Chicken Stew

Life in a Small Town



By Kathleen L. Smith
All rights reserved


Driving home on our country highway that connects all the railroad towns of South Carolina, AC blowing through my thin hair, radio blaring, me singing at the top of my lungs an old country tune, I came upon a fine white leghorn in the middle of the road. I didn’t know it was a “leghorn” at the time. Then it was a big white chicken with a red coxcomb looking rather perplexed, as if it had forgotten why it had begun to cross the road, and I could relate to that, there having been times when I also wondered why I had persisted on a particular course of action in life.

I realized in a flash of sudden brilliant insight that if I veered around that chicken and continued on my journey that, most likely, it would never see the morrow, and that saddened me. For to me, life is a religion, not something I go to worship in church so much as to connect the meaningful dots of my own existence. As such all living things have a value for me. I stopped the car there in the right lane of the two-lane highway, scanning the rear view mirror at several cars a quarter of a mile back.

Honk. Honk. Honk---honk--honk.

The bird gave me a worried look and budged not.

Throwing open the car door with a sigh and a glance at the cars now stopped behind me, I walked up to the chicken and, using my “official I-mean-this” voice commanded, “Shoo!” The bird looked at me. I looked at the bird. “Shoo. Shoo.” The heat index for the day was 105 to 110, and I could feel the searing heat rising from the macadam beneath my shoes. The leghorn was probably suffering heat prostration. It looked more confused even than I often feel at two in the afternoon of a July day in the South.

Having already committed myself to this wild chicken chase, I realized I would have to physically remove the bird from the road. With a somewhat embarrassed glance at the cars behind me, I could see the passengers all leaning to the right and left side windows of their cars, all intensely interested in my pursuit. Putting that in the shadowed back of my mind, I took a determined breath and grabbed the chicken on both sides, simultaneously wondering if this was my day to be pecked to death.

Two cars zoomed by, passing none too far away in the left lane of the highway, impatient to reach their destinations as I idled my time in chicken rescue. I placed the leghorn, who by this time seemed content with my decision to remove it, to a location where I deemed it safe from encounters of the automotive kind and trotted quickly to my car. I had left the door standing widely open. Hopping behind the steering wheel, as I closed the car door, I thought I heard the muffled sound of applause mixed with laughter emitting from the car behind me. I sped off into an imaginary sunset, the gleaming star of glory pinned to my chest, blinking back a tear for a fait accompli. Such is the stuff of life for one in a small town.