Howard Waldrop - The Ugly Chickens

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The Ugly Chickens
by Howard Waldrop
My car was broken, and I had a class to teach at eleven. So I took the
city bus, something I rarely do.
I spent last summer crawling through The Big Thicket with cameras
and tape recorder, photographing and taping two of the last ivory-billed
woodpeckers on the earth. You can see the films at your local Audubon
Society showroom.
This year I wanted something just as flashy but a little less taxing.
Perhaps a population study on the Bermuda cahow, or the New Zealand
takahe. A month or so in the warm (not hot) sun would do me a world
of good. To say nothing of the advance of science.
I was idly leafing through Greenway's Extinct and Vanishing Birds of
the World. The city bus was winding its way through the ritzy
neighborhoods of Austin, stopping to let off the chicanas, black
women, and Vietnamese who tended the kitchens and gardens of the
rich.
"I haven't seen any of those ugly chickens in a long time," said a voice
close by.
A grey-haired lady was leaning across the aisle toward me.
I looked at her, then around. Maybe she was a shopping-bag lady.
Maybe she was just talking. I looked straight at her. No doubt about it,
she was talking to me. She was waiting for an answer.
"I used to live near some folks who raised them when I was a girl," she
said. She pointed.
I looked down at the page my book was open to.
What I should have said was: "That is quite impossible, madam. This is
a drawing of an extinct bird of the island of Mauritius. It is perhaps the
most famous dead bird in the world. Maybe you are mistaking this
drawing for that of some rare Asiatic turkey, peafowl, or pheasant. I am
sorry, but you are mistaken."
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I should have said all that.
What she said was, "Oops, this is my stop," and got up to go.
---------
My name is Paul Linberl. I am twenty-six years old, a graduate student
in ornithology at the University of Texas, a teaching assistant. My
name is not unknown in the field. I have several vices and follies, but I
don't think foolishness is one of them.
The stupid thing for me to do would have been to follow her.
She stepped off the bus.
I followed her.
---------
I came into the departmental office, trailing scattered papers in the
whirlwind behind me. "Martha! Martha!" I yelled.
She was doing something in the supply cabinet.
"Jesus, Paul! What do you want?"
"Where's Courtney?"
"At the conference in Houston. You know that. You missed your class.
What's the matter?"
"Petty cash. Let me at it!"
"Payday was only a week ago. If you can't ."
"It's business! It's fame and adventure and the chance of a lifetime! It's
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a long sea voyage that leaves . a plane ticket. To either Jackson,
Mississippi or Memphis. Make it Jackson, it's closer. I'll get receipts!
I'll be famous. Courtney will be famous. You'll even be famous! This
university will make even more money! I'll pay you back. Give me
some paper. I gotta write Courtney a note. When's the next plane out?
Could you get Marie and Chuck to take over my classes Tuesday and
Wednesday? I'll try to be back Thursday unless something happens.
Courtney'll be back tomorrow, right? I'll call him from, well, wherever.
Do you have some coffee?."
And so on and so forth. Martha looked at me like I was crazy. But she
filled out the requisition anyway.
"What do I tell Kemejian when I ask him to sign these?"
"Martha, babe, sweetheart. Tell him I'll get his picture in Scientific
American."
"He doesn't read it."
"Nature, then!"
"I'll see what I can do," she said.
---------
The lady I had followed off the bus was named Jolyn (Smith) Jimson.
The story she told me was so weird that it had to be true. She knew
things only an expert, or someone with firsthand experience, could
know. I got names from her, and addresses, and directions, and tidbits
of information. Plus a year: 1927.
And a place: northern Mississippi.
I gave her my copy of the Greenway book. I told her I'd call her as soon
as I got back into town. I left her standing on the corner near the house
of the lady she cleaned for twice a week. Jolyn Jimson was in her
sixties.
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---------
Think of the dodo as a baby harp seal with feathers. I know that's not
even close, but it saves time.
In 1507, the Portuguese, on their way to India, found the (then
unnamed) Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean-three of them a few
hundred miles apart, all east and north of Madagascar.
It wasn't until 1598, when that old Dutch sea captain Cornelius van
Neck bumped into them, that the islands received their names-names
which changed several times through the centuries as the Dutch,
French, and English changed them every war or so. They are now know
as Rodriguez, Reunion, and Mauritius.
The major feature of these islands were large flightless birds, stupid,
ugly, bad-tasting birds. Van Neck and his men named them dod-aarsen,
stupid ass, or dodars, silly birds, or solitaires.
There were three species-the dodo of Mauritius, the real grey-brown,
hooked-beak clumsy thing that weighed twenty kilos or more; the
white, somewhat slimmer dodo of Reunion; and the solitaires of
Rodriguez and Reunion, which looked like very fat, very dumb light-
colored geese.
The dodos all had thick legs, big squat bodies twice as large as a
turkey's, naked faces, and big long downcurved beaks ending in a hook
like a hollow linoleum knife. They were flightless. Long ago they had
lost the ability to fly, and their wings had degenerated to flaps the size
of a human hand with only three or four feathers in them. Their tails
were curly and fluffy, like a child's afterthought at decoration. They
had absolutely no natural enemies. They nested on open ground. They
probably hatched their eggs wherever they happened to lay them.
No natural enemies until van Neck and his kind showed up. The Dutch,
French, and Portuguese sailors who stopped at the Mascarenes to
replenish stores found that besides looking stupid, dodos were stupid.
They walked right up to them and hit them on the head with clubs.
Better yet, dodos could be herded around like sheep. Ship's logs are full
of things like: "Party of ten men ashore. Drove half-a-hundred of the
big turkey-like birds into the boat. Brought to ship where they are given
the run of the decks. Three will feed a crew of 150."
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Even so, most of the dodo, except for the breast, tasted bad. One of the
Dutch words for them was walghvogel, disgusting bird. But on a ship
three months out on a return from Goa to Lisbon, well, food was where
you found it. It was said, even so, that prolonged boiling did not
improve the flavor.
That being said, the dodos might have lasted, except that the Dutch, and
later the French, colonized the Mascarenes. These islands became
plantations and dumping-places for religious refugees. Sugar cane and
other exotic crops were raised there.
With the colonists came cats, dogs, hogs, and the cunning Rattus
norvegicus and the Rhesus monkey from Ceylon. What dodos the
hungry sailors left were chased down (they were dumb and stupid, but
they could run when they felt like it) by dogs in the open. They were
killed by cats as they sat on their nests. Their eggs were stolen and
eaten by monkeys, rats, and hogs. And they competed with the pigs for
all the low-growing goodies of the islands.
The last Mauritius dodo was seen in 1681, less than a hundred years
after man first saw them. The last white dodo walked off the history
books around 1720. The solitaires of Rodriguez and Reunion, last of
the genus as well as the species, may have lasted until 1790. Nobody
knows.
Scientists suddenly looked around and found no more of the Didine
birds alive, anywhere.
-------
This part of the country was degenerate before the first Snopes ever
saw it. This road hadn't been paved until the late fifties, and it was a
main road between two county seats. That didn't mean it went through
civilized country. I'd traveled for miles and seen nothing but dirt banks
red as Billy Carter's neck and an occasional church. I expected to see
Burma Shave signs, but realized this road had probably never had them.
I almost missed the turn-off onto the dirt and gravel road the man back
at the service station had marked. It led onto the highway from
nowhere, a lane out of a field. I turned down it and a rock the size of a
golf ball flew up over the hood and put a crack three inches long in the
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windshield of the rent-a-car I'd gotten in Grenada.
It was a hot muggy day for this early. The view was obscured in a
cloud of dust every time the gravel thinned. About a mile down the
road, the gravel gave out completely. The roadway turned into a rutted
dirt pathway, just wider than the car, hemmed in on both sides by a
sagging three-strand barbed-wire fence.
In some places the fenceposts were missing for a few meters. The wire
lay on the ground and in some places disappeared under it for long
stretches.
The only life I saw was a mockingbird raising hell with something
under a thorn bush the barbed wire had been nailed to in place of a
post. To one side now was a grassy field which had gone wild, the way
everywhere will look after we blow ourselves off the face of the planet.
The other was fast becoming woods-pine, oak, some black gum and
wild plum, fruit not out this time of the year.
I began to ask myself what I was doing here. What if Ms. Jimson were
some imaginative old crank who-but no. Wrong, maybe, but even the
wrong was worth checking. But I knew she hadn't lied to me. She had
seem incapable of lies-good ol' girl, backbone of the South, of the
earth. Not a mendacious gland in her being.
I couldn't doubt her, or my judgment, either. Here I was, creeping and
bouncing down a dirt path in Mississippi, after no sleep for a day, out
on the thin ragged edge of a dream. I had to take it on faith.
The back of the car sometimes slid where the dirt had loosened and
gave way to sand. The back tire stuck once, but I rocked out of it.
Getting back out again would be another matter. Didn't anyone ever use
this road?
The woods closed in on both sides like the forest primeval, and the
fence had long since disappeared. My odometer said six miles and it
had been twenty minutes since I'd turned off the highway. In the
rearview mirror, I saw beads of sweat and dirt in the wrinkles of my
neck. A fine patina of dust covered everything inside the car. Clots of it
came through the windows.
The woods reached out and swallowed the road. Branches scraped
against the windows and the top. It was like falling down a long dark
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leafy tunnel. It was dark and green in there. I fought back an atavistic
urge to turn on the headlights. The roadbed must have been made of a
few centuries of leaf mulch. I kept constant pressure on the accelerator
and bulled my way through.
Half a log caught and banged and clanged against the car bottom. I saw
light ahead. Fearing for the oil pan, I punched the pedal and sped out.
I almost ran through a house.
It was maybe ten yards from the trees. The road ended under one of the
windows. I saw somebody waving from the corner of my eye.
I slammed on the brakes.
A whole family was on the porch, looking like a Walker Evans
Depression photograph, or a fever dream from the mind of a Hee Haw
producer. The house was old. Strips of peeling paint a yard long tapped
against the eaves.
"Damned good thing you stopped," said a voice. I looked up. The
biggest man I had ever seen in my life leaned down into the driver's-
side window.
"If we'd have heard you sooner, I'd've sent one of the kids down to the
end of the driveway to warn you," he said.
Driveway?
His mouth was stained brown at the corners. I figured he chewed
tobacco until I saw the sweet-gum snuff brush sticking from the pencil
pocket in the bib of his overalls. His hands were the size of catchers'
mitts. They looked like they'd never held anything smaller than an axe
handle.
"How y'all?" he said, by the way of introduction.
"Just fine," I said. I got out of the car.
"My name's Lindberl," I said, extending my hand. He took it. For an
instant, I thought of bear traps, sharks' mouths, closing elevator doors.
The thought went back to wherever it is they stay.
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"This is the Gudger place?" I asked.
He looked at me blankly with his grey eyes. He wore a diesel truck cap,
and had on a checked lumberjack shirt beneath his overalls. His rubber
boots were the size of the ones Karloff wore in Frankenstein.
"Naw, I'm Jim Bob Krait. That's my wife Jenny, and there's Luke and
Skeeno and Shirl." He pointed to the porch.
The people on the porch nodded.
"Lessee? Gudger? No Gudgers round here I know of. I'm sorta new
here," I took that to mean he hadn't lived here for more than twenty
years or so.
"Jennifer!" he yelled. "You know of anybody named Gudger?" To me
he said, "My wife's lived around here all her life."
His wife came down onto the second step of the porch landing. "I think
they used to be the ones what lived on the Spradlin place before the
Spradlins. But the Spradlins left around the Korean War. I didn't know
any of the Gudgers myself. That's while we was living over to Water
Valley."
"You an insurance man?" asked Mr. Krait.
"Uh ... no," I said. I imagined the people on the porch leaning toward
me, all ears. "I'm a ... I teach college."
"Oxford?" asked Krait.
"Uh, no. University of Texas."
"Well, that's a damn long way off. You say you're looking for the
Gudgers?"
"Just their house. The area. As your wife said, I understand they left
during the Depression, I believe."
"Well, they musta had money," said the gigantic Mr. Krait. "Nobody
around here was rich enough to leave during the Depression."
"Luke!" he yelled. The oldest boy on the porch sauntered down. He
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looked anemic and wore a shirt in vogue with the Twist. He stood with
his hands in his pockets.
"Luke, show Mr. Lindbergh-"
"Lindberl."
"Mr. Lindberl here the way up to the old Spradlin place. Take him a far
as the old log bridge, he might get lost before then."
"Log bridge broke down, daddy."
"When?"
"October, daddy."
"Well, hell, somethin' else to fix! Anyway, to the creek."
He turned to me. "You want him to go along on up there, see you don't
get snakebit?"
"No, I'm sure I'll be fine."
"Mind if I ask what you're going up there for?" he asked. He was
looking away from me. I could see having to come right out and ask
was bothering him. Such things usually came up in the course of
conversation.
"I'm a-uh, bird scientist. I study birds. We had a sighting-someone told
us the old Gudger place-the area around here-I'm looking for a rare
bird. It's hard to explain."
I noticed I was sweating. It was hot.
"You mean like a goodgod? I saw a goodgod about twenty-five years
ago, over next to Bruce," he said.
"Well, no." (A goodgod was one of the names for an ivory-billed
woodpecker, one of the rarest in the world. Any other time I would
have dropped my jaw. Because they were thought to have died out in
Mississippi by the teens, and by the fact that Krait knew they were
rare.)
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