that such a stance would lead on to trouble, to which he responded, “You bet it’s trouble, mister, and you’re in it,” which then led me to explain that it was not me I was worried about, as I was already in constant and excruciating trouble at home, but rather a situation he himself might want to avoid, who had yet to taste the rhetorical wrath of a mother convinced that she alone had any right to judge her children or, beyond that, the narrative vindictiveness of a father seeking to win his wife to him by continual displays of violence against anyone his wife held to be worthless, who, I heard later, launched his sawdusted corpse-in-the-making (he is all dust and no saw now, I assure you: we may begin in earnest to sweep him away) across the principal’s desk in an attempt to close forever the town man’s offending throat, while my mother grabbed at, and pulled against, those same callused fingers she had perhaps that very morning scraped away from her delicate lap, hoping to beat out a last-minute compromise), but I had only then begun to assimilate at home.
The chickens were a help with that, the assimilation, and I thank them for it. I would also apologize, since there were moments when I sensed that their pleasure did not entirely equal my own. And, of course, because they are now all dead. It is silly, I know, to apologize to the departed with words so few of them made use of while still alive, but we do so anyway, apologize, or refuse to, if we are going to be Americans about it. My already condemned father stood too often at the side porch while the sun went down on him, declaiming (he? it?) against whatever after-school activity had lately kept me away from the stead (if I had come from a “sports-team practice” he would look about ready to disown me (from what? from what?); if I explained that I had just now been with a country girl, and had held her furry crotch in my dirty palm, and had squeezed it till et cetera, et cetera, I might enact a brief pause in his bitching while he gazed up at the purpling sky, and considered whether or not I was lying (invariably I was), or else reminisced (which is more what I was going for there), after which he would catch himself up and continue) when I knew full well that chickens would not eat by the light of the moon. Any child will become exasperated by this sort of thing (or inspired, is my overall point here) and will rejoice in the chance to teach its parent otherwise. I do, though, apologize to the chickens.
At first these birds appeared ruffled as the moon lit their dinner, and for a week or two they refused to lay, but I held fast to my schema and soon had them gathering in the coop yard to feed only when moonlight presented, and staying inside their shelter on those occasions when it did not, during which nights I threw feed down onto the coop-house floor, and shone a flashlight in through the mesh, so as to coax along what result I wanted. My success in this experiment spurred me on to several others, hardly more scientific but every bit as fun.
The hens needed their wings clipped regularly so that they would not fly the hexagonal mesh that encompassed, but could not wholly hide from view, their grassless yard. Traditionally one cut the end feathers off the right wing and left it at that, but I wondered whether less standard dos might not produce more glamorous trips. I began to try out various shapes and depths of trim, on both or either wing, and with some rigor I vetted the hypothesis that a certain Bernoulli-friendly styling, accompanied by a hindrance attached to one foot or the other (after seeing my brother lift weights out in front of the house, and me do God knows what out behind it, my father asked what the hell I thought I was doing back there, and I told him my activities were of no concern to a petit-bourgeois arriviste (because a Parisian woman had after the war years married a Goochland farmer, mistakenly thinking she was doing something romantic, there were French lessons offered, if a tad sarcastically, at the high school) who did not even know that chickens prefer to dine by moonlight like everybody else, whereupon he took a step toward me, and I took a step toward him, with the clippers still in my hand, which may or may not have led him to stop, and to consider all the feathers strewn between us, and to say, before he turned and disappeared back into the house, “Those hens are your responsibility”), might produce panicked barrel rolls through the air, and desperate hover-bounces off the coop side, and flapping front backflips with a half twist (I achieved this once, or else the hen I conscripted and handicapped did: when she landed, facing suddenly back at me, she cocked her head and produced the second-best look of astonishment I have ever seen on a chicken), which even Wilbur and Orville (for whom I named most of the lady test pilots in my care) would likely have applauded.