No, not that poultry story, Ben, ....

..  not the story of how your mother went hysterically ballistic when she found a sparrow sharing the shower with her, not the one about the man my father knew who let his chickens into the house at night so they could roost over the kitchen stove, not the time a tom turkey fiercely attacked and battered  a toddler Dorothy, not about the time my bantam rooster, Dick, got drunk and threw up after eating the residue fruit from my mother's homemade dandelion wine, certainly not the story of a persistently egg-bound hen who caused me to swear off eating eggs for life, not the story of two young chicks, one half-pink and one half-green, given to us after our cousins  tired of their store-dyed Easter presents, nor the grim tale of an aggressive rooster who claimed the garden as his domain until the day my mother clocked him in the head with a pail and knocked him permanently senseless.
      This is the story of a chicken who, after eating gravel as grit to digest its food, as chickens do, had a large enough chunk embedded in her crop that sickened her. She couldn't eat, turned pale and listless, a sad sight.  My mother could feel the mass in its crop, just below the surface. My aunt and uncle were visiting, and while my mother held the chicken in her arms, palpating the mass,  Uncle Tommy used his pen knife to slit the skin, beneath the feathers, and, Voila! removed the offending piece of stone.  A surprisingly bloodless operation as  I saw it, but then I was so little I wasn't in position to  get a good view, and there were all those feathers.  My mother was prepared with a needle and thread and quickly sewed up the incision.
    The chicken was set on the ground and scurried away.  Well, not exactly scurried---that chicken was never again able to regain a normal chicken's gait.  Something about the hasty suturing or the even hastier incision connected the chicken's leg to its neck or head in some fashion, understandable to anyone familiar with the anatomy of a hen.  For the remainder of its days, every step the chicken took forced its head to bend forward and downward.  That limping chicken really stood out in the flock