“Pop, there are some good dogs out there, the kind of dogs that go to heaven one day, but that dog ain’t one of them.”
I said those prophetic words to my father the day he rescued the troublesome stray from the animal shelter—paroled would be a better word—but little did I know the full extent of the trouble ahead. The dog in question was now firmly detained inside a cage in the back of Dad’s pickup as we drove to deal with his latest crimes.
“I needed a good guard dog, and he keeps the foxes, coyotes and burglars away,” Pop had said that day in the dog’s defense, even as the mutt was gnawing up a good electrical cord, urinating on my tires and looking for a garden hose to eat.
“He also keeps away the delivery man, the mail lady, and the Girl Scouts selling cookies,” I had retorted.
Butch came into our lives rather abruptly, kind of like an ominous growth that suddenly appears on your backside, and I was itching to have him removed. Unfortunately, Pop was a lover of almost all animals. Any stray that showed up on his farm got a cot and three square meals a day, no background check needed, no questions asked. He even liked cats, that’s how bad it was.
Of course, my dog and family pet, Barkley, took up with Butch right way. He was always one to succumb to peer pressure and follow the wrong crowd. Soon, Butch had Barkley out all hours of the night, chasing skirts and cars, and hanging out with a pack of other unsavory felons. Before we knew it, all the unprotected maidens along Speed Limit Road became “great with pup.” Phone calls began pouring in from the owners of the dishonored lady dogs, demanding child support from the tramp or his owner.
Then the killings started.
Reports began circulating around the neighborhood of missing, dead, and partially eaten chickens. For a while it was a mystery to everyone but me, but eventually one of the neighbors recorded video evidence from a home security camera and took it to the proper authorities. Sure enough, right there in black and white, was Butch, inside the man’s chicken pen with a hen in his mouth, while my idiot dog was standing there as the lookout, grinning and looking directly at the camera, his fluorescent orange collar leaving no doubt the accomplice was Barkley. It was like watching a Netflix true crime documentary where the accused gets caught red handed on tape. I made a mental note to buy him a new blue collar later in hopes of plausible deniability.
For those of you who don’t know the frontier code of rural South Carolina, there is no mercy for a varmint that dares kill and eat a live chicken, especially a good, productive laying hen. My late Granny, bless her Southern heart, once “whupped” a chicken-tasting dog so bad that I confessed to eating the bird myself just to save him. Both the dog and I sat in church that next Sunday and took Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
As we drove on our apology tour from angry farmer to angry farmer, from henhouse to henhouse, the county animal control officer’s warning still rang in my ears: “Shut that dog up and make amends to the property owners, or I’ll sock you with a hefty fine and have the dog euthanized!”
Even then, Pop still foolishly thought the canine criminal could be rehabilitated. But being an animal lover wasn’t Pop’s only flaw. He also suffered from honesty, with the occasional bout of good citizenship, so he willingly paid every chicken farmer for the dead birds or offered to replace their losses with chickens of his own.
The final visit was with an old farmer everyone called Possum Pete. Possum was a neighbor no one associated with for reasons of both hygiene and reputation. He was sitting on his porch barefooted and wearing crusty overalls, a shotgun leaning against the wall behind him, waiting for us when we pulled up, dust billowing about from his dirt drive. The house was every bit of a hundred years old and in disrepair, and there was a foul smell to the place that I couldn’t describe at first.
Surrounding the old farmhouse was the most motley assortment of ragged, run-down animals I had ever seen. There was a one-eyed calico dog, a three-legged hound dog with flies buzzing around him who may or may not have been merely sleeping, a gaunt milk cow with sagging udders and every rib in her body visible, an equally pathetic horse that needed shoeing, a pen full of the wormiest, sloppiest hogs ever to root the earth, and a small flock of mangy, free-range chickens pecking the bare dirt yard. One chicken had a broken wing that pointed almost skyward, a second had multiple pink spots of hide showing where it had been severely henpecked, and another was almost completely bald, as if Possum had plucked its feathers to butcher the animal for supper but changed his mind before throwing it in the pot. Outward appearances aside, in terms of meat on the bone you could probably butcher the whole flock and barely have enough meat for a chicken salad sandwich, and it would probably kill half of them to pass a decent-sized egg.
“Pop, I think you’re in luck,” I whispered before we climbed from the truck. “I don’t think those sickly, scrawny chickens are worth more than a couple dollars apiece.”
“That the livestock murderer you got back there?” Possum called, reaching for his shotgun. The gun, like everything else about the place, was also an old, ragged affair, held together with wire and duct tape. “He damn sure looks like a cold-blooded chicken killer to me!”
Butch was trying not to make eye contact with the angry farmer, or stare at the free-range chickens for too long. Apparently, that dog was smarter than I gave him credit for.
“Now hold on!” Pop called back; hands raised as we approached. “There’s no need for the gun. I’ve come to make things right and apologize.”
“You’re damn right you’re gonna make things right,” Possum said, spitting on the dirty porch floor. His spittle was brown, but I don’t think he was chewing tobacco. “I talked to me a lawyer, that big shot over in Hampton. He told me that I’m owed some restitution, compensation, and maybe even some reparations. Oh, and he also said something about my emotional infliction and pain and suffering, and I’ve got some actual and punishable damages coming to me, too, or else we gonna have to take this matter up before the Supreme Court there in town.”
“Hold on now,” Pop stammered. “There’s no need to get the courts and any crooked lawyers involved. You just tell me how much you paid for those chickens, or give me a fair market value of what they’re worth, and I’ll write you a check right now. Plus, I’ll throw in a few of my best egg layers just as my way of saying I’m sorry. We can settle this whole business right now, and I promise you it won’t happen again.”
An awkward silence filled the yard of the farmstead, save for the occasional cluck of the surviving chickens and growl of empty animal bellies, as the old farmer thought this over. Maybe it was the way the sunlight struck the porch, but I could swear that Possum’s yellowish, red-rimmed eyes kind of glittered and shined with some furtive, hidden intelligence, or was that pure evil I saw there?
“Fair market value, you say?” Possum asked with a sly grin, before putting his head down in renewed grief. “Well, that scoundrel right there killed 12 of my best chickens. My show chickens, at that!”
I found it strange that Butch had killed such a large and even number of chickens—an even dozen—but I kept my mouth shut. Pop had agreed to pay for all this, so I let him handle the negotiations. My dog was merely an accomplice, as it were, not the ringleader and primary suspect.
“Show chickens?” Pop asked.
“You know, the kind you take down to the county fair and win a blue ribbon with. Yep, six of them poor lost souls were top-dollar, full-blooded chickens with papers! Struck down in their prime! I probably shouldn’t take less than $25 bucks a head for those.”
I took another glance around the yard at the mangy animal misfits. Most of them needed feeding, doctoring, and worming, and a couple needed rescuing and rehoming. There were a few that looked like they might not survive to see sundown. That three-legged dog hadn’t moved since we got there, so I was pretty sure by then that it needed a hole in the ground. But I sure didn’t see any blue-ribbon candidates.
“Papers?” I asked, astounded. “You mean like when you have a AKC registered dog with papers?”
“25 bucks!” My father blurted, more to the point. “Right now, I can buy chickens at the market all day long for only five or ten bucks!”
“And then there’s that half dozen of my heritage chickens your monster of a dog ripped to pieces,” Possum continued. “I’ll have you know those birds were descended from The Original Chicken!”
I had a feeling that this was about to get ugly and out of hand.
“The original chicken?” Pop asked, likely afraid to know the answer.
“Yep, them chickens that your dog kilt and ate came from a straight bloodline all the way back to the very first chicken that came over here on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock,” Possum didn’t miss a beat. By then he was grinning a mostly toothless grin from the porch while trying to feign grief and outrage at the same time, which is not an easy feat. “I’m no history scientist, but I’d be willing to bet before she got on that boat that chicken used to lay eggs for the Queen of England herself! Hell, for all I know that hen might have come descended from the pair that was holed up on Noah’s Ark! My granddaddy used to have papers on all that, but you know, Sherman burned them up when he burnt all those courthouses during the Civil War, so you’ll have to take my word for it.”
“I’ma have to ask at least $50 bucks a piece for those dead birds,” Possum added solemnly, shaking his head in mock grief, “But then I still have all this mental infliction and painful suffering to deal with.”
Pop’s face was turning a shade of purple. I wasn’t sure if it was anger, stress, a cardiac event, or just the strain of doing so much math in his head. I had stopped multiplying the math out after the first batch. I was hoping that he had brought his nitro pills for his heart.
“But if you think all that’s too much,” Possum concluded with an undisguised, unapologetic smirk, “I can stop by and see the animal control officer on my way to the courthouse.”
By the time we pulled out of the driveway, I was beginning to suspect that Pop wasn’t that much of an animal lover anymore, and shooting that dog began to look better and better with each dollar added. But knowing Pop, he would let the felon off with probation and house arrest. We drove home in strained silence for a while before Pop finally spoke, mouth full of heart pills.
“You can’t really blame the dog, you know. Dogs are predators, carnivores, and it’s their instinct to hunt and kill and eat things. I reckon it’s the way God made ‘em. And sometimes these things just happen.”
I looked in the mirror at the dumb dog hanging his head out of the bed of the truck. Butch was almost smiling, ears flapping in the wind, happy to be alive, to see another day and probably eat another chicken. I glanced back at the dashboard to the nitro pill bottle and Pop’s checkbook that were both just a little lighter than before.
It’s a dog-eat-chicken world out there, but somehow, I don’t think canines are the only predators an honest man has to worry about.
Michael M. DeWitt Jr. is a multiple-award-winning journalist, longtime editor of the 144-year-old The Hampton County Guardian, author of four books, including Images of America – Hampton County, Wicked Hampton County and Fall of the House of Murdaugh, and host of the Wicked South Podcast. DeWitt’s work has been published in print and online around Gannett’s nationwide USA TODAY Network, and he has appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS’s 48 Hours, Dateline NBC, and Netflix documentaries.
As a humorist, DeWitt’s award-winning Southern humor newspaper column, “Southern Voices, Southern Stories,” was published in newspapers from Cape Cod to northern California, and he has been a regular contributor for South Carolina Wildlife magazine, Sporting Classics magazine, and its online counterpart, Sporting Classics Daily.
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