A couple evenings ago, on my way out to the barn to milk the goats (since Danny, who usually milks the goats was gone) I heard a rooster's crow from somewhere high off the ground.
Looking up, I discovered that our mottled gray and white rooster had decided to once again roost in his favorite spot in the scrub oak tree. Had he kept quiet, I would never have discovered his hiding place, but he just had to announce that he was king of the mountain. And I spied him.
It reminds me of a rooster story that our pastor's wife, Mathel, told me a while back. Mathel used to serve as EMT for White River and surrounding areas. She has oodles of stories, but when I asked her for one from her EMT experiences, she said this one was the funniest (although, as you will see, it did not start off very funny).
One very hot summer night, a call came for an emergency just outside of White River. An older couple had been traveling from Wyoming, and just outside town, the man slumped over like a sack of South Dakota wheat in the passenger seat. His wife managed to go on to town, pulling in at Thoroughbred Hotel and placing a 911 call. Mathel with a driver named Jeff ended up being the EMT to go check on the situation.
Sure enough, as the woman had figured, the man was dead. There was nothing to be done except decide what to do with the body. Well, as I already said, it was very hot, and Mathel didn't want that body sitting in the vehicle the rest of the night and through whatever part of the day that they'd have to wait for the coroner/funeral home director who was always busy. She and the driver swathed the dead man in a body bag, zipped it up, and set it on the gurney just outside the fire station where it would be cool in the shade. Another volunteer at the station who worked at the town clinic took the bereaved wife to the clinic where she could place some calls to family.
Sometime early in the morning, both Mathel and Jeff noticed a rooster crowing. "Cock-a-doodle-do! Cock-a-doodle-do!" They looked at each other in astonishment. The rooster sounded like it was in the fire station, so Jeff went all around that station where the trucks were mashed in like the dill pickles Mathel squeezed into her pint jars. No rooster. Then he went all around the outside of the station, while the rooster continued to crow.
"I don't know of anybody around here who has a rooster!" Jeff said.
Meanwhile, Mathel, who had also been looking, noticed that whenever she went near the gurney with the body bag, the crowing sounded louder. As she stopped stock still, so did Jeff. There was that crowing again! Jeff's eyes got as wide as Mathel's china turkey platter. He did not say a word. He just pointed desperately at the body bag with the [assumed] dead body in it.
Both Mathel and Jeff knew what the noise might possibly be. When a person is dying and struggling to breathe, they can make sounds that are similar to squeaks or crows, Mathel explained to me. Surely the EMTs had not wrapped up a dead body only to have it actually be alive? Or was it a ghost?
Jeff refused to come any closer to that horrible body bag. Mathel had to be the one to find out just what was going on. Gingerly she started to unzip the bag. And that is when a voice squeaked, "Good morning! Good morning! It's six o'clock!"
Mathel nearly jumped out of her skin! Had she not seen flashes going off at the same time, she would have probably run for cover, but luckily, she said, she saw flashes and realized they were from a watch the man was wearing. The man had a talking watch! At six in the morning, it told him the time by crowing.
She and Jeff exchanged shaky laughs that soon became more laughter than shakes, especially when they told the story to others around. The best part was when Mathel was asking the man's wife if there was anything she needed from the man before the body was sent to the funeral home. Did she want any article of clothing, anything from his pockets?
"I'd like his watch," the lady said. "He's diabetic, he's an amputee, and he's blind. So he has a talking watch!"
"Let me tell you a story about the watch," Mathel said, and she told the story.
Despite her sorrow, the woman laughed outright. She could not help it. "He would have loved it!" she gasped. "He had the last laugh!"
And that is Mathel's story about the rooster's last laugh.
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