Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [121]
The laying hens, on the other hand, are great fun. They follow me to the office in the morning and tap on the glass of the storm door. If I rattle a tin tray of feed, they come running. I catch and feed them grasshoppers. They are not pets as such (their siblings, the ones that remained with our friends Billy and Margie, actually jump into your arms for cuddle time), but they are engaged and surprising and fun to watch. Sometimes when the deadlines are really closing in I wander down and let them eat feed from the palm of my hand just for the relaxation of it. I can envision a time when all a man would want is a porch, unoccupied time, and chickens in the yard.
Jane is not growing at the rate of a meat chicken, but she is holding her own. When I put her in the football hold my arm gets tired before she does. I’ve begun taking her along in a backpack while I’m doing chores. Yesterday when we approached the pigpen and the pigs did their usual woofing and galumphing, I heard a funny noise behind me, kind of a slobbery chortle, and when I craned my head I could see Jane smiling at the pigs and I realized I had just heard her very first out-loud laugh.
Nighttime, however, has not been so joyous. After settling into a groove in which she slept most the night, suddenly Jane’s begun waking up and bawling. Last night after Anneliese had tried feeding her and she was crying again, I took my turn. I went through my whole repertoire of tricks—rocking, bouncing, pacing around the kitchen island sixteen times in the ambient glow of the microwave light—and nothing worked. Finally I gave her my knuckle to suck, and as she latched on I felt a slight snag and there was your answer: her first tooth breaking through.
I was down tending the meat chickens when Muzzy the butcher rolled into the yard driving a shiny red diesel truck with a winch and boom mounted in the bed. Custom Butchering & Scrap Iron, it says on the driver’s side door. He seemed to step from the cab while the truck was still in motion, already in stride as his feet hit the driveway. I was a ways across the yard, but I could see he was long-legged and cowboy-slim. His bill cap rode high and looked big for his head. The brim wasn’t tracking with the rest of him—it pointed leftward. He was wearing a silver pistol in a black leather holster. The pistol rode loose, with the handle tipped out, and I noticed he had no fingers on his left hand.
He was stomping toward me, but he was looking down toward the pigs. The female was visible beside the feeder. “Oh, she’s nice!” he said. “That’s a good one! From here I’d say about two-twenty!” I shook his hand—the one with fingers—and walked him down to the pen. While walking I shot a glance at the hand and could see it had been patched up with flaps and grafts. Wherever those fingers went, they didn’t go easy.
“Oh, look at that big guy!” he said, pointing to the male, who had come snuffling up from the back of the enclosure. “He’s nice and thick through the shoulders. He’d be ready now. He’ll go about two-fif…no…I’d say two-sixty.” He had clambered over the gate and was right in there now, hands spanning the hog’s front shoulders, poking and squeezing some. “Dandy!” he said. “That’s great, thick through the shoulders like that.” He was looking up at me and smiling, proud as if he’d raised ’em for me. Naturally it felt good to hear that the guy liked our pigs.
“The female, she’ll go about two-thirty,” he said, revising his original estimate upward. “Yah, you could butcher ’em anytime. Give my wife a call and she’ll set it up.”
We had been sitting Fritz the Dog again, but that is over now because he killed four of the laying hens. It took him a matter of minutes. When I walked to my office the chickens were beneath the big pine tree and Fritz was lying beside the sidewalk, and when