23. The Watchdogs ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Ida was exasperated. The foxes kept taking her chickens, even though she closed the chickens in the hog farrowing house that Robert had built in Mr. Coffman’s class.

“Joe, I think I’ll give the last three chickens to Mrs. Bowen,” Ida said over her bowl of oatmeal one morning.

Joe, who had raised chickens for a good portion of his income during much of his early adult life, said, “It would be strange not to have any chickens. We’d have to buy all our eggs.”

“We’re doing that now,” Ida said, adding raisins and brown sugar to her oatmeal. “I’d like to try guinea hens, instead.”

“I would suppose the foxes would consider guinea hens as succulent as chickens,” Joe suggested, pouring milk on his cornflakes.

Robert, who had miraculously escaped having to eat oatmeal, was having cornflakes with the boys’ father while Charles had oatmeal with their mother. Robert could hardly wait to discover where the conversation would lead.

“People who always have to be right can’t learn anything new,” Ida, the former teacher, responded, smiling.

“What are guinea hens?” Robert asked.

“Guinea fowl are birds about the size of chickens,” Joe replied.

“Mrs. Bowen has some keets that she wants to give me,” Ida said. “Her guinea hens hid their nests so well that she didn’t find them in time, and now she has too many keets.”

“I guess we should try guineas,” Joe said.

“They’re better than watchdogs,” Ida added, encouragingly. “They’ll let us know if we have prowlers.”

“I doubt if we would ever have a prowler out here in the country,” Joe said.

“‘People who always have to be right—’” Charles began.

“Hush!” Ida interrupted. “I can talk to your father that way, but you can’t.” She turned toward Joe. “‘—can’t learn anything new, ’” she finished. After a second, everyone laughed heartily.

So the Rhode family had no more chickens, but Ida, Joe, Charles, and Robert had guineas aplenty.

As the keets grew into full guineas, they were slate-colored with white dots in swirls and lines all over their feathered plumpness. Their heads were mostly white. The dark lines over their eyes could have been eyebrows, imparting to their glance an air of being perpetually indignant. Perhaps they were vexed most of the time! Their pale yellow and pink beaks were rather thick. Red wattles curved out to the sides like ribbon bows. Pink and yellow helmets stuck up like folded newspaper hats. The skinny legs and long toes were the same yellowish pink.

Rather than screaming whenever they saw a fox, the guineas screeched at anything that moved.

On an early spring day when impossibly dark clouds surrounded small apertures of transparently blue sky and beams of sunshine like those of spotlights made bright yellow patches along the fern-green fencerows, the guineas shrieked at each change of light and shade in the heavens and on the earth. Really, they needed no provocation to scream bloody murder. Whenever the spirit moved them, they screeched!

The guineas defined the word flock, epitomizing what was meant when “flock” was coined. Where one went, all went. Schools of fish on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom could not have changed direction in synchronized movements any more uniformly than guineas. First, they would scurry toward a hedge apple tree, but, for no apparent reason, they would veer right or left in unison, squawking the while.

Even though they had been kept for long periods inside the farrowing house to teach the guineas where home was located, they ignored the house as soon as they were permitted to roam freely. If the Williams place had not been an oasis of trees and slough in the midst of broad fields with neighbors not nearby, the guineas might well have gone vacationing down the road, sampling what each farmstead had to offer. Joe reasoned that the only factor pressuring them to stay put was the general emptiness in all directions.

The guineas preferred to roost in the hedge apple trees at night.

“How they avoid the foxes is beyond me!” Joe exclaimed to Ida, whose face broke into a big smile of satisfaction every time she gave consideration to her guinea hens.

Robert had been surprised to hear guineas in the uppermost branches of the hedge apple trees at dusk. That they made their way up that high and back down again was remarkable for such large birds.

While guinea is said to taste like pheasant, Charles and Robert never found out, as Ida would not have put one of her pet guineas in a roasting pan for love or money.

The small tan guinea eggs with their brown speckles, though, were broken and their contents fried or scrambled for breakfast.

“See?” Ida happily said to Joe. “We don’t have to buy so many eggs at the grocery store now.”

“People who always have to be right,” Joe said, not completing the sentence but winking at Ida.

Like turkeys, the guineas formed circles around anything foreign, such as a frog. “Chi-chi-chi-chi-chi!” they cried in a huff, their heads ogling for a better view, their feet lifting and redeploying continually. At feeding time, they could form circles around the farmer with the feed bucket. “Chi-chi-chi-chi-chi!”

Robert became accustomed to the guineas’ shrill outcries. To him, they sounded like an old disk—not equipped with wheels—being pulled along a gravel road. Their noise became part of the environment. It became more noticeable when they quit screaming for an extended period of time than when they screeched.

Ida could not have been happier with her decision to acquire the guineas.  

   

9. The Game ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Mrs. Russell introduced a playground game that she had known when she was a child. Children from all the grades could participate. The group was divided into two teams of perhaps twenty each. One team formed a line along the sidewalk on the south side of the gymnasium; the second team, along the sidewalk on the north side of the school building. A designated student stood in the middle of the parking lot between the two sidewalks. He or she was “it.” At a signal given by Mrs. Russell, the two teams ran toward each other, passing one another to gain the opposite sidewalk. Meanwhile, “it” was tagging as many students as possible before they could gain the safety of the sidewalk. Once students were standing with both feet on the sidewalk, they could no longer be tagged. Those that had been tagged had to remain with “it” and tag more students when the two lines ran toward—and through—each other the next time. When only one runner had not been tagged, that runner’s team was declared the winner, and that runner became “it” for the next round.

Robert couldn’t play the game often enough! He loved racing pall-mall for the safety of the opposite sidewalk—all the while dodging students who were trying to tag him. From his peripheral vision, the sprinting students seemed like clashing armies in the movie Khartoum. Whenever the two teams ran, the pounding of feet echoed between the gym and the school.

The game was the last that Robert would recall from his grade school years. When he would enter the seventh grade and move from classroom to classroom, there would be no more recesses on a playground. Mrs. Thrush, who taught music and art, would no longer push her upright piano into the classroom to lead the students in singing such rounds as this one that enshrined the cries of a mender of chairs, a fishmonger, a ragpicker, and a skinner in the streets or marketplaces of Old England:

Chairs to mend! old chairs to mend!

Rush or cane bottom,

Old chairs to mend! old chairs to mend!

New mackerel! new mackerel!

Old rags! any old rags!

Take money for your old rags!

Any hare skins or rabbit skins!

… or this one, sung by carolers at Christmas time in England as long ago as the 1500s:

Hey, ho, nobody home;

Meat nor drink nor money have I none,

Yet will I be merry.

Robert vaguely sensed the transition that was approaching. In small increments, his childhood was receding into the past. Like swans, the years were slowly slipping away.

On the Fourth of July, Joe gently nosed the car into the weeds along a gravel road just south of the park in Fowler where the fireworks were displayed. Ida spread blankets on the ground, and everyone sat together as a family. Other cars came to line the road, and other families sat on blankets. Joe poured a cup of coffee from a thermos and handed the cup to Ida. Robert said, “Coffee always smells so good!”

Ida asked Joe, “Are you going to let Robert taste yours?”

“I don’t know. Am I?” Joe asked in return.

“I think he’s old enough,” Ida replied.

Joe poured a small amount into his clean cup and handed it to Robert, and Robert sipped the nutty liquid. He was hooked on coffee then and there.

As darkness fell, the family watched for pink lights, which were the wands the volunteer firemen carried to light the fireworks. In the gathering haze of a hot summer’s night, the pink lights began to fan out mysteriously. Then, with the sound of the air being punched, a nearly invisible rocket slithered up and up. Suddenly, a giant flower of light bloomed overhead!

Everyone oohed and ahed, comparing colors and effects to choose favorites. At their distance from the park and from their vantage point behind the show, Joe, Ida, Charles, and Robert could not always discern what the displays on the ground were intended to be, but the waterfall was always obvious and always appreciated for its dazzling white, its smoke drifting to one side, and its noise not unlike a cascade.

The finale was grand enough with several bursts of brilliant color occurring in rapid succession in the night sky.

That same summer, a brash Barred Rock rooster had assumed leadership of Joe’s flock. Whenever Charles or Robert entered the chicken yard, the rooster ran toward the boy, leaped in the air, thrust its legs forward, and raked the youngster’s legs with its talons while flapping its wings against his knees. “Ow! Oh, ow!” Robert exclaimed on many occasions. For some reason, the attacks of the rooster made him forget the option of escape, and he stayed rooted in one spot while the Barred Rock flapped him again and again, leaving wicked scratches in the seasons when shorts could be worn. Only Joe’s intervention could save the boy. Every time the rooster got Charles, Charles merely scowled while running away. Both boys appealed to their mother.

“He’s mean!” Robert emphasized.

Ida laughed.

“That rooster’s becoming a nuisance,” Charles said.

Ida chuckled.

“You wouldn’t laugh, if he flapped you,” Robert said, brows lowered.

“I wouldn’t let him!” Ida said, holding her sides and wearing the biggest grin! “You have legs! Use them! Run away from the rooster! You’re faster than he is!”

“He’s mean!” Robert repeated, but he could see that he wasn’t getting anywhere with his mother. Charles had already given up and had gone to his room to work on some project.

So the attacks of the rooster continued. Robert would enter the chicken yard with extreme caution. He would look left. He would look right. When he thought the coast was clear, he would begin walking through the yard to the gate that led to the barn. Suddenly, from nowhere, the rooster would come running, lurching from side to side as he raced. Robert would freeze. Whoosh! The rooster would kick, rake, scratch, and flap Robert’s legs.

“Ow! Oh, ow!”

Joe would appear in the barn door. He would size up the situation and would stride toward the rooster, eventually shooing it away. The rooster would strut arrogantly, its beak forward as if he had been declared the champion fighter. Then it would take a pose, lean its head back, wag its wings, and crow noisily.

“He’s so mean!” Robert would say.

“Don’t go near him,” Joe suggested.

“Don’t think for a minute that I want to go near him!” Robert said, almost pouting. “He hides until he sees me, then he comes running at me!”

“I doubt that he’s hiding from you,” Joe said.

“Yes, he is!” Robert said, before he was aware that he was contradicting his father—which he had been taught never to do. “I mean, he surely seems to hide because I look for him before I come through the gate. Can’t you sell him?”

“No, he’s a good rooster. Your hens earn blue ribbons at the county fair because we have good stock, and that rooster is good stock,” Joe answered.

“I guess you’ll have to try to run faster to get away from him.”

Almost every time that Robert entered the chicken yard, whoosh! “Ow! Oh, ow!”

Robert began searching for other pathways. He hacked a meandering trail through the giant ragweed and gypsum south of the chicken houses, but the trail ended in an open stretch of some thirty feet before he could reach the gate leading to the barn. While still hidden among the weeds, he would peer out. “No sign of him,” Robert would whisper, to reassure himself. Then he would leap to his feet and make a mad dash for the gate.

Whoosh! “Ow! Oh, ow!”

One day, Charles said to Robert, “Look! We have to go the barn to help Dad. That means going through the chicken lot, and that means the rooster will flap you.”

“He could flap you,” Robert said.

“That’s what I was about to suggest,” Charles continued. “I’ll go first. You stay right behind me. When the rooster flaps me, you run around me and through the gate into the barnyard.”

“Alright!” Robert agreed, smiling. Then his smile faded. “But do you really want to get flapped just so that I don’t have to be flapped?”

“I’ll take the flapping this time, and you can do the same for me the next time,” Charles said.

The boys entered the chicken lot and walked about half of its length. Robert stayed close to Charles. Then the rooster ran up behind Robert.

Whoosh! “Ow! Oh, ow!”

On another day, Ida took the egg basket on her arm. She sang softly to herself:

I come to the garden alone

while the dew is still on the roses,

and the voice I hear falling on my ear

the Son of God discloses.

And (Ida paused, holding the note.) he walks with me

and he talks with me,

and he tells me I am his own;

and the joy we share as we tarry there,

none other has ever known.

Repeating the song, she gathered the eggs. Just as she stepped outside the chicken house, here came the rooster!

Whoosh!

The egg basket, which was nearly full, went flying. After the rooster had his fill of flapping, he strutted to the side, leaned back, and crowed.

The next day, while Joe was reading the newspaper and Ida was ironing, Joe turned to her and gently opened a topic of conversation: “I happened to notice that the rooster didn’t crow this morning.”

Ida set the iron on its heel, sprinkled water from her yellow bottle onto the sheet she was preparing, and resumed Ironing. “No?”

Joe hesitated, thrown off by her one-word response. “No, no crowing today. I wonder if he might be ill.”

“Ask Mrs. Bowen,” Ida said.

Joe stared at the newspaper and read the same sentence three times while he tried to second-guess why he should ask Mrs. Bowen. He cleared his throat. “If I were to ask Mrs. Bowen, what do you suppose she would tell me?”

Smoothing the sheet while tiny clouds of steam rose around the iron, Ida replied, “Mrs. Bowen would tell you that Mr. Rooster is alive and well and taking good care of her flock.”

Joe let the paper fall on his knee. “Do you mean to tell me that you gave Mrs. Bowen our rooster?”

Ida glanced at Joe. “It was mean,” she said.

“Will Mrs. Bowen still be speaking to you tomorrow?” Joe wanted to know.

“Oh, I told her it was mean,” Ida explained, “and she said, ‘The meaner the better! The mean ones can fight off the skunks.’”