From The Bill from My Father: A Memoir by Bernard Cooper
Light shot from the lens of the projector and burrowed through the room. It flickered over the furniture and gave the dark a restless depth. I watched dust motes whirl and collide in the beam, and this bright turmoil, this erosion of countless powdery grains, was proof of a fact I knew all along but hadn’t grasped until that moment: the world was being ground to bits. I was still transfixed when I heard my father tell me to snap out of it and pay attention to what was on the screen.
In a wood-paneled office, a stout black woman sat across a desk from a white man, whose bony hands were folded atop an ink blotter. A pen holder slanted in his direction, and next to it a name plate identified him as a judge. His lips moved nonstop, but the film was silent and I couldn’t make out a word he was saying. All the while he stared into the camera with the unnatural expression of a person who’d been told to act natural and not stare into the camera. The woman paid respectful attention, leaning forward once or twice in a futile effort to interrupt. She clutched under one arm a leather-bound book that was either a Bible or a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. On the desk beside her lay an overstuffed purse.
The judge was still yammering when the purse, without so much as a twitch of forewarning, stood up, wavered on two spindly legs, and walked toward him, though “walked toward him” suggests that the purse had a particular destination, whereas its halting progress was more along the lines of two steps forward, one step back. For a moment I wondered whether it was a marionette, though I couldn’t see strings, and besides, who in their right mind would make a marionette that looked like a staggering handbag? No, the purse’s senselessness hinted at the possibility that it once possessed sense and now was trying to get along without it. This was animal motion, too reflexive with muscle and nerve to be anything inanimate.
The judge’s mouth stopped moving when the scruffy whatever-it-was lurched into his line of vision. He gave it a wary, sidelong glance, ready to react should something unexpected occur, which, considering what had occurred already, would have to be inconceivably strange. That’s when the camera slowly zoomed in, moving as if it, too, were an animal, a predator hunting its unsuspecting prey. It slid between the woman and the judge, intent on the mound in the middle of the desk. Feathers slowly came into focus. Wings bristled as the creature breathed.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“Watch,” said my father.
He had been a witness to the actual event, but because I didn’t know this yet, his Watch was like a magic command that caused what happened next to happen. A stump emerged from the thing’s right side, which until that point had looked identical to its left. The stump pivoted toward the camera and paused long enough to reveal its severed end. A tunnel of tendon and pearly bone led inside the creature’s body, the sight no less gruesome in black-and-white. The woman’s fingers descended into view, holding an eyedropper by its rubber bulb. She squeezed until a bead of clear liquid glistened at its tip, then angled it toward the cavity. The stump strained upward.
The idea of watching the creature being fed made me speechless, queasy. How much closer would the camera zoom? What kind of contractions would swallowing involve? That blind, groping, hungry stump was the neediest thing I’d ever seen. Leaving the room was out of the question; my father would view my retreat as rudeness, or worse, as proof that I was a delicate boy unworthy of paternal wisdom. I couldn’t have fled anyway; sunk in the possessive depths of the couch, I could barely move.
The droplet wobbled.
“Sugar water,” said my father.
Not until later that night, after unsuccessfully begging myself to please stop thinking about the gaping wound, did I realize that sugar water referred to the solution in the eyedropper. At the time, however, my father might as well have said spoon clock or hat bell for all the sense his comment made.
The pendulous droplet fell into the stump. Then another and another. For all that creature knew it had started to rain, and the rain tasted sweet. As the woman doled out the final drops, words scrolled up the screen:
There is hope for you too
when you see how divine power
keeps Lazarus alive!
Mrs. Martha Green’s decapitated fowl
lives to become
THE MIRACLE CHICKEN!
This 20th century wonder brings a possibility
of new life and new healing
to an army of believers.
It’s all TRUE!
This movie is AUTHENTIC!
The woman’s purse was a headless chicken. I might have uttered this fact aloud since it came as such a great, if short-lived, relief. My father had used the phrase “like a chicken with its head cut off” to describe all manner of frenzied activity, applying it to bad drivers and harried salespeople and even to my mother, who cooked dinner in a state that could be described either as motherly gusto or stifled rage. Every time I heard the expression, I pictured the figurative chicken running around a barnyard in circles and spurting a geyser of blood before dropping dead in the dust. Dropping dead forever, I should add, because it never occurred to me that a chicken might survive its execution, give hope to humans, and star in a film. Wasn’t a head indispensable?
Dad towered beside the projector, his figure awash in flickering light. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar.
“There’s your old man,” he said, pointing to the screen.
A crowd dressed in Sunday finery milled around the front lawn of a clapboard house. People stepped aside to let my father pass, a sea of hats parting before him. Mrs. Green trailed in his wake. She cradled Lazarus in her arms, careful not to let the bird be jostled and also not to hide it from view. Making his way through the crowd, Dad cast frequent backward glances to make sure Mrs. Green and her bird were behind him. Photographers jockeyed to get a good shot. Reporters frantically scrawled on their notepads. Men and women craned their necks, some letting children straddle their shoulders to get a better look.
Mrs. Green refuses to hand Lazarus over to the S.P.C.A. despite a court order from Judge Stanley Moffatt. Her attorney, Edward S. Cooper, claims the bird is “an act of providence for the benefit of all mankind.”
The throng of spectators, two or three people deep, waited behind a listing picket fence as my father escorted Mrs. Green into a yard overgrown with blooming hibiscus and bougainvillea. She seemed at home there, so I supposed the yard was hers. It may have been an effect of the grainy eight-millimeter film, but this ramshackle Eden glowed with an ancient, paper-thin light, as if the screen had turned to parchment. It wouldn’t have surprised me if one of the bushes had burst into flame and spoken in a holy baritone.
My father carried his monogrammed briefcase by his side. He and Mrs. Green walked to a small table that had been set up on a patch of grass. They glanced nervously at the camera, humbled by the expectant crowd. Black and Caucasian faces looked on, soldiers in an army of believers. Mrs. Green gazed almost sorrowfully at the bundle in her arms. Hesitant to let it go, she inhaled a bracing, duty-bound breath, then gingerly lowered the chicken onto the table. Its feet dangled like scrawny tassels, and once his legs touched the table top, they buckled without a hint of resistance.
I’d learned over the years to heed my father’s impatience as one would a storm warning, and watching him stand there on-screen, I recognized signs of impending anger as he glared at that motionless bird. A prominent vein bulged on his forehead. His grip on the briefcase tightened. I could almost hear him thinking, Of course this would happen. What did I expect? Just when things were going my way, fate sticks out its leg and trips me. He and Mrs. Green stood side by side and I thought I saw him nudge her with a silent ultimatum: Do anything you have to do, but get that goddamn poultry to move! You want people thinking this is some kind of hoax? I felt the weight of his briefcase in my hand, his hot collar encircling my neck, his heart thumping inside my chest. “What if it doesn’t move?” I asked. Meaning if it didn’t, would we both be ashamed?
He looked worried in the movie but not in real life. He smiled faintly and crossed his arms.
“That bird’s as alive as I am,” he said.
Silent concern rippled through the crowd; a few people used their hats as fans or consulted hefty, gilt-edged Bibles. Mrs. Green patted her forehead with a hankie. The twentieth-century wonder looked about as wondrous as a feather duster.
What were my father and Mrs. Green to do? They couldn’t rouse it by snapping their fingers or waving their hands in front of its face. Maybe they could communicate to the bird through touch, the way Annie Sullivan had tapped the word water on Helen Keller’s hand. Of course, it wouldn’t look good if my father and Mrs. Green started poking at the chicken; you can’t badger a miracle to happen and then expect people to marvel when it does.
I gasped when the chicken sprang to its feet, wings thrashing the air. Feathers bristled when it stretched its stump. The camera pulled back as if rearing in fear and astonishment. People in the background flung up their arms in a mute hallelujah. Mrs. Green’s unbounded joy caught my father off guard; he swayed in her embrace, eyeing the chicken over her shoulder. Big letters bellowed from the screen:
Cock-A-Doodle-Do!
My father’s high, delighted laughter rose over the sound of the projector.
“Is that chicken something?”
“Rooster, you mean?”
“Chicken,” he corrected, annoyed that I might have missed the big finish, might have been distracted when water turned to wine.
“Chickens don’t crow,” I told him.
“What?”
Tricky business, repeating a statement that belonged, I realized too late, in the “back talk” category. I scrambled to match oinks and tweets and moos with the appropriate animal, only to discover that the correspondences were more debatable than I’d realized. My rooster remark sounded arrogant now, and possibly untrue. “Do roosters crow?” I found myself asking.
The projector lit my father’s face from below. His chin and brow were islands of light, his eye sockets deep, unreadable. “Supposing a chicken doesn’t crow,” he said. “Then this one’s more of a miracle.”
* * *
Remember the headless rooster?” I asked.
My father leaned toward the microphone.
“Chicken,” he insisted, then sat back in his chair.
“But the chicken supposedly crowed, Dad. And chickens—I’d stake my life on this—don’t crow. They cackle. Or cluck?”
The querulousness in my voice, and the irritation in his, had been preserved for thirty years.
“Look,” he said, “if the client says a chicken crowed, the chicken crowed. Mrs. Green heard it. So did half the people who were at the press conference that day. Maybe they were in a religious state. That kind of thing has never happened to me personally, so I wouldn’t know. All I know is that Mrs. Green buys the chicken from a local butcher, takes it home for dinner, puts a pot of water on the stove, and when she goes to pluck the thing, it stands up and starts strutting around the kitchen like this was just another day on the farm. She’s standing there gawking when a voice comes out of nowhere and tells her to name the bird Lazarus, and she hollers, ‘Praise the Lord.’” Here my father lifted his arthritic arms as high as he was able, the jumpsuit stretching taut across his belly. “She gets on the phone to call her friends, who call their friends, and so on, and pretty soon people are showing up at Mrs. Green’s house in droves, lining up just to get a look at the thing. Being your enterprising type, she starts charging admission. Can you blame her? She sees a brass ring and she grabs it. That’s America.”
Book “The Bill from My Father: A Memoir” by Bernard Cooper
Painting” “The Cock” by Chef and Artist Jacques Pepin