No truths here, I am sorry to say, mean anything any longer, except where they apply to the chickens; I have neither the time nor the patience left to swerve. Where once I had allowed myself to imagine these birds adventurous escapees, inspired by and inspiring me (but which came first?), I saw them now as complacent stay-at-homes I was not above pelting with their own eggs for boring me so badly, and for making me smell like chickens, and chicken feed, and chicken shit, as I sat friendless (I was sure) and Godless (I was equally sure) at school and talked about a sentence (or an equation) not even the teacher took much interest in;
Or on the floor of a Richmond Rite Aid, where my vacuum cleaner had just knocked over a maxipad display, and one of the boxes had come open, and I was yanking pads and carpet fibers out of the machine’s wide mouth when a slim figure slipped around the corner, and stepped over the electrical cord, and snatched up one of the still-intact boxes, and hurried away toward the cash register, and I saw from behind that this was the very girl I was just then in love with, who would be pregnant so quickly, by another, that I might as well have scooped her up a free handful off the floor;
Or in the passenger seat of an adult I admired, as I asked him whether I should follow my brother to The University or should apply in secrecy to a college up north and in town (my parents had ordered me not to: they deemed the northern application fee an insult, or a hardship (I cannot remember which), and refused to pay it, thinking their hubris might at last put an end to mine), and this man had counseled me to do as I liked, though Virginia parents generally knew best, and he himself had received a fine education from one of the Atlantic Coast Conference schools, on a football scholarship there, and then he stomped on the brake, and grabbed a rifle (or was it a shotgun?) out of the rack behind our heads, and before I knew it had arced around the front of the vehicle, and jumped the ditch, and back-rolled over the barbed wire (I had not seen this maneuver before), and raced across the field after a wild turkey he had no honest hope of catching, and when at last he returned to me, and put the gun back up in the rack, his eyes asked a sympathy of mine that would prove as elusive as had the turkey;
Or in a booth at the McDonald’s on Patterson, having passed on the way the burial of a child I knew perfectly well, some of whose bereaved, I knew perfectly well, would now filter in, all dressed in black, and await their turn to order Happy Meals and Big Macs, because they knew, perfectly well, given where they had opted to dwell and to die, how long it would be before they had another chance to eat at McDonald’s;
Or on a couch in the still-usable half of our living room, trying to watch television and awaiting inspection by the parents of my brother’s ambitious new girlfriend, who were visiting their ambitious girl and her new boy at The University, when we heard pressure on the gravel outside, and then a screeching of tires away, and my sister guffawed, and my mother collapsed into her melodramatic tears, and I remembered (how could I not?) that time I caught a ride home from a charitable girl at the high school, and pointed up at the house once we neared the curve that had famously bested all those drunks, and the girl drove right on past.
She assumed I was joshing, of course, and what pains me, in retrospect, is that I was. I meant only, by my pointing, that “here” was where I, and my little sister (who had recently been menaced by a boy at the high school and, before I could “have a word with him” (by which I mean attack him in one of those hideously tiled bathrooms I had avoided myself since at least the seventh grade), struck him in the face with a steel-toothed hairbrush she had ferried in her purse to school, reportedly with such force that it remained lodged in the poor boy’s cheek as she turned back around to smile at the teacher whose job it had been, theoretically, to protect her all along; later, when inquiries were made, neither this teacher nor her charges would admit to having seen a hairbrush, nor to hearing any hypothetical screams), would be forced to sleep tonight, and eat our victuals, and do our chores, and compose a few paragraphs where such were asked, and set out for school the next morning worse people.
It was absurd to imply that human beings actually lived in that place. (Philosophically, there is no sound argument to be made that anyone ever lived there, or that the house itself ever existed, or the county, or the commonwealth, or the self, or that I in fact exist today, comprising as I can but these few paltry words (or are there too many?), which, again, seem real enough to me (see the fifth through the eighth paragraphs of the eleventh part of my fifth attempt to end all this), but what if I have that all wrong?) There was (psychologically speaking), for at least one of us in the car that evening, a visceral certainty (could we not smell it, the viscera, if not the certainty?) that chickens did indeed exist up there, next to a house haunted by an uncertain farmboy who half believed in that house, and in that county, and in that commonwealth, and who could not decide whether, to be free of his dragons, he would have to fly those birds or those birds would have to fly him.
Compass rose
I let my guard down, re the chickens. I see that now.
I took their quietude for serenity, when I should have taken it for what American country quietude (or town loudness, either way) has always hidden: further subterfuge. So what if I had seen them bunch up against the coop wire in seasons previous, and tear at the opening they had initiated there? By this fuss they had wanted not freedom but snake blood, and by my father’s axe I had given them that. So what if they seemed thereafter to want nothing? I was a fool to think the matter, or themselves, the least bit settled.
One vernal eve, with the moon fat and jaundiced over Richmond, and the sky gone a gulp past grape soda, I stood and watched a lone hen peck at the loosened flap behind the feed trough/chicken toilet, and I wondered whether she had not been driven insane. By fear, perhaps, and this was then an autonomic echo of how she, and her kind, had dealt with insecurity in more serpentine times. By grief, perhaps, and this was then a senseless rituaclass="underline" the pecking out of a passageway to the afterlife for every sweet little sister she had lost to the king. I wondered how she would react if I seized her now, and brought her up into the yard, and laid the axe handle across her neck, and pulled the body loose from its troublesome head. Would the body run back down, past the asparagus patch, and ghost-peck dutifully at the unfinished hole? Or would it die here in the yard, crestfallen, as the head already had?
Currently I have this hen figured for an agent, likely one of several whose work I was not meant to see, nor ever fully to understand. A week or so later, as I climbed the hill from our mailbox one ponderously green afternoon, having checked to see whether I had been asked yet to a college up north and in town (I had not), I saw in my periphery, laid out true across the front yard, a wide and fetching compass rose. The cardinal points of this compass were vacant, I will allow, unless you want to count nail-ridden boards and the odd rat lookie loo, but the ordinals there were well-enough represented: Brown Dog, as I remember it, held the southeast position; Ginger Snap, the southwest; Cooper held the northwest position and promised, by his quick musculature, that he could cover the northeast as well. That would have been Blackie’s spot, had the pines not claimed him years before.