The LA Times published
this story way back in 1980. Might be
the only rooster obituary they ever ran.
A
Fowl Deed
By
Charles Kraus
It was one of life’s tragic moments –
Brewster being lowered into the ground, my young daughter clinging to my pants
leg, sobbing goodbye to her dear, dear friend.
And in the distance, the phantom cheers of local residents, delighted by
the prospect of peaceful dawns, uninterrupted by the bugling of the departed
rooster.
Brewster
was gone, and except for my wife and 4-year-old Rebecca, who worried that
Farmer-God might not feed him well enough in rooster heaven, people seemed
downright pleased by his departure.
I am, by
nature, not a rooster booster. Back in
New York City, mama tried to raise me proper, and the only barnyard creatures
we got to see were of the plucked variety, hanging grotesquely by their naked
kosher necks.
Even in
Oregon, where my wife and daughter and I had recently spent 18 months waiting
for the sun to come out, roosters stayed clear of my path. There were cow-Oregonians, sheep-Oregonians,
pig-Oregonians. In Eugene, one of our
country’s old-age homes for surviving hippies, we actually met a guy with a pet
gefilte fish. Yet, I encountered not a
rooster.
The world
is an odd oval, and evidently it was written somewhere that my footsteps would
cross rooster droppings. This came to
pass upon our return to Los Angeles.
If the
census taker had a question on his page that read, “What do you think of when
you hear the name Los Angeles?” you could bet your two-bedroom, $400,000 shanty
that not a single individual would respond: “Roosters.” But it was not in the wilds of the Northwest
that Brewster entered my life. It was a
few blocks south of Los Feliz Boulevard.
We had
just moved into our house, the truck had gone off taking the cord to our television,
and we’d settled in for a good night’s rest.
Brewster let us sleep until about 6 a.m.
That was the hour he had selected for a few pre-dawn vocal warm-ups.
Having
not been schooled in the art of adapting rooster calls to the written page, I
will merely say that the rooster’s pitch was somewhere below that of a
tone-deaf bull elephant, and that his repertoire resembled a whirling garbage
disposal filled with tin cans.
“When I
took this place,” I explained to my wife, “they didn’t tell me it came with a
warm-blooded alarm cock.”
“That’s
OK, dear,” she replied. “Where did you
say we packed the ax?”
I wasn’t about
to resort to butchery, and so turned to sticks and stones. Not that they helped much. This was no stewing hen, but what I later
learned to identify as a bantam. A
bantam is a rooster that can fly! Fly
into the trees, fly into the hills and fly into your early morning sleep.
Rebecca
took an immediate fancy to the barnyard character. She’s the one who named him. And rumor has it that when I wasn’t looking,
she even brought him his dinner.
As the
days passed, I formed a kind of adversary’s admiration for our feathered
siren. He was clever and quite
handsome. He marched about our back yard
and the slopping hill beyond it with a demeanor so assured and commanding that
our three cats and Gabby, our dog, refused to question his credentials.
Thought
Rebecca enjoyed telling her new chums that Brewster was our personal property,
the truth was that we were his personal property. He strutted up and down in front, as well as
in back, of our house, coming and going as he pleased. The area kids staged several rooster hunts,
but the bantam, with a verbal assist
from our daughter, always managed to secure himself in a nearby tree, a smirk
on his beak and a “cock-a-doodle-doo” on the tip of his tongue.
About a
week into this activity, there was an early-morning knock on our door. Was it Brewster, with a request for pancakes? No, it was a greeting from a gentleman who
turned out to be our neighbor.
“Hello,”
he said, shaking my hand.
“I’m your
neighbor. Welcome to Los Angeles. I can see from your license plate that you’re
down from Oregon. Didn’t happen too
bring a rooster with you?”
Oh no,
could it be true? Had the rooster
arrived the same day we’d reached town?
If that were the case, then every resident within a rooster’s striek was
of the opinion that the damn fowl was ours.
I assured
the fellow that Brewster and I had never met, that he wasn’t connected to our
family, that I’d assumed he come with the house, and that, in fact, I’d done
everything short of calling the authorities to get him the hell out of our
yard.
“Don’t
worry about the authorities,” he said, “I’ve already called the Department of
Animal Regulation.”
He shook
my hand again, and then as an afterthought, told me it was against the law to
bring a rooster across a state line.
I
couldn’t’ blame the guy for being upset, but at the same time, I was beginning
to see Brewster’s side. They were
ganging up on him, and I’ave always rooted for the underdog – or in this case,
the underrooster.
My wife,
who seemed to be growing resigned to bantam eccentricities, suggested we catch
Brewster and donates him to a nursery school.
That sounded a whole lot more reasonable than donating him to a pot of
soup, and so I set out to capture our friend as quickly as possible.
Rooster
hunting, never one of my strong points – I don’t even have a license – required
tree climbing ability, also one of my inadequacies. And just as I’d figured out how to get from
limb A to limb C, Brewster flew past me.
“Pretty
good view,” a voice said, and for a moment I was willing to believe that the
bird could articulate when well-motivated.
“You see
any roosters around here?” the speaker continued.
Looking
down, I spotted a uniformed individual, field glasses in hand and dandruff on
her shoulders.
“We’ve
had a complaint about your rooster,” she told me as I made my way to the ground
floor.
“It’s not
mine,” I explained.
“That’s
not the way we heard it.”
“Circumstantal
evidence.”
Just
then, Brewster came walking up the drive.
“Tell her
you don’t belong to us,” I shouted, but he refused to confirm this fact.
“I was
just trying to catch him and cart him off to a nursery school.”
She
nodded, jotting a few notes down on her pad, and explaining she had only come
to investigate. Someone else, an authorized deputy, would be by to assure
Brewster’s incarceration. The rooster
didn’t’ seem nearly as frightened by this information as I did. Maybe he knew a good lawyer. Anyhow, he marched to within a foot of our
dog, teased Gabby just enough to create an interest, and then flew back to the
tree.
The city
bird catcher never showed.
Unfortunately, his presence became moot.
For that evening, Brewster attempted to repeat his little game with our
dog. It was a plain case of ‘once too
often.” I will say only that even a
handsome, cunning, and intelligent rooster can miscalculate. This time, the results were feather-raising.
Rebecca
cried. My wife did her best to hold back
her tears. I felt a little sick to my
stomach. Even the dog looked remorseful.
And so we
came to bury the bird.
I won’t
say I miss him, but every time I open a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle, I get
a lump in my throat that’s not a stuck piece of celery.
////
