What would you do if you came home to a yard full of live chickens?

The Chicken’s Little Revenge


In the South, we go to church. Whether it is a large, stuffy, and lofty church or a wooden building down by the railroad tracks, we consider the church to be the hub of our culture. As good Southern Baptists, my wife and I mingle in the church circles, through the good and the bad.
My wife has filled many important positions in the church, from treasurer to Personnel Committee Chairperson. My duties usually lie in the culinary arts. I run the Picnic Committee.
I believe the church selected me to head this committee because of my brilliant leadership skills as well as my ability to form and execute a plan flawlessly. I often wonder what amount of liquor they had been drinking before they decided I was the best choice. After looking at the other candidates, I suppose that I understand the decision.
Every October for the past one hundred years, the church wanted a fall picnic that would carry on the Southern Baptist traditions of eating and fellowship. I had taken great pains to plan the last ten pig roasts with the skill and dexterity that I am famous for. We served coleslaw, baked beans, and the best barbeque in Virginia, washing it all down with the sweetest iced tea around. For years after, we continued the tradition.
As with everything, there is a season, a season for pork and a season for something else. As the church matured, we began to get members from other parts of the country. These families brought new traditions and customs. Some of these new customs involved dancing. Others replaced the store-bought grape juice with wine during our Lord’s Supper celebration. Others involved revamping one-hundred-year-old traditions. The families brought to the church a new season. The season of the chicken.
The new families were not used to the old style of southern cooking where lard was king and fat in the barbeque was considered tasty. They wished for the light-fragrant aroma of a dozen chickens cooking over an open flame. In other words, they wanted the ordinary and bland.
My family is steeped in the pig tradition. We have raised, fatted, and prepared some of the best pork ever to cross southern lips. Chicken, however, was Sunday fare, wrapped in flour, salt, and pepper, and deep fried to a golden crisp delight. We certainly had never dealt with chicken cooking of this style. They wanted to plop the old bird on a steel grate and roast the skinless meat to a rubbery substance.
Among the members of the picnic committee was Leeann, a young mother from Pittsburgh. She was known for her raven hair and winning smile. This isn’t to say that she was only known for her looks, but simply says that common sense took a back seat to beauty.
Leeann’s primary job was to obtain the necessary chickens. Within the confines of the church picnic budget, there was only room for a third of the chickens needed for the picnic if they were purchased from the grocery. My suggestion was to only tell a third of the church about the picnic. The fault in this plan lay in the prayer line and gossip connection. As soon as you invited the first person, the rest of the church would be aware of it by dark.
“How did you guys find a pig for the money that the church allotted?” Leeann asked me.
“I bought them from Old Man Wheller at his farm,” I said.
Leeann and I spent hours calling every grocery, meat market and packing house in the area. When I was convinced we were back to pork, a call came from good old Leeann. She had been calling poultry suppliers for most of the morning searching for chickens in our price range. When she found a place on the outskirts of town near the stock yard that would supply us with the two hundred chickens reasonably, she phoned me bubbling with excitement.
“Mr. Hodges also agreed to deliver the chickens on the day before our event,” she announced.
I was elated with the success Leeann was enjoying with the entree. Having completed her mission, the picnic committee officially decided to make the chickens our main dish. Some well deserved applause was offered for Leeann’s work. A few sighs were heard from the old timers. The group, however, was now ready to extend its full force on implementing the chicken roast picnic.
I dug through the family recipe books searching for a recipe for roasted chicken. There were recipes for roast pork, roasted rabbit, and roasted lamb. There were recipes for every mention of fowl that included deep fat frying them. I even found a recipe for roasted, deep-fried frog legs. I simply couldn’t find a recipe for chicken cooked on a barbeque. I realized that I would have to do something that I had never done in twenty years of marriage. I would ask my wife for her recipe.
Sheer delight rose across her face as I asked her for the ingredients for her father Craig’s barbequed chicken with rosemary. With tears of joy streaming down her face, she sifted through the dusty old cookbook on the shelf. I stared at the book title with shivers running up and down my spine. A Yankee’s Guide to Healthy Cooking didn’t sound too promising. Translated into southern jargon, it means Food That Doesn’t Taste Good.
I wrote down the recipe, but I knew there was no way we were going to fix chicken with less than delicious taste on my watch as picnic committee chairman. After a few substitutions, I began to see some promise. I deleted the skin removal process. I replaced the light sprinkling of extra virgin olive oil with a generous slathering of garlic-flavored lard. Finally, I removed the light vinaigrette sauce and replaced it with a home-style, molasses-based barbeque sauce, my own special brand. Now, that was better!
After church that next Sunday, we held an emergency meeting of the picnic committee. I announced the changes to the recipe. The change had a calming effect on the old-time members. Being established Baptists of the old-time variety, they knew that flavor was an important ingredient in any church-eating function. I also arranged for the cooking committee to meet on the day before the church picnic to help unload the truck and to prepare the chickens for cooking the following morning. I mentioned that each of the workers should bring a sharp knife and be prepared to dig their hands into the chicken project. From the looks on the faces of the committee members, none of them seemed as anxious to participate as I had imagined.
I thought everyone would jump at the opportunity to slice and dice chickens. The thought that no one would want to participate in the project never occurred to me. For some strange reason, I assumed everyone would have joined this committee for the very opportunities we were about to embark upon.
To the contrary, I received every excuse known. One had a doctor’s appointment. One couldn’t remember where Leeann lived. Of the host of excuses, my favorite was the dead grandmother.
“Horace, this is the third time this month that a grandmother has died,” I said. “And I just saw her at the market, yesterday. She didn’t look dead to me.”
It took several tries to convince Horace that his excuse wasn’t working. In desperation, I finally called his grandmother and placed the two on the line at the same time.
“It’s a miracle!” Horace exclaimed.
“In payment for the miracle, you get to help with the chickens,” I replied.
As the weeks went by, the rest of the details of the cookout fell in place. The pastor announced the picnic each week in the Sunday service and the bulletin contained a sign-up sheet for those that planned to attend. The families were selecting their favorite covered-dish specialties to bring with them. I was feeling proud of our planning. We had left nothing to chance. We planned for every contingent.
That Friday, I met Leeann at the church lot. We were there to meet the funeral home director who had agreed to lend us one of his funeral tents for our picnic. Even with the impending rain storm, we were feeling good about the event.
“Guess we’re going to pull off the event without a hitch,” I said to Leeann.
“Guess so,” she said.
We chatted for a few minutes while we waited for the funeral director to arrive. In a few minutes, his workers began erecting the tent. Mr. Turner stood around talking with Leeann while the workers finished up the last details and began heading for the next job.
“Thanks for the invitation to the picnic, but I am sure you will have your hands full without me,” Mr. Turner said.
There must have been a few minutes more of small talk before Mr. Turner started toward his car laughing hysterically. I thought this an odd situation, and I wanted to know what had been said. With the strange look on Leeann’s face, I knew there was some problem heading our way. After a few minutes of discussion, I realized that Leeann had a small problem with the chickens.
“How hard is it to remove the feet from a chicken?” Leeann asked as we walked out to our cars.
“It’s not hard, but the butcher shop usually does this for you,” I said.
Leeann looked at the ground. She explained that she had bought the chickens with the feet still on their bodies. I thought for a second about the statement Leeann had said without realizing the consequences of what had transpired.
The fog of poor understanding lifted as the phrase, “on the foot” drifted through my brain. For those that are not familiar with this wording, it means that the chickens are still walking around on their feet. I looked at Leeann with my serious and concerned face and asked her the exact phrase the salesman used.
“Yea, on the foot. That was it,” she replied.
There is hardly a good way to describe the events unfolding that afternoon. Leeann was having two hundred live chickens delivered to her immaculate home in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the area. While we were talking away the afternoon with the funeral director, the chicken truck, with its wonderful aroma, was parking in Leeann’s driveway.
A tear streamed down Leeann’s face as we sped toward her house in her husband’s Porsche. With each turn, the tires squealed and Leeann cried. She made every effort to beat the chicken delivery to the house. If she could get to the house before the truck, perhaps she could stop the delivery and keep the neighbors from forming a lynching committee.
As luck would have it, Ted, her husband, took the afternoon off from work to help unload the chickens. He, too, was not sure of the size boxes the chickens would be shipped in, but he thought Leeann might need his help.
When Leeann and I arrived at their lovely house, we could hear a chorus of cackling and smell the aroma of barnyard animals. Ted was sitting in a chair in the rear yard by the fence. A single feather was dangling from the hinge on his glasses. Scattered around the rear yard was a host of live chickens pecking at the ground.
Ted babbled on for some time before his speech was understandable. First, I could only understand that Mr. Hodges had delivered the chickens. Later, we realized that the truck had just backed up to the back yard fence and threw the chickens over. After a glass of water and a few moments to let the Valium take effect, Ted was finally able to convey his feelings to his lovely wife in a coherent manner. Perhaps their young children will forget those particular words before kindergarten.
The rest of the committee trickled into the yard as Ted began making apologies to the neighbors. Leeann, of course, sat on the back deck, crying. The committee and I formulated a plan to load all of the chickens into our cars and carry them back to the chicken yard.
The committee was a little light on experience in the chicken wrangling business. Ms. Edith was the only one of us that had actually raised, slaughtered, dressed, and cooked a chicken. The rest of us ranged in experience from having plucked at least one chicken in our lifetime to being totally emaciated by the thought of touching the feathery beasts.
Even with all of this going for us, we took a few hours to round up all of the chickens. Well, it took a few hours for Ms. Edith to round them up while we watched from a distance. All of the chickens were stuffed into my truck under the truck cap.
You cannot imagine the difficulty of driving a truck with a bed full of loose cackling chickens. First, the smell will choke you. The feathers flying in the window of the truck will cause you to go nuts. The worst part is the other driver’s honking, shouting, and gesturing in your direction. I felt like a donkey at a horse show.
Upon arrival at the livestock yard, we were greeted by Mr. Hodges. He stood blocking the door waving frantically and pointing to the “No Returns” sign. We pleaded with him to take the chickens back. We begged. We threatened, but no amount of our requesting would convince this dear businessman to take back the chickens.
Before we left the chicken store, I took a few minutes to open the side vents on the truck cap. The smell from the enclosed fowl was, in no other terms, foul.
Standing in the parking lot, we met as a committee to discuss the situation. In summary, we were twelve hours away from the church’s largest event without the food of honor. We had spent our entire budget on a truck load of live chickens we didn’t want. There was no place to put them, either. Horace’s suggestion to leave them in my truck was not a good idea. Neither was Leeann’s suggestion of turning them loose in the community park.
Our other problem was that we did not have any funds to buy the entree for our church picnic. We had spent the money, but had nothing to show for it. Our perfect picnic was running into a few glitches none of us had anticipated.
Ms. Edith stood next to me, trying to break into the conversation. Everyone was talking at once, but no one had a good solution. Finally, after much commotion, Ms. Edith shouted her thoughts.
“Let’s just butcher the chickens and serve them,” she said.
The group looked at the elderly lady with our jaws scraping the ground. Our jaws flopped lower with each of the details that Ms. Edith enumerated. With nothing else presenting itself as a reasonable plan, each of us tightened our throats to avoid any spillage and agreed to Ms. Edith’s plan.
Ms. Edith stopped by her house to retrieve her kitchen hatchet and scalding pot on the way to the church kitchen. With simple instructions from our new-found leader, Edith, we took our places at our assigned stations. Some of us were assigned to cutting the heads from the chickens. Others were in the scalding and plucking station. Lastly, was the cleaning and cutting station. I was in the substation called the chicken liver department. It was a small committee that sifted through the entrails for the livers. Retrieving the livers and gizzards from the pile, I placed them in the small bowls for preparation the next day.
Adding insults to injury, the Chicken Liver Department also had to chase down the beheaded chickens. It seemed like such a small job until you actually have to chase the chickens and take them to the plucking station. Just getting the beasts to flop into the scalding pot was more of a chore than I had imagined the entire process being.
None of the stations seemed to be doing well. The beheading station, however, seemed to be having too much fun. Even today, I am concerned about their willingness to end the life of poor defenseless creatures. The scalding-pot team seemed to be making progress until Ms. Nellie Mae began complaining about the steam from the water wilting her hair. The plucking station was slowed to a crawl. A quick visit to the station revealed that Leeann was plucking chickens using her tweezers, one feather at a time.
“I wanted them to have that manicured look,” Leeann said. “See. I even painted their nails.”
I stared down at the pile of pink chicken feet at the butchering station. The guys were laughing hysterically at Leeann’s continuing antics. After a few well-chosen words, I returned to my own station to see if they really needed my help, or if they could continue without me.
The picnic was slowly becoming a fantasy as the evening ground into the night. I found myself inventing excuses for our poor performance long before the midnight hour had arrived. Ms. Edith, the ever positive female, sang an old hymn while she worked. Finally, as the last shred of confidence slid from my brain, I bowed my head and begged the Lord to strike me dead with lightning if He couldn’t arrange for a nuclear holocaust before morning.
Being the ever-loving and caring God, He took my prayer for the ridiculous and delivered the miracle I needed. Around midnight, Ms. Edith’s sisters arrived to help. They had driven for hours to come to our rescue. Each took a station and in short order, the chickens were scalded, plucked, and quartered. With tears in my eyes, I hugged each lady with an embrace that these ladies will never forget.
As the morning hours faded into dawn, I returned to the church yard and the large barbeque cooker sitting in the parking lot. Over the cool crisp morning air, I could see the steam rising off of the cooker as the belly of the giant barrel became hot. I took the buckets of chicken quarters from the refrigerator and carried the first group of marinated chickens to their new surroundings.
I raised the lid on the cooker and reached for the first pieces of chicken. An intense pain ran down the length of my arm as the lid slammed shut on my fingers. As I raised the lid again, the first group of foul language exited my mouth. Unfortunately, there were more foul words hollered at the grill than there were fowl pieces on the grill.
I found a certain peace in seeing the first pieces of chicken hit the grill. I was so thrilled that I forgot to attach the prop rod for the lid. The lid crashed down upon my fingers again, capturing a second round of foul verbal abuses aimed at the grill.
I finally decided that the prop rod was more of a requirement than a suggestion. I attached the rod to the back of the lid and turned to retrieve the rest of the chicken. This would have been the perfect plan had I connected the rod to the front of the lid, but the slight deviation in from the original design caused the lid to again crash on my already sore fingers. Flattened and bruised beyond recognition, I decided to use my other hand for the rest of the day.
After adjusting the rod’s position to the proper place, I placed the rest of the chickens on the grill and watched as the first quarters began to sizzle. With everything in place, I lowered the lid down onto the hot grill.
Most people, at this point, would have used caution while lowering a lid onto a hot grill. Being the adventurous sort of fellow, I decided to place my hand squarely on the grill housing. The fowl laying on the grill were treated to a colorfully foul discussion about the parentage of the grill.
Returning to the task at hand, I began preparing the barbeque sauce for the final moments of cooking. I knew there was plenty of time before the chicken was ready, but with all of the previous problems, I didn’t want to leave this task until the last minute. I wanted to be sure there would be plenty of time to correct any mistakes and repair the damage before the entire church found the trouble. Besides, we were using my grandmother’s favorite cold remedy as one of the ingredients. I wanted to pour a little juice from the jug before the rest of the church came around.
While carrying the ingredients from the car to the picnic table, Leeann bounded across the church lawn, wide eyed and pony-tailed. Not wanting to offend her with the moon shine, I poured the jug’s contents into the empty gallon water jug that was laying in my back seat.
I greeted Leeann and proceeded to carry the fixings to the table. Leeann volunteered to help and grabbed the water bottle. I felt happy to have the help and gladly handed her an additional bag or two.
Having all the ingredients on the table, I pulled the recipe from my shirt pocket. I began the task of making the sauce. I added a pinch of this and a cup of that. Noticing that Leeann was facing away from the table, I even added a bit of cold remedy to my cola. It seemed the proper cure for those sore fingers. The first splash in my drink did so well that I added a couple of extra splashes.
I set the sauce on the top rack of the grill to simmer for a few minutes. Sitting at the table, I began to chop the onions and peppers for the relish. As was my normal style, I wanted to add a small bit of hot pepper to the mix. Just the least bit gives the relish a small kick. I cut the small part of the pepper into fine bits and added it to the relish.
With everything looking good, I meandered over to the grill to flip the chicken quarters. Taking a pair of tongs in one hand, I threw the grill open with the other. Having learned a valuable lesson at the last visit to the grill, I was able to avoid the lid slamming into my fingers with swift movements and cunning dexterity. On the next attempt, I remembered to place the prop rod in the proper hole.
As I was wrestling with the grill, Leeann had made her way to the fixing table. I am not sure what planets had to align to cause her to see that half-chopped pepper sitting on the table. Whatever caused it, Leeann decided the pepper was too precious to waste. Did I mention this was a hot pepper?
Leeann flung the hot pepper in her mouth. Nothing happened. She chewed the pepper, savoring the pungent taste. Nothing happened. Seconds passed. A small ring of smoke floated out of one of her ears. Then the other. Her nostril flared as a bold cloud of smoke billowed out of her nose.
The smoke pouring from her ears and nose convinced me that I made the proper decision to put only half of the pepper in the relish. She screamed and hollered. She fanned her mouth while jumping up and down. Finally, out of desperation, she grabbed my drink and swallowed the entire contents with a gulp. Still burning, she grabbed the only other liquid on the table, the water jug full of spirits.
She gulped a few mouthfuls of that Virginia Mountain Mist before realizing this wasn’t water. Spraying the contents out of her mouth and all over her white tee-shirt, she let out a Rebel Yell that would have made any southerner proud.
In that fleeting moment, I knew that this event was now officially a total disaster. I reached Leeann with a large glass of soda. I took the water jug back to my car and returned to find a pensive Leeann sitting at the table with a perplexed look on her face.
“That wasn’t water, was it?” Leeann asked me.
I shook my head “no.” I couldn’t believe that Leeann, a cute Yankee girl from good upbringing, had consumed enough moonshine to make a country boy wobble, was calmly sitting on the picnic table without a worry, other than her burning tongue.
We both decided to keep the few minor incidences of the recent event to ourselves and to continue as if nothing happened. I thought this was wise, but with each passing moment, I began to believe this would be impossible.
It started with a slight slur in her speech. At first, her Yankee accent made it hard to notice her slurs. There was a slight lilt in her voice, but her speech slowed, giving her the impression that she was acquiring a southern drawl to her speech.
Then Leeann developed a swagger in her walk. It was a small shuffle and a foot drag, reminiscent of the strolls danced at the fifties sock hops. Then the walk became a stagger. It was obvious I was going to have to call Ted and have him pick up Leeann. She needed to sleep this off. With a good night’s rest, she could return to the church world with a queen-sized headache.
I was sure that I could tell the church that Leeann just didn’t feel well and would not be joining us. I didn’t need to bore the congregation with all of the small details.
The problem was Ted. I struggled with exactly how to tell Leeann’s husband how she had accidentally sipped her way to intoxication. My mind could not conceive of a way to spin the story where I became the hero. The best I could do was to tell the truth and make an appointment with the dentist to replace whatever Ted loosened in my mouth.
Ted, however, was used to Leeann’s escapades. He arrived with the family van. Ted was curious as to how I had gotten her drunk since she was a teetotaler from birth. I explained the situation, about the chickens, the butchering, the hot pepper, the mistaken jug, and the total lack of responsibility of a few of the committee members. I didn’t mention who owned the jug. After much discussion, he took it much better than I would have if the situation was reversed.
As Ted drove away, I added the sauce to the chicken for those final minutes of cooking. Over my shoulder, I could hear the church members gathering around the tables. In the distance, I could hear Ms. Edith and her sisters recounting the events with the chickens to the rest of the church.
I struggled hard to keep my secret as I placed the golden brown chicken quarters on the plates. I bit my tongue each time someone asked Ted how Leeann was doing. I kept the promise of silence throughout the entire picnic. I let a small sigh escape as the last morsels of chicken found their way on a plate. The first drops of rain fell on me as I realized that the event was over.
I stood under the church porch with the smokers for a few minutes. Between each puff, the group mentioned how nice the chicken had been, but most missed the large sandwiches stuffed with pulled pork and my family’s famous sauce recipe. I assured them that next year, the pig would again be the guest of honor.

Finally, when I arrived at the house, I could not hold my tongue anymore. I exploded the entire series of events to my dear wife.
“Chester, you’re such a liar,” she replied.