The Book of the Dun Cow

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  Southeastern winds met the west winds over Chauntecleer’s land, and the storms produced were lasting and savage.

  The Rooster would hear an electric zzzz, like a sigh from the points of twigs and old grass; his feathers would rise a fraction on their own; then—CRACK! Blue, dazzling light; a ripping of elements; and the frightful thunder went slamming into everything that stood upright. The storm strode on brilliant, quivering spiders’ legs all around his Coop; and the rain drove at the earth as if it were intent on digging craters. The Hens huddled, and the Rooster crowed his canonical crows with particular care and assurance; for his soul knew well where the sun was, though the sun was hidden and never showed itself: Chauntecleer’s crowing had become both sunlight and certitude for his animals; it made for them the day they never saw. It pointed placement for all their scattered and shredded feelings. And it brought them through in good order.

  Because, finally, the storms strode westward and away—and a gentle spring was given her time in spite of the sky’s confusion.

  Spring: The moist air smelled of loam and the earth. It smelled like flowers even before the flowers had begun to bloom. Chauntecleer had preserved hope in his animals during the storms; so when the storms left, the animals quickly forgot them. And when the new spring air filled up with sweetness and promises, so very quickly the hearts of the Hens were stirred. They clucked, gossiped, joked, giggled, and grinned; they swept the floor with feathered brooms, scrubbed the roosts, poked at cobwebs, dusted with down, and threw every window wide open. Spring! The air puffed through the open Coop and gently tugged at the feathers on their backs. And that was a good feeling. The busy waters outside chuggled and laughed gladly. And that was a good sound. Seven young Mice and three young Chicks tumbled joyfully through the Coop, squealing and falling over each other; and thirty-one Hens didn’t mind their games at all.

  That was a good time.

  Lord Russel, the Fox of Good Sense, had taken to visiting the Coop often these days; and then who fussed at him or shooed him away? Nobody. They welcomed the blatherer, even listened to his many stories of clever escapes—and listened so well, with so many appreciative clucks, that he decided to reveal unto them several marvelous tricks known only to himself and to his grandfather, long since dead. And while he explained the finer intricacies of his tricks, the three young Chicks—named Ten Pin, Five Pin, and One Pin—sat down in wonder and gaped.

  “Children, to be sure, of their father,” the Fox would say. “The spitting—not to say spitting—images of the old crow, er, Cock. But it is rather more evident, more to the point, most evident, that they possess, each one of them, the uncommon acumen, the, shall we say, uncommon Good Sense of their uncle. Ahem! Shrewd uncle”—by which he was, of course, referring to himself. For he had decided that any Chick who took such an interest in his arcane tricks should be nephew to him. And here there were, Glory be!, three such Chicks! Therefore he would be without discrimination an uncle to all three of them. The Fox took Pins One, Five, and Ten under his wing, so to speak, and came to the Coop exceedingly often.

  It was a very good time!

  Even Mundo Cani Dog looked around the Coop from where he lay in front of the door and found it possible to grin a cavernous and toothy grin. Once somebody heard him laugh. But then a debate developed on whether the Dog had really laughed after all. Neither side triumphed in the debate, for nobody heard him laugh again. But there sat that smile on his continent of a face, and that was good for something.

  John Wesley Weasel sat himself down at Ebenezer Rat’s old exit at the back of the Coop and did an astonishing thing: Moved by the spring, he was striking up a relationship with the Wee Widow Mouse. “Sparking,” he called it. “Sparking the Widow.”

  “Mice cleans in the spring,” he said through the hole, while the Widow hunched and puttered over her cleaning. “I see. That I see. John Double-u understands. Mice and Double-u’s is different, there’s a fact. Look different—on account of Mice is squeaky homebodies. Double-u’s is beings of the whole outdoors. Nothing to a Double-u to spend a whole night outside a-huntin’. Bring home food for the family, you understand. For the family, you understand.” He looked significantly into the Widow’s home to see if she understood, to see whether she had taken the true depth of his meaning. “Look different. Double-u’s got finer fur and sleekier backs and twistier turnings. Run at a clip and fight like the devil. Double-u’s takes care of their own. Is well able to take care of their own. Of their own, you understand.” He looked significantly at the Widow. He was sparking, you understand. “So Mice cleans in the spring. Well, now. There’s a marvel. There’s a habit I could learn to”—here John Wesley had a small coughing fit—“like.”

  And the Ants came marching seven by seven, carrying enormous quantities of food to their hole, where the larder had grown bare: Corn kernels and dead beetles thirteen times their size they carried. “HUP, WHO, HREE, HOR!” Tick-tock marched at the head of the column, crying commands. “WHA ARE WE FOR?” And a chorus of rumbling bass voices sang in return: “BUSY-NESS AND WORK, SIR! NEVER WILL WE SHIRK, SIR!”

  “Morning, morning, cousin Chauntecleer,” Tick-tock said as they passed by the Rooster. “A fine and likely morning you have crowed in. Propitious for a little bit of doing.”

  Chauntecleer didn’t answer. But Tick-tock had only spoken out of the corner of his mouth, too busy to notice the look in the Rooster’s face, and he marched on.

  It was a very good time, the springtime.

  But as it progressed, and as the waters giggled running away, Chauntecleer the Rooster acted more and more strangely. Sometimes he was with his animals, laughing louder, strutting prouder and grinning broader than any of them. At such times he knew what the spring was about and, in spite of the lasting rain, he enjoyed its promises with all of his heart. But at other times a strained, worried look came into his eyes; and then, no matter what good thing was going on around him, he grew silent and went inside of himself. Then he didn’t answer his animals’ questions, and he didn’t notice when they were telling jokes. Then he ate very little. And he began to take trips by himself. He would disappear from the Coop without a word for hours at a time, returning heavy with mud and heavy with worry. When the trips lasted throughout an afternoon, and then when they began to stretch out into a full day, the animals heard terce, sext, and none crowed in a tiny triple Peep.

  “The Pins,” they would say; and they would nod to one another.

  Chauntecleer had two separate feelings going on inside of him that spring. They were like two worms in his soul, and they were fighting with each other, first one winning and then the other. One worm was good, nearly a butterfly. This was the feeling which he got from the Beautiful Pertelote, from the three Pins, his children, and from the joyful, springtime Coop.

  No one had ever heard him crow lauds as he crowed lauds these early mornings! Oh, he reared back his head, threw out his chest, flustled his feathers as if they were a shimmering army, and let fly with a full cannonade of a crow: “COCK-A-WING-DING-DOOOOO! GOD BLESS THE WORLD AND YOU!” Then he was proud, was dizzy with pride. For he stood on the haunch of a mountainous Dog, and there beside him stood three young Chicks—their yellow heads back, their yellow chests out, their yellow, downy feathers making an awful effort to bristle.

  “PEEP!” they cried, and Chauntecleer fell down off the Dog and rolled laughing on the ground.

  Three Chicks thought that this was wonderful; so they pipped-pipped-PEEPED all over again. And their father laughed until his stomach hurt and he got the hiccups.

  “Congratulations, twits,” he roared. “God put trumpets in your throats! Why, you will blast the morning from her mooring and shatter the east! Peep? Ah-ha-ha-ha!” And he kicked at the air in his joy.

  Pins One, Five, and Ten jumped onto his chest, and he knocked them away like cotton balls. Then he gathered them together under his wing and said,
“Ye are lions, roaring lions, and sons to me.”

  The Beautiful Pertelote saw these things from the doorway and was glad.

  But then she saw what no one else was seeing. She saw the look of worry tug at Chauntecleer’s eyes—until he grew silent, and set his Pins up in a straight, proud row, and went off on another private trip.

  The other feeling in his soul during this springtime was an eating, unsatisfied worm. It chewed at him and made him restless. It wouldn’t let him sleep at night, or else it invited dreams not good. It made him to be what he had never thought he would be again: lonely. He forgot that he could talk to Pertelote, and she didn’t remind him; for in her love she let him be.

  Chauntecleer’s trips were to the river. It was the river which was confusing and troubling him. And more than that, it was what he thought he saw there which made him so private in his anxiety.

  The river had never stopped its swelling. During the previous winter it had, certainly, frozen; but even the ice had not locked it in its place. Rather, it had continued to swell until it burst through that coat of iron ice, like a living, serpentine monster splitting open its shell, and great chunks of ice went spinning away in the current. The ice would form again; the river would swell again, more than before; and again the ice would break above the strain. All winter this had gone on, the river growing and growing; and Chauntecleer had gone to watch its growth and to worry. He worried because he did not understand it. He no longer recognized his borderland river.

  And he worried profoundly because he had begun to see visions.

  For example, when he looked at the ice chunks in the river, they became heads even while he was looking—heads bobbing up and down in the water. At first they were no more than heads, with their mouths and their eyes closed, mute, expressionless. And they were all of them white. They looked to him like the heads of lions, or of cows; they were wolves and bears and lambs and bulls, calves and kids. Once Chauntecleer thought that this was a trick of his eyes, and he might have let it pass. But as he had gone back again and again through the winter, the ice had always poured by as severed heads. And when their eyes opened up and began to look back at him, then he knew that it was no trick, but a vision he was having, and he waited to learn something from the vision. He continued to return. Yet the heads taught him nothing. They looked at him with deep sorrow in their eyes. Presently the mouths, too, opened up; and the Rooster heard the sounds of grief in his vision. Bawling and bleating, sobbing and keening, the heads flowed by him in the river; but never a word did they speak. Chauntecleer returned troubled.

  And now the spring had come. The heads had melted away, and the Rooster’s vision was over. But the worm in his soul was not gone; for still the river had not stopped its swelling.

  The river was a flood—as it had never been before. And, boiling far beyond its banks, the flood picked up every floating thing on either side of it, rushing each thing away in its current. The good river had become a destruction, silently swallowing Chauntecleer’s land foot by foot. It scoured the earth away from the roots of the trees. It pressed against these trees until they collapsed; and then it rushed them away as well. It swallowed nearby hills, creeping ever closer to the Coop. Miles are miles; miles are a long way to go, and so it was not yet anywhere near the Coop. But there came a day, during this spring, when Chauntecleer left the three Pins behind him in a proud, straight row and went to look at the river’s flood. On this day his worry slipped very close to panic, because when he looked he could not see the other side. Water covered all the land to the south as far as he could see; and what is more, the water was not still. It sucked and snuffled at the edges of the earth with its boiling current.

  And that night poor Chauntecleer had a dream.

  [FOURTEEN] Chauntecleer’s dream, the first engagement with the enemy

  This was not a dream which comes out of the dreamer. It was the kind of dream which goes into him. And so it came with a hard power. And so its ending was neither fixed nor determined by its beginning. Some dreams are merely pockets in sleep, to be filled up with things from the sleeper’s memory, and they pass with the waking. Others become solid events in the dreamer’s life, sleeping or awake. Chauntecleer’s dream was of the second kind.

  He dreamed that he was standing on a small, muddy island in the middle of the river. There was room for his standing but no more. The river stretched all around him till, in every direction, it merged with the grey sky; and there was not a twig or a leaf to be seen anywhere. But it was the river, for it had a current and his island made the water gutter and ripple.

  The water stank with such a loathsome odor that the Rooster could not breathe without gagging. The rotten smell was strangling him. He was shaking his head violently to be rid of it, but to no good.

  And it seemed to him at the beginning of his dream that he was waiting for somebody. He was angry that he had to wait so long in such a place.

  “Why don’t they come?” he said in a gagging voice.

  “Pax, Galle superbe,” the river answered him in the language of the powers. But in his dream Chauntecleer was neither surprised by the river’s talk nor ignorant of its meaning. It seemed natural, and he understood it: “Peace, Proud Chauntecleer,” the river kindly hummed to him. “I know your trouble, and I have remembered you with an island out of my own bosom. I know your distress, and I shall companion you. I am both your company and your haven, Proud Chauntecleer. Peace.”

  But Chauntecleer was angry.

  “I don’t want your island,” he snapped. “Flush your island! I want them here, and I need them now. Oh, why don’t they come?”

  “By now, dear Chauntecleer, you should have learned how quicksilver are the hearts of those you serve. Yesterday’s gratitude is forgotten today. Forgive me my speaking the truth,” sang the river mildly, “but their need once satisfied, they do forget the Lord who led them, and then he’s left alone—his own need and himself, alone. They have forgotten you, lonely Chauntecleer.”

  “I don’t believe it! They will come!”

  “And as for my island, consider how very much you need it. Consider flight, should I withdraw it from you—though I mean no such threat—and wonder whither you might fly. Consider the unutterable loneliness should I fall silent and cease to speak with you—”

  “You see?” the Rooster suddenly cried out. “Look there! You see? They’re coming for me! They haven’t forgotten!” Chauntecleer leaped and waved at a dark spot on the horizon.

  “No, rather you shall see, Proud Chauntecleer. And then you shall know the truth.”

  As it drew nearer, the spot showed as a boat made out of branches. Then it was a whole series of boats, a fleet, and the animals who rode them were his own. Chauntecleer grinned and forgot his anger. “Ha, ha!” he laughed, and prepared to leave the island. “Here I am! Here I am! I knew you wouldn’t forget me!”

  Silently the first boat swept toward the Rooster; silently it breasted him, and silently it passed by. Pins One, Five, and Ten had not so much as looked at him.

  “Pertelote!” Chauntecleer cried to the passenger on the second boat, “drag the water and turn. Or look at me! Just look at me!”

  But the second boat passed with the first.

  “Oh, thankless breed of creatures,” sang the river.

  “Shut up! Shut up!” shouted the Rooster, suddenly desperate.

  “We shall see,” the river sang calmly.

  “Here!” cried Chauntecleer to the Weasel on the third boat. “I’m over here. You can swim, John. I can’t. Steer here! Here! Here!”

  But one after the other the boats passed the island; and none paused, nor would anyone on the boats giance at the screaming Rooster standing on it: the Wee Widow Mouse and her children; Beryl, Chalcedony, and twenty-eight Hens in grim procession.

  “Stop! Give me a ride! Oh, save me!” Chauntecleer plead
ed with Mundo Cani—first to his blank face, and then to his back. It was a humiliation that Chauntecleer should have to plead with the Dog at all; but it was wasted humility. The Dog sailed away with the others.

  “I hate you!” Chauntecleer screamed at the disappearing boats. “Hate you! Hate you! Hate you all!”

  His throat hurt with the screaming. And when he was alone again his chest convulsed with angry sobs. But, strangely in this dream, it felt very good to be screaming these words, and the sobs were sweet medicine. Chauntecleer had much pity for himself, lost and ignored upon his island. But the self-pity, too, felt good. It was a comfort and a relief and even a baneful sort of triumph to be screaming pure hatred from the bottom of his soul—especially when he felt that he had the right to hate. They had done him first! Therefore his was righteous wrath, deserved self-pity.

  “Ah, so we see the truth,” the river hummed mildly all around him. “We have clear eyes, now, and nothing is hidden from us anymore, and we have become as wise as God. Their Lord provides them comfort in their need. Their lonely Lord fills them with good things, and they answer his benevolence with what? With a cold and bitter distance! With ‘Sir’ and ‘Please you, sir.’ Am I right? And then, when the need is his—how then, Proud Chauntecleer? What then? Why, foul ingratitude! Oh, proper bird, how lonely you must be!”

  “Hate them. Hate them,” Chauntecleer mumbled, savoring the pain. “Hate them all.”

  “Aye! They, the ingrati.” The river began to toll terrible words, naming the Rooster’s animals for him. “And they, the oblivii. And they, the peccati. Here I have remembered you, and with an island out of my own bosom have saved you alive. But they have forgotten you, turned away from you, cut you off, despised you, sentenced you to misery and a forsaken death. Ingrati! Oblivii! Peccati!”