Chickens

I liked visiting the chicken farm.

I liked watching chickens

in their white ruffled dresses,

yellow kneesocks,

red hair bows,

gabbling like schoolgirls

fenced in at recess time,

until one day we found

the farmer’s wife,

a pot of scalding water

between her knees,

her hands full of feathers,

grinning, “You’ll never

get a fresher one than this.”

On Sundays we have chicken for dinner. Grandmama’s chicken is always perfect: golden- brown on the outside and tender on the inside. Every Saturday we go to the Tolkens’s farm to buy the chicken. We buy butter and eggs there, too, and thick whipping cream. My grandmama calls the cream schlag and heaps it on all our desserts.

Mrs. Tolken keeps the butter and cream in the spring house, which is just a stone shed over a little stream. The stream comes up from the ground. It is so cold that everything in the shed is chilled even on the hottest day. While my grandparents talk with Mrs. Tolken, I wander around the farm. I watch the chickens take dust baths, which seems like a strange kind of bath. I listen to them talking to one another. “Gabbling,” Mrs. Tolken calls it, a good word to keep. In the barn there are two horses, Andy and Ben. I feed them lumps of sugar I’ve sneaked. In back of the barn is the sty. I always go there to see if the pigs have any new piglets.

Of course I knew it was a chicken we were buying from the Tolkens, but I never connected the newspaper-wrapped package we carried home with the chickens that I loved to watch running around in the yard. Then one day we got to the farm a little early. Mrs. Tolken called to us from her back porch. “Just about to pluck your chicken,” she said. “I’m a little behind myself today.”

She had one of the beautiful feathery white chickens by the throat. It was dead. She dipped the dead chicken into a pail of scalding water. Then she pulled at its feathers. They came out in her hands like the petals off of a flower. The scrawny chicken was left naked. Its skin looked like it had goose bumps.

On the way back to our car I wouldn’t look at the live chickens running around. I promised myself I’d never eat another chicken as long as I lived.

The next day Grandmama baked the chicken as usual. Every time Grandmama opened the oven to baste the chicken it gave off a heavenly smell. But I told myself I wouldn’t touch it. We were just going to sit down at the table when we heard a car in the driveway. It was my Aunt Fritzie and Uncle Tim.

Even if there isn’t any money for her clothes, Aunt Fritzie always wears something fashionable. She can cut up old clothes, or dishtowels, or slipcovers and turn them into a wonderful outfit. That day she wore something pale blue and gauzy that Grandmama recognized right away. “Fritzie, those are your living-room curtains!”

“It’s much more stylish these days to have bare windows,” Aunt Fritzie said. She put her arms around me, and I could smell the perfume she always wore. “Well, Elsa, don’t you look terrific. We went to see the movie Little Women last week, and I said to your Uncle Tim, ‘Amy looks just like Elsa.’” The thing about Aunt Fritzie is that she always makes you feel good, even if you know the nice things she says aren’t the truth.

She is artistic, too. She cuts out pictures of sleeping babies from magazines. She pastes them on tiny silk cushions and dresses them in handembroidered bonnets and little shawls trimmed with bits of lace. When the pictures are finished, she frames them and sells them.

Uncle Tim is Irish. He is handsome, with slick black hair and a black mustache. Before the Depression, they had money, and Aunt Fritzie loved to dress him up just like she dressed up the pictures of the babies. She bought him silk shirts and golf knickers and black-and-white shoes. One Christmas she gave him blue satin pajamas and matching blue satin sheets. But the satin sheets and pajamas were so slippery that each time Uncle Tim turned over he slid out of bed. Even now, when he had been out of work for months, he was wearing a straw hat and a white suit that looked new.

They acted surprised that we were just sitting down to dinner, but they ate an awful lot. There was plenty, though, because Grandmama always cooks extra. During dinner Uncle Tim did tricks, like pulling out a napkin from under a glass of water without spilling any water, which made Grandmama nervous.

After dinner Uncle Tim played records on the Victrola. He has a fine tenor voice, and he sang along and got us to sing, too, even Grandmama. Before they left, Aunt Fritzie asked me to show her all the things I had collected from the beach. She took a long time looking at them, and she said when she was my age she collected all the same things. As we came downstairs I heard Grandpapa say in an angry voice, “You spend money on a new suit, but you want to borrow money for groceries.”

Uncle Tim said, “If I want to get a job I have to look prosperous. No one will hire a salesman who looks like he’s down on his luck.”

Grandpapa sighed and took out his wallet. There wasn’t much in it. Grandmama got up and went into the pantry. In a few minutes she was back with more money. Aunt Fritzie threw her arms around Grandmama and Grandpapa and cried a little. But soon she was laughing and Uncle Tim was making jokes and they were in their car waving cheerfully to us as they drove away.

“Will they ever learn, Carl?” Grandmama said.

“They have a way of forgetting unhappy things,” Grandpapa said. “Maybe that’s not so bad.”

It was only then that I realized I had forgotten all about Mrs. Tolken. I had eaten the chicken. Two helpings!