A FABLE
Three old hens lived in the yard of a tender-hearted farmer named Nelly. The hens were at the end of their egg-laying days, but Nelly hated slaughtering her chickens even when they had outlived their usefulness, and the three hens had been with her for a long time. She’d grown rather fond of their cackles and squawks, which, at times, almost sounded like human language. She’d even begun teaching them how to make their noises resemble people-talk more closely, although she wasn’t sure they really understood what she was trying to do, because they didn’t pay much attention to her lessons. But she tolerated them, even though they were bad-tempered and quarrelsome, prone to pecking the other animals who lived on the farm.
In addition, the hens had special qualities. One of them had especially fine plumage, another possessed an exceptional voice, almost as clear and sonorous as a cock’s crow, and because there was no resident rooster, it was she who greeted the dawn every morning. The third, though less overtly gifted, had an air of sensitivity seldom seen in a chicken, and although she followed her more assertive friends’ lead in whatever they did, Nelly thought she always entertained second thoughts she was too shy to express.
So Nelly did her best to take care of the three old biddies, making sure to shoo them into their roost in the barn each evening to keep them safe from the fox who had a lair in the wood outside the farm.
One day two new chickens wandered into the yard. They were as old as the three hens, and Nelly assumed that her neighbor, who owned a much bigger farm, had been getting rid of all his older birds, slaughtering the ones who were still tender enough to make good meat, and driving out those who were too scrawny, perhaps hoping (he wasn’t entirely heartless) that she would take them in before they starved or got killed by predators.
Nelly did, of course. But there was a problem: one of the new birds was a rooster. And the three biddies, even the shy one, hated roosters. During their younger days they’d had more than their fill of being dominated and mounted and generally mistreated by arrogant cocks. She’d already tried to adopt another elderly rooster, and the biddies had set upon him, squawking and pecking, keeping him away from the feed, and making his life so miserable that he’d finally run away, to the old hens’ clucking satisfaction.
But this rooster came in with a hen who seemed fond of him, even though he was obviously past the age of quickening her eggs. The three biddies were fussed, but for the first couple of days they were polite to the hen, and contented themselves with simply ignoring the rooster. As was her habit, Nelly talked to the newcomers to encourage them to cluck and cackle and squawk back, and the pair’s replies sounded at least as much like human talk as the chatter of her old hens.
She was delighted. But the biddies remained resentful of the intruders, especially the rooster. And there came a day when the new hen wandered out of the chicken-yard, leaving the old cock by himself. The biddies lit into him mercilessly, pecking him and even flapping themselves into the air on their ragged wings so they could stab him with the spurs on their feet. He tried to defend himself, but they were too much for him, and finally he ran off to find his mate.
Nelly was afraid the pair would never return. But they showed up that same evening, looking not much the worse for their day outside. The rooster was a little truculent, flaring out his sparse ruff and cackling irritably, but his mate clucked at him, and eventually he unruffled his feathers.
The biddies, however, were furious. They attacked the pair with a vicious energy Nellie could hardly believe they still possessed, at their age. They screeched, squalled, crawked and crowed, pecked with their beaks and stabbed with their spurs, flying up so they could dive down and go for the interlopers’ eyes. The other two birds, terrified, fled for their lives, and the three hens ran right after them, clear out of the chicken-yard and into the woods, just as the sun set.
The fox and his mate, already waking up for the night’s hunt, were astonished when five chickens ran right by the entrance to their den. Unprepared, they let the first two pass, but they killed the other three. Their meat was a little stringy and tough, but better than nothing. The old rooster and his mate managed finally to make their way back to Nelly’s farm, and although she mourned the loss of her three old hens, the pair were equally good company, maybe even better, since they didn’t complain as much. So she went on listening to their chicken-cackles and trying to teach them how to make it more like human speech.
Moral: if you pick on your friends, your enemies will pick you off.
I wrote this fable during the last year Patsy and I studied Italian. We attended a small school called Parliamo Italiano, established by an elderly Italian woman named Signora Lally, who ran it in the top two floors of her elegant brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We started with elementary one, proceeded through the intermediate levels, and arrived at the advanced level, which involved reading great Italian writers and writing reports, in addition to polishing our conversational skills. Our teacher was a woman named Nelly Baldan, and we thoroughly enjoyed our classes with her. Unfortunately, Signora Lally died, and her heirs couldn’t continue the school. But Hunter College had expanded its Italian program, and they offered Nelly a job. To supplement her income, she continued to offer private lessons two evenings a week in her apartment near Hunter. We signed on; Nelly was brilliant, charming, and witty, and we’d become as fond of her as she, I hope, was fond of us.
Unfortunately, she already had three women students who had been with her for awhile, and they regarded us as interlopers. Two of them especially resented me, simply because I was male, and they were fed up with men, for reasons I never discovered. One of them dressed to the nines in designer clothes and shoes; she even wore a fur stole in cold weather. She was a fairly typical donna di un certa `eta, as they say in Italian. Perhaps she had recently divorced and her lawyers had secured her a whopping alimony. I never found out. All I knew was that she detested me, even though – or because – my Italian was as good as hers. The second was an opera singer who was studying Italian to improve her comprehension and pronunciation of the arias she sang. Back then, Patsy and I attended the Metropolitan Opera several times a year, but we never saw the singer. Perhaps she worked at the City Opera.
I never found out what the third woman did for a living. She wasn’t as resentful toward me as her two friends; in fact, she was rather shy, and Nelly had to coax her to contribute to the conversations. She was the same age as the other women, and I figured she had been friends with them since childhood, attending the same school and college. I remembered her type from my own school days: the non-assertive teenager who is adopted by a couple of brasher girls as a sort of mascot. When she did speak up, she said highly intelligent things, in excellent Italian, but she always looked at her two friends first, almost as if asking their permission to talk.
Of course the three “hens” didn’t meet a bad end, at least not that I know of. But the motto of my cautionary still applies to them: if you develop a habit of attacking people who want to be your friends, you’ll turn them into your enemies, and they will get back at you. Perhaps by writing a fable.