After breakfast and before we left the table we passed around what we call the “Bread Box,” which is a small box of cards, each one about two inches long with a Bible verse printed on it and, say! Do you know what? Just like it had been when Pop had prayed, I felt like a frisky young steer that has just been lassoed, on account of the card I picked out of the box when it was passed to me, had on it, “Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”
When I got through reading my verse aloud like we all do every time, I looked across the table toward Pop, and his grey-green eyes were looking straight into mine. He had a half grin on his face when he said, just as if there wasn’t anybody else in the room, “Your watermelon, and my fence!” I could tell by the expression in his voice that he had been lassoed too!
Poetry and I managed to get through the morning all right, but it was hard to wait until two o’clock in the afternoon. We did quite a little work around the place, though, such as helping Mom with the dishes, helping Pop with the chores and running a few errands for each of them. Once we stopped in the middle of the barnyard, while I pointed out to Poetry the boss hen of our whole flock—the one Pop has named Cleopatra. Cleopatra is a very proud, high-combed, very pretty White Leghorn who, like all boss hens in a hen flock, could peck all the other hens any time she wanted to but not a one of them ever dared to peck her back. She had already proved to them who was boss by giving every one of them a licking one at a time.
“We’ve got a boss hen, too,” Poetry told me as we stood watching Cleopatra proudly lifting her yellow feet and strutting around to show how important she was.
“We have a second boss, too; she pecks every other hen except the boss hen, and Cleopatra is the only one that can peck her,” I said to Poetry, which anybody who knows anything about what Pop calls the “social life of a flock of hens” knows is the way they live and get along with each other. At the very bottom of the social ladder in the Collins’ chicken yard is a bedraggled-looking hen Mom has named Marybelle Elizabeth. She gets pecked by every other hen in the barnyard and can never peck any of them back.
We liked Marybelle Elizabeth, though. She was one of the best laying hens we had, even though in a fight she wasn’t any good at defending herself, and always ate her lunch alone when all the others were through.
I was standing beside Poetry near our garden fence watching Marybelle as she foraged around by herself like she didn’t have a friend in the world. I was feeling very sorry for her and thinking how lonely a life she had to live—how she had to take all the unfair things the other hens did to her and couldn’t ever fight back.
Poetry moseyed on toward the house then and I kept on standing not more than fifteen feet from Marybelle. “Here, Marybelle,” I comforted her, “don’t you feel too bad. I live a kind of henpecked life myself.” Taking a handful of corn from my pocket, I tossed it to her. She lifted her head high, twisted her neck in every direction like she wondered how come anybody wanted to be kind to her, then started in gobbling up the grains of corn as fast as she could.
“Atta girl,” I said to her. “Go to it!”
Pretty soon, Mom called us that dinner was ready and pretty soon after dinner—and after Poetry and I had offered to help Mom with the dishes and she had surprised us by letting us—it was time for the Gang to meet under the Little-Jim tree.