The Cock's Funeral
BEN
FIELD
RING was shooting pool late aIle night in spring when
Sandy Clark burst into the pool hall flapping his arms. He
cackled and dropped an egg on the pool table.
The egg was big, looked as if Sandy had dug it out of
clay.
Sandy swore the egg was from the great gamecock, White
Mule. He had boarded White Mule for a rich sporting man
from Atlanta. One of his old hens got under White Mule,
laid this egg and burst her egg bag at it.
One of the boys reached out with a cuestick. The egg
smacked the cueball into a pocket.
Tarr,
the barber, held the egg up in the light. "Let's
shoot for it. I'm game any old day to take a chance at a
throw from White Mule."
The pool hall was packed. Everybody slapped down two
bits. It was a lucky break for Sandy with his twelve kids,
his wife ready to drop another.
Mm and boys paired off and shot for White Mule's great
egg. Ring won the egg. He was a better shot than anybody
but Stoney, the burrheaded Negro who was handy man
around the pool hall.
The fellows hooted around Ring like a bunch of small
owls. One said that if Ring didn't succeed with Ella Pierce
now he could suck eggs. Another said now he could bowl
over old farmer Brady with that egg and get himself higher
wages.
Big, mum Ring grinned.
He shuffled his broken shoes,
weaved his head like a shifty boxer, those brown, easy mitts
of his dangling down to his knees. He wrapped up the egg
in his. handkerchief and walked down to the edge of the
town where Ella lived. He fired a clump of grass from be-
hind the oleanders against Ella's window. He spat on the
egg and kept wiping it clean.
Ella tiptoed down in her nightgown. They went into the.
henhouse and put the egg under the fussy bantam hen. The
bantam was the best brood hen in the country. She'd mother
a stone.
Ella put her hands between Ring and herself. There was
something high, wide, handsbme about Ella, like about a
mallow rose. Ring smelled her days after he'd been with her.
He could feel her skin on a fork or plowhandles.
Ella held his hands and whispered huskily that they were
talking of laying men off in the sawmill. They were scared
for the old man's job as edgeman. Her mother was dogging
his heels every living minute he was home. It woudn't be
half so bad if she herself could be sure of her olvn job in
the cafe.
Ring shifted from one leg to the other. That Bible-pressed
old woman was going to be uglier than a bear now. Said
last week she'd no more let her Ella marry a lunkhead farm-
hand than go to bed with a stable fork.
If the banty hen would do the job, they might have a
cock here that would give him more than the ten dollars
18
a month skinner Brady paid. White Mule had been a great
winner, a high flyer. Ring had seen him flat on his back
left-jab another cock with a sound liL::ea rail hurled against
the side of a barn.
Ring gave Ella all the change he had to buy the banty
hen a peck of the best poultry feed in town.
Three weeks after Ring had won the egg, the mail car-
rier stopped off at Brady's farm to tell him the egg was·
hatched. L\:Joked like a stag. Ring couldn't wait until he was
through spraying the peach tr~es. Foul from fish oil, he
hied down to Ella's.
Sure as shooting, it was a stag-gangly,
black as coal,
shot-eyed. Ring carried the stag to town. The fellows got
around the pool table.
Tarr poked. it with his finger.
The chick fought back.
Sandy gave it whiskey through a straw, rubbed whiskey
into its tail. He christened the chick "Orphan Boy," because
the hen with the burst eggbag had her head chopped off and
White Mule had been killed a few days ago in a great
battle.
Tarr made a toast. "Young fellow, knock the stuffiings
out of all comers. Jump as many hens as the Jew King
Solomon. The big thing always is to take no shit tram any-
body. That's the big thing in life, Boy. Fight for us. We're
a gang here of honest laboring men, not rich bastards. You
fight for us, we'll bet on you till the last ditch."
Orphan Boy picked at the green baize and squirted a plug.
The men and boys laughed and said it was the wisest
answer ever made to any toast.
Ring took Orphan Boy to the farm. Orphan Boy shot up
into a rangy cockerel, lean as a whipstock, body shaped like
an iron, a proud head, a fast eye that could nail a fly on the
wing. He could spring to a roost eight feet up from a flat-
footed start. He stayed up in the trees at night. His crow
was stronger than White Mule's, which had sounded like
blowing on an empty whiskey bottle. His crow was sweet as
song.
The fellows helped Ring train Orphan Boy. Some had
lost their jobs in the sawmill. But everybody chipped in to
buy gloves, the size of chestnuts, to fit over the spurs. Every-
body worked for a winning cock, a great cutter.
Even
Sandy, who was afraid that the cock might grow up into
a turkey-weight,
brought over flour and stale bread to make
special grub for him, to keep his flesh firm and corky. He
helped dub Orphan Boy, trimming comb, gills, wattles. He
showed Ring how to sweat and shampoo him.
It was Ring who could best handle the Boy, stroking
him from his silk throat to his breast, from hackle to tail.
Ring's paws were always better talkers than his tongue.
The Boy would bristle up to the others, slyly picking at a
twig, a straw, a stone the size of a cobble which .could be
laid up in a wall, all the time coming closer and, closer,
then making a sudden feint, jab away with spurs and beak.
The fellows would get bloodied up answering his challenge.
They'd gloat over his boxing and then his hunting up a hen.
They'd go home with some of that fight and heaven for
their own women.
At two months Orphan Boy took his first hen. At four
months he knocL::ed the devil out of Brady's big barnyard
FEBRUARY,
1936
