Chicken Sh*t

By Mary R. Shefferman

When we moved from East Northport to St. James, the chickens came with the house. A rooster and a handful of hens. My brothers, Mike and Mark (this was years before the joining that brought my brother Brady), took on the responsibility of feeding them and collecting the few eggs they laid. It was novel for a while. Then again, moving from a house on three-quarters of an acre to one on three-and-a-half acres was novel, too. Hell, everything was novel.

The rooster, who we fondly called Foghorn Leghorn after the cartoon character, would occasionally get some sort of infection in his feet. The chickens were in a coop, and their penned area had mucky ground. I suspect that encouraged infections. Though I never went myself, Mike and Mark would talk of how unusual it was to sit at Dr. Jones's, the "animal doctor," with a chicken in a cardboard box. People were intrigued.

"Is that a cat?" they'd ask, peering to get a look at what must be an adorable little frightened kitty.

"No. It's a chicken."

"Oh." They'd sit back down, preferring to coo over the lummox of a dog sitting next to them, drooling.

Mike and Mark had to drain the pus out of Foghorn's feet daily, and wrap them in gauze. This was good practice for their medical careers later on. A test of sorts; If you can't handle lancing the rooster's pus-filled foot, how can you expect to cut your way through a human?

This infection thing happened with the rooster more than once. The hens never seemed to have a problem, though.

Aunt Helen is a sucker for a stray animal. Not that that's a bad thing. She's a nurse (nurse practitioner now), and compassion comes with the territory. Or the territory follows the compassion. I'm not sure when it started. I know that while she and Uncle George and Grandma and Grandpa Drews were driving cross-country in the camper back in the late sixties or early seventies, Helen picked up a dog in Arizona.

Helen and George would take turns driving the camper. It was night and Helen was driving when she spotted a little dog running down the road -- with nothing else in sight. Her sudden U-turn nearly knocked everyone in back of the camper out of their seats. The second U-turn might have been expected; by then they were all demanding to know what Helen was doing. They stopped the camper and the little dog apparently ran right up to them. They took him in and gave him food and water.

The next day they set about looking for his owners. No luck. So they stopped at the local shelter intending to drop him off. But when Helen asked what would happen to the friendly little dog if no one claimed him, they told her he'd be put to sleep after seven days.

Helen took the dog.

Despite my Grandparents's protestations that they did not need nor want another dog, they named him Arizona and fell in love with him. My Grandpa doted on the little dog and fed him anything he wanted from his own plate. Right from the table. Arizona even sat on his own chair while Grandma and Grandpa had their meals in the kitchen. After Grandpa died, Arizona would sit on Grandma's chair, right behind her.

Helen also took in a kitten she found on the SUNY college campus that she named Suny. Suny became an enormous and friendly cat.

She took in a little scruffy dog, Peppy, who had been the pet of one of her patients. The woman had died and there was nowhere for Peppy to go. He lived a good long time with Helen and George and their daughters, Lori and Amanda. In the end, he was nearly blind, he didn't move so fast, and he was a little cranky. But he had a good life.

Which brings us back to the chickens. Helen somehow -- I'm not clear on the details -- ended up with about 75 baby chicks that missed a flight (a plane flight, not a bird flight). She knew her brother Bob (or Bobby as she always calls him), my father, had chickens. Of course he would take them. My father, practical man he is, figured the chickens would eventually produce eggs, so why not?

The chirping little balls of yellow fuzz arrived in several incubator cages. It was cold outside, if I recall. The compassion for animals comes either from genetics, which would make sense, or from a familial influence, which would also make sense. Either way, the little chicks in their incubator cages ended up in Mike and Mark's bedroom.

They chirped. A lot. I don't remember whether they chirped all night or whether Mike and Mark draped a sheet over the cages to keep the little chicks quiet at night. I also don't remember for how long the chicks stayed in my brothers's bedroom. I know some number of the chicks died. I know they grew very quickly. I know they were soon enough moved to the basement of the shop, where there was more space and they were kept warm and their chirping didn't bother anyone.

I should explain. My father has a rug cleaning and repair business. The shop is in an oblong building right behind the house. There's a meet-and-greet area which consists of a metal desk and carpet samples. He also sells carpeting. There's the wrapping table, where clean rugs are wrapped in brown paper. There're the bins -- huge numbered wooden shelves where the clean, wrapped rugs are stored until the customer picks them up or my father delivers them to the customer's home. The dry room, which has a lofty ceiling with rows of horizontal wooden rods suspended by (at that time) ropes. The wet rugs would be draped onto the rods, which had a strip of wood nailed to the top, with a bunch of little pins sticking out to grab the rug. Then my father and whoever was helping him would hoist the rug up in the air by pulling on the ropes. Suspended like that, the rugs would dry with the help of heat and fans. Now the ropes are chains and the whole process is automated.

Then came the washroom -- where the rugs were cleaned. Right before the washroom is the bathroom. Across from the bathroom is the door to the basement. It's a very creepy place. Dark. The concrete isn't finished prettily like new basements -- it was functional. That's all it needed to be. This is where the chicks spent their young days.

The little chickens grew and several more died. By the time they were ready to move to the chicken coop, there were about thirty or forty chickens left. There was also a rooster.

The chickens continued to grow. They far surpassed the size of the hens we already had. After some research my brothers or my father determined that these were Jersey Giants. So the cute fluffy little balls of yellow fuzz, packed thirty to an incubator box, grew to the size of a large cat or small dog (like a schnauzer). Mike and Mark and my father had to increase the size of the chicken coop. They converted one of the horse stalls into a new coop and made a huge fenced area for the chickens to wander.

I should explain the horse stall. As I said, this property is three-and-a-half acres. In addition to the house and the rug shop there is a three-car garage with (at that time) several horse stalls at the back of the garage. There was another barn further back with several more horse stalls. Another barn, even further back, was a single horse stall where some Belmont trotter was housed for a while. Now all the stalls are gone. Behind the garage is a regulation size pool table and a bunch of stuff (power tools, fishing equipment, nuts and bolts, boat cushions). The second and third barns are storage. The stall that had been converted into a chicken coop was facing the opposite way, toward the backyard, and is now a bicycle shed.

At some point there was a problem with the eggs -- or maybe to prevent a problem with the eggs -- and we spent many hours crushing clam shells for the chickens to eat, for the calcium.

I don't like birds. From a distance, they're fine, but they disturb me on some deep level, so I avoid them as much as I can. The chickens were no exception. Hens are not leaders and will follow you if they get it in their little skulls that that's what they're supposed to do. I would run shrieking into the house because a harmless little (well, big) chicken was following me. I was 12 or 13 years old, maybe 14. I did not feed the chickens. I did not collect eggs. These were Mike's and Mark's duties.

One weekend, Mike and Mark were away. I don't know where. Friends were visiting, Eva and Michelle, the daughters of my Godparents. My father asked me to feed the chickens and give them water. He was busy. He was working, cleaning rugs. Despite my dread of the chickens (and probably with a good deal of whining protest), I took the seed to the chicken coop. Eva followed at a distance to provide moral support.

I managed to get past the hens. You can clap your hands at them and they walk away. They're really very docile creatures. My fear is totally irrational, but it's mine. But there was that Jersey Giant rooster at the back of the newly designed coop, the old horse stall. Roosters are not docile. They do not scare easily. It's got to be the testosterone. And that rooster was particularly sensitive, I think, because there was something wrong with his vocal chords and he sounded pathetic when he crowed.

I walked into the coop with the feed bucket. I had to open the top of the feeder and pour the feed into it. It was an aluminum gravity silo feeder, a fat tube with a little trough at the bottom; as the chickens ate, the seed would flow down. Simple enough. I was terrified. The coop smelled awful and the floor was mucky with chicken sh*t. It was summer and I was wearing shorts and flip-flops. As I approached the feeder, the ungrateful rooster lunged at me -- honking hoarsely and flapping. I screamed. He was going to kill me. I dropped the feed bucket, my flip-flop got stuck in the muck, and I stepped in the chicken sh*t as I ran out of the coop. The flip-flop had catapulted some chicken sh*t onto my legs, too.

My father took pity on me, traumatized little wretch I was, and fed the chickens for the rest of the weekend.

Mike and Mark continued to feed the chickens and collect eggs. Some animal began to raid the chicken coop. My brothers tried to patch up whatever hole was letting the creature in, but lost several chickens in the process. The Jersey Giant rooster and Foghorn Leghorn weren't very happy with each other, but they managed (though I have no idea how). Foghorn and all the original hens eventually died. The Giant hens continued to die off over time. Then there were none.

Now the original chicken coop is gone. Before it disintegrated, my father used it as a wood shed. The converted stall is, as I said, a bicycle shed. All the muck and smell -- and the crushed clam shells are gone, too. The only thing that remains is my deep-seated terror of chickens. And the vivid recollection of the sensation of stepping in chicken sh*t with one bare foot.