South Carolina Poultry Festival

Thank you, South Carolina Poultry Festival! (You may now re-read that sentence. No well-adjusted person could possibly hope to make sense of it after only one go-through.)

Thanks are in order for introducing the world to no less a personage than Cornpeck Cluckswell, III. (Not the character's real name, except by unimaginable coincidence.) What's not to love about him? This tophatted, tuxedoed dandy has his traveling case in hand (containing, it may be assumed, brandy and ascots), and he's off to the S.C.P.F.

Mr. Cluckswell offers us all a valuable lesson: Suicidal ideation is not solely the province of the demented indigent (see nearly every other post here). Even the well-to-do know the sting of disappointment, the stain of regret. Even a coopful of receptive pullets cannot erase Cluckswell's clinical depression. And so—South Carolina, here we come!

Oh, for a time, the assembled poultry-gawkers will pat him on the back and exchange pleasantries. But then, as he knows it will—he's counting on it—the crowd begins plucking him with their eyes. Before he knows what's happening, South Carolinians (Batesburg-Leesvillers, to be precise) have rent him drumstick from drumstick. "Come on, Paw! This rich chicken wanted it that way!"

And finally, Cornpeck Cluckswell, III, is at peace, just another dead bird in hand-stitched Egyptian linen, freed from the unrelenting demands of wealth.