My Chicken, Girlfriend - A Book by Scott W. Webb
The pandemic will, without a doubt, spawn a lot of stories. It’s possible that this group of stories could become its own genre. There are those stories set during the Great Depression, or World War Two. And now, we will have stories with a backdrop of Covid, quarantines, and social distancing.
Scott W. Webb recently published a memoir that takes place during the pandemic. It is a story of how his life became entwined with the lives of a flock of chickens. It’s fitting and unsurprising that the first “pandemic” book I’ve read and enjoyed is a chicken book. That’s who I am and that’s the sort of books I read.
I was first drawn to this book because Scott Webb is a guy. Why is it that almost all books about chickens are written by women? Of all the chicken-themed books on my shelves, I can count on my fingers and toes the male-authored books. And I don’t even need to take my shoes off. And I only need one hand.
So, when I heard about a new book about chickens written by this dude, I knew I had to read it. Because I’m a guy who writes about chickens and there are so few of us! Then I flipped open the book and discovered that the book’s epigraph was the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, a superb little word nugget that I’ve always been fond of. I was hooked. Then I flipped back a page and realized there was another epigraph that preceded the poem; lines from Neil Young’s song, “Cinnamon Girl.” “I want to live / With a cinnamon girl. / I could be happy / The rest of my life / With a cinnamon girl.” I was really hooked. I mean, Neil Young lyrics in a chicken book! The lyrics are pertinent because one of the main characters is a cinnamon-colored hen. “This guy sings to his chickens! I know he does!” I said to myself. “My kind of guy!” Mr. Webb, for the record, has informed me that he doesn’t recall ever singing to his chickens. But still, I can picture it!
We all know of the sad lives of factory-farm production chickens. Their entire existence is spent in a crowded cage with no room to move or even flap their wings. By comparison, the chickens of this book live in paradise. Their coop is in the middle of a horse pasture. They spend their days lying in the shade of an apple tree by the barn. Or they wander the pasture where they “have plenty of fresh or aging horse manure to scratch into. Plus, the ground has more green grass, bugs, worms, and weeds than they could ever eat in one day.”
While their lives are good, they are, sadly, often short - due to hawks, foxes, “skunks, possums, bobcats, cougars, yes there’s a local mountain lion or two, plus crazy horses cantering, stomping, and leaping…and stray dogs roaming the countryside.” This is a book about chickens. It is also about tragedy. And its aftermath.
When Webb first moves to onto this Tennessee farm, he has no idea that he is moving to a chicken paradise. He also doesn’t know that his life is about to become entangled with the feathered inhabitants of that paradise. He has an immediate need for a place to live due to a breakup. A friend mentions that there is a vacant mother-in-law apartment on her daughter and son-in-law’s horse farm. He makes the move.
When he moves in, he notes the chicken coop. He’s had prior experience tending chickens. But this time, he tells himself, he will not get involved with the chickens. This is a book about chickens. So, we know how that turns out.
For a short time, Webb dates a bartender. When he learns that she is earning more than he is as a therapist, he enrolls in bartending school. He eventually has a gig as a bartender at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. By the time he starts bartending he’s already well into taking care of the horse farm flock. “I started letting the chickens out in the morning…because I’d hear them squawking. While I was at it, I’d throw them a little feed, maybe fill their water. Then I’d see that the feed was running low [so] I’d drive to Edward’s Feed mill about an hour away…”
The problem with bartending is that he would often be arriving home well after dark – thus would be shutting the coop after midnight. “I’d use the flashlight on my phone, reach the coop, say to the chickens, ‘Hi, hi, it’s only me!’ One or two would make a cooing sound back at me. I’d say: ‘Good night chickens!’ And, ‘Sleep tight!’”
Then comes the pandemic and everything changes. In early March, 2020, he gets word that the arena will be shutting down “for a few weeks.” Thus, he has a lot more time to spend with the chickens.
In May, tragedy. One morning he finds a dead chicken, then another, then another - strung across the horse pasture. A stray dog attack, he eventually surmises. After discovering the dead birds, he’s relieved to find survivors huddled together; eight of them. But one cinnamon-brown hen is completely missing. He locks up the eight for the rest of the day to keep them safe.
Midnight. He’s jarred awake by frenzied squawking. A hen is prone on the ground outside his door in the clutch of an enormous opossum. The missing brown chicken has reappeared. Probably she'd run away to who-knows-where during the morning attack. Then, she returned, found the coop locked, and settled in for the night near the house. And then she became the victim of a predator attack for the second time in one day.
The brown hen is not bleeding but is missing feathers and is obviously injured. She can’t hold her head up—perhaps she has a broken neck. He places the injured hen in a cardboard box, and the next day takes her wherever he goes. She won’t eat at first, but he eventually manages to convince her to take some juice squeezed from a watermelon.
Gradually she gets better, but progress is slow and sporadic. “She could pull her head up now most of the time, but still hit glitches. I’d let her run, find her ten minutes later, immobilized, head at feet, waiting for me impatiently…”
By late July she has recovered and is living with her chicken friends in the coop. Then, on the last day of July, Webb has to leave late in the day. He returns after dark and heads across the pasture to shut the chicken coop. In the darkness he spots a shape that, as he gets closer, becomes a chicken. By the time he reaches her he knows it is the brown hen, unmoving on the ground. He goes to the coop and finds it completely empty. He goes back to the brown hen and touches her. She flaps her wings and cries. She’s alive but injured. Again.
He finds his other girls in the dark one-by-one. Murdered. Finally, he finds a big speckled hen alive, uninjured and alone, hiding in the barn. She and the battered brown hen are all that remain of his flock.
I read this section of the book with a lump in my throat. Anybody who has chickens will have the same reaction. Webb moves the nearly-dead cinnamon brown girl into his home and attempts to nurse her back to health. He holds her head up so she can breathe, and gives her small sips of water with an eyedropper - hour after hour, day after day. The brown hen has never had a name. Webb felt that she wasn’t interested in a human label. Now she becomes “Silly” and “Baby” and “Goofy” and “Girlfriend.” He leaves her only to take care of the big speckled hen who now is all alone.
“She’s out there pacing the coop with no thought of herself, but WHERE ARE all of her friends? Suddenly I’m the only friend she has in the world.” He has extended conversations with her. He is able to do that because he understands what she must be thinking. Hen: “Where is everybody else?” Man: “’I keep telling you!’ Dead and gone.”
Would you like to know what happens next? Would you like more chicken stories? This slim book is chock-full of them! It’s a memoir of sorts. The story of events in the life Scott Webb and some chickens during the pandemic months of 2020 and 2021. But it is also philosophy because it is so imbued with lessons Webb has learned about life. Such as, “I mean, if we only stopped what we are doing all the time and could notice more of what the hell is going on! And these reflections aren’t anything I came up with on my own. I’m merely recounting what the big speckled hen told me. I heard it from a bird. I’m merely translating it back to you.” This is from a guy who said that he was not going to become involved with chickens. They pulled him right in. Read the book. You’ll get pulled in, too.
Scott W. Webb’s My Chicken, Girlfriend is available from Amazon.
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