May the Great Gray Chicken bless you

The feathered beast was not at all charming. It was the dismal color of despair, with malice in its hungry-lizard eyes. But there it was, a large gray hen, guarding my elderly father’s new carport.

I didn’t expect to find a chicken there any more than I expected to find a buffalo. Dad didn’t own chickens — or buffalos. And, believe me, I was all full up on life’s surprises. By this point , anything “novel” counted as one more disruption to cope with during the exhausting saga of moving Dad from his home of 30 years.

Exhausting is no exaggeration. Consider the keepsakes and residue from Mom-and-Dad’s life — it was never Dad’s life or Mom’s life, you know? It was always both — that I lifted, cleaned, sorted, tossed, gifted, sold or moved that came from their unfinished, cobwebbed basement:

• 25 dusty boxes of horse competition trophies dating from the 1970s.
  
  
• Three old China sets (in addition to Mom’s treasured set upstairs).
  
  
• Six boxes of Appaloosa News, Equus and other horse magazines.
  
  
• Dozens of cheap vases from times Mom got flowers (no one’s delight matched Mom’s at the tiniest acts of affection; she deserved a barnful of such gestures).
  
  
• Antique lanterns and pots and pans.
  
  
• Hundreds of books, many a century old but yellowed, missing pages and not worth the Depression-era paper they were printed on.
  
  
• Heaps of tools and construction material such as carpet remnants, boards, molding, metal strips, frames without panes, panes without frames and more. (In his 50s, Dad loved working as a handyman after retiring early from a federal government job of 20 years he hadn’t loved.)
  
  
• More, more, more.

So when Chicken (that became her name) strutted from under Dad’s dwarf evergreen bushes, she may as well have emerged from under 20 or so family photo albums that show our family’s story from 1870s Browning, Mont., on Mom’s side and 1870s Colton on Dad’s. For her part, Chicken was fearless, undaunted by my Ford Ranger pickup truck she was planted in front of. I stepped from my rig. Chicken stood her ground, 15 feet away, cocked her head, appraising me.

“Hello, Chicken,” I said, unnerved. “What brings you here?”

Chicken stared.

“So ... what is it you want? What exactly?”

Low cluck rumbled in her throat.

Why fret about a trespassing chicken?


By now, the emotional ache of sorting through my family’s life was certainly big enough and constant enough to manifest a physical presence. A Chicken of Gloom seemed as fitting as anything. My sisters and I were wrung out. Dad was bereft. It had been five years since “surprise cancer” took Mom in 2018 just shy of her 76th birthday. We soon discovered that Mom had been our family’s center. That center was now empty, a fading echo.

Dad didn’t know where Chicken came from. Like him, the bird showed up alone to occupy a new space. Dad, a thin man who has shrunk several inches below his youthful 5-foot, 8-inch height, canvassed his Asotin neighborhood. No neighbors claimed the hen. I recall thinking it was good for Dad to meet his neighbors; I wasn’t so sure that showing up with a chicken mystery was the best first impression. But it was a better impression than Dad had given me when I moved back to Idaho a year and a half after Mom passed. Dad spent too much time in his recliner, watching passing traffic and sleeping. He was foggy, too soft-spoken, falling into that empty space Mom left behind. He’d have spent whole days in that recliner if he didn’t need to feed his remaining horse, a gentle appaloosa mare named Nugget.

One day on the phone with my oldest sister, Dorothy, I off-handedly mentioned “Dad’s chicken.”

“What? Dad has a chicken? You never told me Dad got a chicken. When did Dad get a chicken?”

“I think the chicken got Dad,” I told her.

Dad spent a fair amount of time stalking Chicken, trying to find her roost. He had started feeding her and sitting outside on a bench watching her scratch for bugs.

Dorothy, who has eclectic notions about the spirit world, suggested that Chicken was Mom’s spirit watching over Dad. My little sister, Deb, told her Mom would never, ever, come back as a chicken — and she’d be offended at the idea. It was good to squabble over something funny again. My family are laughing people, not crying people.

Of course, Deb was right. Mom didn’t like chickens. She had bad memories from once working at a chicken farm near Genesee. But being adopted by a great gray wandering hen would have melted her heart. Mom had never lost her childlike love for animals. Every whitetail deer she ever saw (she must have seen thousands) elicited an, “Oh wow! Look at that deer! So beautiful!” The last time I took a scenic drive with her and Dad, we stopped along U.S. Highway 12 by Idaho’s Clearwater River. I pointed to two bald eagles perched in a nearby tree. Mom turned toward the birds, but I knew she couldn’t see them. Her bluebird-blue eyes were fading. Chemo and cancer had weakened her so much. But she smiled, the beatific smile of a dying saint who feels the first warm, golden rays of her heaven. “Oh wow! Eagles! So beautiful.”

Mom died in a hospital a few months later. A few years later, as I sorted decades of memories from Mom-and-Dad’s home, I began to understand how much else had died with her. Gone forever were the best parts of Dad’s life. Gone forever were my old life and my sisters’ old lives. Dead and gone and forever.

With all these years of sadness and change weighing on us, it was good for Chicken to show up when she did. When we needed it and we were ready for it, Chicken gave our family something new to laugh about. She reintroduced mirth into our lives. And, she helped Dad settle into his new place because whenever you move, it takes new memories — hopefully joyful ones — to make that place your home.
I warmed up pretty quickly to Chicken. I looked forward to her greeting me at Dad’s carport.

“Hello, Chicken,” I’d say, as I stepped out of my rig. “How’s Dad doing today?”

Chicken would cock her head, give me her hungry-lizard stare.

A low cluck would rumble in her throat.

(Note: When the leaves dropped last fall, Dad discovered where Chicken roosted, 12 feet up an elm tree. We trapped her, gently, and moved her in with a neighbor’s backyard flock so she’d be warm and safe from predators for the winter.)

Ferguson, of Lewiston, is a former Lewiston Tribune reporter who’s trying to decide what to do with his life. He can be reached at deanf2015@gmail.com.