A Poultry Story

And there are quite a few. This one is from the time we lived in Schmidt's house, as I recall. Tommy and Agnes were visiting. Tommy was kind of a wild man for his time, kind of crazy and unconventional. I think there was a time he didn't have a job,and later he worked nights. Anyway, we were all out in the back yard, and we had chickens running around all over the place, free-range they'd be called nowadays. My mother said one of the hens was acting sick, and she picked it up and showed it to Tommy and Agnes. They'd felt its crop, and evidently determined there was a too-large foreign object that the chicken had swallowed---you should know that chickens will eat almost anything. The chicken was in distress. "I can fix that," Tommy offered. My mother held the chicken while Tommy took out his penknife, cut open the crop area (bloodless surgery as I recall, or maybe just lost in the feathers) and they fished out the offending obstruction. I think it was a stone. Chickens need grit to grind their food, but this chicken had gone too far, sizewise. My mother used a large sewing needle and thread to sew up the incision. They put the chicken down on the ground, the chicken took off, operation a success. The only thing was that my mother must have sewn the incision a little too tight and the chicken walked with a limp for the rest of its life. Picture this---chicken takes a step, its head goes down,next step, head goes up, and so on. We always knew that chicken.