Remembering the pink chick from hell

By PHILIP GAILEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 23, 2000

My most vivid childhood memory of Easter is not of baskets laden with chocolate bunnies and colored eggs but of the pink chick from hell that became a holy terror. My sister brought the chick home as a gift from a shoe store. I still don't understand how chickens got caught up in the commercialism of Easter, but small-town retailers in those days gave away dyed chicks with each shoe purchase. They came in their own shoe box, with holes punched in the side for ventilation.

Anyway, that puny pink chick turned into one of the biggest and meanest roosters ever to strut its stuff around Homer, Ga.

My sister quickly grew tired of the chick and put it out of the house to grow up with the other chickens that roamed free on our farm. The other chickens must have thought this pink bird a little weird, for they ostracized it. After a while, the pink dye and the cuteness wore off, and before anyone paid much attention, that little chick had become an attack rooster with spurs that would put the Lone Ranger's to shame. We soon began to realize the psychological damage it must have suffered as a barnyard outcast. It attacked family members, neighbors, dogs, other roosters and even preachers who would stop by occasionally sniffing for a hot lunch. It put several people on crutches. When the word spread, visitors would sit in their car and blow the horn, seeking assurances that the rooster was not around before setting foot in the yard.

This rooster was unpredictable. It attacked some people but not others. There would be days when it ignored everyone. You never knew when -- or whom -- it would strike. At first, we thought it was hilarious. Then it wasn't so funny. It made going to the barn or the outhouse a mad dash. And even when it lost the race, the rooster waited outside the door, going around in circles with one wing scraping the ground. It appeared to be some kind of mating dance, and a strange one it was. The only way to break free was to distract the rooster and run for the house. The best distraction was to toss an old shoe as far as you could. The rooster would take off after it and pounce on it as if were a hen. Funny thing, this pervert ignored real hens, showing not the slightest bit of amorous interest in them. Have you ever seen a rooster try to mate with a shoe? It's not a pretty sight, but it was one we got used to. I figured it must have had something to do with the fact that this rooster came from a shoe store.

Even though the rooster terrorized her and kept her a virtual hostage inside the house, my sister resisted any suggestion that this bad bird had to go. My mother finally decided to sign the rooster's death warrant after a local preacher came calling and was ambushed by the rooster. That was it. The rooster had attacked a holy man, put him on crutches. Preachers were special. (That was one of the few times I was on the rooster's side. I used to resent preachers coming by at meal time with their sense of entitlement. They always got first dibs on the fried chicken. Children were not allowed to eat until after the biscuit-snapping preacher and the other adults were finished, and by then everything was picked over and cold.)

As I anticipated sitting down to a dinner of rooster and dumplings, without a preacher around, a neighbor offered to take the rooster off our hands and spare his life. He was a bachelor who claimed to have some strange karma with birds, even the foulest of them. He boasted of taming hawks and all sorts of wild critters and of having them eating out of his hand. He promised to give the rooster a home where he would become a civilized member of the barnyard community.

We gladly gave him the rooster and soon forgot about its reign of terror. Life returned to normal. A trip to the barn once again was a casual stroll, with time to pause and smell the flowers (actually, the fragrance of wildflowers was no match for the smell of the stables). You didn't have to carry an old shoe along to distract the rooster. A few weeks later, the neighbor dropped by the house. He was hobbling on crutches. We suspected the worst. The rooster was trying to eat the cats' dinner, and when our neighbor tried to kick him away, this fighting cock nailed him in the ankle with both spurs. Our neighbor decided at that point that this rooster was no longer a candidate for rehabilitation. He made rooster and dumplings but couldn't eat the meat. The old bird, even after hours of cooking, was too tough to chew.

For some reason, I was not surprised.

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