K Russell Breakstone
Part I
We spend a while guessing which of the chicks are hens, and which will be culled. To cull, to separate from the flock. So close to kill, we shiver with the word. Farmers cull; butchers, too. It is, we read online, the last line of defense against the egg-eaters, the cannibals, the barnyard bullies: chickens gone wrong. But we’re not really farmers, the two of us. We are writers, we are introverts, our pronouns are he/him, we identify as cisgendered male homosexuals, and though we know there are radical queer farmers somewhere out east, our chickens, like our Great Dane Pete, are pets, not livestock. They have names, and we gossip about them in bed.
The twelve new chicks come from the store in a box, like oranges. We bring them home in the pickup truck that we inherited, along with the farmhouse and a half-acre of land, from an older aunt. Each of the chicks is the softest thing we have ever touched. They stumble around the incubator like drunks, arguing with the walls, pinwheeling into helpless piles. Pete lies next to their cage. He pants in the warmth of the heat lamp, and his ears twitch with curiosity. We take a chick out to show him. It’s so small, compared to Pete’s great horsey head. He peers at the chick through one yellowed eye, then has to move his entire snout out of the way to look at it again through the other.
Before long, the chicks are grown enough to run around the house. They shit constantly. We lay down tarps and beach towels, which confuses Pete. He smells the salt and suntan lotion, he smells the dander and droppings, his nose places him in the past and present all at once. Pete’s also confused by the hens gathering at the glass kitchen door. They draw the chicks with their maternal cooing, but Pete runs there too, worried the chicks will somehow walk through the glass and out into the wide, wild world. The chicks and hens scatter, then return. Once the chicks leave our house, the hens will take over. They will shelter the chicks beneath their wings. They will show them where the figs fall from the broad, shady tree, they will nestle together at night.
And how will the roosters react, we wonder. Blackbeard is the elder rooster. He is a popular and fair-minded chicken. The hens love him. They follow his spurred footsteps, they settle into their skirts and listen to his thoughts, his observations of the yard. Blackbeard’s domain contains all between the sliding glass door of the house and the oleanders at the edge of the property. His is the fig tree, the coop, the stump, the ditch with the stinging nettles, and the broken wheelbarrow, the long yard of weedy soil that can be dug at for larvae and worms, and the patch of gravel the chickens sometimes swallow in order to help with their digestion. He is not allowed into the garden, but Blackbeard does lay claim to any plants that grow past the chickenwire fence. He’ll lead over a line of hens and encourage them to jump for hanging vines of sugar snap peas and sunfire-red cherry tomatoes.
Blackbeard is the rare thing, we like to say: a good rooster. He does not crow at night, and he is kind to the hens.
His brother, Napoleon, on the other hand; Napoleon is a hen-chaser, a constant crower, a jealous white-feathered rooster who nobody really likes. He tends to the edges of his brother’s domain. He mates with the hens in the oleander, though after they always run back to Blackbeard.
The chicks have been sexed once, already. The girls were sent to be sold at the feed store, and the boys were destroyed. But the process isn’t perfect, we know. We hope all the chicks are female, and to cement our optimism we give them the names of every grandmother and auntie we can think of: Henrietta and Madeline, Beatrice and Francine, Mariam, Hattie, Sally, Molly-Anne, Angel, Grace, and Joy.
By the time we let the chicks into the yard, they have already changed. The dandelion fluff we so treasured has dropped away, replaced by new feathers in barnyard shades of white, brown, and red. Three of the chicks are male. They reveal themselves in their budding spurs, in the arch of their tail feathers, but most obviously in their strut, that impatient high-step that proclaims, in the chicken world, masculinity. We don’t rechristen the roosters, we just reposition their names in gender: from Henrietta to Henry, Francine to Francis, and Sally to cigar-chomping Sal. With Blackbeard and Napoleon, that makes for five roosters. Which is four too many for a coop.
Part II
Napoleon is reacting poorly to the young roosters. He abuses the hens, what Freud calls transference. We find one half-blinded. Others are missing neck feathers, as if molting out of season. We catch him in the oleander, biting a hen’s neck as they mate. It is an easy choice, then: Napoleon will be the first rooster culled.
One night we mix cocktails and make paella in the big pan. We text our friends: who wants an angry rooster? No surprises, Napoleon is universally rejected. We are left with a single option. And yet, there are many ways to kill a rooster. We had heard that the aunt who owned this house, and those chickens, would wring their little necks, two at a time. We imagine grabbing Napoleon by the head and snapping him like a wet towel. We practice on Pete’s stuffed giraffe. He whines in horror, and we laugh. We are drunk.
Napoleon is a middle-aged rooster. We joke about giving him whiskey and cigarettes, a stressful job at the office. Let him work himself to an early grave. We list other possibilities: we could cut his brakes, hire a hitman, teach the roosters to play Russian Roulette. Anything to avoid the inevitable. We say, isn’t Napoleon the enemy? A serial sexual offender, a single white male. Why should we feel guilty? But in the middle of the night, Napoleon’s crowing wakes us, and ripped from dreams of our own encounters with rooster-like men, we clutch each other and know, without speaking, the truth: Napoleon must die.
We borrow an axe from our neighbor. There’s a stump by the oleander. We wave at hikers heading to the trail that abuts our property; with the axe and the pillowcase and the aunt’s old overalls that fit us well with the weight we’ve gained in our thirties, we must look like real ranch hands. Brothers, maybe. What do they call them in Minnesota? Bachelor farmers.
Napoleon sulks in the coop. He watches the three young roosters chasing hens. The girls run to Blackbeard, but he can’t stop the new roosters. Though they are too young to produce heirs, Henry, Francis, and Sal mount the hens everywhere. They even practice on each other. Much like our own older relatives, Blackbeard doesn’t understand what’s right in front of his beady little eyes. He hears the nervous clucking of the hens and searches the sky for hawks.
Napoleon has lost his place at the edge of the yard. The young roosters are too fast, too intrusive. They do not rise to the bait when Napoleon swells up for a fight. They are under the fig tree, they are in the bushes, they circle the coop. Blackbeard and Napoleon have never faced teenagers before.
We sympathize, honestly. The teenagers around town are alien people. They live in the penumbra of gender and sexuality, and they are accepted for it. We remember high school, how careful we were with our bodies, trying to walk straight, speak straight, arranging our component parts to not allow a single loose wrist, a jutting hip, or God forbid the surrender of a lisp. But these children! They’re fearless. Their language, their clothes. Don’t they know how dangerous the world is? Ours is a town with many large trucks, and men who own guns. Barbwire fences border the hiking trails near our little farm; bullet holes dimple the signs of our neighbors that say No Trespassing, Beware of Dog, Violators Will Be Buried in Unmarked Graves. We feel the heat of this next generation at our necks. We cannot keep up with the young crowd, with the speed at which they break the rules then build new ones. It makes us feel old. Already we fall asleep after our daily walk with Pete in the hills, all of us lying flat on the living room rug, snoring at noon.
In the coop we slip a pillowcase over Napoleon’s head. According to the videos we watched, this is supposed to sedate a chicken. But Napoleon flaps and kicks like someone drowning. We hold him tight; his talons catch at our clothes, we stumble against the wire wall of the coop. All the chickens are watching us.
The strength of Napoleon is surprising. His entire body would fit on a dinner plate, but it takes both of us to carry him out to the yard. It is biblical, what we are doing, parting the flock to sacrifice this chicken, pacifying the politics of the yard with a classic beheading. We force Napoleon’s body down. He struggles against the scarred wood as if he knows what a stump and an axe and a rooster add up to.
It is not until the blade is raised over Napoleon’s head that he finally surrenders. His wings still, his legs stop kicking. We prepare to cut, not just through Napoleon’s flesh, but through this very moment: before now, we raised chickens, and after now, we kill them. There’s just no way to put the blood back in a rooster’s body.
Somehow Napoleon tricks us. His sedation is a ruse. Napoleon pulls his head from the pillowcase and claws at our fingers. He rises from the stump like a shout, and runs through the oleanders and into the hills.
For a few days after, we see Napoleon’s little white scalp peering over the high grass. We call his name. We walk the trails around our property and rattle palmfuls of dry corn. A week passes without Napoleon’s cries echoing from the wilderness. We have to assume that, by now, the coyotes have gotten him.
Then a friend of ours calls with exciting news: there’s a farm that accepts abandoned roosters! It is too late for Napoleon, but we throw figs into the cab of the pickup truck and inside hop Henry and Francis and Sal. Pete follows, he whines with the pain of his swollen joints. We have to lean our entire bodies against his rump to push him into the truck.
The farm is some distance away. We drive for hours. We turn off the highway and onto a country road, then gravel, then dirt. Pete lies down across the entirety of the back seat, his nose out one window and his tail beating against the other. The young roosters have tucked themselves into his hollow spaces. All three are sleeping.
Finally, we park. The farm climbs a hillside, it is enormous. We see some shaggy barns and a large yellow house. Spotted horses roll on their backs. A huge gray pig lies under a pile of hay, fat folded down over its eyes. There are roosters everywhere. They perch on fenceposts and in the eaves of trees, on the overturned buckets they use as homes, and on rooftops next to weathervanes cut into the shapes of roosters. They remind us of the kinds of men we see on vacation, still preening and hoping to pick up boys. They look like exiled kings. We open the door, and Henry, Francis and Sal run off. They don’t look back.
Roosters crow as we drive away. The crowing rises in pitch and volume like the warmup of a men’s choir. Pete whines for a while, then joins with a mournful howl. We make a left and start the journey back to our own farm. Suddenly we miss our hens, we miss our reliable, faithful Blackbeard. One, we agree, is the right number of roosters.
Part III
Our friend begs us to take her rooster. The police–the police!–came to her house on noise complaints.
Marty struts the yard. He is a spare, compact, beautiful rooster: feathers checkered black and white, his high, vain head makes us realize just how old Blackbeard has become. Marty dances for the hens. He extends a wingtip to the ground, then trots a complicated little half-circle. Marty trips over his wing, more often than not, and clucks with wounded pride. But he always dances again.
Blackbeard watches from across the yard, in the shade of the fig tree. The hens surround him. The eponymous triangle of black feathers beneath his beak is gone now, lost in the time of five roosters. His pink chin looks ridiculous.
Whenever Blackbeard crows, Marty answers. Whenever Blackbeard clucks, food here, food here, Marty echoes, then tries to mount any hens enticed to his patch of furrowed earth. Blackbeard gives the warning chirp of a hawk overhead, and Marty scurries into the coop. Blackbeard has not moved.
What histories these chickens hold, what politics! They sit on old grudges and cluck behind each other’s backs. Each morning we brew coffee and note the pecking order of the hens as they emerge from the coop. In the evening we cook dinner and watch the chickens file back in. In the spring we give the chickens carrot greens from the garden, and in the fall we cut in half wild crabapples and toss them to our favorite hens. They eat all the flesh and worms and leave half-cups of empty apple skin. In the early dark of a winter the mailman runs over Blackbeard; Marty ascends. The new hens age and there are fewer eggs. We purchase new chicks. There will be roosters culled, and roosters kept. We will bury old feathered bodies next to Pete’s grave near the oleanders. Our own bodies will age, and as if in response a number of young men will move into a house just down the street and ask us for advice on how to convert the rolling green yard into a farm. When we tour their property we will look for evidence of Pride flags, of gun racks, we will wonder if it’s time to move or if we finally feel comfortable holding hands in public. Each year we will make fig pies, a family recipe, until the fig tree is damaged by a falling eucalyptus. Then the fence needs mending, the truck breaks down. There’s always something new to worry over.
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K Russell Breakstone is a writer, artist, and teacher who lives with his wife and son in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has been featured at literary magazines such as Pangyrus, Litmosphere, and Cherry Tree, as well as online at www.breakstonelit.com.