How to Bury the Chickens

My very first act as a single woman came roughly thirty minutes after Sam moved out. It was the first Sunday in May, and after three weeks of prevaricating, Sam and I had agreed—or descended, or whatever we call these things—to part. He’d taken all of his clothes and left, and I took the dogs, whose custody I was awarded, for a walk out behind our old farmhouse. The walk is an old skitter trail that my neighbor Bob is now making into a beef farm; at this time he’d gotten about half the posts sunk for his fence, and the gravel pits were still gashes among the trees. It had been a rainy spring, and I was wandering along feeling a dramatic kind of self-pity when I heard a sound ahead of me: a rhythmic, splashing sound. I walk the dogs on a double hitch, which means that they have to practice teamwork, and this time, they’d teamworked themselves into a five-foot deep gravel pit pool, gotten caught on a branch, and were now doing their best to drown histrionically. May in Maine is not a time for blithely hopping into any body of water that doesn’t have a rubber ducky nearby, but as the dogs were the only beings that didn’t currently appear to loathe my existence, I waded in to my ribs, unhitched them, and then sloshed back home covered in mud, checking periodically to make sure that the brown rivulets between my toes were sediment and not leeches. I was cold, runny-nosed, none too keen on life.

But that’s not my point. My point involves my chickens, who were waiting for me to return, bustling about inside their little chicken tractor, which had wheels and which I dragged across the yard daily in order to give them a shot at some fresh grass. Rosalind, the head chicken, was a nasty bit of goods who’d peck anything that came within range and who also hogged all the raisins. She was a Barred Rock, but the rest, Lily and Pertelotte and their friends, were laid-back Rhode Island Reds, who squatted obligingly to be picked up, refrained from pecking their own eggs, and cheerfully shared raisins like a harem sharing a sultan. The chickens and I had never been what one might call close, but I enjoyed the music of their brooding sounds as I passed, and their excitement when I came by with a watermelon rind made me feel magnanimous and important. So the chickens had a good chuckle when I came splashing up the field, past the pond, and towards the house.

The next morning I had to go to work. My husband had moved out, I hadn’t told a soul, my life was a shambles, and I had to go teach 18 year olds with life-threatening cases of Senioritis about World War I poetry. Score. It was also my job to feed the chickens, something Sam had done in the mornings. Except when I went out, they weren’t waiting for me. At least, not as such.

There were feathers scattered all across the tractor’s reach, and there was the kind of silence best described by Byron when he was going on about Sennacherib, as in, the destruction of. My pink Birkenstocks got soaked by the long grass (apparently people who are on the brink of divorce don’t mow their lawns), and by the time I lifted the lid of the coop where the chickens slept, I knew what I’d find.

The sight was dismal, and I was arrived too late. It was easy to see what had happened. Rosalind laid in the doorway, clearly having tried to block the attacker from entering. The brave chicken had lost her head for her trouble, and it laid beside her in the wood shavings. The others were in a huddle at the other end of the coop, a tangle of feathers and stiff yellow legs. I lowered the lid of the coop, washed my hands, and went to school. How was your weekend? people asked. How was yours? I’d reply with a hideous attempt at a grin. I couldn’t force out a Fine. I could barely make my mouth move.

That afternoon I brought a shovel and two trash bags outside. I dug a hole in the corner of the field, making three starts before I found a place with few enough tree roots. I discovered that sandals are inappropriate footwear for shoveling. I discovered that my body weight, even when I jump, will not do much to stick a shovel into ground it doesn’t want to go into. I discovered that mosquitoes really love it when both of your hands are too busy to swat them. Then I had to collect the chickens. First Rosalind’s head, then Rosalind’s body. She was cold, stiff, and bony, and I couldn’t do it; I just… shuddered. I stood there staring at the corpses as if willing them to hop into the bags, but nothing happened, and I certainly didn’t get any braver. Finally, I said something totally meaningless. I said something my father used to say, and which always drove me crazy. It was his filler phrase, his fallback for his longwinded diatribes on the phone, when I’d be saying, “Yep. Uh-huh,” and looking longingly at the clock, or my dinner, or Sam, when we still looked at each other longingly. I took a deep breath and said, “It is what it is,” and popped them, one after another, into their Hefty shrouds. All my squeamishness vanished in that moment; I didn’t even hold them out from my body; they were just things I was picking up. Chicken parts. The bags were not chicken-proof, and halfway across the field, their claws started to break through and scratch my legs with each step. But I got them to the grave, tossed them in, and covered them with dirt. I laid a dead tree on top to protect them from the neighbor’s Chesapeake, and I said, “Goodbye chickens.”

It would be nice to make some dramatic claim: that in that moment, I let go of my fear— something nice and declarative. In a sense, I suppose this is true. Since that day, I’m able to face the fat spiders in my shed who teasingly threaten to drop on me when I’ve got an armload of firewood; snakes in the compost; the dark and whatever’s in it when I walk the dogs at night; angry rottweilers who chase my bike; Vicodin-doped students who could pick me up with one hand; venom-tongued colleagues; skunks— which, I’ve discovered, are what is in fact in the dark when I walk my dogs at night; and the inexplicable dead mice that populate strange parts of my house-- like the laundry basket-- without a flinch. But this has not come without cost. These fears have stepped aside to make way for something much bigger elbowing its way in. This is the reason I buried the chickens alone, the reason I was the only one there to plunge in to rescue the dogs.

The other day, I scooped up a chubby stranded spider from my classroom windowsill and set him on a potted plant in the hallway. “How can you do that?” shuddered half the class. I looked at their hunched shoulders, raised as if to ward off something as insignificant as the bugger’s tiny little legs. You just wait, I thought, but said nothing.