Four: Foot the Chicken.
All this bad foot stuff happened roughly three months after I named a baby chick Foot.
First, the baby chick almost died. I wrote about that. The baby chick was not yet named Foot at this juncture.
Then, the baby chick — who we hoped against hope would be a girl chick — bounced back, for the most part. Except that her feet did not. Some of her toes were permanently palsied from her brush with death. Like a little chick-sized reaper had come to drag her away and, fight as she did, he had escaped with her feet. So I named the chick Foot, and I said it was because our traumas stick with us and they make us stronger and maybe we should see them as strengths and not weaknesses. The truth, too, is that Foot is a funny name. Like the words “egg,” “boot,” and “babies,” “foot” is a word that I take great pleasure in saying out loud.
Then, later, it became clear that Foot was a rooster. I knew it before anyone else. To tell you to truth, I knew it when I was nursing him back to health in the first week of his life on earth. I could just tell that he would be a rooster. He had a rooster kind of energy.
So we had some decisions to make. Roosters aren’t outwardly useful to a backyard chicken flock: they don’t lay eggs, and they are sort of aggressive with the hens. Logically, we knew we should give him away (or eat him, but roosters are tough-fleshed and also HAVE YOU MET ME?), But God, I was totally in love with Foot. We’d spent too much time together and we had pair-bonded. He walked around the yard so silly, with his completely ridiculous feet, and he couldn’t perch on a stick to save his life, and he had these stupid feathers sprouting all around like a child’s watercolor rejects, and then his attitude was one of great seriousness, which made all of him more endearing and funny.
I found a no-crow collar that tamped his crowing a little bit, and the neighbors haven’t complained yet, and at some point I decided I was just going to figure out how to keep him. When we tell people we have a rooster they always, 100 percent of the time, say, “Isn’t that illegal?” In Chicago, it is not illegal. As long as your rooster isn’t bothering anyone, it’s fine to have a rooster. Backyard gardeners actually say having a rooster is helpful in keeping a look out over the flock, and if they fertilize an egg, the egg gets a different kind of protein in it that is healthy for you. (Fertilized eggs don’t, by the way, crack to reveal tiny pink chick fetuses with closed eyes as I imagined they would. They look like regular eggs for the first several days after they’ve been laid.) But none of this actually matters to me. What matters to me is that I am in love with Foot.
The irony is not lost on me that I spent the summer with bruised and blackened and broken-down feet. After all that waxing poetic about the trauma of a foot injury being a marker of good character, and how we learn from these moments of weakness, and blah blah blah, I literally lost control of my feet and plunged into a spectacularly consistent depressive episode. If I was Foot the chicken, whose feet will NEVER enable him to go to the gym, I would be PISSED OFF.
And, incidentally, Foot seems to be pissed off. Specifically, he seems pissed off at me. When I sit outside within his line of sight and he is roosting somewhere, he crows angrily until I leave. When I go to feed the chickens in the morning, even though I always give Foot something special, like old corn or tomatoes from the market, he attacks me. His neck ruffles way up and his puff gets huge and he LEAPS into the air and he PECKS MY BODY. Foot has left a bruise. He has left multiple bruises, if I’m being honest.
And if honesty hour is still ripe, let me add this: I’m afraid of him. Logically, this chicken can’t seriously hurt me, but the wild in his eyes and the insane noises he makes remind me too much of a dinosaur. I haven’t held him in a long time because I’m afraid to catch him. This breaks my heart.
Bethany says that children hurt their mothers, and this is just the way of the world. My job is to love Foot anyway, and luckily, nothing could be easier. It is possible to hold all his contradictions in a single palm: his silliness, his seriousness, his gentleness, his aggressiveness, that I love him, that he scares me, all of it. My fear, I guess, is that if my emotions are this complex about a CHICKEN, who lives OUTSIDE MY HOUSE, what will I be like around an actual human child?
My sister and my best friend are both having babies. Alexis is due in January and Jen (of Ben and Jen) are overdue at this point. The feeling of loving something alive that I can’t see and that can’t see me, and loving it SO MUCH, even when it isn’t even mine to love, completely blows my mind. And also, I’ve felt a different kind of way this year than I have every other year. Like there is now evidence of a sequel.