On the Matter of My Crowing

A Personal Account

I want it on record that I did not ask for this.

I am a rooster. I have been a rooster for three years. I have a corner of the yard I prefer, a particular patch of gravel where the worms surface after rain, and a routine that, until last Thursday, had served me and everyone around me quite well. I crowed at dawn. That was the arrangement. Dawn. Once. Everyone understood it. The arrangement was good.

Then came the night they brought the teacher into the high priest's house.

I will not pretend I understood what was happening. They had built a fire in the middle of the courtyard - not at the edge, in the middle, which already suggested the night had ambitions and a group of them had settled around it as though they meant to stay. I had already decided to remain on my wall and mind my own affairs when something, and I can only describe it as a nudge, the way the wind moves before you hear it -told me to pay attention to the man who had come in and sat down among them.

He did not belong there. I could tell. Roosters notice these things.

A servant girl noticed too. She looked at him closely, the way you look at something you are trying to place and said he had been with the teacher.

He said he did not know the man.

I waited.

After a little while, someone else looked at him and said the same thing. He was one of them, surely.

He said he was not.

I waited. About an hour passed. I am a just rooster - I have no appointments. I waited.

A third person spoke up, more confident than the others, and named the detail that apparently settled it: his accent, his region, the small geography of his voice that had followed him all the way to this courtyard and refused to be left outside.

He said he did not know what they were talking about.

And while the words were still leaving his mouth -

I crowed!!!

Not at dawn. Not because I wanted to. Once, loud, full and clear, as if I had been holding it the entire hour and the hour was now exactly spent.

From inside the house, the teacher turned and looked in his direction.

That was all. Just the look.

The man got up from the fire and walked out of the courtyard. I watched him from my wall. He did not go far, only far enough to be away from the fire and the voices and then he stopped, and he wept. Not quietly. The kind of weeping that has been waiting a long time to happen and no longer cares who hears it.

I stayed on my wall and I watched him, and I did not crow again.

I have not crowed since.

I had a perfectly good arrangement with the dawn. I did not ask for this.

But I am no longer, strictly speaking, just a rooster.

I am a reminder. A reminder of how quickly a man can become a stranger to himself.