Sex Ed Chicks
Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
—Peter Clemenza, in The Godfather, 1972
A flock of baby chickens has arrived at the house in Maine. They started out as sixteen “unsexed” chicks, meaning the males and females weren’t sorted before going into the box. Odds are that the ratio of male to female will be 50/50, but the actual contents are a surprise, kind of like one of those Jumbo Mystery Boxes sold by the novelty shop Archie McPhee, America’s foremost purveyor of “fighting nun” windup toys and the classic rubber chicken. How to sex a chick? I pick one up and eyeball its X-rated parts. No dangling bits. It’s a hairy eyeball with little whirling legs. Peep! Peep! But, alas, no show. It’s such a tricky task telling the boys from the girls that “chicken sexer” is an actual job, and even the professionals get it wrong. I do an internet search of “sexed chick,” and get dozens of strange hits. The top entry? Sex Ed Chicks.
The omniscience of math prevails: precisely eight of the baby chicks turn out to be males. Seven are dispatched right away. Translation: they are killed. They expire whether or not you approve; blissful ignorance does not change the way of the world. To placate their children, parents buy pastel-colored chicks at Easter to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. These baby birds come dyed. No surprise, then, that they don’t live very long—drowned in dog slobber, smothered in chocolate kisses, set free so they can be promptly run over by an SUV. Pet owners absolve themselves of these deaths, because it wasn’t their fault. The cat did it.
In the blink of an eye the chicks turn into pullets, meaning they still have pinfeathers and are neither fluffy nor cute. They are the chicken equivalent of skinny teenagers who distrust grownups and huddle in sullen groups. One pullet has a broken toe. She occasionally tries to eat it, mistaking it for a worm.
Barred Rocks have round bodies and small heads. Each bird sports a bright red coxcomb, including the hens. They spend their days scratching for bugs and pecking each other the way kids slap each other upside the head. Exuding skittish energy, they eye me sideways with mechanical tilts. At first glance, they are just eight birds running around, posing exactly like the propaganda chickens promoting free-range organic eggs in the commercials. As soon as they decide you’re not a fox, a chicken, or a member of the paparazzi, they turn into thugs. They spend their free time attacking each other, going after bellies, butts, whatever body part is close to the beak. The strong bully the weak. A dominant hen rules the flock, and the pecking order goes all the way down the seven that remain. The Queen is not visibly bigger or stronger than the others. I suppose it’s a matter of a stronger inclination to violence, as is the case with all bullies.
The young rooster, known as a cockerel, is supposed to help limit the girl fights. Chicken folk swear that hens behave better when there’s a rooster running around. The ancient Roman historian Columella recommended one male for every five hens: a Sultana rooster and his happy harem. In flocks without roosters, a hen will sometimes step in and assume his authority. She becomes the man of the hen house. This interesting behavior doesn’t change the fact that chicken society is sexist.
I like the rooster. He’s funny. But he’s not very useful. At the crack of dawn, aged four months, the handsome boy starts to crow.
In Korean: 꼬끼요 (Kkokkiyo)!
In French: Cocorico!
In English: Cock-a-doodle-doo!
In Oz: Kut-kut-kut, ka-daw-kut!
Only English and American ears hear “doodle-doo” when a rooster starts shrieking his head off—an expression that, soon enough, you start wishing were literally true. The first time the rooster goes off at 5 A.M., it’s charming. An hour later, city people are ready to wag their finger vigorously at him and lecture him strongly. In case you’re wondering, “cock-a-doodle-do!” is what the Master hears when he “fiddles with his fiddlingstick/ And knows not what to do.” Bored, the Master says to himself, “Forsooth! Methinks I shall doodle-a-cock!” Today, however, the line has been updated to conform to modern language. It is now called “watching internet porn while hiding in the loo.”
In theory, roosters crow as a warning. The sound marks their territory and scares off predators. Some roosters will crow all day long. These roosters are especially good at getting eaten by hawks. Sure, the farmer can cover a cock’s eyes so he thinks that the sun never rises, but what’s the point of having a rooster that sleeps all the time? Instead of resorting to this extreme, some chicken farmers cut off the bird’s balls, turning him into a capon. Unfortunately for the farmer, castration is not guaranteed to keep the rooster quiet. As a bonus, though, capons are delicious.
True capons aren’t widely available in the U.S. because they take twice as long to reach market maturity as a broiler, and the end product is three times more expensive because they can’t sing like Farinelli the Castrato. In French, this bird is a chapon, and its creation is part of the nation’s gastronomic heritage. I learned these things during my first attempt to buy a fresh chicken in France after I quit being vegetarian. This decision required an extended discussion with the poultry man as to which type of bird would best suit my cooking needs. “Mademoiselle,” he gargled sternly, “a ‘chicken’ is not a chicken. This bird comes in many forms.” Behind me, a long line of shoppers murmured in agreement. “Are you feeding yourself, mademoiselle?” the butcher asked solicitously. He inspected my roundness and raised a calculating eyebrow. “Perhaps you need a bird for a group of friends? Is it a special occasion or . . . ?”—he eyeballed me again and tut-tutted. To my consternation, the whole line leaned forward to hear my reply. Eh, a good butcher can size you up and cut you down at the same time. This is very Parisian. The questions match the bird to the cook, as both sides have their own flavors and quirks. There is the chapon (a castrated male), a coq (an adult rooster), a poule (an adult hen), a poulet (a virgin hen), or a poulard (a teenage chicken of either sex). In the end, I wasn’t entirely sure but I think he gave me a farm-raised, organically fed, non-breeding young hen. He definitely didn’t give me a tough old rooster. If he had, my girlish self wouldn’t have known what to do with it.
That was years ago. Now, I have a killer recipe for coq-au-vin—i.e. old rooster stewed in red wine. It works on young roosters too. And I know exactly what to do with a cock in three languages.
Cock-a-doodle-doo! the cock crows.
I grin toothsomely.
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Cock-a-doo . . .
And then there was silence.
“Where’d he go?” I ask Ruth.
“Away,” she shrugs. “That’s all I know.”
It’s a mystery what’s happened to him. Nobody is talking, not even the hens. And if there was roast chicken for dinner? Why, that was pure coincidence.
The chickens live in a windowless hutch made out of a converted tool shed. The front section of the shed holds sacks of feed and wood shavings for chicken litter. The back section of the shed is walled off with a door for humans. A narrow ramp—a “chicken way”—leads to an outdoor pen. When they get the urge to lay an egg, the hens hop up to a roosting plank and scooch into a laying box. The boxes protrude outside the henhouse, and they have lids that can be lifted from the top, so it’s easy to reach down and grab eggs without bothering the birds. Since it’s already getting cold at night, a light bulb throws off enough heat to keep the chickens warm. I think of Easy-Bake ovens.
Sometimes I wonder what it feels like to a hen when they have to lay an egg. Does it feel like having to go number one or number two, or something altogether different? Once I lifted the lid on the laying box looking for eggs, and caught a hen in the middle of doing her thing. I thought she’d jump down in a huff or starting pecking my hands, but she didn’t move. She just looked up at me with a slightly reproachful glance, as if to say, “Privacy please!” The laying process can take a half hour or longer, and they don’t get magazines to read. Afterward, some hens like to cover their eggs and start the hatching process. This requires forcible booting off the egg, prompting some hens to brood, darkly, as they mull over the egg that might have been. To break their obsessive ruminations, housewives used to grab their hens and dunk them in water. Hence the phrase, “mad as a wet hen.” Funny how only some of them brood. Funnier still that a dunking makes them forget. It’s a reminder that chickens will never become good Baptists.
The hens roam freely outside during the day but stay close to the house. At nightfall, without any reminding, they head back to their coop. This is because the chickens know that predators come out at night: foxes, coyotes, bobtails, falcons, and owls. Raccoons steal eggs. Weasels will too. And, of course, humans do. We’re the biggest thieves of all.
Unrepentant, I go to check for eggs. An early snowstorm has arrived, dropping great piles of snush: snow and slush combined into heavy wet stuff that behaves like bleached quicksand. By tomorrow, because this is Maine, it will be warm again. “I hate the wind too,” I tell the chickens soothingly, doing my best to look like a very large mother hen. But it doesn’t seem to help; my ruse is not meeting with success. They coo-cluck and ignore me like always. It seems perfectly normal. Ergo, something is definitely wrong. Perplexed, I go back outside and head around to look at their pen, expecting to find a tear large enough to admit sharp paws. Then I spot it through the wire. A sodden bundle of feathers. A dead heap of bird. It must have died in the night, because it’s frozen to the ground.
Empty handed, I plod back in the house, and announce the sad news. “Why did she die?” I ask plaintively, saying aloud the question that, sooner or later, everyone must ask and thus end childhood.
“They just do,” Ruth said blandly.
“Aren’t you worried that it had a disease?”
“One was a little red around its butt,” Don says grimly to the room, pulling on his coat and heading out to the henhouse to deal with the carcass. I am glad that no-one expects me to dispose of the body, but it’s mostly out of fear that I’ll turn it into a terrifying food experiment and serve it for dinner.
“It’s probably the same chicken what started laying tiny eggs,” Ruth muses. She makes an O with her finger and thumb. “No yolks.” She tilts her head toward the refrigerator. “One’s in the egg crate.”
I get up from my chair, open the refrigerator door, and rummage about for the specimen. There it is, lying at the bottom of one of the egg crate cups. A wee little egg that looks like it came from a hummingbird.
“That’s how they started out when they first begin laying,” Ruth remarks. “The eggs were small like that.”
From the outside, the egg is perfect. It’s just too small for respectability. It’s a bead of roe, a dried jellybean, a nipple on a male supermodel. I picture snake eggs, spider eggs, and ant eggs. I think about humans who lay eggs. Me, to be specific. I think about Willy Wonka’s Eggdicator machine, and Oompa-Loompas rolling eggs down the chutes, and Veruca Salt being a bad egg and falling down, down, down, and coming out the other end of the world as baby Evita.
I don’t know how I lay eggs. I just know that I do. Small ones without yolks that don’t obey a schedule.
I stare at the too-small egg, and wonder about mine chugging down the fallopian tube until it falls down the chute. Bad egg! Bad, bad egg! What made it come out wrong? “So was there something messed up with it?” I blurt. “What happened to the chicken?”
On cue, Don stalks back in the house, throws another log into the woodstove, then sits down in the living room and settles into his lounger. “It’s hanging out back,” he announces to the room. “Tomorrow it goes on a tree out front and we’ll see if the coyote comes. More likely crows will get it first.”
John comes stomping up the basement stairs. “It’s been a bad year for deer,” he adds randomly. “The coyotes are getting them.” For reasons that escape me, he is wearing a Wellesley soccer t-shirt that clashes spectacularly with the shotgun he’s carrying.
Closing up the egg crate, I put it back into the refrigerator while pondering the possibility of painting the little one in pretty pastel colors. “If the coyotes are getting them,” I say, “then why haven’t I seen carcasses? How come I haven’t seen any tracks?”
“Coyotes don’t hang around posing, you know,” John reminds me. “I’ve seen a couple.”
“I haven’t seen any,” I say, as if my failure to notice them means they don’t exist.
“That’s because you don’t spend enough time in the woods,” he says bluntly.
This is true.
He adds: “There’s a coyote making a trail right near the house.”
“Really?” I say interestedly. I’m not afraid of coyotes. I just worry it might have gone crazy. Why else would it hang out near humans? Except for lap dogs and the occasional rabid raccoon, all sane mammals shun our company. Even housecats aren’t interested in us. They just like the smell of fungus that grows between our toes.
“Yes,” Don interjects unexpectedly, and goes back to ignoring us. He doesn’t seem to notice that John’s parked himself on the big sofa in the living room, and he’s pulling the trigger on his shotgun.
Click, pause. Click, pause. Click, pause.
“Why are you doing that?” I ask crossly.
“Doing what?” he asks innocently.
I waggle my finger at him. “Pulling the trigger on your shotgun.”
“It’s not a shotgun, it’s a rifle,” he replies calmly.
“Shotgun, rifle . . . it’s a gun. In the living room! I mean . . . geez . . . you can’t . . . there’s . . . there’s bread dough!” Indignantly, I point at the kitchen counter where a ceramic bowl is covered with a damp towel. “It’s rising!”
Behind me, Ruth stifles a snort and goes out to fuss with some pies cooling on the porch.
“It’s a Ruger,” John explains unhelpfully. “I’m going to fit it out with a scope.”
I park myself in front of him with my hands on my hips, doing my best to give him crabby looks without making him laugh. “So why are you sitting there, pulling the trigger?”
“Because it sticks,” he answers succinctly. He’s squeezing the trigger again and again so the action will smooth out.
Click, pause. Click, pause. Click, pause.
Glare, pause. Glare, pause. Glare, pause.
“Here,” he pats the beige couch cushion next to him and smiles winningly up at me. “Come sit next to me,” he asks nicely, and pats the cushion again, repeating the annoying gesture until I am forced to sit on his hand, which is of course his plan. “Watch me first,” he orders happily. “Then you try.” He squeezes one more time, a soulful expression on his face, and then he retrieves his hand and starts taking the gun apart so he can show me how it works. There is a safety, and a widget, and the rifle won’t go off unless you know which part to turn first. It may seem obvious but it isn’t. It’s not like the movies. As I watch, he reassembles it. “Now pick it up,” he says, handing it to me.
The Ruger is a lot heavier than it looks, and the butt feels pleasantly firm. I start to laugh, because it reminds me of him.
“Focus,” John growls. He does not have a sense of humor about guns.
Dutifully, I stifle the giggles and return my attention to the rifle. “It’s not loaded?” I ask dubiously, seeking assurance that I’m not going to shoot the television by accident.
“Of course not,” he says dryly. “Here, look,” he says, handing me a thing that looks like a bullet to me. But it’s a dummy, not a blank. There’s no powder in it. “This is what’s in there,” John explains. “If I was loading live rounds, the last place I’d be sitting is the living room.” He means it. When I was seven, my family went to the Sussmans’ house on Christmas. Santa brought my friend Stevie a toy gun. We ran around the outside, rolling around in the snow, hiding in snowdrifts and burrowing under the porch, and then Stevie ran into the house and pointed the toy gun at the grownups. He got in Big Trouble for that. Stevie’s dad was mad. He spanked Stevie right there in front of everyone and took the toy gun away. Stevie knew better than to complain. You don’t aim a gun unless you’re prepared to shoot it, and you never, ever point a gun at your dad. Especially when the unarmed minister and his wife are visiting. It’s very rude.
Cautiously, I jounce the rifle on my leg. The barrel is aimed at the ceiling, where a spider is catching flies for lunch.
“Go ahead,” John urges. “Squeeze.”
I squeeze. Nothing happens.
“Squeeze, but gently,” he instructs. “Don’t tug. Just keep squeezing until it clicks.”
I try again.
Squeeze.
Squeeze.
Squeeze.
CLICK!
I scream and drop it. It lands with a loud thud on the floor.
“You can’t do that,” he scowls, reaching down and picking the rifle up. “Stay calm!”
“But it startled me!” I protest.
“It’s not loaded, it didn’t make a loud noise, and there was no kick. What’s to be startled?”
“It just did. There wasn’t any advance warning and then it just kind of jerked.”
“Well,” he sighs, “that’s part of the problem with this one. You want the action to be perfectly smooth.” He checks the rifle quickly and hands it back to me. “Try again. You need to learn how to handle it.”
Gingerly, I pull the trigger again. The barrel is pointed at the ceiling. The spider is gone. The gun is still unloaded.
Squeeze.
Squeeze.
Squeeze.
CLICK!
I jump again, but this time I don’t drop it. I just flail and feel like an idiot.
My twitchy reaction is “commonly called ‘flinching’,” intones The Hunter’s and Trapper’s Practical Guide of 1878. “This is fatal to good shooting, and must be overcome.” Failure to do so is tantamount to death or starvation, neither of which I feel like trying today. The Practical Guide recommends balancing a quarter on the end of the barrel of an unloaded rifle, taking aim at a target, and pulling the trigger until the quarter doesn’t fall off. Rain or shine, day and night, you must practice, practice, and practice until you can perform on command.
“Huh,” I say out loud, and stare banefully at the gun, which suddenly looks a lot like my violin.
Rolling his eyes, John reaches over to take the weapon away from me. I’m happy to give it up. Bouncing that thing on my lap has worn me out. It’s more exhausting than playing with someone else’s baby. A gun does not seem natural in my hands. I’m too Korean-aunty to pout sexily and stay upright while shooting a machine gun in stilettos, like the Asian actress playing French super-spy Nikita on TV. However, it’s very easy to picture me squatting in a doorway, yelling in 한글 at the cable guy as I hurl raw squid at him.
“You gotta practice,” John intones, and starts pulling the trigger again.
Click, pause, Click, pause. Click, pause.
Sulkily, I slide back into the couch and start kicking the sides aimlessly with bare feet. I can do this because my feet don’t touch the floor when I sit back on the seat.
He stops squeezing and gives me a thoughtful look. “There’s a kid’s rifle downstairs. You can use that.”
I’m so surprised that I stop kicking the couch.
“Sure,” he says blandly, as I resume bouncing on the cushions. “It will be a better fit.”
Click.
The only firearm I’ve ever shot was a BB gun to scare away raccoons that hung around the parsonage. I used a broom to kill the bats that flew into my bedroom. Worn down to a nub, the broom was useless for sweeping up the floor, but when swung like a bat, it whacked bats good. Was I exposed to rabies? Why, yes! Raccoons and bats are carriers. Did I ask for a pistol? No interest. When loud noises became necessary, as they often are for kids, my brother just blew stuff up with his Mr. Science chemistry set.
In everyday life, I’m a goofball, but when a real crisis hits, I get calm. When I was a graduate student in Chicago, I was mugged at gunpoint. It didn’t occur to me to buy a gun. When my Hyde Park apartment was burglarized, I was traumatized, but still, no thought to buy a gun. When I was robbed on the no. 6 Jeffrey bus by a man who sliced open the side of my leather satchel with a box cutter, all he got was my lunch, because I still wasn’t carrying a gun. When I tote up the number of times I’ve had to file police reports around the world, it’s really quite depressing. But none of these experiences prompted me to stop traveling alone or buy a firearm to protect myself. However, I did learn something useful. I’d thought that criminals targeted me because I’m an excitable Asian chick. The Chicago police just laughed at my naïveté, and waved a hand around the station. A good chunk of the other mugging victims were burly men, and they came in many shoe sizes and a satisfying assortment of colors. It was just the omniscience of math again, otherwise known as “the odds,” which I am. So get over yourself, lady. You’re not special.
One way or another, I am constantly running into guns, so it seems a good idea to learn how to handle them. Frankly, it’s simpler to haul John around for protection, because he’s much better at being armed. He’s also better at opening jars, taking out the garbage, and shaving without nicking himself. But, that attitude is terribly sexist. And so, poule that I am, I’m going to learn how to shoot for myself.