What a Man Can’t Do

This time we were on our way to town, not coming home, the wife captive in the passenger seat. Not yipping and howling at all, just being a regular man, my husband wanted to talk about his hen, the one from Stacie, our dentist.

I’d been along when we got this hen, months ago. Even to walk into the chickens’ cage to catch her and the other bird Stacie didn’t want, her spare rooster, Stacie’d had to put on special clothing to keep from getting gored. The other rooster—Stacie’d intended to hold on to that one, don’t ask me why—had a terrible vicious streak. And then, of course, when my husband put his new acquisitions in with his longtime flock, the hen had gotten pecked and ostracized by the ladies.

That’s just how chickens act. And now my husband was telling me about a weird thing he’d just seen.

She still runs to the stone pile, said my husband. (These rocks in the pasture, a hefty distance from the coop, heaped like a burial mound, are from long before our time.) She’s still afraid, he said, and that’s where she goes. She can toddle around by her lonesome. This morning he’d allowed her out of the coop with the others like always, but she’d traveled only as far as the garden post and the rooster was circling her, like maybe he wanted to mate. Or else she wanted to, because she was all scrunched down, low to the ground, like she was waiting for him.

He pecked at her head, said my husband. But not really pecked. Almost a kiss. Then he let her be. He went off on other pursuits, and when he was plenty far, she tore the rest of the way to the stones.

I didn’t tell my husband this, over in my seat, but that hen’s trauma won’t ever heal. Her soul’s been jabbed at, pierced, skewered. It’s not something another biddy, however chastened, or any rooster can fix.