When I was in high school, my brother Wendell got a number of chicks from the Lutheran pastor in town, Pastor Rognlie. Wendell raised the chicks, and did a reasonably good job of it – even cleaning up some. These chicks had access to part of the garage to keep them out of the weather. As these things go, the chicks soon became chickens. In fact, one of them turned out to be a rooster. One morning, very early, we heard this rooster crow and we rushed out to find out which one was making the ruckus. We lived in town after all, and that night we had chicken dinner.
And then it came to pass that I had offered to make chicken dinner for my friend’s aunt Mary Trotter. I called the butcher shop, and I was horrified to find that they were already closed for the day. Now what? With all these chickens in the yard, I had no choice. I had seen them use an ax with a stump to start the process of getting the chicken to the table. So I copied what I had witnessed with the first unlucky chicken I could lay my hands on. Messy though it was, the task was soon accomplished – and the headless chicken indeed acted “like a chicken with its head cut off”. It was awful. I had to pluck the feathers, clean the chicken and bake it. I was told later that the way my friend’s aunt knew it wasn’t from the butcher is that the parts were divided rather strangely. But it tasted good, so all was fine in the end. For years after that, I enjoyed telling this story in the most “proper” social occasions, apparently adding to my notoriety rather than to my social graces.