Read Online Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks - Free Book Online Page A

so.”
    “What?”
    “To stay away from your fighting cocks?” he tried.
    “No, not exactly,” his father said to him. “I don’t want you to be
afraid
of them, boy. And if you just stayed away from them, that’s all you’d be. Afraid. I want you to
respect
them. Do you understand the difference?” his father asked. “Respecting something that can hurt you is different from just being afraid of it. And to respect the fighting cocks you’re going to have to deal with them face to face. Maybe that way you’ll get over being afraid of them,” he promised. “Do you understand?”
    “No … not really. Maybe I do.”
    “Well, it doesn’t matter. You will,” his father told him. And then he told him that he had a “job” for him. Every morning from then on Ham would have to feed and water the hens and roosters, including the fighting cocks. He would start the next morning, when they would do it together, so he’d know how much corn to give them and how to handle the fighting cocks so they wouldn’t hurt him or escape from their cages. But after that he would have to do it alone. It was a “job,” his father explained, because he was going to be paid for it—fifteen cents a week, every Sunday morning before church.
    But Ham could not stop being afraid of the fighting cocks. He might have if one morning early that first week Gene, the yellow one, had not nipped off a piece of the meat of his hand between thumb and forefinger. After pitching corn into Gene’s cage, Ham simply had not been fast enough in pulling his hand away, and the bird had got him.
    His father had showed him how to do it, but true safety depended on speed, so he was not sorry for Ham. “If you’ddone it the way I showed you, he never would have got you. You’ve still got to learn how to respect those birds. It’s not
fear
that’ll get your hand out of that cage in time. It’s respect.”
    So Ham had concentrated on speed that he believed was derived from respect rather than from fear. He practiced on old Henry, the Rhode Island red, whom he knew he respected and of whom he had no fear whatsoever. He would walk into the henhouse carrying a can of corn, and extending a handful of it, he would call, “Here, Henry! Here, Henry! Corn, Henry!” and the bird, head cocked to one side like a partially deaf old man, would stalk somewhat wobbly toward the boy, and when his beak was a few inches from Ham’s hand, the boy would throw the corn onto the cold, bare ground, and Henry would dive for it.
    If that’s what respect feels like, Ham thought, I like it. I especially like it better than being frightened.
    Nevertheless, when it came time to feed the fighting cocks, the only speed Ham developed seemed to depend on fear. He was terrified of the birds—their endless anger, their suddenness, the weapons they carried. Whenever he neared their twin cages in the corner of the henhouse, his hands started to throb, his arms grew weak, and his back and shoulder muscles stiffened. One night he dreamed that as he opened the sliding door to feed Jack, both cocks had flown out and had furiously attacked his face, hunting madly for his eyes, and he had awakened screaming. When his mother tried to get him to tell her about the dream that had frightened him, he had refused to tell her. “I can’t remember,” he had lied.
    Throughout the fall, Ham struggled to overcome his fear of the fighting cocks. The birds had grown used to his feeding and watering them every morning, so they no longer treated his arrival as a chance to attack or escape but instead waitedpatiently for their food, which, as soon as Ham had slid back the door to their cage, they greedily devoured, swinging their heads like short hatchets swiftly chopping the corn to bits.
    In spite of this change in the birds’ expectations regarding Ham’s arrival, a change that in some sense gave them a measure of reliability and even a type of kindness toward him, he was still frightened of them,