Yes, I know, a requiem is a song, or a mass, done in remembrance of a lost loved one. This is neither a song, nor a mass, nor a someone, but it is most certainly a remembrance.
On Saturday, May 31st, my daughter’s pet chicken, Yolk, was killed by what was most likely a dog whose owners were not responsible enough to keep it on their own property. And while I could rant on for a good long time about that rather sickening injustice, I’ll attempt to take the high road and write about Yolk instead.
Many would think that a chicken was an odd choice for a pet. Initially, I was one of them. She was one of a dozen or so chickens that my daughter, my son, and my wife raised from chicks while we lived in Oregon. Yolk, whom my daughter named, bonded to her, which is not all that unusual for young birds when they’re held and interacted with as much as Yolk and her other chicks were interacted with by my kids.
But Yolk was special. As she grew, and as my daughter continued to play with her, hold her, stroke her comb or her waddles, feed her mulberries as they fell from the tree (giving Yolk a dark purple beard that lasted the rest of the summer) their bond grew. Yolk was her pet, her friend, an animal that she loved like no other. During the Oregon winter, when it rained and rained and then rained some more, she would go outside and find Yolk, zipping the docile hen gently into her own jacket and ride around with her on her tricycle, a smile from ear to ear. Yolk loved it all. Yolk would ride around the backyard with her, chase her, eat from her hand or just sit, contently in my daughter’s lap. Such was the bond between my daughter and Yolk that when we decided to relocate back to Michigan, some 2300 miles by car, Yolk would make the trip with us, spending part of her time in a cat carrier between the kids in the backseat, and part of her time looking out the window from my daughter’s lap, watching the countryside roll by. She never so much as complained, and laid eggs for all but the first day of the trip east. It was a sight to behold.
When we finally dropped anchor in Michigan, we set up a temporary enclosure for her where we were staying while we shopped around for a house. Many times it was just Yolk and I hanging out while my wife and kids went out to do things. I would keep an eye on her while she wandered around, scratching and pecking away. We became, dare I say it, close.
At the end of October we were finally in our own home. The weather was changing, Fall was in full swing with Winter close on its heels and we had no coop on our property to house Yolk in. So she moved into a corner of our garage along with another adopted hen name Star that we had gotten from my brother-in-law. So now Yolk had a companion to share the frigid northern Michigan winter days and nights. All winter long they would hang out in the garage or go through the doggy door in the side to scratch around a bit in the snow. As ever, my daughter was there to take care of her, letting her out in the mornings, feeding her, and just seeing her whenever she could. I became the guy that put them in their “coop” at night because they would always fly up to a shelf and try and roost there and I was the only one tall enough to reach them. Every night, all winter long, I’d go out and snag each one from roosting shelf and put them in there cage where they were covered and could roost without worry. I griped about it, having to go out in the cold and get them down, but I’d still do it. It became a ritual and I saw Yolk and put her safely away almost every single night. As Winter thawed and the grass made a reappearance, Yolk and Star could finally be seen wandering in our too-big yard, snapping up the first insects of the season.
The coop came next, a place that Yolk and her soon to be expanded flock would be able to call their own. But make no mistake about it, this was to be Yolk’s coop, her flock of chickens. She was the queen, the bird we’d taken such great care of on our trek across country, my daughter’s true pet/friend. So after much sweat and toil, with the coop inhabitable but not quite finished, we moved Yolk and Star in a mere week ago. They loved it. It took all of one night for them to retrain themselves from always heading back to the garage to roosting in the coop. Yolkie had a new home — her home, and she was settling in.
On this past Saturday it had started off as a beautiful day. Sunny but a bit cool, damp from the evening’s rain. Spring had been a fickle beast this year, alternatively teasing us with what was to come only to blast us again with hints of the past Winter, and as the morning wore on the day seemed to cool a bit and a wind picked up. Clouds rolled in and the day that had begun with such promise began to turn gray. My wife and I had been digging fence-post holes all morning, only half-paying attention to the chickens scratching on the hillside above the pasture. By eleven we were getting ready to leave for a few hours to attend a home-schooling picnic so we could actually begin meeting people around where we live. We put the cats in the house, a strange thing for us to do before we were to leave, and left the chickens to themselves.
The afternoon passed quickly at the picnic, the day grew cold and windy and the sky wore a blanket of gray when we finally, reluctantly, pulled ourselves away from the adults we were enjoying talking with and the kids our kids were enjoying playing with. The conversation was buoyant on the ride home, the kids talking of who they had played with and my wife and I remarking on how nice it was to have an adult conversation with someone for a change. A couple of quick stops at some garage sales and we were turning into our long, winding driveway. We were home.
Home is place of safety. Or comfort. A place that you return to feel better when things are not well, or a place to go and celebrate all that is good. It is not a place you expect to find sadness and pain. It is not a place where you expect to lose a loved-one.
The first thing my wife and I saw were the feathers. They had scattered and drifted down the low rise to the west of our drive. Just what I was looking at did not immediately register until my eyes followed the feathers up the hill and their color became apparent. And there she was. Yolky. Laying on her side at the top of the hill. A single muttered word of “No” escaped from my wife’s lips before we were both out of the truck and up the hill though I knew as soon as I saw her laying there unmoving that we were too late. Yolky, the chicken we had loved and cared for, the one chicken that we had brought with us out of twenty when we left Oregon, the chicken that my daughter loved like no other, was dead.
My kids both saw her on the hill before my wife and I were even halfway there and if I live to be a thousand years old I will never, ever, forget those sounds of anguish. My wife went to Yolky and I went back to the truck and gathered my daughter in my arms. She was absolutely beside herself with grief and I held her, listened to her pleas, listened to her asking me why, screaming how unfair it was. I just listened to her say “Yolky, my Yolky” over and over and over again.
I sat down in the front seat with her cradled in one arm and brought my son into the other as they both sobbed. There was little I could do but hold them. Her Yolky was gone — forever gone — and my heart broke for her, for my son, for my wife, and for Yolky. It was obvious that she had struggled against her attacker, there were four separate areas of feathers where she’d tried to make good her escape before finally succumbing on the hilltop. It was wrong. It was unfair. It was too soon, she was only two years old and chickens can live a long time with loving care. It was so many things my mind went from one to the other in painful lurches. At some point, my mind settled on anger and the injustice of what had happened — it seemed the easiest place for me to be at that time. Railing against the dog that likely took her down, picturing the animal in my mind as being the one we’d seen wandering around our remote neighborhood three or four times in the past. I railed against myself and my wife as parents, for not putting Yolky away in her new coop while we gone, against myself for not leaving when my wife first said we had to leave instead of talking with another dad for ten more minutes. So many little things done one way or another that might have led to a different outcome. Of course you know differently, you know not to go down that path because that’s where madness lay, but still you do. Because when you see your daughter stroking the claw of her poor Yolky while your wife cradles her lifeless form in her lap, you’d do anything in your power to have it all undone.
At some point there were no more tears to be shed by my kids or my wife. The kids wanted me to read to them to take their minds off what had happened and I did so, subdued and sad myself, but that’s what they wanted to do. My wife and I asked if they wanted to help us bury Yolky and they didn’t, so we went down and buried her behind her new coop. When it was done, I went up past the house and to the hill and proceeded to pick up her feathers that still lay scattered across the grass. The wind made my task difficult, blowing them around and snatching them from the container I was trying to put them in and I cursed the weather, the sky, the ground, the dog, anything I could think of bore my impotent wrath. My words disappeared on the wind doing nothing, not even making me feel better, but still they came. Finally, the anger spent, and with only a fraction of Yolky’s feathers picked up, I bent to the task. It was a little over an hour later that I’d finally snatched the last one from the grass, and all the evidence of the struggle had been erased. The hill was just green grass waving in the wind then, just as it had been when we’d left so many hours before. Order, at least in that small part of our world, had been restored.
It wasn’t until Sunday night, after the kids were asleep, when I saw a picture of my daughter and Yolky, when I saw my daughter’s smile as she held her beloved chicken, that I finally broke down. I felt so bad for my little girl, so bad that she’d been robbed of her pet, so frustrated at the impotence I felt over Yolky’s loss that all I could do was cry. The sight of the picture caught me off guard, and the emotions came in waves and waves that night and when it was over I was raw and spent, angry and sad.
And so I sit here today and write this to try and clear my head. There is a hole right now, the same sort of hole that people feel when they lose a dog, or a cat, or any other beloved animal that has been such a integral part of their family. Maybe this wasn’t such a requiem after all. It’s too soon to look back wistfully on the times that my daughter shared with Yolky, too soon to see her in all of the many pictures, too soon to see all of my daughter’s smiles that were because of Yolky. In time something more meaningful and less harsh will be written, something that can bring out more of what Yolky really meant to my daughter, and our entire family.
But that time is not now.
Goodbye Yolky. You will be missed.
Greatly.
