The Howling Rooster

Julianne North

Oh, the stories Arthur told about his upbringing in a small town on the Mississippi Delta, dark Faulknerian tales that outraged and saddened Julie.  His mother, Adelaide, emerged as the centerpiece in these tales.
As a child Arthur slept in his parent’s bedroom.  Twin beds dominated the room, but Julie never determined exactly where Arthur slept. One year after his father’s death of lung cancer, the eleven-year-old insisted on moving upstairs to his own room.  His mother opposed the move.  She preferred to keep him close to her to ease the loneliness of widowhood.      
            “Now, Arthur,” she whined, “stay downstairs with me so you can keep me company.  You’re going to be scared up there all by yourself.”
            Her entreaties fell on deaf ears.  As Harold transferred his possessions from his mother’s bedroom to the large guest room upstairs, he marched up the curved marble stairway to freedom.  “Mom, I’m old enough for my own room.  Don’t worry about me. I’m not afraid of the dark.”
            One childhood episode haunted him.  When Harold, Arthur’s father, was diagnosed with lung cancer in the late 1940’s, there was no chemotherapy or radiation to help.  Arthur, sleeping in the bedroom, was often at his father’s side.
             One morning when the two of them were alone, the father teased his son, “You should be outside playing ball with those boys next door.  Someone might think you’re a momma’s boy.”   Arthur winced.  Angered, he punched his father in the chest.
            “I’m no momma’s boy!”   Harold slumped forward in pain. His cancer had advanced into his ribs, and a single punch was enough break a wasted rib.
            Adelaide had overheard Arthur’s shouting and rushed into the room.  “What’s going on in here?” she demanded.  Surveying the room, she spotted Harold holding his rib cage.  “What’s wrong Harold?  Are you hurt?” Wringing her hands, she turned a suspicious gaze on Arthur. “What did you do to your father?”
            “I didn’t mean to hurt him, Mother,” sobbed the child.  “We were just playing.”
            “How could you have hit your father and hurt him?  You know he is sick.  Bad, bad boy!  Shame on you!”
            Arthur burst into tears.  “I didn’t mean to hurt Dad.  Honest.”  His guilt, deepened by the shame his mother heaped on him, stayed with him.  Julie believed that even in adulthood he felt responsible for hastening his father’s death.   Arthur still missed his father, remembering him as a loving and kind man.
            Arthur recounted an earlier incident that took place when he was five or six years old.  Playing in the yard under the supervision of one of the maids, he spotted his mother dressed in white leaving the house to go to a garden party.  He ran to her and grabbed her white dress with his muddy hands, pleading with her not to leave.
            “Momma, don’t go.  Stay and be with me.  Please.”  His mother was furious with the handprints and pushed the child away. 
            “Look what you did to my dress, you naughty boy!  Now I have to change, and I’ll be late for the party.”  She turned to the nanny and ordered her to “take him inside and lock him in the hall closet.” 
            He remembered staying in the dark closet a long time.  He cried for what felt like hours, but no one came.  Although Arthur attempted to mask his pain with humor, Julie began to understand the impact of these experiences on his developing personality.
            He recalled his mother as remote and inconsistently strict.  Sex was a taboo subject in the home. Adelaide never breathed a word to Arthur about the changes that would occur in his body at puberty.  When he was in his early teens, a cousin in her forties came to visit.  During a time when his mother was away from the house on an errand, his cousin lured him into the bathroom, enticed him into the shower and persuaded him to wash her pubic hair.  Arthur never mentioned this incident to his mother. 
            Several years later a male cousin visited from Oregon.  He and Arthur ended up sharing a double bed upstairs because there was no guestroom.  Given the opportunity and the close proximity, the much older cousin made sexual advances to the impressionable 15-year-old.   When Arthur told Julie about the cousin, he did not provide much detail.  She gathered he had rebuffed the cousin and left the bedroom.  Again, Arthur kept quiet about the fondling.
            The first time Julie met Adelaide, the older woman regaled her with stories about her irreproachable family.  It was as if she had pushed a button in Adelaide’s doughy stomach and out gushed the monologue.  “Everyone in my family graduated from college.  They have all been successful in life.  I am so proud of all of them.”  
            Extolling the virtues of her kinfolk in one breath, she ranted against communism and homosexuality in the next.  Her prejudice embraced most ethnic minority groups, the ACLU and California liberals, to name a few. One evening, as Adelaide railed against the evils of homosexuality, Julie thought about the cousins who accosted Arthur years ago. She figured there were at least two pedophiles in the family and possibly one homosexual.  At wit’s end, Julie turned to her and said, “Homosexuality is not a disease. It’s much more common than you think.  You might even have one in your own family.”  Julie’s outburst silenced her, a rare event indeed.
            It must have caused Adelaide great distress to see her only child married to a liberal.  Julie hoped so.  In Adelaide’s mind, Julie was suspect on two counts.  She was a native Californian, for Adelaide a region that embodied self-indulgence and wickedness.  To make matters worse Julie had attended an eastern, Yankee, liberal arts college.  The two women were at opposite poles in temperament and belief systems.  They clashed often.
The educational and vocational choices that Adelaide made following her graduation from the University of Arkansas with a degree in home economics opened a window into her personality.  On weekends she traveled to Arkansas State Fairs in a model T Ford, selected and purchased with her own money.      
At the State Fairs she performed an unusual procedure.  She castrated roosters, a technique also known as caponizing cockerels.  The process involved starving a rooster for at least 24 hours to avoid complications during the surgical removal of the internal testicles. Adelaide insisted that "the birds who did not survive died a quick and painless death by bleeding and that they were not a total loss since they were still good to eat."  This home economics major was not a quilter, baker or jam maker.
            Dismayed by Arthur’s account of his upbringing, the full significance of how his mother’s behavior shaped his temperament and intellect did not become clear to Julie until much later in their relationship.  Arthur was the product of family dynamics that followed the distinctly Southern literary tradition of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.