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

and he continued to move his hand with the food or water dish in and out of their cages as if he were plucking hot coals from a fire. He tried to respect them for their new restraint, but he couldn’t. He knew that the reason they were no longer flying at him was merely because they were hungry and had realized that it was his job to feed them.
    They didn’t like their cages, especially when every day the hens and old Henry left the henhouse to scratch in the fenced-in yard outside. Also, the daytime proximity of Henry and his harem amiably socializing together seemed to enrage the fighting cocks, and every hour or so the pair would crow angrily at the other birds. As always, Henry continued to crow only at sunrise and sunset.
    Ham’s father no longer talked about arranging cockfights and making lots of money from Jack and Gene. Ham’s mother explained that it was illegal anyhow. “And with good reason,” she had said angrily, but that was as much as she would say.
    Every Sunday morning, before Ham and his mother got into the pickup truck and drove to the church in the Center, his father, who never went to church except at Christmas and Easter, paid Ham his fifteen cents—a dime and a nickel. “Put the nickel in the collection plate. Save the dime,” he told his son each time he paid him.
    And Ham did save the dimes. The first Sunday he had been paid, he had taken the calendar down from the kitchen wall, and studying it a while, had calculated that byChristmas he would have saved almost two dollars, which, he decided, he would use to buy Christmas presents—for his parents and his cousins. Until then, he had been too young to have any money of his own, and he had not been able to buy any presents for anyone. Like a baby, he had been forced only to accept. But now that he had a job, he was not a baby anymore.
    Then one Sunday morning in early December, after it had snowed heavily all night long, the milky, overcast sky in the morning and the dense silence of the first snow caused everyone in the family to sleep a few minutes later than usual. Even old Henry overslept and didn’t crow until almost eight o’clock—a half-hour late at that time of the year.
    In a rush to feed and water the birds, Ham neglected to close the door to Jack’s cage with the snap that locked it. He hurried back through the foot-deep snow to the house, and while his father shoveled out the long driveway to the road, he gulped down his breakfast and got dressed for church. Before he and his mother left, his father paid him.
    Later, when they returned from church and walked into the kitchen, his father said somberly to Ham, “Leave your coat on, boy. I want you to come out to the henhouse and see something.” He got up from his chair, put on his own coat and hat, and led his son outside and along the narrow path he had shoveled to the henhouse.
    At the door to the henhouse, his father stopped and lit a cigarette. Then he said, “Go on in,” and Ham swung open the door and stepped inside.
    The cold-eyed fighting cocks, locked inside their cages, were striding rapidly back and forth. Across from them, in the farthest dark corner of the henhouse, the hens were huddled silently together in a rippling mass, all of them facing the wall. And in the center of the packed dirt floor lay the bodyof old Henry, shredded at the breast and head, with a flurry of blood-tipped feathers scattered about it on the floor.
    Ham turned around and stepped back outside to where his father stood smoking and waiting for him. The sky had begun to clear, and the snow glared brightly in the sunlight, so that for several seconds Ham could not see.
    He heard his father say, “You know what happened, don’t you?”
    Ham tried not to cry and finally succeeded and answered, “The fighting cocks killed Henry.”
    “You forgot to close Jack’s cage this morning, and after you and your mother left, all hell broke loose. By the time I got out here, Jack had killed the