Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a North Carolina free-range mountain farm boy. I crawled all over our Blue Ridge, swam with water snakes in the icy cold Stillhouse Branch, (that I now own). aptly named because my great grandfather operated a legal still on the creek before prohibition. My cousins and I camped in Uncle Dewey’s pasture, smoked dried grape vines and rabbit tobacco, made hunter’s stew out of everything left-over from Momma’s kitchen. I plowed rocky gardens with Daddy’s Farmall Cub, rode the combine and chased rabbits that fled the wheat field ahead of the machine. I dragged dead skunks from the henhouse after Daddy shot them when they tried to kill our chickens. I was a tourist cave guide at Linville Cavern and an Indian at Tweetsie Railroad until I jumped on the train to scare the hell out of children with a wooden tomahawk and scalped my wig off on the door frame.
Chicken House
Because they flew out of the lot, over the chicken wire fence and got in our yard where they would shit, and I would step in it, barefoot, squishing the stinking mush between my toes, tracking it into the kitchen— my mother’s sanctuary of cleanliness— my father and I went to the chicken house at night, where the silent chickens stood grasping, with their curved scaly toes, the smooth worn-round poles stair-stepped up the back wall above the row of a dozen straw lined nesting boxes inside the tarpaper covered shack. With lantern hung from ceiling hook, he’d lift the sleeping chickens off their roosting poles, hold them gently under his arm while I cropped each one’s wing feathers with my mother’s heavy pinking shears. A stealthy skunk sometimes got into the lot at night, digging its way under the wire fence, scenting its way into the shelter. to snatch a chicken off a roosting pole. The hen would squawk and squawk, wake up my dad. He’d grab his shotgun, put on his hat, stick his bare feet into unlaced shoes, run to the chicken house, a pale warrior wearing only droopy drawers, and shoot the skunk. The stinking dead chicken, unfit for Sunday dinner, was then my duty to bury deep with the bloody skunk and no epitaph. I buy a carton, a dozen extra-large Eggland’s Best from Food Lion, eggs that never rested in warm straw nest under mother hens, each egg from an identical Leghorn, one white chicken among thousands caged in long, arched buildings, standing on steel, not knowing of low fences to challenge flight, imprisoned, safe from murderous skunk.
