In the After

by Lindsey DeLoach Jones

The kids found the last of our pet hens on an autumn afternoon, headless and mangled, her pink body slick with blood and matted with her few remaining feathers. Amy, christened thus by our four-year-old daughter, was an ornery White Leghorn who slept alone atop the coop door, inside the hardware mesh that was meant to keep her safe. Of the brood, she laid the smallest eggs.

She was the fifth to die, all of them gone in a single, violent week. An impossible number of feathers—white, brown, black, and iridescent green from our rainbow of breeds—now blanketed our backyard grass, the steps leading to the coop, even the surface of the trampoline we’d purchased in early pandemic boredom. Standing in awe of the havoc wreaked on our neat suburban lawn, I envisioned a murderous struggle in every fenced corner, our avian pets helplessly flayed and beheaded on three separate nights. Inside, the six of us had slept without waking.

When we had converted the playhouse in our backyard to a coop, another project from the pandemic’s stillest days, we installed motion-sensor lights and two lock styles on the door my husband built. We positioned a solar-powered camera to record every movement outside the enclosure. The chicks cost two bucks apiece; their protection cost hundreds. We could measure the length of the virus by the age of our birds. They had shed their baby down the week George Floyd was murdered, had moved into their new outdoor home the day President Trump flashed a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal.

The morning after we lost the first one, our camera footage revealed a petite raccoon on his haunches outside the coop, calmly surveying every corner. He scoped the joint like a retro bandit, absent the urgency I imagined requisite in a creature hours away from vampirizing a flock of squawking, wing-beating poultry. In gray scale, the raccoon sauntered around for a bit then turned to leave, feigning disinterest.

That was at 8:31 p.m. My seven-year-old, Harriet, whose bedroom window is closest to the backyard and whose love for animals exceeds that for her own siblings, had come bleary-eyed down the staircase around that time. She heard the chickens, she said, and they sounded upset. This was something of a ritual—her fear, my reassurance. She was the one who no longer ate chicken nuggets and, after I read Charlotte’s Web aloud, had begun clenching her eyes shut to eat bacon. Together my daughter and I watched the clip then checked the live camera feed: the raccoon was gone. The chickens were calm, retreating into the inner sanctum of the coop to sleep. I rubbed Harriet’s hair, hugged her body still warm from the covers. “They’re safe,” I told her. “See Comet sleeping up there?” She nodded, and I kissed her tousled curls. “Time for you to sleep, too.”

Comet would die around four-thirty that morning when the raccoon returned under cover of darkness. My son tells me raccoons can slide open locks with their opposable thumbs. I imagine the rodent approaching the coop on his second trip, not even pausing to glance around before unlocking the door as though home from work. If that’s what happened, we didn’t see it; our camera records only fifteen-second intervals. It cut out before the raccoon finished smelling the hens. 

The next day was Sunday, and the children, who had each claimed and named a chicken of their own, decorated rocks with Comet’s name and held a funeral for her in the driveway. The service was led by my oldest daughter, who until her chicken died, had shown little interest in the flock. In a rare expression of mutual tenderness, her siblings patted her on the back and offered to let her borrow their chickens anytime.

Even before the raccoon, I was having trouble sleeping. These days, everything threatens. The dark television shows I once watched splayed alongside my husband on the sofa no longer entertain me; too often the dramas of war, deceit, and corruption bring me to tears.

Instead of television, after the children were in bed for the night, I began retreating to our bedroom, where I curled under lamplight and melted chocolate chips in my mouth, drinking whole milk from one of the children’s bright plastic cups. I flipped through the pages of People magazine, the subscription for which began mysteriously showing up at our house a couple of months ago. At first, I rolled my eyes and tossed the magazine into recycling, too tired to alert customer service that they’d gotten it wrong, that no Carly Watson lived at our address. Eventually, the magazine sat longer on our kitchen countertop before I tossed it, until one afternoon I found myself scanning its pages while the kids groaned over math problems and littered the counter with orange peels and pink bits of pencil eraser. I forced deep breaths and skimmed photos of blue couture gowns, a clip of something Whoopi Goldberg said, the breakup of a vaguely familiar musician-actor couple. 

After eight deliveries, I took the magazine to bed with me, greedy for Hollywood babble I once found too silly to merit attention. The celebrity universe feels far away, perhaps the only remaining thing I can safely not care about.

Now that the raccoon has come, I don’t feel sad, exactly, but a slight quease sits in my stomach. I bought the chicks to forestall the purchase of a puppy, the ownership of which seemed, eventually, inevitable. They were a low-stakes pet, I joked to my husband. If they lived, we’d have eggs. And if they didn’t, we were out ten bucks. Things die.

That seems like a long time ago. Before I raised them under a heat lamp, weekly raked their shit from the coop floor, laughed when my children fed them blueberries on the end of sticks. That was before television made me cry.

I began reading about raccoons. In certain cultures, they are imbued with an almost mythical status. In some Native American folklore, the raccoon is a trickster named Azeban. A story of the Abenaki tribe describes the way Azeban’s eyes were marked with ash to warn others he is a bandit and thief. Winnebago legend characterizes the raccoon as a shapeshifter. Their hands, I read, are five times more sensitive than a human’s, so they can practically see with them. It’s true: they can undo locks, and not only that, but they can remember for years how they did it. They can tie and untie knots.

The morning after the first death, my husband inspected the coop that had kept the chickens safe since the beginning of lockdown. He found no holes, nothing in need of repair. Still, he pressed back the mesh that had come loose from the wall and added new staples. “Nothing can get in there,” he declared, certain. 

Each time he was certain, and each time something got in.

An email comes from Amazon’s Subscribe and Save to remind me another two bags of poultry bedding are on their way to my house. I follow an intentionally obscure trail to cancel future deliveries. What, Amazon wants to know, is my reason for canceling? In lieu of My pets were mangled, I select from the dropdown menu I no longer need this item.

The first time we’d seen a raccoon in our yard, the camera had alerted us with a buzz to my husband’s phone after midnight. He went outside in his boxer shorts and threw the closest thing handy—a metal bowl from the kitchen cabinet—at the raccoon as it scratched the coop door. That was a year ago, and in all that time the vermin never found his way inside. It was early in Harriet’s first-grade year, and at school the next day she depicted the incident in her morning journal. Because coronavirus had canceled parents’ night and kept us out of the school building, we’d never met her teacher. We only saw the journal when it came home: a pencil sketch of her father in his underwear, a bowl paused in midair as it hurled toward the chicken coop, a crescent moon drawn in the night sky. And in green pen: a smiley face with tears of laughter. Pleased to meet you, Mr. D.

I wonder why our masked miscreant killed just one hen on the first night but three on the second, more than he could ever possibly need for nourishment. There was something malevolent about the way they died all at once—but not all in one night—the surprise violence meted out over a week like a slow torture. And the way I didn’t find them at night, when I could process it, but in the mornings as we packed up lunches and signed papers and braided hair before school. “There are a hundreds of feathers in the backyard,” my five-year-old son said between bites of his granola bar. “A hundreds of them.” He was still in his pajamas, and together we walked to the back deck to check. We’d find blood and bodies, and the girls would come running, and I would have to say, move along, move along past this, get into the car. 

Harriet is in second grade now. “The kids in my class call me the chicken girl, Mom,” she cries. Both her front teeth are missing, and the words sound even sadder in this lisp particular to childhood, to seven-ness. It is a voice that announces its innocence. “What will I tell everyone?” Later that afternoon, I find her black dress printed with cartoon chickens hanging in her closet and quietly slip it from the hanger.

A few days later, my parents send books to our children in the mail. My son pulls his from the bubble mailer to reveal a raccoon on the cover. Harriet winces and walks out of the room, sits on my bed. I follow her. 

“What is it, love?” 

“You know I love all animals, Mama.” 

“I know.” 

“I think I might hate raccoons.” Her fists clenched, she says the word again; it is laced with rage. “Hate.” 

I’m still reading about raccoons long after I’ve stopped feeling sad about the birds. Raccoons are not, as I’ve come to think of them, rodents. They are something called procyonids, distant relatives to weasels and bears. In her book The Urban Bestiary, nature writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt pleads, “I am convinced that both the racoon’s humanlike feet and its fur mask, symbols for us of action and power, play a large part in our misascribing a certain intent to raccoon activity. It is difficult but meaningful to remember: Raccoons are not actually doing anything to us.” 

Tell that to Harriet.

Almost immediately, the children want to know if we can replace the hens. “Please Mom?” they whine in unison, perched at the island eating breakfast.

It seems unbelievable to me now that I ever kept birds inside our living room, checking on them morning and night, dropping water into their cartoonishly orange beaks, beaks that later dulled to light brown. At home for Easter during the first weeks of lockdown, we had taken photos with the chicks in the front yard, and the kids had sat through online learning with chicks pecking at the keyboard while, in response, their classmates squealed on mute. Alongside cheery notes, we left fresh, still warm eggs on the doorsteps of the friends we no longer saw in person. 

Less than two years later, the sky seems to have permanently darkened, the world more hostile than the day I arrived home with a chirping box. That moment was before the raccoon, before the election, before the vaccine wars, before I had ever raised my voice at my children, before my father-in-law died from the virus in a nursing home, alone. 

In the first weeks of the pandemic, I was certain the virus was another depressing tidbit of world news my children would never know. For now, we would finger paint, and we’d read Frog and Toad together, and we’d bake muffins I’d sneak pureed carrots into while their little heads were turned. 

My job as a mother was dosing the sad, the scary, and the wild. My job was to establish a cognitive recognition of evil as a concept while protecting my children from real trauma. For an entire family of six, I acted as coop, mesh, locks, and surveillance. 

But on January 6, I watched as the Capitol building was overrun, too stunned to shoo my frightened children from the room. Two weeks later, they attended a funeral for the grandfather they’d been banned months earlier from visiting. When I read to the children at bedtime, it became harder to conjure silly character voices and, later, I could not read to them at all.

I had brought home downy chicks and tossed out mangled corpses. 

Hate, I think, like Harriet, although I am too old to think I can blame raccoons.

Not all Native American stories cast the raccoon as malevolent. For several tribes, the raccoon is believed to be a guardian of the clans, serving as a protector of its members. In these clans raccoons are celebrated for the upside to their sneakiness, for being clever and resourceful. They are revered for their tenacity. They are sacred.

Haupt writes, “I sympathize deeply with the loss of any pet and understand the emotions such a trauma can unleash. But,” she warns, “to allow even a marginal wildness in our lives and cities will involve compromise.”

I study the children’s faces, sticky with maple syrup. I have wasted time, assuming there would be plenty of it, when I might have been a partner in witnessing reality.

“I am too tired now,” I say, “for more chickens.” For once, I do not apologize. Their smiles and pleading eyebrows fall, and I turn toward the sink, my own shoulders dropping. From the kitchen window I see a miniature imitation of our own white house, identical roof shingles and a homemade, child-sized doorway. It is graffitied with sidewalk chalk, wrapped in hardware mesh, littered with pine shavings. It is empty.

Published May 22nd,, 2022