Kitchen Pot Pie

"Get that chicken out of the house!" Mom yelled at me.

"Jeffrey never hurts anyone. Do you, Jeffrey?" I cooed softly to the black chicken sitting in my right arm. I was feeding him live ladybugs I'd caught earlier that day. "She's so mean to you, isn't she," I went on. I was eyeing Witch, Mom's flea-infested cat sitting a few feet from me, by the dryer. That thing always wound up in the house. "Here kitty, kitty, kitty," I growled. The cat just glared at me, its green eyes glowing against its black fur.

"I mean now!" Mom yelled again. I just rolled my eyes and walked out, leaving the kitchen door open as the screen slammed shut. I walked down the porchsteps and heard Mom cussing under her breath about me and my beloved Jeffrey, as well as Beth, Mandy, Bob, and other sibling farm poultry. I simply stroked Jeffrey's slick black feathers as he clucked contentedly.

I started to walk out to the backyard when I heard one of my sisters scream. She ran past me with Ahab hot on her heals. the only words I caught between shrieks were, "Damned banty rooster!" Her naked feet left prints in the mud and she flew into the house, hiking her broomstick skirt above her knees.

My sister had probably been feeding her rabbits again when sweet Ahab charged her, possibly protecting the furballs from further fattening. Ahab was barely a handful of a rooster. But, my sister was a full-grown woman who ran from him like he was a bull seeing red. I looked at Ahab, standing a few feet in front of me. He looked back in a sideways glare. "You are mean as sin, Ahab," I said as he strolled toward the chicken house. "And, Sis, you're a wus. But I suppose guts aren't everything."

My other sisters don't necessarily lack guts...or boobs for that matter. The oldest is entitled to the tits, but Miss Sweet Sixteen's got enough boobs for me and my other sister put together. Not that I contribute a lot to that comparison with my hard-as-rocks, just-developing, fourteen-years-in-the-making titties. It's just that she flaunts them around with her so-called "posture" practically putting Dolly Parton to shame. No, I'm not jealous. Disgusted beyond vomitting is a better choice of words.

Dad's tablesaw screamed through my thoughts, hissing shavings from a wound in a nameless piece of lumber. I guessed that he was building more shelves for Mom's books. She has an overabundance of everything from sex books to God books to witch books and probably hasn't even read a third of them. What a waste of space.

As the saw continued to shriek and whirr, I looked at Jeffrey just in time to notice his casually taking a dump on my arm. "Jeffrey!" I yelled, letting the feathered thing fall to the ground. The other twenty chickens began to gather around me, pecking at the few ladybugs I'd dropped with Jeffrey. The three geese honked noisily for their share of the food.

I turned to the wellhouse and sprayed the chicken poop off my arm, soaking the right side of my shirt as well. I looked around the yard: corn cobs, melon rinds, and rotten tomatoes were scattered down the bottom of the driveway by the chicken house. I heard the familiar cluck of a hen bragging about her freshly laid egg. I followed the sound, wondering who the lucky mother was. I saw Mandy strutting outside the coop, her fresh egg cradled gently in a fallen honeysuckle vine beside the building.

As I came near, I noticed Henry, the big rooster, guarding the chicken house door. In a dark corner behind him, I saw Ahab, Patch, and another banty taking turns with Beth, pecking the feathers out of her back as he fertilized her next eggs. "Poor Beth," I thought, pitying the chaos she had to endure just to have her babies. I turned away, disgusted with the males. They were the only poultry I wouldn't mind having for supper. Truthfully though, I'd hate to eat anyone I'd named, even if they were no-good rapists.

A few months ago Boobs had gotten really ticked at one of the banty roosters. She got a tree limb and started beating the crap out of the mean thing. (This was before we'd started naming the chickens. I think it was a solid white banty.) Anyway, she wound up killing it and Mom had her cut off the head and pluck all his feathers. Cold-blooded murder in my opinion. To dispose of the body, they had rooster pot pie for dinner, but I didn't eat any. I get sick just thinking of such cannibalism.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen to me if I were a chicken. Mom says that chickens are raised for food, that we eat their eggs and eventually them, too. No wonder Ahab is constantly charging at everyone. He's got it all figured out. He's angry with the bum deal fate gave him, just like the Indians must have been. Only, I don't think the white men ate the Indians, just overwhelmed and killed them off. Sometimes it's easy to kill, when you don't care about who you're killing.

I remember a few years ago when my wus sister killed some kittens because Dad had been griping about buying food for them and letting them grow up and have more babies to feed and so on until all she could think of was our thirty acres swarming with meowing felines. So she drowned them in their own water dish. Afterward she cried for hours in her bedroom about how their mother came and drank out of the same dish she'd just killed them in. She'd said that their furry bodies were stiffening in the water. I could just imagine their eyes: the mother's, accusing, and the babies', questioning the why of it all. This was before we got the chickens.

Now Witch, the cat we have now, looks suspiciously at newly-hatched babies. I can tell he'd like to eat one, but he knows better. He's been hit with a lead pipe once and learns more easily now. Any food that is in a cage or readily walks by without fear is strictly off-limits for Witch's tastebuds. He's a good mouser, if we don't catch the mice first and cage them. He kills for the sport, and when we forget to feed him.

Mom's always threatening to kill a goose for Christmas dinner. She won't kill Sherry, she's the only girl and she lays nice big eggs. Bob's pretty mean and he's getting really big. I don't want her to kill any of the geese, but I know she'll try to.

The oldest hates wasps and dirtdobbers and bees. She killed at least a hundred or so one summer when we were fixing up the yellow room. Mom has a little ACME brick that she squashes the wasps with whenever they get in the house.

It's easy to kill when you don't care about who you're killing. Maybe I care too much. Maybe I don't care enough.

I looked down, away from my thoughts, and saw the grass, dried and dead from the summer's drought. A dragonfly landed within my view. I thought about the chickens and the earthy stench of them. "I ought to kill Jeffrey for pooping on me."

-Rachel Johnson, 1995