The Chicken Story

There is the chicken story. While we all lived on Taylor Street, our family raised a lot of chickens for a few years during and following World War II. Most of the chickens were fryers for our own eating, but we also had a number of laying hens to keep us supplied in eggs for Mom’s baking and cooking needs. For a few years in the early forties, mom baked cakes, rolls and other pastry items for sale to the neighbors, just to help dad a little with extra money. Mom had earned a reputation as a good baker in the area, and she was reputed to be very good at it. Naturally she used a lot of eggs, all that we could get from the hens actually. Anyone who ever raised laying hens knows how the least little things could interrupt production and even stop the laying process, but dad had these hens of ours laying better than ever at that particular time, so we had plenty of eggs for all our needs.

            Dad worked second shift at Wagner’s during those years, so we older kids had lots of chores with feeding the chickens, watering them, gathering the eggs, cleaning the coops, and even catching and cleaning the fryers we would eat. The other kids helped some, but I really was the one responsible as the oldest, and I naturally had the bulk of the chores on my shoulders.

            I enjoyed the killing of the fryers, especially since Grandma Meredith had taught me her method, which was grabbing the chickens by the neck and swinging them around and around until the head came off. This was much better than the way mom taught me, which had me laying a broomstick over the chicken’s neck on the ground and holding it with my foot while pulling on the chicken’s head until it came off. I used to just cleaver their heads off until I chased one of the kids with the meat cleaver one day, after which dad whipped my butt and hid the cleaver. Anyway, the deal of swinging them until their heads popped off was neat. The chicken would hit the ground headless and run around like crazy for about a minute before it collapsed and died. I never understood how the chickens could run around with no head. They certainly couldn’t see, so they ran into stuff all over the yard before they fell for the last time.

            One day I learned a really neat trick. I discovered a method of hypnotizing chickens while I was over in a different neighborhood with some kids I played with. I practiced it on chickens that belonged to two other families near our neighborhood, and by the time I arrived back home I had nearly perfected the new methodology that fascinated me so much. This is how it worked: first, you catch the chicken, and then you lay it down on its side and hold it still while you use a stick to draw a line straight out from the chicken’s beak. The longer you draw the line, the longer the chicken will lie there trying to see the end of the line. When it does see the end of the line, the chicken will simply get up and run away to the brooder house or to the corner of the chicken yard. Well, I perfected this method to the absolute nth degree by drawing the line straight out from the chicken’s beak a few inches, and then started curling it into a circular spiral and joining the line at some point inside the circle so there was no end of the line for the chicken to see. It was one of the neatest discoveries I ever made. I did it to every single one of our more than two hundred chickens.

            Dad got off work at eleven that night, long after all the kids had gone to bed. Mom always waited up for dad and had a little snack waiting for him before he went to bed. This particular night was different for dad and mom, and very different for me. I heard dad come crashing into the house shortly after eleven and yelling at mom, “Olive, what the hell happened to all the chickens? They’re all laying out there dead.”

            “What?” she said, sounding very surprised and shocked.

            “All the damn chickens have been killed. What happened? Did you hear anything out there bothering them?” he said in a frantic voice.

            She ran outside with him. I heard her say, “I never heard a thing. They were all fine when I last checked on them. Did some animal get hold of them and kill them?”

            Mom and dad both came back in and dad grabbed his big five-cell flashlight, then they headed back out to the chicken pen. Dad walked up to the first dead chicken he came to and stood there and just looked at it for a short moment. He then nudged it in disgust with his foot, thinking for sure that all the chickens were dead. The chicken rolled over once from the nudge, shook its feathers and then quickly jumped up and ran squawking into the brooder house. It scared dad and mom both because they never expected it. Dad nudged a couple more of the prone chickens, and they too came to life just as the first chicken did, so then he and mom went around the entire yard and kicked all of the more than two-hundred chickens back to life.

            A few minutes later, dad and mom came back into the house. Dad walked over to me in my bed and flashed the light in my face. “What the hell happened with those chickens out there?” he said.

            “What chickens?” I whispered with a quiver in my voice.

            “You know what chickens. What the hell did you do to them?”

            “I was just playing with them a little. I just hypnotized them,” I answered.

            “You hypnotized over two-hundred chickens? What the hell are you talking about?” he said as he jerked me out from under the cover.

            “Please, Dad, that’s all I did. I was just having fun with them,” I pleaded for my life.

            Well, no big surprise to me, Dad took me into the kitchen and beat my skinny little butt big-time that very night, right there in front of all the other kids and Mom and God and everybody. I know the neighbors had to hear me screaming for my life.

I wish I could say that the chicken episode was over at that point, but alas, it had only started. The damn hens quit laying eggs—completely stopped all production. Sad as it was for me, and as much as I prayed for them to start again as soon as possible, they just didn’t. I went to talk with them several times a day, begging them to please start laying eggs again, but nothing seemed to work. Each night dad would come in from work and ask mom if there were any eggs yet, and each time the answer was the same. There were no eggs.

            Dad would get me up first thing each morning and beat my butt again.

            I got damn tired of that treatment after several days, so one day I stopped after school and bought a dozen eggs with money from my piggy bank, after which I slinked into the hen house and scattered the eggs around under the hens. Mom went out later and collected all the eggs. I heard her yell, “Yea, the chickens are laying again!” She seemed very happy, probably for me.

            I was worried though, because I didn’t have the money to buy another dozen eggs the next day. I needed the hens to start laying eggs immediately. I shouldn’t have worried about it.

            Dad came in from work that night. Mom greeted him happily, “Look, Paul, the hens finally started laying again.”

            “They did? Let me see.”

            Mom showed him the snowy white eggs, all twelve of them.

            “Looks like an even dozen to me, and they aren’t even the brown eggs like we used to get. Did you buy these eggs at the store to protect him, Olive?”

            “No, of course I didn’t buy them, and now that you mention it, I do see that the eggs are not the same color. Do you suppose the hens can change their egg color?” she said.

            “Hell no, where is that kid, in bed?”

            “Yes, but you leave him alone. He’s had enough,” she said to him.

            She was right about that. I had had enough for sure.

            Dad walked over to my bed where I was faking sleep, and he whispered in my ear, “Nice trick when it works, but it doesn’t work with me. I’ll see you real early in the morning. Sleep good and tight.”

            Dad beat my butt early the next morning for the umpteenth time in two months. I didn’t know how much more I could take.

            One day soon after that, when I least expected it, one of the hens actually laid an egg, and then I looked and found a second egg. That’s all there were, but it was at least a start. I thought for sure that I was finally out of the woods, but it was optimistic thinking on my part. Dad continued to pound on my butt until all the hens reached full production again. He didn’t do it to me every day, but often enough to let me know he hadn’t forgotten the episode.

            I never hypnotized another one of our chickens the rest of my life. You may be tempted to ask, “Did I ever do it to chickens that others owned?” You have to know I did. One just simply doesn’t allow a good trick like that to die.

The End

Paul R. Meredith

1983