The Farm is Quiet

We didn’t always get along. He’d lash out at me and I’d lash back, words against spurs, pleading, screaming, questioning. I wanted him to understand me, wanted him to listen to reason. We didn’t speak the same language, hold the same context. We shared a home but had very different perspectives. I was annoyed by his actions and often cursed his life, a flood of angry shadow work bubbling up from my depths. But that didn’t mean that I wanted him dead.

The sun burrowed out of the clouds of this long winter and painted the hillside green grass green. Tall firs and hemlock punctuated the misty skyline. The old growth wood of the barn almost glowed in the golden light. Spring! I was so ready for a change.

I fed hay to the goats and grain to the pigs with their little dirt covered faces. I collected eggs from the nesting boxes in the darkening coop and laid out swaths of grain for the chickens which they instantly attacked. The yard was quiet in that roadside farm sort of way- birds chirping, goats bleating, pigs snuffling, hens clucking, trucks rumbling by.

Yet something was missing. That shrill call of a dominant male lording over his ladies, a familiar and constant refrain that echoed through our days. I thought perhaps he was up the hill under the scotch broom and fir boughs. Or across the street at the Foodbank jousting for scraps. But his ladies were all here…

I wandered over the land in the beauty of the evening and felt myself being drawn towards the pond. I wasn’t necessarily looking, but in the lower field I found piles of feathers. Soft, tufty gray ones and rigid jet black ones, a tangle of long curved feathers, black and white and iridescent green.

Rooster feathers.

No no no.

But yes, the land was quiet and rooster was not simply hiding in the plum trees ready to attack me for coming too close to his harem. He had been attacked, was gone. Coyote or eagle? Maybe a stray dog? More questions than answers in a pile of plucked and ripped feathers, no body near by.

A flash of green in my palm, I held his mangled feathers in my fist and wandered back into the house with a bucket of eggs in my other hand. His torn up beauty and potential offspring balancing on either side of my body. We will bury his weightless remains under our new lavender plants, fingers in the soil, burying roots that will slither down through iridescence. We will eat the (fertilized) eggs and digest the reality that there will not be brilliant black and green offspring this year. We will feed the hens in our quiet(er) yard. I’ll still be on guard for a while when I hear a flap of wings and rustle of feathers running towards me, but the memories will dissipate with the decomposition of feathers underground.

RIP Rooster Midnight