My Fine Feathered Friend
By William Grimes
North Point Press 2002
$15 USA, $24.95 Canada
85 pages, illustrations
ISBN: 0-86547-632-2
©Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD
"I looked at the Chicken endlessly, and I wondered. What lay behind the
veil of animal secrecy?"
My Fine Feathered Friend is a bittersweet tale that leaves you aching
after you put the book away. In part this is because the main character,
a large handsome black hen who appears mysteriously one winter day in
the writer's yard in Queens, disappears as mysteriously as she arrived.
This is a true story that happened recently. The author, William Grimes,
the restaurant critic for The New York Times, is intrigued, fascinated,
and finally haunted, by this hen. He perceives her as a kind of Earth
Goddess, as solid as a tree trunk, rugged, compact, able and enduring,
yet elusive, vulnerable, and, ultimately, as ephemeral as a fairy
princess. She vanishes when he comes to love her. He calls the hen,
simply and archetypally, the Chicken.
When I first started reading My Feathered Friend, I was put off by the
tone. Grimes refers to the hen for a number of pages as "it," while
referring to his and his wife's cats as "hes" and "shes." His style is
pat with similes and cultivated assurance. I thought, okay, Grimes wants
to make sure that no one, including himself, gets emotionally involved
with this chicken. He's keeping the lines drawn. But I was wrong. The
story reflects his growing tenderness for the Chicken, moving through
levity and wonderment to love, sorrow and loss.
The Chicken has an aura of the "familiar" in folklore, an enigmatic
being regarded as both a homely acquaintance and a supernatural spirit
embodied in an animal that links that animal to a particular person
while retaining an inviolable otherness. Grimes's Chicken is like a
visitor from another planet (exotic and ineffable) who probably escaped
from the local poultry market in Queens (squalid and local). She is a
hero and a survivor -- "a brave little refugee"-- who flouts false
stereotypes about chickens. "I'd look out back and see a cat chasing the
Chicken across the yard," Grimes writes. "Ten minutes later I'd see the
Chicken chasing a cat." She is at once endearingly personal and
profoundly impersonal. She has her own projects. She is self-possessed.
She projects an arch authority, like the author himself. She dominates
Grimes's yard, his cats, and his consciousness. She is, he confesses
protectively, "a hard read."
The Chicken tracks through the universe by way of a residential patch of
earth -- a "pocket paradise" reclaimed from a "wasteland of weeds" in
New York City. She captures the eye of a beholder who becomes a Witness
driven to Inscribe Her Being. Grimes attempts to fit what he "knows"
about chickens (he eats them and makes his living writing about them as
food; otherwise he says "the humble chicken was foreign to me") with his
deepening perception of, identification with, and ultimate yearning and
mourning over this particular hen. She moves him. He is affected by her
"air of mystery," her "appetite for play," her "brilliant evasive
maneuvers," her "genuine courage," her "character," her "willful
high-spirit," her evocation of what the poet William Wordsworth
inestimably versed as "something ever more about to be."
Grimes reads up on chickens, passing on to us pieces of information
(some accurate, some not) about Gallus domesticus in folklore, history,
and poultry manuals, as a backdrop to, an explanation of, the Chicken, a
creature so definite, and infinite, so solid and numinous, she eludes
classification. He muses:
Was it pure coincidence that she liked to sneak up on Yowzer, the cat
most likely to develop a nervous twitch when caught unawares? Time after
time I saw the Chicken trot up delicately when Yowzer had his back
turned, squawk a couple of times, and then watch as the cat leaped a
couple of vertical feet. The Chicken, after a successful ambush, would
run off jauntily, with a cackle that sounded suspiciously like a
chuckle.
At other times, "I'd see Bruiser and Crusher snoozing in the basket,
Yowzer draped along a nearby wooden bench, and the dark, shapeless form
of Midnight filling out the sagging seat of an old sea grass chair we
had bought for a couple of dollars at a yard sale. And in the midst of
the group, perfectly content, sat the Chicken. It was a heartwarming
sight."
One night a police helicopter hovers over the yard, causing the pine
tree in which the Chicken is roosting to sway violently under a wind of
hurricane force. "Somewhere, deep in the branches," Grimes writes, "the
Chicken was holding on for dear life. I couldn't begin to imagine what
was going through her tiny mind. By now, I figured, she had either
suffered a fatal heart attack or had been dashed to the ground. But no.
The next morning, amid wreckage out of Apocalypse Now, the Chicken
reappeared, brimful of vim and vigor."
One spring day, though, the Chicken is gone. She does not return. Grimes
and his wife Nancy look everywhere. They wrack their brains trying to
remember if there were any behavioral signs they failed to notice. "The
previous afternoon I had watched her resting comfortably in her nest
beneath the pine tree," Grimes writes. "I searched for signs of violence
but did not find any. The only trace of the Chicken was a single black
feather near the back door. The Chicken was definitely, profoundly
missing."
It is hard reading the final pages of this book. The depression Grimes
describes is not roguish but real, though he tries to make light. "We
had grown to love the Chicken," he says. We believe him: so had we. "She
really was a big presence in the backyard," Nancy sighs. You go back to
the book cover and study the jet black sweet bird face with its rosy
comb and pert expression, framed in an oval mirror. If you know
chickens, you know the look of that bright round eye, so attentive yet
pensive.
My Feathered Friend is like an exquisite blade sliced across your bowels
in the midst of a light-hearted romp that won't heal. The book ends with
unappeased longing and unsettled questions (unhappy questions on many
levels), not "closure," nor should it. Though Grimes says the story is
"at an end, at least for us," still, he wonders and hopes, maybe the
Chicken will come back. Maybe she's on a journey. He bought things for
her. He and Nancy wait for her. They keep a light in the window. Maybe
he'll wake up one morning, look out the window, and see "a large
feathered form bustling around the patio, scattering cat food and
clucking."
But for now, as Alice Walker said about a horse named Blue, in her
excruciating essay, "Am I Blue,"* let us not let the animals whom we
piercingly perceive become for us merely "images" of what they once so
beautifully expressed and are. The Chicken is every chicken. One like no
other. Take the next step.
*In Living By the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987. This book of
Walker's essays also includes "Why Did the Balinese Chicken Cross the
Road?" ("[T]o try to get both of us to the other side.")
Karen Davis, PhD, is the founder and President of United Poultry
Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and
respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the author of Prisoned
Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry;
A Home for Henny; Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless
"Poultry" Potpourri"; and More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth,
Ritual, and Reality (Lantern Books, 2001). For more information about
United Poultry Concerns, visit www.UPC-online.org.
©For permission to reprint this review, contact karen@UPC-online.org.
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United Poultry Concerns, Inc.