Chickens

Chickens serve as both a food source and a measure of the different capacities within Rose Gordon Burbank’s household. Rose cannot kill them, so Peter Gordon raises and prepares the birds for the table. Their care and slaughter reveal a practical division of labor between mother and son; later, chicken supper becomes part of the hospitality expected of a roadside eating place and the social conventions that surround a ranch crew.

Raising and Preparing Food

Peter fattens the fryers on a mash of bran and skimmed milk supplied by dryland farmers. When the birds are ready, he takes on the killing because Rose cannot do it and cannot even watch. At killing time she goes indoors, closes the doors and windows, and sings; when singing is not enough, she stops her ears. Her response makes the work more than a routine step in preparing food: it is a task she knows must be done but cannot bring herself to witness.

Peter, by contrast, approaches it as a practical responsibility. He kills the chickens by hand, choosing that method over an axe and block. The narrative stresses his control and care in carrying out the work, including his attention to keeping blood off his clean shirt. He regards this proficiency as preparation for the future. That judgment belongs to Peter’s outlook: the work is not merely an unpleasant necessity but a skill he can acquire and use.

The birds then pass through the ordinary stages of food preparation. Once they have been scalded, plucked, and singed, Rose can treat them as produce and fry them. The contrast is exact: she cannot take part in the killing, yet she can complete the cooking. Their meal depends on both of them, with Peter assuming the task Rose refuses and Rose turning the prepared birds into food.

Household Labor and Hospitality

The chickens also belong to Rose’s work of keeping a small eating place ready for customers. When a Burbank has telephoned ahead to say the party expects chicken for supper and beds for twelve, Rose moves out of her room and sets up a cot in the kitchen. Peter, meanwhile, moves into the shed with his father’s books. She has prepared the register and sharpened a pencil for incoming guests, and hopes that the Burbanks—and then other ranches—will return each year.

The scene places the chicken supper within a larger arrangement of labor and lodging. Rose makes room for the customers at personal cost, while Peter’s relocation accompanies the preparations. The request for chicken is a concrete part of the service promised to the party, alongside beds for its members. The passage does not say that the requested supper comes from the particular fryers Peter raises, but it places his work with the birds beside Rose’s preparations for feeding and accommodating ranch visitors.

A separate meal at a roadside eating place shows chicken as part of a public encounter between the ranch hands and their host. The woman has pushed three tables together for the whole group and set out white napkins, candles in old wine bottles, and paper flowers. Phil Burbank sees these arrangements through his contempt for what he considers affected refinement; the napkins, in particular, become objects of amusement to him. The meal’s setting matters as much as its food: chicken is served amid signs of hospitality that the men do not all know, or care, how to observe.

The Chicken Supper and Social Performance

When the party of six has left, the men settle into the meal. George Burbank uses his napkin as intended, while Phil tucks his under his chin and leans forward to eat. Phil admits the chicken is good, though he allows that hunger may explain his approval. His response briefly cuts through his earlier mockery: whatever he thinks of the table manners and the candles, the meal itself satisfies him.

George makes the group’s preference plain, saying that chicken is what they want. The exchange gives the food a straightforward, practical value amid Phil’s attention to appearances and his irritation at strangers watching the ranch hands. Once the other party has departed, Phil feels freer and tells a story about Bronco Henry; the chicken supper thus sits inside a scene that moves from discomfort with public scrutiny to familiar company and ranch talk.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, chickens connect domestic work to the economic and social demands of hospitality. Peter’s competence makes possible a task Rose cannot perform, while Rose’s cooking and arrangements help sustain the household’s service to ranch visitors. The division is not presented as a formal agreement; it is visible in what each does, and in the different ways each responds to the birds.

The contrast between Rose’s refusal to witness the killing and Peter’s composed handling of it also makes his practical skill distinct from her sensitivity to the act. The narration does not need to turn the chickens into a broad symbol: their concrete place in feeding people is enough to disclose how care and necessity are shared unevenly. At the roadside supper, meanwhile, the same food is embedded in another kind of labor—the preparation of a table for customers—and in the manners through which people judge one another. Chickens are therefore modest but recurring evidence of how the novel’s households and working communities provide for themselves and receive guests.