Maybe I did kill those chickens the summer of 1970, wiping out about 50 of the little cluckers on a Perry County back road when I was young, wild and free-range.

I launched my murder most fowl by making Sonny Drake and the other two guys in the van laugh so hard and so loud the chickens heard us coming and got so scared they ran together packed into a huddle so tight the panicky poultry suffocated to death. Asphyxiated, their bodies crushed so tightly against each other, they couldn’t muster a single cluck for help from their quivering beaks.

That’s what the farmer told our boss after witnessing us racing by howling at the top of our savage lungs with me inciting the riot, yelling the loudest, rocking the van back and forth and raising a cloud of dust as we fishtailed along the dirt road past the barn headed to the mountain.

The big German farmer later complained to Sonny’s father, Al, who was nice enough to hire us in the first place. I forget the exact nature of our job that morning, but Mr. Drake had hired us to help clear brush for a future new highway running through Juniata County. Mr. Drake drove a company pickup and held down a good job as a supervisor. Not one of us had listed chicken killer on our resume like we were bloodstained butchers at Mutzabaugh’s Meat Market in Duncannon.

The farmer considered us a gang of hoofty desperadoes coming home to roost. The big man in the bibs and straw hat pegged me as a hardboiled slaughterhouse madman. In a way he was right. Back then I didn’t give a peep about those dirty birds and almost asked the farmer if we could collect their limp downy corpses for a big barbecue at our next underage beer party.

If anything I considered the feather fluster second-degree poultry slaughter, definitely not henocide. I explained that wolves must have snuck down from the hills after we passed by to petrify the pecker-headed poultry.

I didn’t mean to kill the chickens. The thought never crossed my muddled mind that the dumb clucks could hear us or were even listening. If they hadn’t been so chicken and ignored the clatter their descendants might be alive today and their great-grandmothers would have lived on not as spring chickens, of course, but as aging biddies with nice nest eggs. But, no, the bird brains put all their eggs in one basket and the family tree came crashing down to bury their petrified chicken bones in the dirt.

Deep-fried finality serves them right on a silver platter.

In the long run, though, maybe I did the checked-out chickens a favor. Who wants to wind up as nuggets or a McChicken sandwich? Aren’t ghosts of chickens past/passed better off as birds of a feather flocking together in chicken heaven than getting executed to make industrially flattened meat patties?

More than 50 years later, henpecked by guilt, I’m ready to take responsibility for my featherbrained folly and apologize to the late Mr. Drake, the farmer, and mostly, to the deceased chickens.

Sonny’s gone now but I’m sure he’s proud of me as he lives eternal life in Valhalla shaking a tail feather, drinking mead and ale from an antler beer stein and digging into free all-you-can-eat chicken wings and legs and whatever other parts of the birds he wants to gobble. As for me, I no longer see walking dead chickens in my sleep, stunned zombie birds looking at me like I’m a nightmare worse than Colonel Sanders. I crave peace of mind, not chickens cackling at me like I’m some carnival geek.

Now I’m chicken tender, beating my big white meat breast for chicken compassion.

Maybe that’s why 30 years ago I turned pescatarian and only consume plant-based Chik’N Patties. Veggie chicken burgers don’t kill themselves by running into each other before I smoke ’em on the grill. Nope, no beef, pork or poultry for me and my aging heart. I’m a happy man, a proud Appalachian American raised with all the smoked trout, thick ears of Pennsylvania yellow sweet corn and fat red field-grown tomatoes I can eat.

Cock-a-doodle-doo!