Buttfucker the rooster I determined to mold into an assassin His loss in single combat to that Rhode Island Red, and his subsequent not being eaten for it (see the second paragraph of the ninth part of my fourth attempt to end all this), had caused in him a confusion and, I suspect, a shame. I hoped to rectify that with a program of exercise designed to bolster, over many months, his self-esteem. My method here was to kiss and fondle his hens whenever I stepped into the coop yard, despite what sicknesses they might impart, until he showed even the slightest competitive spirit, at which point I would raise my foot and recommend his face to the clay. (Again, this was a very long-range plan.) In time he learned to attack me as soon as I came in through the gate, and his reward for this acumen was a quick boot to the chest that sent him flying back farther than any hen ever had. He kept at it, though, which pleased us both, and I once kicked my way through the Apostles before he finally stayed put, puffed up and heaving against the dirt, his claws folded under him, his eye a mucilaginous dot of odium.
Certainly my father took some notice of these experiments, but after our contretemps in the yard he made no direct reference to them, except when he returned with a rifle (or was it a shotgun?) slung over his shoulder, after sitting all day in a tree and waiting for a wild turkey to pass by (which normally I would have got after him for), and saw how I had the hood of a car up, and the air filter off and tossed against those cinder blocks he loved so well, and a hen perched precariously on the manifold, so that she might peck at a kernel I had placed on the carburetor’s butterfly valve in an attempt to solve forever, via chicken, the problem of a flooded engine. To his eternal credit, he understood at once what it was I was up to and, leaving aside any complaint about corn down the carburetor, yelled out, just before I cranked the ignition key:
“If that car backfires you’ll blow her fucking head off!”
To which I yelled back:
“She’s been apprised of the risks involved!”
Good eating
So we have swallowed fried chicken we knew by name; and ground-up pig we knew by sight, and liked personally; and shreds of deer a-bounce in the bramble at dusk; and cubes of squirrel keeping cozy in the trees; and Lord knows what else we had no honest need of (the outlandish prices charged for outland groceries justifying gas-costly trips into town, yes, but never old goat meat for dinner); and after a spell it is good eating, you hardly notice it.
Advocate
I killed a pregnant lady once. She landed on a paragraph I was trying to construct (Oedipus Rex, I think it was, this time around: “On Oedipus Rex”) and ambled across my lines from left to right. I shooed her away, but she merely rolled off the page, impossibly fat and slow, and I grew irritated by the distraction and smashed her with the heel of my writing hand. Which released, onto palm and desk and page again, a legion of tiny, squirming larvae I had then to scrape into a pile stage left and render into a motionless yet still somehow bothersome paste. To this day I do not know if I did right by that paragraph.
My intention here is not to advocate the misuse of God’s clown airforce for human gain. I mean to say only that it was right for me, at that particular time, in that particular place. Earlier and elsewhere I might not have punched at those fireflies who invaded the yard on warm evenings, so as to aid along the subtleties of a nerd’s self-defense, and felt such a pride when I popped one just right, and he arced off my knuckles like an errant spark, not blinking any longer but lit up now for good, until the grass at my feet shone with the vanquished and I was half entranced, swiping at the air all around me and able almost to ignore them that then faded in the blades below.
(Or else began to blink anew …
(And took miraculous flight …
(Though never to rise again, it seemed to me, any much higher than my bug-stinky fists.)
Earlier and elsewhere I might simply have caught these creatures up and smushed them, as American children will tend to do, and spread the now-activated goo in fluorescent bands across my innocent cheeks, and run down the driveway with the rest of the neighborhood, pretending with all my heart to be a Red Indian, as Waugh would have it, or Kafka’s fornicating translators, perfectly aware that distally, four beats back along the proximal line, I actually was one. But then earlier, and elsewhere, and not surrounded by these objects (words, largely, and mold), and under worse conditions (cool enough tonight, I suppose, if a bit muggy), and not given what in the interim I have happily endured, I might have been tempted to lie. I might have been tempted to craft a cute little segue here between fireflies turning on rather than off when killed (or were they?) and my relationship with the Lord our Jesus, said Himself to have died aglow and then, in a blink, arisen.
I might even have made use of the fact that this metaphor will not hold unless Jesus is continually beat down again by the fists of men, since that would seem to be the Church’s historical argument here, if not exactly its narrative, but in truth I acquired my faith not through metaphorical epiphany but by practical need. I was bored and lonely and afraid during my initial few years out there, and seeing folks on Sunday made me feel less lonely and less bored. (The afraid took somewhat longer.) Pre-rebellion against a gigantic atheist father, I could not fathom why these people would come together each weekend to celebrate the torturing to death of a self-absorbed Nazarene some twenty centuries earlier, even if He had once worked with His hands. Post-rebellion against a smaller threat, and working now gaily with my own hands, I could not fathom why these people would ever do otherwise. I had joined them in a solemn acceptance of, and promised salvation in, the truth that all local life manifested, winged or not, and in perfect imitation of Jesus, a deathwish foretold and pounced upon.
Cheerios
The priests kept croaking, for one thing. Clearly they had come out to die among us, none of them being young or bright or worth all that much to the Church, and each of them forced to minister to the prisons all the workweek, which would have sapped even my own joyous spirit. Father X lasted longest. He was a bald zealot with too many ideas about Saint Paul. In time he was reassigned elsewhere, equally desolate, whence he sent weak epistles until his heart exploded. Father Y I saw some promise in. He was a mess with words, but his toe tapped regularly to the music, no matter how experimental, and his eyes had a tendency to roll back into their sockets, which trait I could not help but admire. He died of a stroke my sister described thusly: “He looked up into his skull and decided to stay there.” Father Z was exactly what you might expect on the heels of X and Y: a short and effeminate wag intent on drinking himself to death by his tipple, which was scotch and milk. He achieved, I am told, a fatal infarction within a year or two’s exposure, though by then I was fled from that plot and heard not a word about the martyr who sallied forth to replace him.