Pet Chickens

I had the greatest grandparents EVER. There are few things I would fight over, but I would cage fight anyone who suggested otherwise. Each grandparent provided me with different things I needed to grow up relatively sane, but my father's parents provided me with something unique: farm animals.

Nanny and Grandaddy farmed forty acres in Drew, Mississippi. After my parents' divorce, they would drive 25 miles to meet my mom and pick me up and take me to the farm for the weekend. There I learned key skills like how to call bobwhites, catch catfish, and pick figs. I don't use any of those skills currently, but they are ready to be whipped out as needed.

Their house was a steady stream of basically feral cats that my grandfather could get to sit beside him and be petted. My job was to name them. Smokey, Midnight, Spunky (the Mike Tyson of the cat world),plus innumerable visitors. One of those visitors regularly had kittens in the back storage building, and those kittens were regularly eaten by some wild animal. In fifth grade, I wrote an essay about the decapitation of the kittens that would probably get me referred to a psychologist today, but at the time I was fascinated by the fact that coyotes came in the yard overnight to catch them.

My grandfather was particularly indulgent of my desire to have pets. Lots of pets. One of my earliest memories is going to the hardware store on Main Street where there was a big box of baby chicks and being told to choose one. I grabbed a loud, polka-dot chicken and spent the next weekend loving him to death. I carried him around by his HEAD. My mother was horrified, but my grandmother was rooting for him to die. This was because I had trained him to ride around on my head, but anytime I sat him on her, he would crap. Like crap his whole body weight.

Of course, Spotty grew up. And I must have caused him brain damage because he grew up MEAN. My grandparents ended up with an attack chicken. He chased off all the farm cats. He would fly up, spurs out, into the face of a dog the size of a German Shepherd. He terrorized the bantam chickens. He chased cars. If a rooster can be evil,he was evil. By the time he was grown, the only thing he was scared of was a broom. When Nanny would go out to hang the laundry, she would carry a broom in her hand and she would have to watch under the sheets to make sure he was not doing some special forces sneak up on her. If he was, she would drop the basket and swing at him like Babe Ruth. Whenever, we would need to go to the car, Grandaddy would open the door and tell us to RUN. He chased my father up a tree and we had to go and sweep Spotty away. Grandaddy, who was perhaps the most sincere Christian I have ever known, used to look at Spotty and say he should take him into the ring as a fighting rooster. Finally, though, Spotty did the unthinkable. He attacked me. I was out in the yard playing, and he came up and drug his CLAWS down the back of my leg. I had a scar for years.

The next weekend when I went to my grandparents, Spotty was gone. I asked Grandaddy where Spotty was and he told me he had given him to the "colored man" (this is 1974) down the road who needed a rooster. The next visit when I asked about Spotty, I found out that Spotty was no more. Apparently when he killed two of the man's "setting hens" instead of fertilizing some eggs, Spotty was fried for Sunday dinner.