Continued.....

by RayLee, Monday, March 16, 2026, 10:19 (5 hours, 19 minutes ago) @ RayLee

It was booger dark before we were through inventorying the birds and the terms were settled. The ex-con and fatboy had segregated out a few biddies of their own. Fatboy knew the flock as well as I as we were nearly equal partners in the chicken endeavour. I had several 3 foot wide 3 foot tall by 33 foot long runs with good wire sides, top and bottom. I would rotate the flocks in and out, letting grass grow in the unused ones. So the new flock was installed apart from the others with the promising exotic stag as sole sire. The hens had to be brood purged as is the custom. The eggs laid were removed until we were sure the new sire was solely responsible then and only then were the hens allowed to sit and incubate.

I forgot to mention the terms agreed. The ex-con was bonded-out awaiting sentencing for ill deeds he owed time for to the citizens of mississippi. He would leave a sum of yankee greenbacks with fatboy for feed and our labor and, in fullness of time he hoped to return to a flock of potential champions. Even with minimum sentencing and good behaviour, he knew he would be on the wrong side of seventy years of age before then.

There must have been some sort of hoodooery about that exotic green and purple plummaged rooster. Everything started going wrong after that. There were vivid nightmares and sickness and job layoffs and kids caught taking snuff at recess time and smoking on the school bus to home. The wife kept complaining of seeing the strange ex-con bad man skulking about in the dark though fatboy and I both repeatedly assured her that he was safely and securely ensconced some 291 miles westward.

It finally got so bad that the wife and kids moved back to town. Our old starter home served as rental property but was currently vacant so there they stayed. That left me to keep house and chickens alone. We weren't precisely matrimonially separated but there was a definite coolness between the wife and I. She even went as far as cutting me off from the expected hymeneal comforts for as long as three and a half to four days at a stretch. All the time she insisted that she kept seeing the bad man here and there in town unexpectedly.

So in fulness of time I gave fatboy the ultimatum. I leased the place in the country to him for a nominal rent and gave him complete custody of all of the birds including the bad man's flock. Thinks turned brighter after that. I moved back to town and the bosom of the family. There were some discomforts what with just the one potty and the mother-in-law next door. But she soon got used to me visiting often with my glossy gun periodical and a roll of my favouriite paper in hand whenever our own potty was in-use.

Time rolls on incessantly and things change. The old convict died in prison and was buried in puckett mississippi. The mother-in-law remarried and moved to ottumwa, iowa which left us her old house to occupy with plenty of toilets to use. Fatboy got caught-up in a revenuer's raid at a pit derby being held at the old cotton gin so our old flocks got busted-up and the place in the country was sold to an elderly retiree couple.

There were still some of those purple-green chickens turned feral about the place though. One day (the gentleman half of the new owners related the following to me later) the new lady owner went to gather some eggs from nests hidden in the willows and rushes about our old stock pond when an irate rooster attacked and both spurred and cuffed her with its wing elbows. She grabbed at the first thing at hand to defend herself and the rooster soon found himself tangled in an old angler's dip net and left under the pond's surface to drown. About an hour later the man returned from town to find his wife in a tizzy and seeing to her wounds. He went out to the pond and retrieved the drowned fowl and untangled its carcass from the dip net, leaving it there by the pondside.

After their supper but before dark she felt safe to continue gathering eggs as there was now no longer any danger. There at the pond she found the purple-green rooster strangely alive and well but now humbly chastened and much more civil and better behaved.