The time my dad had to shoot a chicken

Maybe the chicken lost its mind. Or maybe this was its plan all along: lull them to sleep, let them get comfortable, careless.

When I tell people that my Dad was a farmer, they ask if I grew up on the farm and if we had farm animals. We had two chickens. Once.

I grew up in Unicoi County. We lived in a white house on top of a hill surrounded by woods and the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. At the bottom of our hill, we had an old red barn next to the creek that came down off Little Mountain and joined Buffalo Creek as it wound its way onto the Watauga River over in Elizabethton.

When we got the chickens, I was little — maybe 5 or 6. I don’t remember if Mom or Dad brought them home; to me, they just showed up one day. And then our golden retriever Molly, the sweetest dog God ever made, killed one. Before you call PETA, know that the chicken probably deserved it because they were deranged and hateful.

But the other chicken survived and hung out in the yard. He reformed his insane streak, stayed away from Molly and our St. Bernard Beethoven, and he became my mom’s little friend; he’d follow her around while she weeded.

But we’ve now come to the most significant words in storytelling: until one day.

My father had a carphone mounted in his truck while in the tomato fields. He usually wouldn’t answer it because mobile phones are the same as Democrats to my Dad: there’s just too many of them in this country.

But on this day, he answered and all he heard was: “DAVID, I NEED YOU TO COME SHOOT THIS DAMN CHICKEN!”

The chicken had turned on my mother while she was feeding it and chased her out of the barn and up the hill. She was terrified to turn her back on it, so she grabbed a flag from the front of the house and swatted at it, finally managing to escape into the house. Beethoven and Molly were cowering under the Volvo station wagon.

I was at school when this happened. But given the details I have from eyewitnesses, this is what I imagine happened:

The driveway was deserted when Dad’s truck rolled up and parked. He got out and it was quiet. Too quiet. The dogs, at least one of them the size of a mature wolf and the other technically a hunting dog, were whimpering under the station wagon.

An eerie chill wind swept across the top of the hill. The fowl beast was nowhere to be found.

Dad went to the coat closet and pulled the .22 from its sleeve. He only had a dozen rounds, but that would be enough.

But where was the murderous brute?

The barn.

Mom watched as Dad and the dogs, who had mustered their courage, walked down the hill and into the barn.

She heard clucks, barks, curse words. But no gunshot.

A few minutes later, Dad walked back out.

“I can’t shoot it when it’s cornered,” he said.

I guess to Dad, that wasn’t a fair fight.

The chicken bolted out of the front of the barn into the field. Dad chased it back and forth unloading shots as he went. POW, BANG, BZZT, the shots went every time Dad felt he had a bead on it. The chicken zigged and zagged across the yard, screaming like a chicken trying to avoid having its head cut off.

Dad fired every bullet he had. And then, finally, the chicken went rigid and keeled over: dead.

When he picked it up, there wasn’t one bullet hole in it. The poor thing had had a heart attack.

They gave the dead chicken to one Dad’s farmhands who ate it for dinner and we went to Ryan’s Grill in town.

So no, I didn’t grow up with farm animals.