Why the Cock Crows

by Vickie

So, roosters. 

They are beautiful in the sun.  The one beside the house has feathers that are a shimmering mix of copper, jade, gold, and ruby hues. He resembles, if for one moment he stands still, the masterwork of an artist. He stands, not in the austere space of a Paris museum, but surrounded by trash and dirty water and naked children.

The story goes that roosters crow at dawn. This, I can verify, is not true. As far as I can tell, every rooster in the Dominican Republic begins crowing at 4:15 and stops when the sun comes up, about 2 hours later. The sound – and I mean the sound of a rooster who sleeps about 12 inches from your  bed on the other side of a wall that has a window covered by only iron bars – my bedfellow almost – the sound is like a bolt of lightning that shoots through your head, into your heart, and out through your stomach.

I am almost always asleep when he begins and you’d think my vital organs would remember and not contract in shock each and every time. But they don’t remember and I never go back to sleep so I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the cock’s crow.

First, they’re all a little different. The smaller ones are high-pitched and not so loud and scary. The big ones have powerful, terrifying crows – and my bedfellow is a whopper. Yes, the sound is terrifying – because he sounds as if he is crying out in abject terror while in the jaws of one of the hounds of the Baskervilles. I am convinced that the cock’s crow is the result of fiendish nightmares coupled with mass hysteria.

A cry escapes….

ERRRRR….

The hound squeezes his jaw tighter and there is a pause – you can almost hear the gasp for breath…then..

Eeeerrrr…..eeeerrrrr   

a  pause  - then a small, puny

errrr

a longer pause, a deep breath and the final plea flung out to his rooster god for salvation

errrrrrrr000000000000000000000

There is no cock-a-doodle-do about it.

His fellow roosters hear him, near and far, and call out in sympathy and terror, imagining themselves in the jaws of the hungry dogs – mass hysteria throughout the pueblo for a couple of minutes. Then, I guess they fall back to sleep until another wakes in terror and screams into the night.

 ERRRRR….

Eeeerrrr…..eeeerrrrr   

Errrr

errrrrrrr000000000000000000000

There are variations in the pattern. I hear one old guy every night. I imagine that he is quite old because he only has three ERRRRRR’S left in him, and they all sound a little shaky.

ERRR

Long pause

Errr…gasping for breath

Er..r…r.r.r.er

I admit that there are some roosters who don’t actually sound terrified – they actually sound like they’re crowing just for the pure joy of it. I imagine these are the youngest ones – who haven’t been around long enough to be haunted by the terrors that surround them in the night and the fragility of their lives.

Good bye!

By Jim Wheatley
April 7, 2012

     She is seven, almost eight, and she can read. Not bad considering what I’ve seen in some of the schools here. But  this pueblo has better schools than most. She lives in the house across the street from where I’m staying, a tin shack, pitiful really. I’ve been inside. There are three tiny rooms.  I’m not sure how many people live there, 8 to 12, three generations. They do the cooking outside on some rocks.

     The Peace Corps wanted me to catch a couple of kids from the street and test their reading levels. So that is what I’m doing here. And, I notice she smells.  I think how terrible that is and I judge her mother.

     Her mother says “good bye” to me every day. She really means hello but good bye is the only English she knows.

     Later I see mom walking down the street carrying two five gallon buckets of water. And , later I see her again, and then again. I realize then that there is no water in the house and every drop has to be carried home from god knows where, for all those people, to cook, to clean, wash clothes, and flush the toilet. Daily baths are an extravagance. It is Semana Santa (Easter Week) and all of the relatives will be stopping by later and mom is cooking on the rocks. The kid will have her bath, mom is just too busy right now and probably needs to walk back to the water with the buckets again.

She sees me watching from across the street. She waves. “Good bye” she says.

La Música

March 5th 2012

by Jim Wheatley

     It’s a long story, but last night I found myself sitting on the patio at Domingo’s house, playing bachata.

     How did I get there? I had followed the music the day before. He saw me listening from the street and invited me in. People here are like that.

     Domingo is one of those guys you read about in National Geographic or see when someone posts an ultra cool video on youtube. He is the genuine article. He plays an old guitar that is always a little out of tune. Actually it is a piece of crap and can’t actually be tuned. He uses a pencil and string for a capo. But, he has these monster 3 fingered picking chops like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Also, he sings. He sings high, thin and full at the same time, fragile and strong (think Ibrahim Ferrer).  And I’m playing all these bachata licks and we are rocking out and I’m thinking this is incredible, how did I get so freaking lucky, and where in hell did I learn to play bachata? Maybe it is because I’ve heard it nonstop, day and night for 6 weeks.

     The scene is important, too. The house is made of rusty tin and unfinished block. The patio is just a small broken slab of concrete with a partially fallen down roof above. This would constitute a pretty rough barn in Kentucky. Here there are five kids, 4 with clothes on, playing under one dim bulb hanging from a rafter. There is a small TV.

     In the night sky Venus and Mars seem so close the sky looks three dimensional; like you could reach past one and touch the other; like you could almost triangulate yourself and for once understand your position in the universe. But of course you can’t and I digress.

So there we sit, two guys that have absolutely no common experiences. He’s never heard of Kentucky and thinks New York is a country. He has a strong dialect and it is difficult to communicate. But, we really don’t need any of that. We just play the old style bachata, one song after another in the star light, occasionally congratulating ourselves when we know it was a really good one. And, both of us thinking the exact same thing – This is too much fun!