THE PUZZLEMENT OF THE PEACOCK

A Christmas Fable

by Barbara J. Olexer

Once upon a time, in a garden of incomparable beauty and

tranquility, there lived a peacock. This peacock – his name was Sam –
was no longer a fledgling and had passed his mid-life crisis so he had
time to reflect on the things he experienced and to contemplate the
mysteries of life. When he was young, he had spent most of his time
strutting around with his tail feathers open in a wide, gorgeous fan to
impress the peahens. And they were impressed, too! But even then he
noticed that the peahens were not the only ones who were impressed.
Humans were, as well.
Humans watched him raptly as he stalked about in great dignity,
holding high his enormous fan of iridescent blue and green and gilt with
all the colorful decorations on the tip of each feather. It was heavy and
sometimes he got very tired but everyone loved to look at him so much
that he didn’t really mind the inconvenience. And sometimes, even in his
giddy youth, he would think about the humans. He felt so sorry for them.
Poor things, they were not even as decorative as the peahens, who had
no tail feathers to speak of, or even the mallard drakes with their fairly
fine feathers. In fact, they weren’t even as pretty as the swans, who were
graceful and regal, even if they were plain white.
The poor, drab humans. Oh, a few of them had skins that were kind
of bright and shiny but they were big and awkward-looking. They had
no wings and no feathers at all, much less gorgeous tail feathers. They
didn’t even have slim legs and toes. Theirs were bulbous and very funny
looking. Sam often wondered how humans managed to walk, they were
so oddly-shaped, sticking way up in the air as they did with their upper
appendages flopping around with every step.
Sam liked to fly up into the weeping willow that grew beside the
garden pond. He would sit there for hours, watching what went on below
him on the ground and in the water and thinking long, deep, profound
thoughts. He smiled at the ducks who broke into excited quacking many
times every day and all over nothing at all as far as he could tell. He
smiled at the humans, too, in a tolerantly scornful kind of way. Although
they didn’t look like ducks, they resembled ducks in other ways. They
were incessantly quacking and chasing one another and pecking at one
another and moving restlessly to and fro. Sam knew, of course, that each
entity on earth has a purpose but he could not imagine the reason behind
the creation of humankind.
There was a rhythm to life in the garden. Spring, summer, autumn,
and winter came and went, year after year. Sam enjoyed each season in
turn. He was attuned to the rhythm and accepted the weather pattern of
each season without wishing it were different. Only one time of year
brought disharmony to Sam. Every year after the willow leaves had
turned from green to golden and had all fallen to the ground; when the
days grew short and the nights long, the humans seldom came to the
garden. And some of them – this was the part that puzzled Sam and
unsettled him – turned hard as stone. And, what’s more, they stayed in

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the garden all day and all night. At no other time of the year did humans
behave in such a fashion.
In the twilight, Sam could see the top of the big fir tree that stood in
the front garden from his perch in the willow tree. It was glittering with
lights – blue and red and green and golden. He loved it when the fir tree
bloomed. He flew down to the ground and walked around to the front of
the garden, his tail dragging behind him. That was bad for the beautiful
feathers but his vanity had abated somewhat with the years and anyway
the peahens were all in the poultry house where it was warm and there
were long troughs of grain. He would go there himself for the night but
first he wanted to see the whole of the fir tree with its dazzling blossoms.
The tree was very lovely in the night, a tall cone of glory. As he had
expected, because it appeared every winter, next to the tree stood a small
shelter, open on the front. There were a cow, a donkey, some camels,
and a couple of sheep in front of the shelter, looking at two humans
inside. One human stood, leaning on a staff, the other knelt; both were
staring at a manger filled with hay. There were a few other humans
outside, also staring at the hay. Some had brightly colored coats and
some had plain brown coats. Some knelt, some stood. One was sort of
hanging over the two inside the shelter and to Sam’s intense confusion,
this human appeared to have some sort of wings. Wings. On a human.
On a human who’d been turned to stone.
The reason Sam knew the humans and animals had been turned to
stone was because he’d pecked them. Every year when they came out to
stand in the garden, he pecked them and every year they were hard as
stone. He walked back and forth and around but had to admit that he was
just as baffled as he’d always been by this weird human behavior. He sat
down in front of the shelter, gazing alternately at the fir tree in full
bloom and the people and animals who had turned to stone. He hoped
that someday it would be given him to solve the mystery in the scene
before him.

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