the death of the last white male

The death of the last white male occurred on the very first day of the Chinese New Year, and to make matters worse, it was the Year of the Cock. When Grace discovered the lifeless body, she was filled with foreboding. He was a Silkie, a magnificent bird with showy snowwhite plumage, and sapphire blue cheeks, and a powder puff on the top of his head. His name was Gorgeous, but mostly they just called him “The Gimp” on account of the limp he had acquired in a battle with his predecessor, Bootsie, who had been the king of the roost until he died of a mysterious flu-like illness. They had put The Gimp in charge then, and he took over running the white hens, but he was never quite up to the job, possibly due to his crippled leg. He could never quite get on top of things, Grace complained, and after he took over, the number of fertilized eggs dropped precipitously, as did the number of new white chicks. In fact, the survival of the entire white population had been looking iffy for some time now.

Death came from the sky in the form of Buteo lagopus, a roughlegged hawk, pausing in its spring migration to Alaska for a quick bite of lunch. Like a Chinese roadside buffet, Grace thought. Allyou-can-eat. She had known something was amiss when she passed the chicken run on her way to the grocery store, and there was nary a bird in sight. Not a cluck to be heard, nor a feather to be seen. Grace thought they had all flown the coop, until she happened to look underneath it and saw them tightly huddled there, a quivering ball of feathery terror. She looked to the sky then, searching for a cause, and spotted the hawk. It was sitting in a snag, staring at Grace with a nictitating yellow eye.

Of course Grace couldn’t really see the yellow eye nictitate way up in the snag. It was too far away, and her own eyesight was getting worse. Bob maintained that the degeneration was due to all the time she had spent in front of screens. Cathode-ray tube technology was hard on the eyes, he said, so it was only natural, but Grace couldn’t accept this. She had always taken pride in the acuity of her vision. Like a hawk’s.

Seeing the hawk, she thought briefly that perhaps she should stay close to the coop, that she should do something, but instead she continued on her way. She was going to the store to buy nine perfect oranges for their New Year celebration. The chickens would be alright, she thought, and the store was closing. She had just enough time to walk there, and the oranges were necessary for luck. Bob was out in the forest cutting firewood when Buteo lagopus made its kill. Later, when he came in, and Grace told him about the death of the last white male, he raised his eyebrows at her choice of words, but he didn’t take it personally. Grace tended to fetishize whiteness, at least when it came to fowl.

“And husbands,” her husband added.

“Foul white husbands,” Grace repeated. “Yes.”

“Don’t say things you’ll regret,” Bob said. “Death can strike you down in the blink of a nictitating eye.”

Grace thought about the yellow eye. She thought about the way hawks hover, riding the updraft, their wing tips barely fluttering. She thought about the trembling ball of earthbound chickens below, and about Gorgeous, strutting bravely out to confront his foe and strike terror into the deadly raptor’s mind. A fool’s errand, apparently.

“It’s the end of the white race,” Grace said, mournfully. “Now all our birds will be brown.”

“I like the brown ones,” Bob said. “They have a beautiful, henna colored variegation.”

“I like the white ones.”

“There’s a reason the brown ones survive, you know. They’re better adapted. If you were a hawk, hovering half a mile in the air, and you saw a brilliant white bird and a dun-colored one, which would you go for? Which makes the better target?”

“White males do make good targets.”

“Glad to oblige.”

Grace didn’t actually see Gorgeous make his futile and suicidal run at the hawk. When she passed the henhouse on her way back from the store with her bag of oranges, the deed was done, and what remained was the aftermath. At first all she saw was a flocculent white pile, which she took to be a small drift of melting snow until she saw it moving. Drawing closer, she made out the shape of the victorious raptor, straddling the now lifeless Gorgeous, flipping him over and looking for his heart.

Grace felt her own heart sink. It’s my fault, she thought. I should never have gone to the store. I should have stayed and guarded the

coop. She took a step forwards. Feeling the woman approach, the hawk paused and glanced at her, but only briefly, and then went back to ripping the brilliant white feathers from the breast of its prey.

Should I scare it away, Grace thought. Yes, of course I should. We can’t have hawks killing our chickens. We can’t have them thinking that our hens are easy. We don’t want them coming back for more. But Grace didn’t move at first, because there was something about the utter indifference that the hawk demonstrated toward her presence, which she was loathe to disrupt.

Perhaps it’s endangered, Grace thought. Perhaps I should let it finish eating. A rooster is a small price to pay for the survival of a whole species, even if he was our last white male. Besides, he’s already dead.

She took a step closer and paused. Why isn’t it scared of me?

Curious now, Grace picked up a small stick and advanced. The hawk looked up once again with its indifferent yellow eye.

Grace raised her arms, raised the little stick into the air above her head. “Shoo!” she said.

The hawk blinked, unimpressed, then it dipped its head and sunk its beak into the rooster’s breast, extracting the bright red heart. The hawk looked back at Grace. Now that she was closer, she could see the clear membrane slide horizontally over the fierce yellow eye. The hawk flipped back its head, opened its beak, and transferred the heart to its crop. Then, leisurely, it spread its great wings, flapped them once, twice, thrice, and flew away.

Grace carried her stick into the coop and approached the pile of feathers that had once been Gorgeous. There was a neat little incision where his heart had been. The breast feathers were stained bright red. She couldn’t see his head.

Maybe it’s not him, she thought, hopefully. Maybe it’s just one of the hens.

She poked the corpse with her stick until the head flopped over, revealing the deep plum-colored walnut that he sported on his forehead in place of a comb, which marked him as a Silkie male. Under his fluffy white feathers, he had the blue-black skin, characteristic of his breed. His brilliant sapphire cheek patch, another characteristic, was already dulling. His eyes were dulling, too. Now that he was dull with death, she didn’t want to touch him.

Stupid, she thought. He’s just dead, not contagious. But still she went and got the rubber gloves that Bob kept in the barn to use when cleaning chicken shit from the coop, and she got a bucket, too, and brought these back into the run. With a gloved hand, she picked Gorgeous up by a foot and lowered him head first into the bucket.

No, she thought. She put her hands on either side of his body and turned him around so that his feet were down and his head was up. That was better. His body felt frail and stiff through the thick rubber. She retrieved the plastic bag of oranges that she had left by the gate and carried the bag and the bucket back up to the house. She didn’t want to leave the dead rooster in the run in case the hawk came back to finish him off, and besides, she thought, the sight of him might be demoralizing to the hens.

Back in the house, she placed the oranges in a bowl on the kitchen counter next to the window. The nine perfect orbs of California sunshine looked waxy and unreal in the surly Pacific Northwest twilight. It was February, and the days were short.

“Crepuscular,” she whispered, looking away from the oranges and peering at the dim outdoors where the mist weighed heavy on the boughs of the cedars.

She had spent the previous week cleaning their kitchen. It was a Chinese New Year ritual she had learned from a Feng Shui expert on a home and garden show on television. Grace’s parents had immigrated to the United States when she was a little girl, but she had never felt much need to get in touch with her Chinese roots while living in America. Here in Canada, however, people were a lot more multicultural, and she felt she should make an effort. Now, in the week prior to the New Year, she set to work clearing out the stagnant energy of the old year and making room for abundance and luck in the new. She emptied the pantry and refrigerator of stale food. She gathered all the jars that were less than half full, and filled or discarded them. She cleared the refrigerator door of all magnets and mementos. She replaced the worn out sponges and dish towels with new ones. Then, with a broom, she swept the old year’s dirt from the kitchen, straight down the hallway, and out the door.

Bob had helped. His job was to locate and remove all the dead shrews that he had stashed in Ziplock bags and tucked into the deep recesses of the freezer. These were shrews that the cat, intent on winning Grace’s love, had killed and brought to her as offerings. The cat also brought her deer mice and rats and squirrels and small birds, too. Sometimes he would leave just a single organ—a gleaming liver or tiny kidney—on the floor by her side of the bed, where she would be sure to find it with her bare feet when she woke in the morning. Bob wasn’t interested in these leavings, however. It was only the intact shrews he collected, saving their little bodies to take to the island shrew expert for identification. The shrew expert was studying the mandibular morphology of the Vancouver Island water shrew, Sorex palustris brooksi, which was an endangered species.

“Everything around here is endangered,” Grace complained.

Bob sighed. “Yes,” he said. “It is.” Patiently he had tried to answer her question as to why it was necessary to fill their freezer with dead rodents.

“It’s our duty to count,” he said, “to keep track of the losses. And, by the way, shrews are not rodents.”

“I thought they were rodents.” She had always lived in large cities. The shrews looked like kitchen mice, the kind she used to capture in glue traps. She would set the traps behind the stove at night, and then in the morning she would collect the stuck mice and beat them to death with a rolled up newspaper as they struggled to free themselves from the lethal adhesive.

“Different order,” Bob said. “Shrews are Insectivora. They have five toes, like Silkies, not four. See?” He held up a foot.

Once, a small mouse had gotten his foot caught in the glue. Just one hind foot. When Grace checked the trap in the morning, the mouse was already dead. It had died trying to chew off its leg. She hadn’t thought to count the toes.

“Fine,” Grace said, turning away from the dead little shrew. “Just please get rid of them by New Year’s.”

The nine oranges were necessary for the last part of the ritual. After the kitchen was clean, she and Bob would stand on the threshold of their house and take turns rolling the oranges, one by one, through the front door. This was to symbolize the luck coming into their household. But this year, as she waited for her husband to return from chopping firewood, she thought about Gorgeous, dead in the bucket on the porch, and her enthusiasm for the New Year, in general, and orange rolling, in particular, faded, replaced once again by the sense of foreboding. She knew she was being silly. She knew they could always get another white male—Silkie cockerels weren’t a dime a dozen, but neither were they particularly rare. Still, knowing this did nothing to dispel her dread, which was like a toxic fog,  heavy and pestilent, settling into a hollow. She had grown used to it. It predated the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war. Perhaps it had started with Y-2K.

They both felt it, and they had hoped that moving to Canada would help. They’d been coming to the island every summer since before they were married, but after 9/11, they decided to try living here year round. Canada seemed like a better place to raise children. There was public healthcare. Bob could continue his research away from the distractions of the city, and Grace would quit her accounting job and concentrate on getting pregnant. And for a while, Grace found that her spirits had indeed lifted somewhat, but as time passed, she came to feel that from this vantage point up north the goings-on down south of the border were all the more disturbing, and there was even less she could do about it. She felt helpless. Bob didn’t mind the fact that the islanders still thought of them as “the Americans,” but Grace found herself hoping to pass for Chinese. A week after she turned forty, she learned that she was pregnant. Bob was ecstatic, and at first so was she. Then, slowly, her dread returned.

She sat down at the kitchen table to wait for Bob, turning on the radio instead of the TV. The radio host in Toronto was interviewing an expert from the Center for Disease Control about the H5N1 influenza virus. The clock was ticking, the expert said. Trans-specific viral migration of Asian avian flu was occurring at an alarming rate. A pandemic was no longer a question of if, but of when. Hundreds of thousands of chickens in Southeast Asia were starting to shiver and fall over dead. Migratory birds were being infected. The flu was spreading to house cats and pigs. Forty-five black-striped Bengal tigers in a Bangkok zoo had died and more than a hundred others sickened and had to be destroyed. And people were starting to die, too. Babies, mostly. Children who’d come into contact with chickens. If the virus continued to mutate and develop the ability to mix or swap its avian genes with human genes, the flu could infect 25 to 30 percent of the world’s population. Hundreds of millions of people could die.

In December, 1997, when the same flu hit, every last chicken in Hong Kong had been killed and buried in landfills. Grace had watched it on television. She still had family in Hong Kong, aunties and uncles and cousins, and so she was concerned. She had watched the trucks drive up to the farms, and the men, dressed head-to-toe in moon suits and protective bio-hazard gear, jump from them like aliens landing. They had stuffed the living chickens in white bags and then gassed them. They used earth movers and cranes to shovel the bags into enormous holes in the earth. A million-and-a-half birds. She heard the sound of Bob’s boots scraping on the porch. She heard the sound of him stopping, followed by silence as he paused to look down into the bucket. She got up and walked to the front door and opened it. He was squatting by the bucket with Gorgeous in his hands, turning him over, examining the neat incision. He looked up when he heard her on the threshold.

“Hawk?” he said.

She nodded. “He’s our last white male,” she said.

He raised his pale eyebrows.

They would bury Gorgeous under a tree, Bob said, and Grace could choose which one. She chose a flowering plum whose white blossoms reminded her of snow and feathers. It seemed wasteful to bury a perfectly good chicken, particularly a Silkie, whose black flesh and bones were prized in China for their health-giving properties, but she didn’t want to cook him and eat him, either. She felt it wasn’t right to eat food that had died of natural causes, as if the act of killing, itself, was what rendered an animal comestible. She knew it was silly.

“Not to worry,” Bob said, tamping down the earth. “Nothing is wasted. He’ll make good fertilizer. When you eat a sweet plum in August you can think of Gorgeous.”

She ran her hands over her stomach. In August, their baby would be two months old. In August, she would be eating sweet plums and nursing a baby. She wouldn’t want to think of Gorgeous. She shook her head. The whole thing seemed impossibly far away. She remembered the waiting oranges, but after what had happened, she wasn’t sure what to do.

“Maybe it’s too late,” she said. “Maybe they’re bad luck now, and we shouldn’t roll them in.”

“Don’t be silly,” Bob said, taking her hand and pulling her up the hill to the house. “Come on.”

She let him lead her, but she wasn’t convinced. He was so American. What did he know about luck? When he offered her an orange, she shook her head. He shrugged and took aim. His arm was strong, and the orange rolled crazily down the long hallway, followed by another. One by one, they bounced against the cedar walls, bumping down the basement steps, veering and careening into the bedroom, the kitchen, even the bathroom. Watching him bowl the sunny orbs, Grace felt her heart lift. What he didn’t know about luck, he made up for in enthusiasm.

“There,” Bob said. “Done.” He grinned and picked Grace up in his strong arms. Following the route of the oranges, he carried her over the threshold and set her down carefully in the middle of the kitchen. He retrieved an orange from under the stove and dug into its thick rind with a blunt thumb. He peeled off the skin and broke it into sections. He offered her one, slipping it between her lips.

“Pure California sunshine,” he said.

She could taste the bitter citrus oil on the hard edge of his thumb. She bit into the pulp, expecting a burst of sweetness, but the fruit was disappointing, its flesh dry and insipid and slightly rotten-tasting. She wrinkled her nose and spit it out. It had looked so perfect from the outside.

Bob chuckled. He bent down, and brushed a bit of pulp from the corner of her mouth, and gave her a quick kiss. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just you wait for them plums.”