REVENGE!

Revenge is a dish best served cold, it has been said. The only way I like revenge served cold is maybe on a sandwich. Yes, I’ve been known to eat revenge.

It all started when I was a little over two years old. Dad and his boss went hunting, for pheasants I think, and brought the families with. One family consisted of Joe, his wife Josephine, and their black Lab named Prince. The other was Mom, Dad, and me. I wasn’t expected to be as helpful as the retriever.

I got to feed the chickens on the farm the first morning we were there. The chickens were much more interested in pecking my ankles through my socks than they were in the corn I threw from the bucket I carried. After my legs were cleaned up and my bloody socks changed, I went back outside, steering clear of the chickens. I headed over to the pigpen to check out a sow and her new litter. The sow was a very protective mother and tried to tear down the wall of the pen to scare me away. I had just climbed up for a better look when the world shook and the sow snorted as if to say, “Leave my babies alone!” I got the message and spent the rest of the day in the kitchen with Mom, Josephine, and Mrs. K to keep me safe.

That night, after dinner, I went to bed in an upstairs bedroom. I like to think I slept with Prince but think it was more likely I did not. He probably slept in the barn.

The next day the men took the women with them in my father’s Nash sedan when they went hunting. Of course I went with. I was afraid to be left at the farmhouse with animals trying to get me. Daddy’s car had always been a safe place.

The men grabbed their guns and Prince and headed out to hunt birds. They hoped to get enough to take home for themselves and to feed the farmhouse for dinner. Soon enough they were nowhere to be seen.

The women talked women talk. I looked out the window and ate apples and oranges from a paper bag. Mom and Josephine ate apples and oranges too. They threw the apple cores and orange peels out the car windows. So did I. That was not allowed on the streets of Chicago but seemed perfectly natural in a farmer’s field in South Dakota.

Belly full, I took a nap until I heard a commotion from the front seat. Mom and Josephine were very upset. I think it was the first, and maybe the last, time I saw my mother afraid of anything. Josephine tried her best to keep from screaming. She failed. Mom wished out loud the men had left her a gun. I looked out the windows of the car and saw the ground had changed. Gone was green flecked with wildflowers, apple cores, and orange peels. Now all we saw were the backs of giant animals surrounding the car. Maybe it was instinct that sent me balancing on the back of the driver’s seat and reaching for the car horn. Mom helped me with the car horn. She was bigger than I was, closer to the steering wheel, and much more successful at making a racket our hunting men were sure to hear.

Hear it they did. The first evidence of their return were gunshots into the air, of course. It wouldn’t do to kill a bunch of Farmer K’s hogs. Prince tried carefully to herd the hogs away from the car. Dad and Joe yelled at the hogs, shooting in the air each time the giant pigs halted. Soon we were all together. Daddy heard the story of the hogs surrounding us. Then he heard how I was the hero with the car horn. On the way back to the farmhouse, birds collected and put in the trunk, Prince sitting next to me in the back seat, my father suggested I think of those hogs the next time he cooked bacon for breakfast. It was his way of making any fear disappear. I took it one step more, pretending the pheasant I would eat that night was really one of those chickens from the morning before.

Can anybody really blame me for enjoying pork and chicken? Yes, friends, revenge is sweet, especially with a good barbeque sauce.