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.
They didn’t like their cages, especially when every day the hens and old Henry left the henhouse to scratch in the fenced-in yard outside. Also, the daytime proximity of Henry and his harem amiably socializing together seemed to enrage the fighting cocks, and every hour or so the pair would crow angrily at the other birds. As always, Henry continued to crow only at sunrise and sunset.
Ham’s father no longer talked about arranging cockfights and making lots of money from Jack and Gene. Ham’s mother explained that it was illegal anyhow. “And with good reason,” she had said angrily, but that was as much as she would say.
Every Sunday morning, before Ham and his mother got into the pickup truck and drove to the church in the Center, his father, who never went to church except at Christmas and Easter, paid Ham his fifteen cents — a dime and a nickel. “Put the nickel in the collection plate. Save the dime,” he told his son each time he paid him.
And Ham did save the dimes. The first Sunday he had been paid, he had taken the calendar down from the kitchen wall, and studying it a while, had calculated that by Christmas he would have saved almost two dollars, which, he decided, he would use to buy Christmas presents — for his parents and his cousins. Until then, he had been too young to have any money of his own, and he had not been able to buy any presents for anyone. Like a baby, he had been forced only to accept. But now that he had a job, he was not a baby anymore.
Then one Sunday morning in early December, after it had snowed heavily all night long, the milky, overcast sky in the morning and the dense silence of the first snow caused everyone in the family to sleep a few minutes later than usual. Even old Henry overslept and didn’t crow until almost eight o’clock — a half-hour late at that time of the year.
In a rush to feed and water the birds, Ham neglected to close the door to Jack’s cage with the snap that locked it. He hurried back through the foot-deep snow to the house, and while his father shoveled out the long driveway to the road, he gulped down his breakfast and got dressed for church. Before he and his mother left, his father paid him.
Later, when they returned from church and walked into the kitchen, his father said somberly to Ham, “Leave your coat on, boy. I want you to come out to the henhouse and see something.” He got up from his chair, put on his own coat and hat, and led his son outside and along the narrow path he had shoveled to the henhouse.
At the door to the henhouse, his father stopped and lit a cigarette. Then he said, “Go on in,” and Ham swung open the door and stepped inside.
The cold-eyed fighting cocks, locked inside their cages, were striding rapidly back and forth. Across from them, in the farthest dark corner of the henhouse, the hens were huddled silently together in a rippling mass, all of them facing the wall. And in the center of the packed dirt floor lay the body of old Henry, shredded at the breast and head, with a flurry of blood-tipped feathers scattered about it on the floor.
Ham turned around and stepped back outside to where his father stood smoking and waiting for him. The sky had begun to clear, and the snow glared brightly in the sunlight, so that for several seconds Ham could not see.
He heard his father say, “You know what happened, don’t you?”
Ham tried not to cry and finally succeeded and answered, “The fighting cocks killed Henry.”
“You forgot to close Jack’s cage this morning, and after you and your mother left, all hell broke loose. By the time I got out here, Jack had killed the rooster and scared the hens so bad they probably won’t lay till spring.”
Ham said that he was sorry. He said it several times because it felt strange to him when he said it, almost as if he didn’t mean it, as if somehow he were glad that Henry was dead and the hens wouldn’t lay.
His father told him that being sorry never changed anything in this world. Never. “So the first thing you’re going to do is buy a new rooster for those hens. If we’re lucky we’ll get them laying again. It’ll probably help if we put the fighting cocks out in the barn right away, so this afternoon I’ll build a couple of coops for them out there. Up to now I kept them in here because it was easier for you to feed them all at once. Now it’ll be harder for you,” he said grimly.
“How much will a new rooster cost?” Ham asked, knowing the answer even before he heard it.
“Two or three dollars,” his father said, flicking his cigarette butt into the snowbank and heading for the house.
Ham stood there alone for a few seconds and then started running to catch up to his father, who had almost reached the house.
The Drunken Pigs
In certain years the family raised a pig. Always Poland China pigs. But there was a period of about five years when they were raising two pigs, every spring butchering the older of the two and replacing it immediately with a young one. In two years that pig would weigh one hundred and fifty pounds or more, and its turn, as the older of the pair, would have arrived.
By that time Ham, whose responsibility it was to feed them, would’ve grown attached to the bristly, pinkish white beast, so he was grateful that every time his father and Archie Carr, the butcher, packed one of the pigs into the back of Archie’s truck and drove off with it, they left behind a football-shaped and sized piglet, so small it had to be fenced separately for a while to protect it from the clumsy, thrashing bulk of the remaining adult pig.
“Pigs don’t get along until they’re about the same size,” Ham’s father had explained. “Like people.” Then he had laughed down lightly at his son, and touching the boy’s coal black hair with his enormous fingertips he said, “Naw, not like people.”
Ham knew that they raised the pigs to kill and eat and that it saved them a lot of money. It was wartime, and even though his father worked hard every day as a plumber, Ham knew that they were poor, so he tried to think about the pigs the way he thought about the vegetable garden.
It wasn’t easy. The pigs themselves made it difficult for him. They had too much character for it. Certainly they rooted like potatoes in the dark ground of the pigpen, but sometimes Ham would stand on the rough board fencing of the pen and watch them snuffle through the dirt, and when the pigs realized that he was there, they’d stare up at him and wrinkle the loamy surface of the dirt with their buried noses, as if signaling to him. Besides, the pigs ate potatoes — or at least they ate the peelings, whole buckets of them, left over from Ham’s mother’s cooking at the end of each week.
And yes, it was true that the pigs were in fact shaped more like a summer squash than anything else — they surely weren’t shaped like animals, or people. Rounded at the ends, long and smooth-sided, so fat their tiny legs in soft ground were almost invisible, with a tendril-like tail at one end and leafy ears at the other, it should have been easy to think of them as nothing more than gigantic pinkish summer squashes. Except of course that they ate squashes, ate greedily the seedy cores that Ham’s mother scraped away when she was canning for the winter.