The fighting cocks made Ham’s father happy. He had brought them home with him, their cages stashed in the back of his pickup truck, early one summer evening, after having spent several hours in Pittsfield at the Bonnie Aire Café with some friends. He had bought them from a man he had met there, a lumberman from Canada who was going out west by train and couldn’t take them with him.
That first night Ham’s father had talked excitedly about staging cockfights with Jack and Gene. Even though he’d never actually seen a cockfight, he figured there wasn’t much to it once you had a pair of fighting cocks. Ham’s mother said that she really wasn’t interested in anything that had to do with animals such as that, and she had gone into the kitchen to wash the supper dishes. Then Ham’s father had fallen asleep in his chair by the radio.
As soon as he realized that his father had fallen asleep, Ham crept over to the cages, which his father had placed on the floor next to his easy chair, and he studied the strange-looking birds. The one named Jack was red, the one named Gene was yellow, and they both looked fiery — fast, sharp, sudden little birds with wildly round eyes, short orange combs, beaks like the points of scissors, and long knifelike spurs attached to the backs of their legs. They reminded Ham of snakes — their cold, unblinking eyes, the way they held their bodies motionless while they watched him, always from the side, turning only their wedge-shaped heads as Ham moved in a careful circle around their cages.
Finally he sat down on the floor next to the cages. His father was snoring. Reaching out one hand, Ham brushed the top of Jack’s cage and quickly yanked his hand back. The bird didn’t move. Trying the same thing with Gene, he joggled the cage a bit, knocking the bird off-balance for a second, but getting no other response from it. Moving back to Jack’s cage, he once again reached toward the mesh, and just as he felt the touch of the cold wire against his fingertips, he realized that the bird had lanced the palm of his hand with its beak, and a hot flower of pain filled his hand and shot up the length of his arm.
He screamed, and his father woke up, and his mother came running in from the kitchen. Blood was pouring from a small hole in the palm of his hand all over his flannel pajamas and bare feet. Ham kept screaming and slapping his hand against himself as if a tiny spot of fire were stuck to it.
Wrapping his hand with the dishcloth she had been carrying, his mother hurried him upstairs to the bathroom, where, after a while, she was able to calm him and wash and dress his wound. Then she took him into his room and helped him put on a clean pair of pajamas and tucked him into bed.
Kissing him good-night, she said, “Don’t be afraid,” in a voice that helped him not to be afraid, because it was a voice that told him she was not afraid.
Then she went downstairs, and he could hear her talking to his father, though he could not hear the words. Several times his father interrupted her, but she quickly resumed talking.
After a few minutes his father started talking, and his mother began to interrupt, but he kept on talking in his low, steady voice. And when he finished, he left the living room and came into the hall and started up the stairs.
He came into Ham’s room and sat down at the foot of the bed. “Let me see your hand, son.”
Ham extended his gauze-wrapped hand to his father, who examined the dressing for a second, then returned it. “Still hurt?”
“A little,” Ham said somberly.
“A lot, I bet.”
“Yes, a lot.”
“Did you learn something?”
“Yes. I guess so.”
“What?”
“To stay away from your fighting cocks?” he tried.
“No, not exactly,” his father said to him. “I don’t want you to be afraid of them, boy. And if you just stayed away from them, that’s all you’d be. Afraid. I want you to respect them. Do you understand the difference?” his father asked. “Respecting something that can hurt you is different from just being afraid of it. And to respect the fighting cocks you’re going to have to deal with them face to face. Maybe that way you’ll get over being afraid of them,” he promised. “Do you understand?”
“No … not really. Maybe I do.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. You will,” his father told him. And then he told him that he had a “job” for him. Every morning from then on Ham would have to feed and water the hens and roosters, including the fighting cocks. He would start the next morning, when they would do it together, so he’d know how much corn to give them and how to handle the fighting cocks so they wouldn’t hurt him or escape from their cages. But after that he would have to do it alone. It was a “job,” his father explained, because he was going to be paid for it — fifteen cents a week, every Sunday morning before church.
But Ham could not stop being afraid of the fighting cocks. He might have if one morning early that first week Gene, the yellow one, had not nipped off a piece of the meat of his hand between thumb and forefinger. After pitching corn into Gene’s cage, Ham simply had not been fast enough in pulling his hand away, and the bird had got him.
His father had showed him how to do it, but true safety depended on speed, so he was not sorry for Ham. “If you’d done it the way I showed you, he never would have got you. You’ve still got to learn how to respect those birds. It’s not fear that’ll get your hand out of that cage in time. It’s respect.”
So Ham had concentrated on speed that he believed was derived from respect rather than from fear. He practiced on old Henry, the Rhode Island red, whom he knew he respected and of whom he had no fear whatsoever. He would walk into the henhouse carrying a can of corn, and extending a handful of it, he would call, “Here, Henry! Here, Henry! Corn, Henry!” and the bird, head cocked to one side like a partially deaf old man, would stalk somewhat wobbly toward the boy, and when his beak was a few inches from Ham’s hand, the boy would throw the corn onto the cold, bare ground, and Henry would dive for it.
If that’s what respect feels like, Ham thought, I like it. I especially like it better than being frightened.
Nevertheless, when it came time to feed the fighting cocks, the only speed Ham developed seemed to depend on fear. He was terrified of the birds — their endless anger, their suddenness, the weapons they carried. Whenever he neared their twin cages in the corner of the henhouse, his hands started to throb, his arms grew weak, and his back and shoulder muscles stiffened. One night he dreamed that as he opened the sliding door to feed Jack, both cocks had flown out and had furiously attacked his face, hunting madly for his eyes, and he had awakened screaming. When his mother tried to get him to tell her about the dream that had frightened him, he had refused to tell her. “I can’t remember,” he had lied.
Throughout the fall, Ham struggled to overcome his fear of the fighting cocks. The birds had grown used to his feeding and watering them every morning, so they no longer treated his arrival as a chance to attack or escape but instead waited patiently for their food, which, as soon as Ham had slid back the door to their cage, they greedily devoured, swinging their heads like short hatchets swiftly chopping the corn to bits.
In spite of this change in the birds’ expectations regarding Ham’s arrival, a change that in some sense gave them a measure of reliability and even a type of kindness toward him, he was still frightened of them, and he continued to move his hand with the food or water dish in and out of their cages as if he were plucking hot coals from a fire. He tried to respect them for their new restraint, but he couldn’t. He knew that the reason they were no longer flying at him was merely because they were hungry and had realized that it was his job to feed them.