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.
