Tillie's Chickens

The day Tillie's chickens got loose was a Saturday. The canteen had closed early and there was little or no traffic except for the ferry passengers. My mother and grandmother were playing gin rummy on the sunporch, my brothers were eel fishing somewhere up island, and I was deep into a new Nancy Drew Mystery when from out of nowhere, a cloud of chickens descended into the blackberry patch and commenced to shriek and cackle loud enough to wake the dead.

The noise woke the dogs and they rounded the corner from the back door at full speed and full volume, anxious to join in the melee. There were chickens in the thorny blackberry thicket, chickens on front lawn, chickens in the air and one lone, brave soul roosting suicidally high atop the flagpole.

“Good God Almighty!” I heard my grandmother shout from behind me, “It's an invasion! Jan! Ring Elsie and have her ring Tillie to come round up these filthy creatures!”

I will never forget the sight of my normally staid and well-grounded grandmother charging toward the blackberry patch with her apron flapping and shouting “Shoo! Scat!” at the top of her lungs while my mother held onto the doorjamb to keep upright and laughed herself to tears. Next on the scene was Uncle Willie, running across the road in his longjohns and denim overalls, wielding his trusty shotgun and yelling something about chicken for dinner.

“The ditch, Willie!” my grandmother yelled, “Mind the ditch!” but Willie only had eyes for the chickens and propelled by his own momentum, he raised the shotgun over his head and just before he reached the ditch, gave an almighty jump. It was, of course, to no avail and for several seconds he and the shotgun disappeared from view while a number of the chickens took flight. During the time it took him to climb out and shake off the mud, the ferry docked and a steady stream of traffic began winding its way past. The lead car, a station wagon with New York plates, perhaps unfamiliar with the habits of chickens, slammed on its brakes just as it reached our footbridge and ended up sideways on the dusty road, narrowly missing a particularly defiant chicken and grazing the guardrail. An untidy family of seven tumbled out like a can of worms and set off a torrent of protest from the cars behind.

“Willie!” Nana was yelling, “Put that fool thing down 'fore you shoot yer damn foot off! Ain't a gonna be no shootin' chickens in my yard when they's children about! Jeanette! Pull yourself together and git on that damn fool telephone!”

“No need,” my mother hollered back, “Yonder comes Tillie!”

And indeed, Tillie's rattletrap old pickup was careening down the steep gravel drive, backfiring with every bounce, spewing clouds of exhaust and spilling a trail of wooden chicken crates in its wake. Tillie herself was behind the wheel, wearing her signature pith helmet with attached veil, a corncob pipe clenched between her toothless gums.

“Look out, Alice!” I heard Uncle Willie shout, “She don't always stop where she's a mind to!”

Tillie, in her 70's at the time, was a formidable woman, the kind of woman the island folk were pleased to call “colorful”. She'd raised chickens for years and had recently taken on bee keeping, a decision that caused her neighbors some alarm and aroused an unhealthy curiosity in their children. She'd come into the world one-armed from some long forgotten birth defect and was known to be a shrewd businesswoman, as spry as a mountain goat and a devout atheist. My daddy had once said that in a community of people who prided themselves on their natural reticence with strangers, Tillie practiced an enviable economy of speech with everyone. She was not one to waste words.

I watched and listened as the pickup's uncertain brakes screeched to a stop just shy of the blackberry patch and Tillie emerged, a coffee can of chicken feed tucked under her elbow-less arm. Before she'd thrown the first handful of feed, the chickens were gathering around her in a cloudy haze of beaks and feathers and one by one, Nana and I caught them, my mother shoved them back into the wooden crates, and Uncle Willie toted the crates into the bed of the pickup.

The tourist children cheered.

When it was over, we were were dusty and feathery and everything smelled like a chicken coop but every last creature, save one, had been captured and crated.

“Tillie,” my grandmother said tiredly, “You swore you was gon' clip their wings.”

“Ain't had time,” Tillie scowled, climbed back into the ancient pickup and drove raggedly up the gravel driveway in a cloud of blue smoke. Nobody had noticed that the chicken on the flagpole hadn't fallen for the chickenfeed ruse. When she saw it, my grandmother hustled me inside and Uncle Willie got his chicken dinner after all.