Henpecked

Art by Bryan Moats

Nothing but trees—oak, black gum, and hickory all ablaze in color—surround the highway on both sides. But a cold, thick gray grips the damp landscape, and even the festive foliage is dulled in the dankness.

That I’m likely lost only adds to the gloom.

I can see Bodega Road right there on the GPS. Hell, it’s right there on the paper maps I scrounge out of the glove box, too. But there’s no street sign, and even as I ease to a stop where it’s supposed to be, I can’t find it from the two-lane.

I reckon you just gotta know where to look—to count curves and mailboxes, to recognize a subtle thinning of trees. “And even if you’ve been there before, you can miss it,” said Sheriff Calhoun. But then he said he hadn’t been there in years, wasn’t sure if the maps matched up to where it actually was, and was even less certain there was a single house on it, even though that one house was the only reason I was out here.

I miss the road on two passes.

Typical rookie stuff, I know, but I’m embarrassed right here in the rig by myself. Yell County is where I was born. I’ve long prided myself on a familiarity with all its rustic mysteries, and knowing all the backroads figures strong into who I think I am. But in this first year as a deputy, I’ve already learned many a thing I didn’t know—and many I didn’t want to know—about the place I call home and the people I call neighbors. I’ll never again see it, or them, in the same light as my boyhood perspective. I reckon in that context, learning of a pig-trail road I never knew existed—and one that leads nowhere—seems like the least of my failures in understanding.

On the third backtrack, I finally see it. Subtle as a slender shadow, it looks like a little tunnel cut through the woods, almost like a path forgotten decades ago, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s been down it since the storms two days ago. The GPS—before it petered out a hundred yards in, like the worthless radio and barless cell phone—showed that it dead-ends at the bottom of a holler six miles south of the highway. That one lonely house that might or might not be there is supposedly the only structure along the entirety of its ruddy, rutted path.

Even in four-wheel drive, I’m skeptical I’ll make it. After four days of rain, the red-clay track—likely not smoothed by a grader in months if ever—is the consistency of heavy pancake batter. I slip the Blazer into 4-low and crawl through as sticky splats of mud drum the fenders and the Buckshot mudders slurp through, buried to the hubs. The old Chevy slips and slides as my white-knuckled grip and muttered prayers fight for the middle of the road—a battle I figure I’ll lose sooner or later. But the tires do their thing, biting into the gravel bed buried under all that muck just enough to keep out of the ditch where, at best, it would suck the truck down to the axles. At worst, it might swallow the truck and me whole.

But that one old house, if it’s there, is where I aim to get to.

Reports of small livestock—rabbits, goat kids, just-weaned pigs, even a calf—disappearing from farms surrounding Bodega Road had boiled over into crazy talk, beyond the notion of coyotes or other varmints to blame. Ridiculous conspiracies have already been whispered among the bib-overall crowd—black panthers, flying saucers with little green men looking to “experiment” on Earthlings, and a whole bunch more of the supernatural and stupid.

So this morning, Sheriff Calhoun said someone ought to look into it before the stories got even more out of hand. I giggled and told him I thought he was just tired of phone calls from irate hobby farmers threatening to vote him out come November.

That’s when he said that someone was me.

Forty-five minutes after turning onto what I think is Bodega Road, I confirm that there is indeed a house down in this holler. It’s a tiny, wood-sided shanty squatting on the only clearing along the entire road. Waist-high switchgrass and blooming goldenrod line a rough pasture bordered by rusty chicken wire anchored with graying cedar posts. It looks lived in. Barely.

I ease up alongside the only car in the home’s narrow dirt driveway, a 1977 Thunderbird in that ghastly stock cream color. One hideaway headlight cover is on the fritz, the car locked in a perpetual wink. An old feed sack flutters as a slow but sharp afternoon breeze cuts through the high grass. I close the truck door and start down a gently rutted pathway to the front porch. Tax records are patchy, but the last known property owner is supposed to be a lady by the name of Becky Orpington. Says she’s a widow of what now would be three decades and should be nearing ninety years of age.

I haven’t even knocked yet, but Orpington, I figure it’s her, sees me through the screen and pauses. She’s just looking at me.

“Howdy, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?”

“Mrs. Orpington?”

A perky shock of stiff red hair bounces as she waddles to the door. Given her pear-shaped figure, Orpington moves with an odd lightness. She stops at the door mid-stride, one leg lifted for a full second before carefully completing the step, toes down first. She side-eyes me with narrowed pupils. Her irises are the color of butterscotch.

“How do,” she says in a peculiar, halting fashion, her voice throaty and hoarse. I introduce myself, show her the badge, and ask if we can visit for a spell.

“I reckon,” she says. “The parlor is this way.”

The house is mostly well kept and modestly furnished. A faint, feathery, musty smell—something like an old quilt left out in the summer sunshine—fills the parlor. Birds are a theme. Reproductions of John James Audubon’s naturalist paintings mixed with dollar-store avian images cover nearly every available space. Tacky ceramics of chickens and turkeys sit on end tables. A colorful feather arrangement, highlighted by the magnificent brilliance of peacock tail plumes, spills out of a large glass vase on the kitchen table. A wall of blue ribbons stands behind the vase—thirty in all. “First Place: Yell County Fair,” they read.

“What can I do for you?” asks Orpington, her tone lilting from a croak into a higher range that catches me off guard, as a crow caws and clacks from somewhere in the woods beyond the open window.

Given the chicken wire, feed sacks, and living out here in BFE, I figure Orpington raises a few animals. So I ask if she’s lost any livestock lately. I ask if she’s noticed anything around her place that would make her suspicious. Orpington says she hasn’t; that, yes, she keeps a few chickens and other small critters, but all are accounted for. I’m scribbling her answers on a notepad when soft rhythmic clicks—the sound of something clawed walking on wood—pull my eyes toward the kitchen.

A chicken steps into the parlor doorway.

It’s a standard-looking red hen, likely a Rhode Island Red as I recall the yardbirds my grandmother kept so long ago. The hen stands still as stone, staring at me in that unnerving chicken way, head turned to the side, saurian eye locked onto mine.

Goose pimples prickle up the back of my neck.

I turn my focus back to Orpington, who is also staring at me intently.

“So... so... you don’t recall any strange goings-on around these parts lately?”

Orpington says she hasn’t; that things are “just peachy back here in the holler.” She hasn’t lost a chicken to human or varmint for a long while, and even her garden okra produced a bumper crop this summer. “Haven’t even seen a deer or raccoon back here in, oh, I’d say five or six years,” says Orpington. “Just the crows and birds, and my chickens.”

When she finishes, Orpington turns toward the hen in the parlor with us, who then saunters to her slippered feet and hops up into her lap. They both turn their unblinking gaze on me. We sit in silence for some time—I’m not sure how long—when a cacophony of cackles erupts from the backyard, jarring me from the stupor.

“More of your chickens?” I ask.

“Oh, I’ve got twenty or so laying hens,” replies Orpington. “I call ’em my blue-ribbon gals. Those hens are the ones responsible for them awards I saw you eyeballin’,” she says. “They’re likely feelin’ a bit peckish. Haven’t fed ’em since early this morning. You can come watch if you want; it’s quite the spectacle.”

I follow Orpington down into her basement, expecting to find more sacks of feed, but instead she walks up to a huge glass tank writhing with the furry little bodies of more than twenty rats. “This is my secret ingredient for those blue ribbons,” says Orpington. “Lots of protein. But we’ve been runnin’ low lately. This is the last of ’em, and I’ve been tryin’ to ration ’em out.”

The old lady then climbs a stepladder like she’s a teenager, lowers a five-gallon bucket into the tank, scoops it full of rats, and deftly snaps a lid on it.

She strides to a basement door leading outside, and on over to the chicken pen where silent birds watch in stillness. I follow.

“Check this out.”

As she dumps the bucket, the chickens converge like a horde on the scattering rats.

And the chicken pen becomes a circle of Hell.

The massacre rages for only minutes—wings, clawed feet, and punishing beaks blur as rodent blood sprays, splashes, and finally oozes under the pen door, pooling at Orpington’s feet.

As the last terrified squeals and excited clucks echo in my ears, the frenzy calms. A few chunks of pink rat flesh and chicken wire dripping in red are the only indicators of the wholesale carnage that just occurred. A couple of hens peck through the leftovers as I stand, mouth agape.

An insidious, slow smile stretches Orpington’s thin lips—the first emotion I’ve seen cross her pallid face.

“There’ll be some boomer eggs tomorry,” she says with a wink. “Nothin’ puts weight in an egg like fresh red varmint meat. Puts some weight on me, too.” Orpington clucks a chuckle.

“Wait, are you... have you been eating rats?”

Orpington’s smile wilts, and her face goes stone again.

“They ain’t much different than squirrels,” says Orpington. “Not as tasty, and they sure don’t measure up to those big white rabbits.”

As every last scrap of rat disappears into ravenous craws, I know that truth will be impossible to prove. Hell, I can’t believe it myself.

The soft clucking stops all at once. The hens go silent and gather at the pen gate in a slow, synchronized cadence.

Every yellow eye focuses on me.

“But I reckon the best eggs come from that real pink, fatty meat,” says Orpington. “My hens ain’t had that good stuff in more’n thirty years or so.”

She lifts the latch, and it falls against the chicken wire with a soft metal clink.

“Come to think of it,” she says, “I been hankerin’ for a plateful myself.”