Betty is dead. She died under the fig tree I had just seen her under two hours ago, happily eating and pecking at the ground. And now she’s dead, under a low lying limb, like she was going to get up but something told her to stay down on the black soil for a minute or two longer and next thing you know you will be buried in it within the hour.

She must’ve had a heart attack. That’s what Taylor said when he saw her body, saw how limp she was and felt how warm her body was, especially under her wings. She probably had a heart attack right when you pulled up. Right when she heard your car. Then he looked away, not wanting to see her body anymore and wonder what had happened to her.

At first I didn’t want to tell him she was dead. I thought about burying her first then telling him later, but I didn’t know where to dig. You can’t just bury your pet chicken in someone else’s yard. He was kindly letting me keep my chickens at his place, and he more than kindly allowed Betty to stay inside his house in her cage since she never acclimated to the heat of the Alabama summer due to a terrible injury she had in May. Also, he had lost a bet. That’s really how he ended up with a chicken in his house. 

When I had asked him if she could stay inside the house it was only if, once inside the house, she ate her food. She hadn’t been eating, due to the oppressive heat, and I told him I thought she might if she could stay inside and cool off. “If she eats then she can stay.” And she did eat. So she stayed. She went to his porch every day at dusk while the other chickens ran to the coop to roost. She ate at midnight once her body had completely cooled off and she crowed in the morning when it was time to let her out. 

I ordered her a red polka dot chicken diaper from a place on the internet called My Pet Chicken, and I imagined the photos of Betty in her Minnie Mouse bloomers, standing in the living room of the Mayor’s house. “Mayor of Waverly and his pet chicken, Betty” the newspaper photos would say. That morning, the morning of her death, I thought about this year’s Christmas card and wondered if I should get all the chicken’s diapers to match Betty’s.

No. Just Betty on the Christmas card. Maybe with her Mayor.

He asked me where he should bury her while I was remembering the Christmas card idea. He motioned towards his neighbor’s dirt mover and said it wouldn’t take him long to do it. Maybe she should go near the burn pile? He had been burning brush and old lumber all day, so the burn pile was a coal ring and before I knew it he was on the mini-x, the dirt mover, and the sun was just about gone. 

He gently scooped the first chunk of earth alongside some coals and methodically placed the dirt to the side. I watched a few more scoops and marveled over how long it would’ve taken me to dig a hole in this hard earth. How many holes have I dug in my lifetime? How many times had I offered the earth a piece of my heart? 

After the hole was deep enough to keep coyotes from trying, I picked up Betty’s body and walked her to the hole Taylor had dug. My intentions were to gently place her body in her grave only it was too deep for me to reach down so I had to kind of toss her down into it, like throwing a sack of sand. This made me laugh a little, though I don’t think Taylor saw me. It’s hard not to be awkward and kind of harsh with a chicken’s body in a deep dark hole while the boy you’ve admired for most of your adult life looks on with the controls of a dirt mover in his gentle hands. He covered her up with the soil that matched her feathers, and then it was over. There was a tenderness in the process that I didn’t know death could have. 

The whole affair took five minutes. 

But the hole that Betty leaves will last a lifetime. 

Now, every time we gather around the burn pile in the Mayor of Waverly’s backyard, we gather around the body of one of the best chicken girls I’ve ever known.