In 1932, when I was 3 years old, Mama’s garden at our Nebraska farmhouse was important. Laid out in rows and plowed free of weeds and crabgrass, it was planted with a selection of vegetables. The yield meant my family rarely bought food. The bounty grew, poured into the kitchen and was canned, preserved and sometimes given away. Since my siblings, Hobart and Sara Ann, did lots of the work, they had an interest in the harvested crop. Hobart and Sara Ann kept a watchful eye, and anything amiss inside the garden’s tight fence was attended to.
Mama attended a county agent’s demonstration at a neighboring farm where the agent’s wife had hatched an incubator full of leghorn chicks that were now pullets. They would soon become part of the henhouse, and food for her freezer less those she sold.
Mama was partial to the leghorn hens that laid abundantly. When they stopped laying, they usually became soup, pie, casseroles with noodles and so forth. This was their life in the fenced area of Mama’s chicken run. She bought twelve of the beauties, all pullets ready to lay — so she thought. But soon it became apparent there was a chanticleer rooster amongst the mix that was forcefully attending to one of her hens.
He had a beautiful red comb and full body but he was hardly past adolescence and he had begun to care for her hens and gave fierce attention to ferreting out rodents, foxes and an occasional skunk, driving them off with fury. Hell hath no scorn like a rooster supreme. No one was above his suspicious stare — you tarry, you suffer.
