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.