Alfred McSqueen was a pig farmer who kept chickens because every member of his lineage had kept chickens since before the Depression. He was bald and possessed a scrawny, famine-assed physique common to mid-middle-aged alcoholics.
His latest bender had lasted three days. So had the rain. Everything drinkable in the house, including the cooking sherry, was gone; it was time to get some food on his stomach. Wife dead some three years now by her own hand, daughters run off, he would have to trudge through a no man's land of mud and collect his own breakfast.
His gumboots were seven inches muddy by the time he clomped inside the hen house. And in the thunderclapping pain of his hangover, he'd forgotten the egg basket. But two would be enough—provided he could hold them down, even.
Fat Ass was the only hen he'd ever given a name to. At twelve pounds, she was remarkably large even for a Blue Cochin. Her nest box was the first in a row of thirty. He lifted her by the neck and took her two tan eggs. Turning for the door, his mud-slick soles slid in the slime of accumulated chicken droppings. His feet flew straight out from under him and he landed whammo on his back, head slapping the concrete floor like a clown shoe.
The chicken is a naturally inquisitive animal. After an interval of caution, Fat Ass made her way down the ramp board for a closer inspection. Climbing aboard his peacefully rising-and-falling chest, she gave McSqueen an exploratory peck on the forehead. Chicken minutes passed until she eventually nestled all motherly onto his face with obsidian-eyed contentment. "Ahh," you can imagine her saying.
Mrs. White experienced a rush of possible schadenfreude when she drove by and noticed all the chickens roaming his yard. Something was amiss. She lived downwind of his fetid hog barn and, because of this, felt she spent a disproportionate amount of her social security on Glade air freshener. Her previous requests for recompense had gone ignored.
Keen to be the first bearer of possible bad news, she dialed Sheriff Tom Osby's office.
"Tipton County Sheriff's Department. Deputy Donaldson," a voice said.
She remembered young Donaldson from his grammar school days as a sulking bully. "This is Carlotta White. Lemme speak to Tom."
"He's indisposed right now."
"Tell him there's something funny out by McSqueen's"
"Like what?"
"Jus' tell him."
In the patrol car on the way out to McSqueen's, Tom Osby's bay rum aftershave attacked Deputy Donaldson's nasal membranes like a poison gas, and the eighty-three-year-old sheriff's stupid jokes made him dizzy with irritation. To cope, he reran his daydream about Osby dying midterm so he could run in the next election-he'd given up on Osby retiring long ago.
They pulled into the yard as far as they could without getting mired in mud.
Osby said, "Those footprints run 'tween the back door and the coop. Go check the house. I'll look in the outbuildings."
The deputy was relieved to avoid animal husbandry's concomitant stench. He found nothing but the traces of a solitary man living in disarray in the farmhouse. Mrs. McSqueen had hung herself three years ago come August, and the two daughters, aged thirteen and fourteen, had run away last year-with cause, it was rumored.
He wandered back outside where he heard Osby invite him into the smelly hencoop.
Inside, squatting beside McSqueen's chickenshit-spattered body, Tom Osby had one of McSqueen's eyelids pried back with his thumb and was peering at the white of his eyeball. "Busted capillaries," he said in a preoccupied murmur.
"He dead?" asked Donaldson.
"Yep."
"Heart attack, Sher'ff?" Donaldson said hopefully.
"Nawp, it's murder. Murder most foul."
There he went again: lame jokes from TV. "Haw haw. 'Fowl' as in birds, right? That's a good one, Sher'ff. So … whodunit?"
Osby stood up and made an arm sweep at five white nesting hens and a big bluish-gray one pecking at something in a far corner. He said, "I questioned them, but they're hiding something."
"Haw haw. Good one, Sher'ff."