I’ve had very few pleasant encounters with birds: wild, pet or poultry. When I was a child, I had been pecked by an overprotective mother hen; I had even been chased by one of my neighbour’s
geese. Then, as a teenager, I had been attacked by a little black bird whose nest in the hedge I had unwittingly disturbed. Once, on my way downtown from school, a pigeon, roosting some 20 feet above the ground on a high-tension wire, managed to synchronise his bowel movements with my leisurely stroll and plopped a wet one on my school shirt. All of this in addition to the episode when my pet canary flew away while I was cleaning his cage.
It should be easy, then, to understand why I was hesitant when I was asked by my neighbour’s daughter to help her landlady recapture her escaped Dominican cock.
From my kitchen I could hear some commotion outside but, too hungry to care, I didn’t investigate. Then I heard three sharp, quick little knocks on my front door. When I opened, the neighbour’s daughter, a demure little girl, was standing before me with urgency in her eyes. “Good morning,” she said, smiling coyly. ‘The lady next door want you to help ketch her chicken. It get away.”
I tried to stall. “Help ketch a chicken?”
The girl nodded.
“For yuh mother?”
The girl swung her head from side to side. “The landlady. The old lady.”
“Old lady” – having a soft spot for little old ladies, I knew I had to help.
“Ah comin’ in a little while,” I said, “Let me just put on my shoes.”
Before the words could properly drop out of my mouth, the little girl zipped off to her yard. Now I couldn’t change my mind if I wanted to. I quickly put on a pair of old sneakers and went next door. There were the girl and her mother standing in their backyard looking over the fence into my yard, which their landlady was entering by climbing over a halfway broken-down portion of my chain link fence. By the time I reached the girl and her mother, she had already touched down in my backyard. Then I saw the cock. It was scampering about in my yard with the old lady in hot pursuit. He tried to fly over my fence back into the yard he’d just come from. He didn’t quite make it and ended up stranded between the two fences in the overgrown track.
“Boy” – that had to be me, of course – “come back across here and block the fowl, and I will take him in the track.” An invitation back to my yard – how pleasant of the old lady. I could see this lady liked to take control … no wonder the poor cock was in a hurry to escape.
By the time I got back to my yard, the old lady had already climbed over my fence and was standing in the track. It was amazing she didn’t get tangled. The cock ran to the far end of the track and the old lady shouted to me, “Jump across and hold him!”
I did not care to get in his way. He was looking desperate, as if he knew that he was destined for the pot if he was captured. One false move from this cock and I would have to put him out of his misery permanently. So I just prodded him with the stick in my hand.
He ran the other way, straight into the old lady, and she grabbed him up at once. She was perspiring and putting her spectacles back in place; they kept sliding down her nose. But that didn’t stop her from climbing back into my yard again. This time she increased the degree of difficulty by doing it with a frantic fluff of feathers in her hands.
“Young man, like you fraid the fowl or what?”
“No, I fraid it pick out my eye!” I retorted.
“That cyar do you nothing,” she responded. “I determined, you know. And he cyar get away. Go and get a piece of twine for me.”
I ran inside and ransacked some cupboards, found some twine and ran back outside. “Tie it up for me,” she ordered.
She was determined to make me into a bird tamer. She lifted the cock by his wings and held him out to me. I decided it would make no sense to refuse; there was no escape from this old lady. Even the cock realised that; he had stopped wriggling and fighting and had submitted to his fate. I just tried to stay clear of his beak and spurs and managed to bind his feet together quite well.
Now that the work was done, she thanked me for my help and enquired, “What is your name, son?”
“Steve.”
“Steve!” She paused as if to consider the name carefully. “I’m Mrs Hart. You can’t do without me,” she giggled.
She promptly left, scolding the cock. “Why you running for? I don’t want to cook you. I want you for a rooster for my hens … ”
I ran back into my kitchen before she decided to call upon me again. Hunger was undermining my patience. I lifted a hefty plate of provision and you know what – stewed chicken. There’s one place that chicken don’t get away – on my plate.
