The Lost Landscape Read Free Page A

little girl and the little girl always knew what Happy Chicken’s special clucks meant, that no one else could understand and so when the Mother, or the Father, or any adult, asked the little girl what on earth she and the little red chicken were talking about, the little girl would repeat that it was a secret, she could not tell.
    Sometimes, at unpredictable moments, I felt an urge to “kiss” the little girl—a quick, light jab of my beak against the girl’s hands, arms, or face.
    And the little girl had a special little kiss on the top of the head just for me.
    I WAS A YOUNG chicken less than a year old at this time in the little girl’s life when she hadn’t yet learned to run on plump little-girl legs without tripping and falling and gasping for breath and crying.
    If the Mother was near, the Mother hurried to pick up the little girl, and comfort her. If the Grandmother was near, the Grandmother was likely to cluck at the little girl like an indignant hen and tell her to get up, she wasn’t hurt bad.
    If the Father was near, the Father would pick up the girl at once, for the Father’s heart was lacerated when he heard his little daughter cry, no matter that she hadn’t been hurt bad . (But the Father was not often nearby for he worked in a factory seven miles away in Lockport, called Harrison Radiator.)
    But always if an adult wiped the little girl’s eyes and nose thelittle girl soon forgot why she’d been crying even if she’d bruised or scratched her leg—the little girl cried easily but also forgot easily.
    When you are a little girl you cry easily and forget easily.
    Nor is it difficult to appear happy when you are a young chicken and without memory as the smooth blank inside of an egg.
    The Mother had chosen the little girl’s name Joy-ce Carol because this seemed to her a happy name, there was joy in the name, when people spoke the name they smiled.
    The Mother was a happy person, too. The Mother was not much older than a schoolgirl when the little girl was born but the little girl had no notion of what “born” was and so the little girl had not the slightest notion of how old, or how young, her pretty curly-haired Mother was, no more than Happy Chicken had a notion of anyone’s age.
    This was the time when the little girl was an only child and so it was a happy time for the little girl who had her own room (separated by just a walk-in closet from her parents’ room) upstairs in the clapboard farmhouse. One day soon it would be revealed that the little girl was just the firstborn in the family. There would come another, a baby brother with the special name Robin , competing for attention and for love the way the squawking chickens competed for seed scattered in the barnyard at their feeding time.
    The little girl had no notion of this amazing surprise to come. The little girl had no notion of anything that was to come except a promise of a drive to Pendleton for ice cream, or a visit with the Other Grandmother (the Father’s mother) who lived in Lockport, or a holiday like Christmas or Easter, or the little girl’s birthday which was the most special day of all June 16 when dark-red peonies bloomed in profusion along the side of the house as the little girl was told, just for her.
    On her fourth birthday, the little girl was allowed to feed cake-crumbs to me, while the adults looked on laughing. Happy Chickenwas allowed to sit on the little girl’s lap, if the little girl held me snug, and my wings tucked in, inside her arms.
    Pictures were taken with the Father’s Brownie Hawkeye camera.
    Pictures of little Joyce Carol and Happy Chicken , 1942.
    With a frown of distaste the Grandmother would say, in her broken English, A chicken is dirty . A chicken should stay on the floor.
    The Grandmother did not like me though sometimes the Grandmother pretended to like me. In the Grandmother’s eyes, a chicken was never anything