Bonnie Olsen
Collaboration
One member of the animal kingdom I've always liked is the chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus. So when my caretaker Phineas showed me the ad, WANTED: NEW HOME FOR CLASSROOM CHICKEN, I agreed to take her in. "Cynthia," the students had named her, their star specimen in a Gallus Maturation Project. They’d observed her progress through the wrinkle-skinned hatchling stage to the fluffy yellow chick stage, on to the gangly awkward pullet stage, and when she’d finally achieved full, adult chickenhood, they’d let her come to me.
Phineas and I provided a coop of good taut chicken wire, but maybe because Cynthia had always lived in a classroom, exposed to analytical thought and problem solving, she soon learned to launch herself in ever higher spirals until she topped the coop's chicken wire fence, then she'd soar—I'd never seen a chicken soar—down to the driveway, the lawn, or most often, the compost heap.
The heap provided ample habitat for invertebrates, primarily pill bugs, Armadillidiidae, and earthworms, Annelida. With pill bugs, like any chicken, the instant Cynthia spotted one, she'd peck it up and gobble it down. But for her, earthworms were different. Cynthia didn't just peck Annelids; she studied them.
She would nudge an earthworm gently onto the lawn, then stand up tall, and, cocking her head, would scrutinize first with one eye, then with the other as the worm performed its coiling, twisting, thrashing attempt to regain darkness and safety. Near as I could tell, Cynthia seemed to be collecting data—a predictable result of her classroom education.
Phineas thought so too. "Don't never see a chicken so smart like that," he observed. Then he went inside to put our groceries away. Rejoining me at the compost heap, he said, "Been some time, you know," but this time he wasn't talking about Cynthia. This time he was referring to my seizures.
"I suppose watching Cynthia keeps them away," I told him, which it demonstratively did. Nowadays, aside from one specific trigger, I was nearly seizure-free. When seizures did come, according to Phineas, what generally happened was, I'd “just thrash around some, then sleep a while," which does make them sound harmless, but those seizures were severe enough to keep me from attending university. They were, in fact, so severe as to keep me from ever leaving this house and the one-and-a-half-acre lot around it. Phineas was the best caretaker I'd ever had, and he said doing for me is the best job he'd ever had, so we figured the two of us were a pretty good match—and now with Cynthia, the three of us.
"I got you some more them ramen noodles you like," Phineas said, his way of reminding me it's lunch time. I can make my own ramen, if Phineas pours the boiling water.
***
One day Cynthia and I were out on the porch, the two of us enjoying a bowl of spicy ramen noodles—Cynthia can tell the difference between a squirming earthworm and squirmy ramen noodles—when all in a panic, she flew squawk-squawking away to her coop.
I was still picking noodles from my hair when my father's big rig zoomed up the driveway and screeched to a halt. "I’ve come for my own," he said, drawing pick and shovel from his truck. By "my own," he didn't mean me or even this house. No, lately, my father had become convinced that my mother had died withholding some kind of treasure from him, which he all-of-a sudden knew to be buried deep in some specific, previously undisclosed location behind the house.
In the old days, my mother used to refer to him as a “reformed academic.” He’d been an adjunct professor until the day his research revealed that the lowliest independent trucker out-earns any adjunct sociologist. Right then, he'd quit the university and bought himself a big rig. When asked, my mother would say, “No point trying to explain the inexplicable.” Her outlook did tend toward the calm and rational—as does mine.
My father must have excelled at trucking, because our family’s standard of living definitely improved, including the acquisition of this house-plus-workshop on a one-and-a-half-acre lot. The workshop was a nod to my mother, who liked to build wooden furniture. She took to saying she thought she'd married a scholar and instead had got herself a plutocrat. By “plutocrat,” she'd meant my father’s increasingly disagreeable approach to just about anything. He might be nursing the germ of an idea when he set off on a long haul, but without benefit of research, testing, and studied observation, by the time he returned, that germ of an idea would have blossomed into some irrational conclusion—always more twisted and disagreeable than the one before it.
Phineas joined me on the porch, being near in case I seized again. My father's abrupt appearances generally did trigger seizures, and that day's was bound to fall into the category of a "doozy"—which, unfortunately, it did.
By the time I recovered, my father was away on another long haul, and Cynthia had resumed her study of Annelid behavior. Her latest hypothesis seemed to be that an earthworm dropped onto a nasturtium leaf will behave differently from an earthworm dropped onto the lawn. Our nasturtium plant had gotten out of hand anyway, and its broad, flat leaves could easily be plucked by a chicken.
"She been sticking those leaves together," Phineas informed me one day as I was recovering from yet another seizure, and indeed Cynthia was doing just that. She would pluck a leaf, poop on it just so, then nudge another leaf partly over the moist poop to create a larger surface. Another dollop of poop, another leaf, and her leaf mat would grow. When she'd got her leaf mat large enough, she'd drop a worm atop it and observe intently.
"She timing how long it take for the worm to get hisself to safety," Phineas said, and that did seem to be it. We watched Cynthia perform another trial. Then another. With the third, Phineas roused himself. "You want to see that hole he dug out back?"
I supposed I should.
My father had dug more than a hole; he'd dug a pit. I estimated its dimensions at a radius of five feet, depth of four—though it looked deeper, because he'd been piling the dark, clay-like, dug-up earth high around his pit’s circumference. Judging by the boot marks in that heap, he’d been climbing up and over it to further his digging. I seized again, another "doozy."
Science tells us that the human brain is equipped to withstand only so many seizures, and by my own calculations, I had to be approaching that limit. The problem was, I could collect data, plot points, and draw graphs much as I liked, but no graph on earth could predict the exact day my brain would fail to recover—only that the day was fast approaching.
This time though, I did recover, and as soon as Phineas had me “up and at ‘em” again, he told me, "You got to come see Cynthia's mat now. I been given her Elmer's glue, works better than poop." It certainly did. During the days I'd been "out," Cynthia had fashioned a sizeable carpet of nasturtium leaves. "See how she keep them leaves soft and green? I puts out a pan of water, and she dip in a wing, then flutter around.”
I told him, "You know what you two have become? Scientific collaborators, that's what." We had a little chuckle over that, but then I sobered. "About that hole?" I had to know.
"Six feet deep now, closer to seven. He been bringing a ladder, winch, and bucket—no light though. Guess he got such a clear idea in his head, he don't need light."
I didn’t find that hard to believe.
Phineas said, "He be back again pretty soon—today, maybe tonight."
I took that as warning to stay indoors, which, given my increasingly fragile state, might be a very good idea. Cynthia, however seemed to take that news another way. She stopped her worm testing and stood up tall, taut, and alert, looking hard into Phineas's eyes, which were looking back, equally intent. They didn't break their gaze until I started walking alone toward the house, and Phineas had to stay beside me.
I couldn't know how many hours remained until my father's return, and I couldn't tell if I would survive the seizure it triggered. I spent all the rest of that afternoon writing my will. It wasn't long, because the only treasure I could bequeath was Cynthia, and the only heir I cared to name was Phineas. But I took my time to get the wording right.
***
Next morning, I woke to Phineas's voice saying, "You got...you got to come out back." I'd never seen him so shaken.
My father's big rig was parked there in the driveway, but for some reason, it didn't trigger a seizure. Phineas and I waited to be sure, then together, we walked around to the back. By now, my father’s mound had grown so high, we had to clamber up it just to see down into the pit. Phineas kept a tight hold of me, and frankly, I kept a tight hold of him, too.
It was good I had, because way down deep at the bottom lay my father's body, horribly contorted beneath a tangle of pick, shovel, rope, winch, ladder, and bucket. "Dead," Phineas said, though he didn't have to, because the buzzing of flies was already telling me that: Calliphoridae, a species known to sense death in minutes so as to lay its eggs within the decomposing flesh.
And as I stood atop that mound of earth, it seemed to me that a small piece of my damaged brain fell back into place, and with that newly completed brain, I achieved confidence, reason, and memory.
I could now remember how my mother and I had been out in the workshop, chatting amicably about university in the fall. Had I settled on a major yet? “Almost,” I’d told her. “General biology for the early years, then maybe zero in on ornithology or herpetology.” We’d been building extra-tall bookcases of fine, dense walnut, having agreed they should be weighty in every sense of the word.
And at that moment, my father had burst in, just returned from one of his extra-long hauls and fuming with rage. "I’ve come for my own," he’d said, referring to my mother's inheritance from her recently-deceased Aunt Muriel. The will had read, "I bequeath my most valuable treasure to my most valued niece," and the treasure had turned out to be a great many books, most of them about zoology, all of them deserving of extra fine, tall, weighty bookcases.
But out on the road, my father had reached the conclusion that the "valuable treasure" had to be gold or securities or jewels—and further, that if his spouse was heir, Muriel's treasure was his as well. My mother had tried to explain the true nature of her inheritance, and he’d beat her to death with a board of fine dense walnut. And on a back swing, he'd caught me too, hard on the head.
Later, the doctors had told me my survival was "a miracle," and that my mother and I had been found crushed beneath two toppled, unfinished bookcases, an accident.
Some accident. Some miracle.
So our new house became my convalescent ward, and the money for my university education went to wages for Phineas, and eventually, upkeep for Cynthia.
I climbed back down the mound, and Phineas allowed me to walk away alone. Somehow he knew, as did I, that there would be no more seizures.
I set out to find the leaf mat. Physically speaking, it still had to exist in some material form and in some actual location. I found it—or rather pieces of it—on the far side of the compost heap beneath dense and sticker-y brambles where few would care to look. I collected my specimens and transferred them to the lawn for further study. Piece-by-piece, I re-assembled the mat, carefully examining each component in detail.
Judging by the dark, clay-like soil clinging to the underside of my re-assembled specimen, this mat had once been in contact with the mound of earth by my father’s pit. There, someone intent on entering said pit—motivated by greed and heedless of the dark—would step on it. And where he'd stepped, boot had met earthworm—quite a number of earthworms, it looked like—and had slid, leaving behind a great long smear of Annelida guts.
I had to sit back. Even Cynthia could not have transported that mat all the way from the compost heap to the mound of earth. Nor could she have spread that mat and arranged all those worms just so. For that, she’d have needed a collaborator.
Phineas came up beside me. "Guess now, you can get yourself that university education you wanted."
I could.
We watched Cynthia scratch up an Annelid and immediately gobble it down. We kept watching, and she did it again—no observation, no timing, only consuming that worm quick as she could like any ordinary chicken might.
Phineas said, “Looks like she done gone back to being a chicken.”
“Yes.”
He took a breath. “Been wondering if maybe I could maybe buy that rig off you, take up long haul trucking for a while.”
“It does look like your days of scientific collaboration are over.”
“And you’ll be off to university, selling the house, the land, but…what you going to do about her?”
For a while, we watched Cynthia behaving very much like a chicken—almost self-consciously so.
“I think we can trust Cynthia to take care of herself,” I told him. “She is, after all, an educated chicken.”
Bonnie Olsen lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with her very patient husband John, and only memories of the chickens she once knew.
