The Chook Shed - Father was a Fancier

Father was a Fancier
H. Gordon Green

I am a chicken fancier, one of those men you will find joyously encamped between the rows of feathered bedlam in the poultry section of almost any fair.
Ours is a hobby few can understand. The breeders who raise other kind of livestock are sane enough. The animal of their choice generally earns them a living. But ask a man of the "fancy" how much his birds pay him, and if he answers at all, don't expect it to be the truth. There's no more similarity between a poultry fancier and a poultryman, than there is between a stamp collector and a... postmaster. What no one seems to suspect is that a fancier is merely a man who is pleasantly haunted by memories of a boyhood spent on a farm or in a small town which he has really never consented to leave, regardless of what success he may have attained elsewhere.
It may simply be that you can't forget the kind of chickens your mother used to keep. Or you remember the comical Leghorn cockerel which you trained to fly to your bedroom window for corn every morning.
Or the Christmaslike thrill of waking to a fair day morning in that long ago, knowing that this was at Last the great day you were going to show some of your very own Minorcas. And, if you won first prize, the fifty cents was yours to spend in any way you wanted. Or if the fever had already worked itself deep enough in the blood, you could hide it away until next spring, when you could buy another setting of another kind, perhaps.
I met my breed thirty years ago in company with a half-dozen more of my father's brood one winter's night, as we fought for the close places beside his stoveside rocker. We met it in a tattered old poultry book which my father had picked up one day at a library sale. The Golden Pencilled Hamburgs were on one of the color plates which hadn't fallen out yet. What beauties they were!
We had never seen such a bird. In all of the years we looked at that book and talked about these wonderful chickens, they were no more real to us than King Arthur's knights. There were other pictures in that book too, but right from the start, the Golden Pencilled Hamburgs were OUR breed. Ours because they were our father's choice.
"Now them's a bird that's got some right to holler at the sunrise," he used to say.
And one day when the picture at last fell all the way out of the book, he took our Uncle Bertram's army picture out of its frame and put the Golden Pencilled Hamburgs in its place. "I think we're going to have some of those, some day," he said.
Our mother couldn't understand such adolescence in her husband at all. He had always been so cautious, so solid. And here he was now getting all excited about some fowl that looked more like a red and gold pheasant than an honest-to-goodness hen.
Father didn't argue, which meant that his mind was set. But mother refused to let the matter drop. "anyhow," she comforted herself, "you'll never get around to it. Its just one more of those ideas you're always getting out of your dream books!"
The one dream which did materialize was the fabulous Golden Pencilled Hamburgs. Not at first, of course, for we must have looked at that picture for all of three years before we got them. There came a fall, however, when our inventory looked so good that father decided that he might be able to afford a trip down to the winter fair.
When he came back, he brought a pair of exquisitely barred feathers, to show us that he had at last made a face-to-face acquaintance of the breed.
"And are they really pretty, Daddy?" we asked. "Really as pretty as they are in the picture?"
The five dozen eggs arrived one March day when the first warmth of spring was sucking the snow away from the hillsides. I can remember the excitement there was when we unpacked them and found that only two were broken. I remember too, how gloomily mother wondered about their cost. "Probably spent a dollar or more a dozen for those silly eggs," she said.
I doubt if she ever knew that father had paid five times that for the eggs. The valuation was on the express label that he told me to put in the stove.
So our start in Hamburgs cost us $25.00 plus the express, plus the second-hand incubator that father bought to bring them to life. And the incubator went into the parlor which, to us children at least, seemed the only place in the house worthy of it.
Every night for three weeks we made a pilgrimage into the parlor to watch our father test and turn the golden eggs. We went in tiptoeing carefully along the pathway of papers mother had laid down to protect the carpet, and I recall that when we knelt to look, for some reason or other, we always found ourselves speaking in whispers.
Came the twenty-first day, when we knelt by the hour to see the humble miracle of life breaking forth from the dead-rock stillness of the egg, and becoming the unspeakably beautiful thing which is a chick in its first fluff.
Surely there was never anything happened in those wonderful years more wonderful than those 42 chicks which stepped out of their shells that spring. And by September, when their plumage was coming into its first grandeur, they were the pride of the farm.
One of the things I remember dearest is how they would follow father from one end of the barnyard to the other, coaxing for the bit of corn he always had in his pocket, and how he used to lure them out onto the lawn on a sunny Sunday morning, because their gold and red looked so rich against the green.
And to the visitors who were forever coming home from church with us, he'd say quietly: "they're real show stuff, you know. Got the eggs from a man named Humphries. He's supposed to have the best flock in America. ..Does he make a living out of them?... Well now, as a matter of fact, he's connected with some sort of a steel company. Never saw him, mind you, but I hear he's one of the vice-presidents.
The usual comment might go like this, "Um-hum... Not a bad looking sort of bird. Must lay a pretty small egg though, eh, Henry?... Wouldn't dress out much either. Or, are they one of them you're supposed to kill young for fryers?"
It got embarrassing after awhile when he discovered how hard it was to explain to such neighbors that there were actually breeds of fowl whose greatest purpose was simply to parade under the sun and be beautiful. He never got much appreciation around home. That which eventually did reach him, came from men he had never seen before.
First came Mr. Humphries himself. He drove up through the mud of our lane one bleak November day in a Packard; the fineness of him was enough to set us children gawking at him from the safety of the summer kitchen door, "Did you have any luck with those eggs you got from me?" he asked.
Father looked doubtfully at the glint on Mr. Humphries' shoes and his low rubbers and then led off through the slop of the barnyard to the henhouse. Mr. Humphries looked at the birds for a long time.
"Pure beginner's luck," he said. "I believe you have almost as good a flock as I have."
Which, so he told us confidentially a little later, was probably the best flock in the whole world. "You'll have to send some of those birds down to the Winter Fair," he said. And without waiting for an answer, he picked out the ones good enough to go, and put some colored rings on their legs.
Much to my mother's fright, Mr. Humphries accepted her invitation to supper that night. But Mr. Humphries noticed neither the special food nor the special tablecloth. He just talked Golden Pencilled Hamburgs.
"It's knowing how to mate the right matings that gives you birds like I've got," he said. "You've got to make one mating for your hens and another to give you your best cock birds...as soon as I get back to the office, I'm going to send you a book about that. But you've got to go to the fairs, you know. That's where you really learn."
So father started going to the shows, his birds often going down in the same cattle truck that took him. And, now in the great bragging sessions that often filled our noon hours at school, we finally had something to say about our father.
Before this he had always been too quiet. We could never hope to brag, as the O'Hara boys could, for instance, that he could lick the next-best man in the section with one hand tied down.
We knew that he would never own a two-ton team of Belgians, such as Burnery MacKellop's dad took to the gravel pit every morning. He had never been overseas, or out west, or in any other of the far countries from which a man ordinarily returns as an everlasting hero.
But our father was famous anyhow. More famous by far than all the rest, we thought, Our dad had some of the best Golden Pencilled Hamburgs in all the world. But as for me, the most swelling pride of all came from seeing the kind of men who used to come down the aisles of the great shows to greet father as if he was a long-lost brother.
A few of these were farmers like himself, but many of them were men with names which you were sure you had heard before. Big men in industry, in the world of sports, clergymen, lawyers. Men whom you felt must surely be addressed as "sir" back in their panelled offices.
But when they were talking exhibition fowl, first names were plenty good enough. Especially if they happened to be among the few who bred Golden Pencilled Hamburgs.
"Henry, you old fox!" I can hear them saying. "You've done it again! When are you going to give us other guys a chance?"
"Gave you the pick of the crop last October," father might remind them.
"But you still beat us! How do you do it?"
And father would laugh in his shy way, and maybe compose a yarn for them. He fed his birds banana centers. Or he kept them by the parlor stove all winter.
And then, when Mr. Humphries suddenly died, and his flock disappeared with him, our Hamburgs WERE the best in the world, and we soon had a bushel of ribbons to prove it.
The years didn't bring father much of the ease that should have come from his toil. Each spring there was the blossoming of new promise, but each summer saw the old, old struggle against the soured and brittle fields and the unconcern of disastrous skies. The only luxury I can ever remember father allowing himself was that flock of ornamental chickens. And I shall always be able to see him as he would come in some noon from the summer fields, the grime wrinkled in his forehead, his face weary with sun and fatigue, sitting by the well for a moment with his famous chickens gathered around his feet.
I was eighteen that year I went to Normal School. That was back in 1932. Oats were bringing a cent a pound that year, and we decided we'd feed ours into pork. From the pig money was to come enough to start me off on my great adventure.
But when starting time came in September, pigs were bringing so little it was hardly worth a man's effort to load them into a truck. Father decided to hold on to his for a while. So he gave me what money he had, and one memorable day I boarded the bus for the city. "I'll send you the rest as soon as I sell the pigs," he promised.
But the price of pigs was to go lower still. Farmers began shooting their piglets at birth that year, because they were worse than worthless.It wasn't until I hitch-hiked home for Thanksgiving that I learned where the money had come from. Father had sold the Golden Pencilled Hamburgs!! I felt awful! I knew how much they'd meant to him.
"$300 is a lot of money, son," he explained quietly. "And maybe it was like your mother said anyhow...They always were sort of a plaything."
But it was only when he saw how badly I felt about it that he tried to joke a bit. "Guess I showed some of those practical Thomases around here that there was gold in them after all," he said.
That was the day I made a solemn promise to myself that some day, just as soon as ever I could, I'd see to it that the Golden Pencilled Hamburgs could come back to my father's farm. It was the only way I could get that Thanksgiving dinner past the lump in my throat.
But it was a harder promise to keep than I had anticipated. There was hardly as much money in teaching those depression years as there was in feeding pork. Came then such things as marriage -- and then the war. And by the time that I might have bought some of our breed back again, the family had begun to break apart.
Then father moved into the city where chickens were considered unsanitary -- and a rooster is forbidden by law to crow every morning. So I never was able to keep that promise really.
But I finally did put back some of the Golden Pencilled Hamburgs. I got an even dozen of them a few months ago. Not from the man who gave my father $300 for them so long ago, because he died last year. But the son to whom the birds were left was quite pleased to have me take the fool things off his hands.
And I got a lovely redwood incubator along with them. It's in my front room now, beside the television set, and my own three children have been begging me to load it up with eggs, ever since we set it up.
The chickens themselves aren't quite as good as they used to be when we had them before. At least that's what father says. That's why he's up at my place so much of the time right now.
"Its knowing how to make the right matings that gives you the good birds," he reminds me. And he doesn't think THAT knowing is quite mine yet.
Come show time again -- the best may once again be ours.

From the novel: The Faith of Our Fathers
by H. Gordon Green, 1966