Henous Deeds Most Fowl
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Here are some stories from my past, tales of heinous deeds that involved chickens.  Thus, the title of the article.
The first story happened when I was very young indeed.  It was the day that my mother tried to set up my first real bed for me.  That was a big day for me.  I was graduating from a crib to a real bed.  Maybe that's why I can still remember it.  I watched eagerly while she tried to assemble the bed.  I was probably making a royal nuisance of myself but mothers can be very patient when it suits them.  She got the frame pieces attached to the head board and the foot board but she had some difficulty with the box springs.  They kept falling between the frame pieces.  She thought about it for a while and then recalled that there should be slats between the frame pieces.  That was bad news.  She couldn't find the slats.  Much to my frustration, we had to wait for Poppa to get home from work.  When she asked him about it, he looked sheepish and said, "Oh.  So that's what those boards were."  He took us out to the chicken lot.  There were my slats, in a condition that probably rendered them unsuitable for use in a bed.  He'd previously nailed them together into chicken feeders.  I don't remember how the situation was eventually resolved.  Many years later, when I was in my middle 40s, I built a bed for myself.  I built it out of half-inch plywood, 4x4s, and 2x4s.  It's glued together.  Instead of slats, I used sheets of 3/4 inch plywood, cut to size, to support the box springs.  Nobody's going to use that for a chicken feeder.
I must have been about four years old at the time of this next story.  I don't think that revenge was in my motives.  I was only trying to do as instructed.  I was following Poppa around, as young boys will follow their fathers.  He was in the chicken coop, trying to collect the eggs.  A particularly feisty hen fought him until he gave up in exasperation and yanked her out of the nesting box.  He held her upside down by her legs and handed her to me.
"Here!" he said.  "Take this ol' hen outside an' throw 'er on the ground!"
I did my best.  Poppa looked around just in time to see me, holding the hen by the legs, as he had done, and raising her over my head as far as I could reach.  "No, son!", he yelled, just as I threw her on the ground as hard as I could, straight down.  I still had a lot to learn at the age of four.  I was just trying my best to do what Poppa had told me to do.  It didn't occur to me that the hen might land on her head and break her neck.
By the time that I was about 10 years old, my chores included feeding the table scraps to the chickens.  At that time, the chickens lived in a fenced lot that was actually fairly large, as such things go, but still not large enough for the number of chickens that lived in it.  Consequently, the ground was hard-packed and bare.  The only food that those chickens ever got was the grain that we fed to them, any grasshopper that blundered into their lot, and my table scraps.  After the table scraps became one of my chores I noticed that, when I walked up to the fence, the chickens would rush toward me in a frenzy.  They were desperate for food.  For a while, I just dumped the scraps over the fence and watched the chickens fight over them.  Then, I realized that I could have more fun if I threw the scraps into the lot one at a time.  The chickens would all dash toward the morsel.  Whichever chicken got there first would grab it and run.  The chicken had to stop before it could eat what it was carrying but if it stopped then another chicken would steal the food from it.  Eventually, some lucky, and I use the word with reservations, some lucky chicken would manage to swallow the bit of food.  Then, they'd all run back to me for more.
I'm sorrowful today for the torture that I inflicted on those poor hungry birds but, at the time, I was just a boy.  It was just a game.  I didn't mean any harm by it.  I don't know if this is some kind of a karma thing but there are few meals that I like better than fried chicken, especially KFC.  Even so, I still think about those chickens.