“Peter, I’ll bet you’ve never seen trained chickens before,” Mr. Jones began.
“Dad,” said Marvin, in a tone that any kid I knew would have recognized immediately as meaning “Don’t embarrass me.”
“Mr. Jones,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“I’ll bet you’re wondering if you could train a chicken yourself,” he said. “Well, of course you could! It’s not easy, don’t let anybody tell you that. But it’s not impossible. Don’t let anybody tell you that, either. You remember what the great Dr. Johnson said about the dangers of overestimating or underestimating a task and how a little work, steadily applied, will eventually achieve its goal.”
There was an unspoken “don’t you?” at the end of that, and I answered it with “Well—”
“He said that you should carry in your mind, at once, ‘the difficulty of excellence, and the force of industry’ and remember that ‘labor, vigorously continued, has not often failed of its reward.’ Now, you take the breeding and training of champion chickens—”
“Actually, Mr. Jones,” I said, “what I wanted to know is, did you make those trees?”
“The trees?”
“The little wire trees.”
“Why, Mrs. Jones makes those,” he said. “Pretty, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” I said. “They really catch your eye.”
“And those windflowers on the ends of the branches—”
“Windflowers,” I said. “Yeah, those are something.”
“The way they rotate—”
“I like that,” I said.
“And scintillate.”
“That, too.”
“And coruscate.”
“Sure.”
“Well, the chickens like that, too. It keeps them amused.”
“Ah,” I said.
“And yet,” said Mr. Jones, raising his finger and his tone, “the remarkable thing is that those windflowers keep other birds away. It used to be that when we fed the chickens, the other birds thought we were throwing seed out for everything with wings. They’d come swooping down and take the chickens’ dinner before they could eat it. Especially the pigeons. Regular hijackers, those pigeons. When the word got out that we were feeding the chickens, why before you knew it, we’d see the pigeons waiting around for dinner, checking their little watches to see how long it was going to be before we brought it out.” He gave me a wink to tell me that the business about the little watches was a joke. “A fellow down the street told me the trick is to have some shiny things hanging on strings so that they flash in the sun—the top of a can, say, or a piece of aluminum foil. That scares the other birds away. So I strung a bunch of junk like that around, and it worked very well—kept the pigeons and the other birds at bay. Not only that, but I noticed that the chickens liked it. They’d stand there gazing at the shiny foil for hours, happy as clams. It mesmerized them. Funny thing, isn’t it? The flashing metal frightened the other birds, but amused the chickens. There’s probably something very profound behind that discovery, wouldn’t you say?”
“I—well—I guess,” I said.
Mr. Jones gave me another of those winks of his. “Well,” he said, “the can lids worked, but they looked just awful. Marie—Mrs. Jones—couldn’t stand it. So she started working on them. She nipped and snipped and clipped at them till she cut them down to size and shaped them into stars and flowers and pinwheels, and eventually this is what came out of it—she makes the metal trees out of scrap wire, and she makes the windflowers—we call them windflowers—for the branches.”
Windflowers. Windflowers, court bouillon, Zwischenraum, shandy, ontology, epistemology, bills of lading, splines.
“Would you like one?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, thanks.” It was considered polite at that time to refuse gifts, no matter how much you wanted them.
“You’re sure?” said Mr. Jones, reaching for one of the trees.
“No, no,” I said. The one he was reaching for wasn’t my favorite, so being polite was easier than it would otherwise have been. “Thanks, but—maybe next time.”
“Okay,” said Mr. Jones. “Marvin, it’s time for you to walk the chickens.”
“Oh, okay,” said Marvin, with a reluctance I recognized. “Want to walk the chickens with me?” he asked.
“Just a little way,” I said. “I should be getting back home. I’ll walk my bike with you.”
“Don’t forget your plans,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. The three of us walked up the narrow cement steps to the back door and went in through the kitchen. I must have felt that refusing a wire tree with windflowers had built up a pretty good balance in my politeness account, because, although it was also considered impolite to ask for things, I said to Mrs. Jones, “That court bouillon sure smells good. Do you think I could have a taste?”
“For the king,” she said, “anything.” She ladled a little into a cup, blew on it, and passed it to me. I liked it.
“It’s good,” I said.
“It’s bun soup,” she said—for what reason I couldn’t begin to imagine—and then she added, with a wink and a smile, “I’ll bet you’re relieved.”
MARVIN AND I walked together for a few blocks, the chickens in two orderly lines ahead of us, Marvin keeping them in line with a few bars from “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” now and then. He was eager to talk about working on the watchtower, and I tried to appear just as eager as he, but I have a mind inclined to wander, and just then it kept wandering back to the windflowers, the coruscating bits of tin spinning in the thin evening light, just as, at entirely unpredictable times, it would wander to Miss Rheingold’s legs or Raskol’s sister Ariane or the pleasant anticipation of the day when we would change the combinations of the locks.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 605, Mark Dorset considers Advice: Good; and Music from this episode.
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🎧 605: “Peter, I’ll bet . . .”