The Book of the Dun Cow

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  “If I had never had sons, how could I lose sons? If I had never ruled a land, how could I fear to lose the land? It is in the giving that treachery begins. If I had never loved these animals, which the almighty God put into my keeping, I would not die thinking that they may die.

  “But by your will I am where I am. By your will things are what they are. Now by my will I demand to hear it from your own mouth: Where are my sons? Why is Pertelote weeping underneath me in the Coop? And what am I to say to her? Bear them, bless them, watch them; then ball them into tiny balls and stuff them in the earth! I’ll tell her. She’ll be comforted. I’ll tell her of the will of God.”

  Chauntecleer drove hot air deep into his lungs. He roared: “And by my will I demand to know now—it is most certainly time now to know: O God, where are you? Why have you hidden your face from us? Why now, of all times, when things are on the rim of disaster, have you turned away? Nine months! I have not seen the stars for nine months! In nine months we have not seen a single passing of the sun, and the moon is only a memory. Faith, right? By faith I should believe that the spheres still turn above these everlasting clouds. Tell me! Tell me! Infinite God, tell me what we have done to be shut from the rest of the universe! But you won’t tell me. You’ve dropped us in a bucket and let us be. It wears a person out, you know. Yeah, well.”

  Then the Rooster did move. His head sank between his shoulders. His wings drooped. He broke into tears. “My sons, my sons,” he wept. “Why didn’t God let me die instead of you?”

  Chauntecleer sobbed several moments together. Then he spoke in another voice, without raising his head.

  “Aye. He wills that I work his work in this place. Indeed. I am left behind to labor. Right.

  “And one day he may show his face beneath his damnable clouds to tell me what that work might be; what’s worth so many tears; what’s so important in his sight that it needs to be done this way. . . .

  “O my sons!” Chauntecleer suddenly wailed at the top of his lungs, a light flaring before it goes out: “How much I want you with me!”

  The dark land everywhere held still, as if on purpose before such a ringing, echoing cry. The dark sky said nothing. The Rooster, with not an effort to save himself, sagged, rolled down the roof, slipped over the edge of the Coop, and fell heavily to the ground. Wind and sobs together were knocked out of him; he lay dazed.

  And then it was that the Dun Cow came to him.

  She put her soft nose against him, to nudge him into a more peaceful position. Gently she arranged his head so that he might clearly see her. Her sweet breath went into his nostrils, and he assumed that he woke up; but he didn’t move. The Dun Cow took a single step back from the Rooster, then, and looked at him.

  Horns strangely dangerous on one so soft stood wide away and sharp from either side of her head.

  Her eyes were liquid with compassion—deep, deep, as the earth is deep. Her brow knew his suffering and knew, besides that, worlds more. But the goodness was that, though this wide brow knew so much, yet it bent over his pain alone and creased with it.

  Chauntecleer watched his own desolation appear in the brown eyes of the Cow, then sink so deeply into them that she shuddered. Her eyes pooled as she looked at him. The tears rose and spilled over. And then she was weeping even as he had wept a few minutes ago—except without the anger. Strangely, Chauntecleer felt an urge to comfort her; but at this moment he was no Lord, and the initiative was not in him. A simple creature only, he watched—felt—the miracle take place. Nothing changed: The clouds would not be removed, nor his sons returned, nor his knowledge plenished. But there was this. His grief had become her grief, his sorrow her own. And though he grieved not one bit less for that, yet his heart made room for her, for her will and wisdom, and he bore the sorrow better.

  The Dun Cow lay down next to the Rooster and spent the rest of the night with him. She never spoke a word, and Chauntecleer did not sleep. But for a little while they were together.

  At dawn Chauntecleer crowed lauds; and then he went alone into his Coop.

  There was movement there in the dim light, as if the animals were waking up. But that movement was all pretending, since not one of them had been asleep. No rain, no wind—but there had been a storm that night nonetheless; and the silence of the last several hours had been unreadable. So the animals had blinked and breathed their ways through the long night, all of them awake: the Hens, the Mice, the Fox, the Dog, the Black Ant, too; the beautiful and mourning Pertelote—and a Weasel.

  Everyone saw solemnity in their Lord. Everyone permitted him to walk to his perch undisturbed. Everyone except—

  “Rooster knows who, don’t he?” said John Wesley Weasel from a position directly in front of Chauntecleer.

  But Chauntecleer hardly saw him. “I’m tired, John Wesley.” His eyes rested instead on Pertelote; and by the bowing of her head he saw that she was filled with sorrow. She was also very tired and should sleep.

  “John knows who!” snapped the Weasel. “Once is, always is! No changing the wicked. No teaching the vile!”

  “Ah, John—speak to me at prime. Explain yourself then.”

  But the Weasel wouldn’t let the Rooster pass.

  “Is only clawing and killing for his like. Execution! Execution! Chop away his head!” He was warming to his subject.

  Chauntecleer looked him in the eye for just a second, then looked away again. “You make no sense,” he said. Compulsively he glanced back to Pertelote. She was shivering. The Rooster felt that the Weasel’s chatter added trouble to her sorrow. “Clear out!” he commanded.

  But John Wesley suddenly hunched his back so high that his fore and hind legs pressed against each other. It was a fighting posture. He had waited all the night long to say what burned inside of him, and now it swept him away:

  “Hate him! Hate him!” he hissed, flashing his teeth. “One murders Chicks! One breaks a Hen what should live! Oh, how John does hate him!”

  That triggered Mundo Cani. Reading threat, the Dog reared from his place at the door and plunged toward the Weasel to pitch him out.

  “Off, mountain back!” cried the Weasel. “Touch me and I touch you with what for!” The Weasel’s teeth were razor sharp and furious. His courage was phenomenal.

  “Mundo Cani!” Chauntecleer ordered. “Sit down!” He did. “You, John Wesley.” He glared at the Weasel. “I don’t ever want to hear that again. Never again in this Coop or on this land do I want to hear that you hate a living soul.”

  “One wants hating,” the Weasel persisted. “Pleads for hating. Kills for hating.”

  “Not hating, John Wesley.”

  “Look what he—”

  “Not hating!” Chauntecleer’s crow was full of thunder. Hens tottered and began walking on their roosts. The Weasel cowered. But yet he didn’t stop talking.

  “Here’s one Double-u,” he mumbled, “what won’t kiss no Rat.”

  Then Chauntecleer gazed at him with sudden understanding. “Wise little Weasel. So you think you know who killed my children.”

  “Think! I think and then I know. I know!”

  “Good thinking, perhaps, John Wesley. But your conclusions are bad. He couldn’t have done it.”

  “Was Nezer,” said the Weasel—and that did it.

  Immediately the Coop blew up: confusion, motion, wild clucking. Jacinth streaked through the air with no place to land, beating her wings as if she were cursed. The others responded, leaping in place and turning circles.

  John Wesley was pleased. They, at least, believed him.

  “Ebenezer Rat!” he cried above the blizzard.

  Chauntecleer crowed for order. He crowed again. He crowed a third time. But the Hens were letting loose the strain of a wakeful night. Yesterday’s horror, last night’s dumb waiting, suddenly had a name, and that name had broken their
control.

  Chauntecleer moved. He laid a wing on Jacinth and another on Topaz and held them close until they were still. He did this to one after another until they all knew him by his touch and had finally settled into an uneasy peace.

  “Did none of you sleep last night?” he asked.

  They only looked at him, and he was moved to pity them.

  “God help us all,” he said.

  Then, while things were momentarily balanced, he rose to a perch above them. “All right. Take some comfort in this,” he said, “that it couldn’t have been Ebenezer Rat. Whatever Nezer is, whatever he might wish to do, he couldn’t have broken Beryl’s neck as it was broken. Ebenezer can break egg shells, and he is wicked enough to eat the eggs in them. But this is just a fact: If he went against a full-grown Hen, either he would lose to her, or else her death would have been much bloodier than Beryl’s.”

  “Nezer has a grudge.” The Weasel pressed his argument in spite of the Rooster’s words.

  Chauntecleer whirled on him: “And a grudge may be strong. But a grudge isn’t strength!” Right now he despised arguing with the insolent Weasel; but he desperately didn’t want his Hens aroused again.

  “Can want revenge, ha! Little grows big for revenge. Puny gets strong for revenge. Then hunt him! Kill him!”

  “John Wesley Weasel, look at yourself! Those are the words of revenge!”

  “Who kills three Chicks? Who leaves none to be prince? Who chooses three to kill three? Him what was humbled by their father: Nezer Rat!”

  “John, don’t you see what you’re doing? Now you want me to choose one to kill one. You want me to do what he did. I should become a rat to kill a Rat! Avenge revenge? Why, that’s sin—and a poor, defeating sin at that!”

  “No. Not.”

  “What then? Why do you push it so?”

  “Let John Double-u be Double-u. John hunts him. John kills him”—the Weasel threw back his head, unmistakable contempt for Chauntecleer in his eyes—“for you.”

  “Proof!” said the Rooster. “I want—”

  Suddenly a high, tiny voice pierced the air: “Out! Out! Out!” The voice came from underneath the floor, bleating, chopped with panic. A windless skittering under the floorboard silenced both Rooster and Weasel; then the Wee Widow Mouse shot from her hole.

  “Get him out of there!” she beseeched Chauntecleer, backing away even from him. “Please tell him to go away!”

  The Hens began a nervous jerking. The Rooster hardly knew what to ask.

  “He wants in the back hole,” the Widow pleaded. “Please tell him to go away.” The young Mice were tumbling out after her, bewildered.

  Without a word Chauntecleer flew from his perch, directly out of the Coop. He spun round the corner to the back.

  There—half in, half out of the Widow’s back hole—he saw a body. The head had gone in first, and then the rest of the body could get no further. Yet, weakly, the four legs were pushing forward with a hopeless will. But the entrance was impossible. Two strong, white feathers were buried in the back of this body, their span much too wide to let it pass; so it was against these feathers that the legs were pushing, and the feathers denied it entrance.

  Chauntecleer heard Mundo Cani speak behind him: “Ebenezer Rat,” the Dog said.

  “Just so,” said the Rooster quietly. “Pull him out, Mundo Cani.”

  The Dog took the body between his two paws and drew it backward.

  Even on the open ground Nezer continued to tread his legs, ignorant that his home was no longer in front of him. His eyes were closed. He was nearly dead. He had an impossibly deep wound on the side of his neck. His fur was matted with blood.

  John Wesley Weasel stood beside them. “You see?” he said.

  “I see, you impertinent fool!” Chauntecleer hissed without lifting his eyes from the dying Rat. “Now, Weasel, you look and see!”

  He turned Ebenezer’s head to the side. The wound yawned. But the lesson was elsewhere: Clamped in the Rat’s mouth was a foul section of a serpent, chewed away from its greater body. Organs enough clung shredded and gouty to the flesh to prove that that one had died as well. It must have been a hideous fight.

  “Talk, Weasel,” Chauntecleer hissed, “when you know in God’s name what you are talking about.”

  In all his life Chauntecleer had never known Ebenezer Rat to speak a single word. Therefore he didn’t expect an explanation now, and he asked no questions. He said, “Peace, Nezer,” and he watched in silence until the legs stopped their treading and the body relaxed. The feathers lolled a little; and then they were perfectly still.

  Ebenezer Rat was dead.

  Chauntecleer took the serpent from the Rat’s mouth. Then he yanked both feathers from their sockets and threw them violently at the wind. He stroked Ebenezer’s fur smooth, groaning while he did. He kissed the Rat.

  And then he leaped high—to the top of the Coop.

  “I want a Council!” he cried; his voice echoed from the forest in the morning air: “Council!”

  “Every one of you! Have your kin here by the afternoon. Present your breed before me! Let not one of them stay away, not women, not children, not the old—everyone! Have them all here by the afternoon!”

  Though none of them had slept, they all took to their heels and left—John Wesley Weasel among them; and the dawn light saw them disappear.

  “Where is Scarce?” cried the Rooster. “Scarce, where are you?”

  “Here,” said a small, buzzing voice. “Never, never gone.”

  Chauntecleer looked and saw him just off the end of his beak. It did take some looking to see Scarce, even when one knew where he was. Scarce was a Mosquito. Scarce was all Mosquitoes; but then, all Mosquitoes are one. So they were all known by the one name, Scarce. And if someone had spoken to one of them, he had spoken to them all. And if someone avoided all of them, yet there was always one he couldn’t avoid. On the whole, there was no better messenger than Scarce.

  “I want you to put it into every ear in my land,” Chauntecleer said, “that I will have a Council in the afternoon. Do more than inform them. And more than urge them, command them to come. No one—no matter how large and powerful, how small and cunning—is safe who stays away. Perilous times, Scarce. I want every creature at this place by the afternoon.”

  Scarce simply disappeared, and his buzzing went with him.

  Then Chauntecleer went inside a hollow Coop to be with Pertelote. He went wordless, and wordless he sat beside her. He knew the size of her sorrow.

  [SEVENTEEN] Comings

  Between yesterday and today, between the time of her wretched discovery and the moment she fell into an exhausted sleep, between death and death, Pertelote had said nothing; and none, not even Chauntecleer, knew for sure what went through her mind. One thing, however, she did say.

  Chauntecleer had been sitting beside her for an hour—not touching her, nor even looking at her, but yet writhing in his soul on her account—when she shifted position ever so slightly. Immediately his senses quivered, alert.

  She said, “Beryl was a good nurse.”

  Chauntecleer nearly made a noise of agreement, nearly sought to start conversation. But he thought better of it.

  “This sacrifice was not meant for her,” Pertelote said. And then that was all.

  An hour later the Rooster concluded by her breathing that she had fallen asleep, and he was relieved. Strangely, her sleep set him somewhat free. Since he himself had no trouble talking—indeed, lived, moved, experienced, and identified experience by the words of his mouth—her silence was a suffocation for him and her distance a torment. They bound him. They damned his love to helplessness. They made him feel mortal and small next to such self-possession. If she would offer him words, then he could heal her with words. Moreover, then he would win the right to spill
his own feelings into the open by words—and could do so with impunity and without the fear that he might diminish himself by the blather. But when she slept, words were not even a remote consideration. And the sleep itself was a kind of unspoken word, signifying trust. Therefore Chauntecleer often waited for his Pertelote to fall asleep first before he let himself—a tiny, private conquest; a bitty proof of his own self-possession. And therefore her sleep on this particular afternoon set him free.

  The Rooster, without leaving Pertelote’s side, turned his attention to the other Hens asleep in the Coop. Despite the daylight, he had commanded it; so they slept. But he heard the nervous cries of their dreams. He saw them shudder, rise up on their legs without waking. He knew that—though the name alarmed them—they had wished that the enemy had been Ebenezer Rat, because they knew him. Nezer had a head and tail which could be measured, a track which could be recognized, a wickedness which could be laid low, a name! He was a Rat, an animal: He was one of them. Feared, invidious, criminal, and right worthy the punishment he received—yet one of them, for all of that. But now the Hens dreamed faceless dreams, fought the bodyless, the eyeless—gibbering, screeching, wordless, nameless, immeasurable, unutterable, the enemy was in their dreams hagging them. And these dreams were the worse because sleep in the afternoon is a heated, sweaty, fretful affair. But the Rooster had commanded it.

  Chauntecleer watched his Hens and his stricken wife with yearning.

  Middle afternoon. Lord Russel, the Fox of Good Sense, stepped out of the forest, a solitary figure. He glanced furtively around the empty Coop yard, then snatched himself back into the brush. For the space of ten minutes the yard stood abandoned, flat, and still. Then another Fox, not Russel, twitched into view and slunk from bush to bush. One by one Russel’s kin began to creep into the yard, obviously uncomfortable to be in open spaces, but coming. Cousins, male and female; red coats and black tips to their tails, as if the tails had been dipped in ink; silently on padded feet, and singly they came. They were a breed all unused to talking with one another; so it had gone against Russel’s nature to gather them together, but he had nonetheless done it, and they came: Nieces and nephews, second and third cousins, aunts and uncles unto the fourth and fifth generation, the Foxes came.