What Are the Chances, part 1--Chickens

What Are the Chances?                            Part 1:  Chickens                                          Mary J. A. Gould
                                 
I lay on a gurney in a chilly hallway in the Saint Elizabeth hospital, awaiting an ultrasound. I had between my feet, a cloth bag. It contained my writings, two stories I was editing for a book--all the mental stimulation I would need to keep from going nuts for a few days while my lower appendage healed.
Another gurney was positioned against the opposite wall, and upon it rested a woman who looked to be around eighty years of age. Her shaggy gray head protruded from a cocoon of sheets and blankets. She was obviously feeling the chill, and was not looking my way.
After the handsome attendant left me alone, I pulled out the story I'd been working on called "Chickens," and began reading to myself, pen in hand, feeling the sound of the words in my mind, and making edits. From out of nowhere appeared an attractive, auburn-haired woman in blue scrubs. She smiled, asking my name and checking it against a clipboard in her hand. "Whatcha doin' there, homework?" she inquired.
"Oh, no, I'm just doing some editing on this story I’ve been writing."
Her smile broadened. ""Oh, wow!  You a teacher?" she said, looking at me with abject amazement.  Everyone thinks it’s great if you say you’re writing a book.
At that, the cocooned lady on the other gurney opened her eyes and looked over at us. Then another hospital worker appeared, obviously on her break, and said hello to her red-headed friend, myself, and the other lady.
"She's writing a book," said the redhead to her friend, as if that were the most unusual thing in the world. The other woman's eyebrows went north with surprise. "What dedication, huh?"
"What discipline," offered the friend.
"What kind of a book is it?" They both asked.
"It's about my grandparents, my parents, and a lot of the folks they knew around Hubbard back before the Depression, and around the turn of the century. It's about how my grandparents met, and my parents, too. My one grandma was a nurse who took care of a woman who was insane, and there's one story about that."
"You from Hubbard, then?" The Gurney-lady raised her head and asked.
"Yeah. I still live in the old house my grandparents built out in the township.
What a heritage! They thought that was great.  And a coincidence--the Gurney-lady was from Hubbard township as well, and knew the very road I lived on.
"What's the story about?" The redhead leaned over my shoulder to look at the page.
I framed a nutshell synopsis. "It's called 'Chickens.' It's about a fellow my father knew before the Depresson. I don't really know what his real name was, but when he was a young man he trapped coons and sold the pelts."
The Gurney-lady sat up, all ears, as I rattled on about the story.
"He raised chickens and sold both eggs and chickens. He used to sell a chicken to someone, then he'd go to their place at night and steal the chicken back. Then he'd kill the chicken, and when he got to this one place where the stream went under the road, not too far from his house, he'd sit on the bank and pluck the feathers and toss them in the rushing water, thinking that the "evidence" would all wash downstream and never be found. Then he'd take the chicken home and cook it and eat it for dinner himself.
"But one day in the early spring there came a really hard rain, and the culvert backed up with water and overflowed. The county road crew came out to see what was causing the problem.  When they rooted around in the culvert, they found that it was full of chicken feathers."
When everyone laughed, the Gurney-lady said, "And I know who you are talking about."
I looked hard at her. "You do?"
I was shocked, and the two hospital workers looked at us in amazement.
"Yeah," she said, with a certainty born of experience. "He was my uncle. And you're right, that's what he used to do."
"Wow! Do you remember him well?" I was hoping for a sequel to my story, or at least some more details.
"Just vaguely. He died when I was small."
No sequel. "Did anybody ever tell you the chicken feather story? I asked.
"No, but I remember that he sold chickens, because when I was just a little girl, my parents didn't have money to buy me a christening dress, and he bought it for me with his chicken money."
I was flabbergasted. Here I am in a hospital hallway, and of all the stories I chose to tell these curious women, it has to be the story about an uncle of the perfect stranger who is laying on a gurney across the hall from me.
What are the chances?