We live in the West Salem neighborhood of Winston-Salem, NC. Our house teeters on the fence between gentrification and boarding houses, a dead end to our right, a small Christian College to our left. Straight out the front door, we can see the victory gardens of the young and hip families in their pre-Depression Craftsmen homes, old enough to be affordable, freshly painted for the sake of looking presentable. Out the back is the Interstate and a checkerboard of foreclosed properties shadowed by uncut grass. Our front yard fits right in with the calculated earthiness of the middle class and our backyard in the a battlefield of carelessness. In the forest of grass, weeds, dead trees live some special members of our community, our chickens.
Our little community consists of two houses, all boys, with one exception, Erin, my wife. We even things out a little bit with a few hens to bring some femininity to our midst. Excitement swelled as we erected our coop, the cozy abode where we would manifest our rejoinder to God’s assignment in Genesis to care for the creatures. Once we got two hens, Margaret Thatcher and Ricki Lake laying, we decided to raise two more chicks from birth. My dad, who lives in Manhattan, asked, “where do you get a chicken?” Well its not very hard when your city bumps right against the rural South. Erin is a mother, in her marrow. We do not have kids yet, but she works in Maternal and Child public health with a community in Guatemala. It was about time she had someone to raise up with her bursting affections.
The chicks, which Erin named Reepicheep and Cadbury, sprouted in our dining room, then the basement once they were escaping (and smelling) with greater frequency. I remember holding our adult chickens and looking in their eyes, grateful to be the one with the feed and the drink. They each have personalities. Ricki has a sweet way about her, Margaret is loud and aggressive, Reepacheep is adventurous and alert, and Cadbury is the sweet little one. Erin always wanted to name a chick Cadbury and when she came home, she was the one who let Erin hold her. One day, Erin’s babies were no longer chicks. They were teenage hens, gawky, tall, but awkward and slow. They roamed the yard with the other two hens and while pecking order had to be established, no one was hurt, we just had two chicken cliques.
Our garden was a little beaten by the heat and a few weeks with slight rain when late July rolled around. We were eager to see the chicks start laying eggs in a few weeks, a sign of creation and bloom. I went out to check on them one morning and noticed all the Chickens were up in the nesting area. Sleeping? Laying? None of them were roaming the open space in the bottom of the coop. As I got closer however, I saw a lifeless Cadbury. There was no blood, just this sweet chick, who suddenly looked smaller than she did yesterday. No air in her lungs to inflate the cavity decorated by her red feathers. I had to walk into the house and tell their mother that Cadbury had died…in my care. They prospered and grew like corn in planes when Erin was the steward. Erin cried and asked me in a defeated rhetoric, “why?”
When I retrieved the shovel from our basement, it scraped the concrete floor with such obnoxious volume, as if to taunt me with its purpose this day…to bury our sweet Cadbury. We don’t know how she died. Dehydration, disease, heat exhaustion, and there is little we can do to find out. I was so angry when calloused fools would ask in front of Erin about the cause of death in a tone one might use to ask something like, “why did the mailman drop the neighbor’s package at our house?” My annoyance was a distraction though, what was really going on was the surfacing of confession. I had to confess to God, the creator of our sweet birds, that one suffered in my care. Am I indictable for failure to care? It is speculative at best, who knows what happened? But failure, earth, heat…death triumphed on my watch. Sorry God, sorry Erin, I may not do any better, but I promise to never forget what it meant to look at our sweet chickens’ eyes and be grateful as the proprietor of nourishment and shelter.
austin pfeiffer 