By Mary Sharry
Sun contributor

City chickens may be a new thing now, but in the city of my childhood, Toledo, Ohio, there was nothing unusual about raising backyard hens, roosters or even rabbits for that matter. Times then, as now, were lean and tight, and people were just beginning to rise up out of the dire straits of near poverty; so raising chickens for their eggs or a Sunday dinner, or rabbits for Saturday night stew, helped nourish many families.

In that city, avenues ran in one direction, intersected by the more important boulevards; the roadways that were called drives were older and paved in brick and were intersected by streets where squalor lived – derelict bars, pawn shops and neglected houses with dirt front yards where dogs were kept on chains wound around wooden posts. The dogs barked and snarled at passers-by. Here was Central Avenue, there Collingwood Blvd. My mother and father and I lived on Milburn Avenue, which ended at Old Orchard Park through which my mother walked every morning on her way home from her night shift job in the nursery at Toledo Hospital.

The park was huge with playgrounds and picnic tables throughout, and a ringed pony-ride, which I loved to watch, but where on the day my mother lifted me onto the leather saddle I shrieked in fear. “Get me down. Get me down.” The patient ponies walked dumbly, nose to rump, around their tethered circle which smelled of manure and hay. In that park in the wintertime a great sledding hill captured the laughter and energies of children and adults; and in the spring older children, boys mostly, climbed a stone wall from which grew ivies and mosses. Tall elms arched overhead presenting a cathedral-like sanctuary.

From uptown to downtown, red brick buildings mingled with old granite structures, and city buses traveled the worn brick road past the Willis Overland factory where rows of drab green Army jeeps stood waiting for rail shipment. The railroad ties were intersected by streetcar rails; and above the street there ran a web of wires which provided the current for both the streetcars and trolley buses.

Smokestacks belched charcoal plumes over the city, and the noxious vapors drifted above the Maumee River all the way out Anthony Wayne Trail to the Toledo Zoo. Here, in cages, were the lions and tigers and bears that stalked my bad dreams. The smell of animal urine seeped into the air and even my mouth, as the odor permeated the shells of salt-roasted peanuts, tainting each bite.

My father was acquainted with the keeper of the primate house, and so we were invited into the nursery where I got to hold an infant orangutan. This small creature’s rust-colored hair stuck out at angles atop her head. She grasped my finger and gazed at me with what seemed an expression of wonder. Her eyes glistened like buttons made of obsidian. I’d wanted a pet so badly and wished we could have taken her home, which, of course, was out of the question.

After the day at the zoo, we rode home on the Old Orchard bus. I dozed. My father woke me when we arrived at the stop at the end of our alley. On the walk home our feet crunched over the cinders that people threw out whenever they cleaned their coal furnaces. We, too, heated our small house with coal. In the springtime, with buckets of hot, soapy Spic and Span, my mother would wash away the dirt and soot that had collected on the walls during the winter months.

There was our coal bin in a corner of our damp, dark cellar. A small, rectangular window cast a slant of light revealing cracks in the concrete walls. Each fall a noisy, red dump truck from the coal company backed over our front yard. A chute was placed through the narrow window and coal was shoveled from the truck onto the chute; thick chunks rolled and tumbled through the opening to the bin below. The man who delivered the coal wore sooty overalls. Even his face was smudged, and his eyes, the whites more red than white, peered out at me. I was afraid to look back at him, but I loved the thundering rumble of the coal.

My father’s shovel scraped against the coal bin floor as he filled the scuttle and loaded the furnace, its door clanging shut when he was finished. There came the day, though, when the natural gas line came to our neighborhood and we abandoned the coal furnace for a new gas-fired one. This is where the rooster comes in.

Late in the following spring my parents swept and scoured the old coal bin, and one day they uncrated a red rooster down there in that dank room. Hooray! A pet, for me, I thought.

From the overhead light I watched the bird peck at the corn my mother had placed in a dish for him alongside a water bowl. His shining eye glanced at me and he tilted back his cock-comb head when he swallowed. My parents assigned to me the task of feeding him. I cooed and talked to him and told him how pretty he was. He seemed to agree and strutted about the enclosure, stretching his scaly legs. I made it a point to push open and scrub clean the small window up near the ceiling so that in his cell my rooster could enjoy some daylight and fresh air.

My parents were not aware of this bird’s pet status in my mind. I named him Red and fed him from my bare hand although I’d been warned not to as he might peck, but peck or scratch, he never did. He even let me stroke his beautiful tail feathers as he ate. Ah! I loved that gorgeous bird. Red!

In our neighborhood, on thirty-foot lots, our houses were so close together that you could touch fingers, if the person next door stuck their arm out through a window and you did the same. That summer, through the open windows, surely, I thought, the neighbors must enjoy Red’s cock-a-doodle-doo, especially in the morning.

If our house, a bungalow, was small, the kitchen, although it had two windows, was tiny. When I washed dishes, a task I enjoyed, I could look out over the sink and view the neighbor’s back porch, which was painted yellow and lined with pots of red geraniums. The other window in our kitchen looked out to a smooth-barked cherry tree. When warm, humid air drove us outside we sat beneath that tree and ate our meals at the sturdy plank table my father had built along with benches on either side.

In those lean times the gift of a live chicken was welcomed. Just once I sat there at the table under the tree and watched while my father held a hen down on an old tree stump. Under my father’s strong hand the bird lay silent while he decapitated it with one swift chop of his hatchet. Awed and repulsed, I didn’t look away. The headless body staggered about the yard, the white feathers tinged with bright blood. I couldn’t bear to watch another slaughter, even though I would enjoy the dinner my mother cooked up – stewed chicken with dumplings.

The kitchen was too small for a regular table and chairs, but beneath the window facing the cherry tree there was a folding table. You lifted the hinged top and folded out a hinged section of wood on which the surface rested. The table top was painted enamel white, the folding support, blue. It was there at the kitchen table that my mother would clean the chicken, the smelly innards going into a bucket for disposal. “Pee-e-ewe,” I’d wail. She would tell me to leave the room if I couldn’t stand to watch. Well, I liked to eat my lunch there, and dressing the chicken was most unappetizing.

There were apple trees growing along our alley, and when no one was looking, my mother would send me out to pick up the apples that had fallen to the ground. She made apple sandwiches in a little iron toaster which she held over the open flame of our stove. Sliced apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, and oleo were placed between two slices of stale bread. The lid on the toaster was closed and the exposed crusts cut off. Apple-cinnamon steam spewed from around the edges. My mother brought in two chairs from the dining room and we played anagrams or hangman while we ate the sandwiches. The table creaked when I raised myself on my elbows to rearrange a word or add a letter. In the cellar down below, Red pecked at his corn-filled dish.

One afternoon when I came home from school my mother was washing the top of the kitchen table. She wrung her dish rag in a pan of hot, soapy Fels Naptha water and rubbed in circles over the white table. A kettle bubbled and boiled on the stove. The steamy aroma of chicken, rosemary, onion and celery wafted from the pot. I went out to play until it was time for supper.

Twilight came earlier each day. It was almost dark by the time I was called in to eat. Light from the overhead kitchen lamp spilled through the doorway and into our small dining room. My mother always made sure an ironed tablecloth covered the maple dining table. She had taught me how to arrange the forks on the left, knives and spoons on the right, and set out the elegant cut glass cream and sugar bowl, a wedding gift from her parents.

I set the table and took my place and watched as my father lit two tall candles. They flickered and glowed across the table and made the sugar and creamer sparkle. A bowl of mashed potatoes was already on the table along with a boat of gravy. My father sat across from me and when my mother carried in the steaming platter of chicken pieces he made smacking noises with his lips. Mashed potatoes were my favorite food, but not gravy. For some reason my father insisted, in spite of my protests, that I needed gravy on my potatoes. He made a well with the gravy ladle, and the golden liquid filled and flowed like lava from the mound of potatoes. My potatoes were ruined, I said; but to make up for my disappointment my mother placed a plump drumstick on my plate. I bent forward and inhaled the wonderful, warm aroma.

While I poked around at my potatoes with my fork, trying to gather a pure, gravy-free portion, my father began to chew on a piece of meat from his plate. He chewed and he chewed, and then he laid his fork down and said that was the last time we’d raise a rooster, even if it was a gift. My chair fell over when I pushed myself away from that table.

Down there in the basement, where earlier in the day Red had scattered his dried corn kernels, I cried the tears of anger. The water dish was gone and so was Red’s food bowl. From overhead I could hear my parents’ voices, their footsteps coming down the stairs.