The Painted Rooster

Seventy-one years ago my father left this life, and a year or two later my mother remarried. That involved relocating her, my sister, and I from the edge of D.C. to a part of the suburbs that was almost as rural as the area in which I now live. It was called Landover, Maryland.

There my new stepfather, an attorney, had a great 1-acre place with two interesting buildings that quickly became my exclusive territory. One was a large chickenhouse, and the other was a garage/barn that was used as neither. It had a central room with a concrete floor and an attic above. On either side of that were two more rooms that, however, had dirt floors and rough plank walls. Consequently nothing of value was ever stored there, though they contained stuff that was quickly going to rot, and I was the only one ever to step in those side spaces. I don't remember what was in the left-hand one. The right-hand one contained all the shutters that belonged to the house, but in our time they never returned there.

The thought that something should be done about those two areas lingered in my mind long afterward, mainly involuntarily in my nighttime dreams, even after, in the 1950's or '60's, that whole place disappeared under a highway interchange in the teeming suburbs of today.

Along one side of that paved central room ran an elevated area, and not long after we moved there, my stepfather had the house repainted, and one day the painters left a 5-gallon bucket of paint open on that platform.

Some chickens were around, and I happened to see the rooster jump up on the rim of the bucket. He wasn't as smart or as agile as a cat. As a result he teetered for a moment, lost his balance, and fell into the oil paint and drowned.

After I reported this incident, I was rewarded by being roundly accused by my stepfather of picking up the rooster and dropping it into the paint.

I suppose that he had noticed that there was no love lost between me and that rooster, and it had chased me several times. But the attorney should also have known that his charge was totally ludicrous. The rooster had sharp-pointed spurs that to me looked to be six inches long at least, and it had an attitude to match, and at age 9 or 10 there was absolutely no way I was going to go anywhere close enough to that sucker to pick him up or do anything else with him. And I have to say that I wasn't nearly as regretful about his terrible fate in the cream-colored paint as I would've been in all later stages of my life.

After that relations between me and my stepfather never regained even the level of mild hostility that had already existed between us from the start.

I think it was a little after that that he also accused me of ruining one of his apple trees in his tiny orchard by taking a hand saw to one of its bottom branches. But there logic and the evidence was on his side. I really did cut that branch but couldn't finish the job because the branch was at least four inches thick. I defended myself by saying that I was pruning the tree.

But I am grateful to him for getting us out to that place. It was incredibly more outstanding than the Washington Redskins football stadium for which Landover has been famous for years more.