400 Boys and 50 More by Marc Laidlaw

chicken that did it this time, the good chicken Pop had killed that afternoon by stepping on its head with his boot heel and yanking up on the talons, everything happening in slow motion under the August sun, as if the whole world wanted Jory to see exactly how it was done: the sound of the spine pulling apart, and the taffy-stretched squawk, the slow drizzle of blood on the green grass where the dead cock flapped and twitched among the hens while their heads gawked and eyes and beaks gaped as wide as they would go in the bottom of the bucket that Pop gave Jory to dump in the crick. They hadn’t gone out to kill the rooster, but it’d given Pop a few good scratches when he went in the coop for a couple-three hens, and Pop had just gone crazy himself right then and swore like hell, grabbed that cock and stepped down . . .
    “I can taste it,” Mama said. “It’s in the flesh now, Henry. It’s got in their feed.”
    Pop put down his fork, slowly, while Jory crumpled the napkin in his lap and wished he couldn’t remember so well what Pop’d looked like when that cock had upset him, because it was kind of the same look he had now. The cock hadn’t intended to spur him, Jory was sure of that; it had only been a dumb creature. And likewise, Mama didn’t mean any harm; she couldn’t help herself, she was always tasting the badness. But it made Pop angrier each time, and Jory more worried, and baby Tad—who didn’t know what any of it was about—closer to tears than usual.
    “Now look,” Pop said, in his levelest tone of voice, “you don’t start that again. I don’t want to hear it.”
    Tad was looking between the two of them while he tore at a drumstick. Jory saw Mama catch him looking, then she reached out suddenly and took the leg from his fingers.
    “I don’t want you eating this now, you hear?”
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing? The boy’s got to eat.”
    When Tad got over looking stupid, he shut his eyes and started crying.
    Pop pushed back his chair and stood up, and Mama raised the drumstick as if it were a club. He came around the table, put his hand on the back of Tad’s highchair, and then stood there scowling at Mama. She met his look with one of her own, a fiercer one, Jory thought, and he wished again he could stop thinking about the way that rooster had looked, the craze in its dumb eyes, and finally the lack of anything in them, when they were just staring out of the muddy water in the crick.
    Mama moved first, but not to give in. She did her second crazy thing; threw the drumstick over Jory’s head, bang into the closed cupboard. Pop grabbed her wrist and Tad screamed, and then she was crying, “You know it’s true, Henry, God damn you for lying! Unless you’ve taken in so much of it up there spraying that you can’t taste it no more—”
    “Hasn’t no more flavor than rain,” he said. “You listen—”
    “Rain never made the greens in the truck garden taste like this.” She shoved at the ladle in the salad bowl, spilling lettuce and tomato wedges onto the red-and-white checkered tablecloth.
    “Like nothing.”
    “Bitter as tin, you mean. It’s got in the tomatoes, the squash, the potatoes—living things suck it right up, even though it’s dead. And that’s what we’re going to be, Henry. You, me, your children. All of us like that stunted corn we shucked last week. They’re gonna have to come throw us all away someday soon.”
    He threw down her arm. Tad reached for a tomato wedge but she slapped his hand away. “No you don’t.”
    Tad sniffed.
    “Look at your brother,” she said. “You don’t see him eating. Jory knows better, don’t you, Jory?”
    “Let the boy eat,” Pop said.
    “I know,” Mama said, suddenly brightening in such a wrong way that he knew she was going to do another crazy thing. She started to get up. “We'll go out. Jory, get you and your brother’s coats. We’ll take a drive into town and have us a nice hamburger at