When I was seven years old, I had a jet-black rooster. I’d raised it and three others just as dark from baby chicks for a school project. Although he was born with some delicate distinction I could never put my finger on, I soon discovered I could tell him apart from the others by picking him up and looking him square in the eyes. There was a dash of white smack-dab in the middle of the left lens. I tied a piece of blue string around one of his legs so I could more easily identify him from a distance.
Entering the pen at feeding time one day, I noticed, to my horror, a shriveled leg next to the food bin. My second-grade mind had failed to deduce that a young rooster’s leg will continue to grow, string or no string. And if said string is never loosened, the results could prove catastrophic. My blemish-eyed rooster wobbled confusedly next to my work boot, weak, staggering, and possibly near death. I called to my mother, who was gathering bed sheets from the clothesline.
“My goodness,” she said, entering the pen and kneeling next to the ailing bird. Brushing the palm of her hand over the back of its head, she gathered the woozy rooster in her arms and exited the coop, disappearing into a dense patch of cedars.
An anguished hour passed before I heard the familiar strains of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” My mother came into view on the other side of the garden shed, my beloved rooster following close on her heels as if he’d been born with only one leg. “We shall come rejoicing,” my mother sang as she went into the pen, crouching with her back to me. She whispered words of such secrecy I could only make out a faint “de-vine.”
Patting the rooster on the plume of its tail, she left the pen, closed the gate behind her, and guided me up the path. I looked over my shoulder at my rooster chasing the others away from the fresh pile of scratch my mother had left. I watched her closely as she stooped to retrieve the basket of laundry, the words of the hymn still nimbly on her lips. Ignoring my plea for any scrap of information on what had transpired between the two of them, she kicked open the door of the wrought iron gate and continued on to the house.
Trying to keep up in the wake of recent events, I seriously pondered what a sheave was, and why rejoicing always followed the bringing in of them.