"A SORT OF GRANDEUR CREPT INTO IT"
There is a huge, dark river that runs through the heart of
Oregon, gathering into it as it moves through the rainy
landscape a hundred thousand smaller streams. This river
defines the state; it gives it its distinct identity. It's
I-5 I'm talking about, of course. And anyone who has
travelled up I-5 from Ashland to Portland has seen, from its
bank, hidden in stands of fir, or tangled up and overgrown
in vines and moss, the house or trailer, barn or whole town
standing silently, as though waiting for you to pass to
resume its secret life.
Because that's what Oregon is, despite the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival, the Britt Music Festival, and all the
other sucker-punch tourist traps and cultural theme parks
constructed to suck the money out of Californians' wallets.
Oregon is a million separate secret lives that are none of
your goddamned business. But tonight must be your lucky
night because tonight, I'm taking you home with me. To Aunt
Helen and Uncle Bill's, Gold Hill, Oregon. You probably
won't even get shot at. I'll tell them you're from Seattle.
Uncle Bill and Aunt Helen. He sharpened saws for a mill and
she yanked a lever that mixed up the rat hair and the beets
for some cannery. The best thing about them was their old
weird homestead. It was like a cross between the Munster's
house and that field in Hee-Haw where the chuckling yokels
pop up with their wise cracks.
Out back of Aunt Helen and Uncle Bill’s, Bill always had
birds. A cheeping, chittering, chattering ton of miserable,
stinking, shit-covered avian monstrosities. He would have
the occasional Chinese Golden Pheasant and so on, but mostly
he had pigeons and chickens. I remember one time he had
this tiny little chicken yard, all fenced in, overhead too,
and just way too loaded up with birds. Well those birds,
and this is something anyone who’s ever had more than a
fucking chickadee should know, was when you put too many
chickens together in a small space they will peck each other
to death. So here you have maybe 50 chickens in a space no
bigger than a living room, and at the very least 25 of these
poor animals have had so much of their heads pecked that
their brains are exposed. To the air. I am maybe six years
old. This is extremely unpleasant.
Well as often happens in my family, horror takes over when
common sense proves ineffective and, finally, Bill gets
liquored up enough to deal with this.
He's standing there in that weird yellow kitchen. The only
thing that wasn't yellow in that kitchen was the strangely
complete collection of glass powerline insulators Aunt Helen
had amassed. So many charges had gone through them, the
"good ones," anyway, that the glass had turned as blue as
Aunt Helen's hair. She had about thirty-five of those
things lined up on the window ledge above the sink.
Anyway, there's Bill, teetering by the back door that let
onto the screen porch full of Ball jars and newspaper,
struggling to pull on his kelly plaid hunting jacket, so old
and moldy it was practically liquid. He puts on most of the
cowboy hat he thought made him look like Tex Ritter and
bangs the door behind him. In the screen porch he
disappears for a moment, only to pop up winking and smiling
and holding in his right hand the old kindling axe. And off
he goes. Out across the puddles and pot-holes full of muddy
rain, around the mounds of what passed there for
yard-clippings, towering wicker men of brush, and down the
slick gray chute to the chicken house.
After a long, grey moment with nothing but the sound of the
rain falling on the moss-covered roof, a mind-bending shriek
splits the air, like maybe digits flying into the stinging
nettles. Rushing to the window, we are greeted by a scene
from the cartoon Apocalypse.
Bill is spinning around in circles, blue axe flying, chicken
heads whirling off in swirling fountains and curlicues of
blood and feathers puffing out of the open door of the
chicken-house like a pillow fight gone terribly wrong and
the sound of splintering wood and chicken feet and suddenly
Bill shoots through the little door into the yard, calf-high
in 16 months of chicken-shit and rotting feed and straw and
mud, axe trailing blood like a monster, around it goes
again, round and round, and little heads are shooting
through the chicken wire and Bill, a crown of shit-stained
chicken feathers on his tall, balding forehead, running in a
barely controlled fall this way and that and always, just a
little bit before him, the Rock rooster, Mike.
The hens are parting for Mike like the Red Sea for Moses,
Bill the Second Coming behind him, Vengeance is mine, saith
the Lord, and around the chicken yard and again, back and
forth until, just for a moment, Mike stops, lets out a
grisly croak and charges straight for Bill, flying directly
at his eyes, just missing and clawing his forehead and that
same digit-flying shriek and back they both go into the
chicken house then out the front door, hens, dead and dying
flying out before them, and off go Mike and Bill into the
ancient towering stumps and underbrush in the gully.
Well, it turns out that, as Bill had flipped the latch on
the chicken-house door and pulled it open, Mike had been
waiting for him, as he waited for him every day, and right
as the light had silhouetted Bill, Mike flew at him, this
time right on target, taking a strip of the skin of Bill's
head with him. So, a project to thin the woefully
overburdened chicken population turned into a vendetta, a
struggle in which for perhaps the first time in
human/chicken relations the physical talents and mental
capacity on both sides were perfectly even.
Bill storms into the house.
Where's my goddamn gun! Your not taking any gun into the
woods, shape you're in. I'm fine damn it, where's my gun?
Wind up shooting your own damn head off. Fine, I'll take
the bow. Damn it Bill, let me put some alcohol on that cut.
Aaaargh! Leave it the hell alone. Where's the kid's bow
and arrows?
My fiberglass compound bow was no marvel of workmanship but
some dumb drunk Oakie could sure as hell pin his own ass to
a tree with it, especially with those razor-bladed hunting
arrows, but sure as hell Bill took my quiver of 15 hunting
and 10 target arrows, and the bow, which he almost lost a
fingernail stringing, and went off into the woods again .
Off goes Bill into the madrone and manzanita, into the
spruce and eons of decomposing needles and bark, after Mike.
And when, two long hours later, Bill emerges, he is holding
Mike by one of the arrows sticking out of his back. Mike is
dead. Mike looks like a porcupine. You see, half the
arrows taken by Bill into the woods are protruding from
Mike's lifeless body. The other half, we may presume, are
sticking out of the boles of trees and fallen logs, errant
squirrels, swallowed up in tangles of chickweed and berry
vine, skunk cabbage and stinging nettle.
You done Bill, can we eat?
Done? Hell no.
What is there left to do?
Why, I'm gonna cut the son of a bitch's head off.
Watch your language.
Then you're gonna cook 'im.
What?
We're gonna eat the son of a bitch.
Watch your language. We're doing no such thing.
By God, we are.
Then you pluck him and you cook him.
Fine.
Fine.
Dinner was late the night that Bill defined himself and, by
association, my family. And, as we sat together, everyone
eyeing the venison longingly, Bill forced a piece of Mike
onto each plate. Eight people in the lemon yellow kitchen
of Aunt Helen and Uncle Bill's in Gold Hill, Oregon—and, oh
yes, the darkness did surround us—looking at each other like
a bunch of POWs, chewing and chewing and chewing and
chewing, as the tender venison grew cold on our plates.