Roland

Roland was always up at the crack of dawn. It was like clock work: every morning he’d be up and awake and ready to start his day. He was well known throughout the entire town. “There’s Roland,” everyone would say as they rubbed their eyes sleepily and tried to dive back under the covers for a few extra winks.

But Roland wouldn’t let them. “Get up, get up, get up!” he’d call out and soon the whole town would be stumbling across their floors in slippers and bare feet, hunting for their eye glasses and for a fresh cup of coffee.

Once they were fully awake, they appreciated Roland and how consistently he fulfilled his duty every morning. It seemed like the whole town moved in rhythm to Roland’s awakenings, and they felt themselves fortunate to have him greet them every morning.

Now it so happened that one day the town council decided to buy the fire barn a brand new siren. “Just think,” they told each other, “now all the volunteer fire fighters will have to do is listen for the siren to go off and from all over town they will know to come to jump into their boots and hoist up their pants, pull on their jackets and hats and race to the fire in their big shiny trucks!” “Just think of that!” the townspeople said in wonder. “A siren on top of the tallest tower in the whole county that can be heard for miles around!”

And then the townspeople started thinking, “Why if there was a bad storm coming, couldn’t we sound the siren for that too?” “Why yessiree,” said the town council and soon the siren was not only calling in the volunteer firefighters, it was alerting the townspeople walking on the streets doing their daily errands to ugly storms, saving them from the wrath of high winds and hail and drenching rain and even a small tornado or two.

When school started up that fall, the principal had an idea: wouldn’t it be great to use the siren as the last bell of the day so no children could use an alarm clock tucked into their bookbag to fool the deaf old chemistry teacher into letting them out early. The town council agreed and soon the siren became the signal for getting out of school.

The factory foreman, not to be outdone, pestered the town council for a siren blast for shift changes. The principal wanted it for first bell too. The police officers wanted to use it to signal curfew for the teenagers necking up at Lookout Lake, and these were such good ideas that the town council agreed and agreed and agreed.
There got to be so many blasts of the siren that a special system had to be worked out like Morris Code. Two longs and a short meant school was about to start and two shorts and a long ended school for the day. Three shorts and another set of shorts signaled shift changes at the factory. A long wailing sound meant the volunteers needed to rush to the fire trucks and a whoop whoop whoop meant an approaching storm.

But the sound of Roland was still the way the town woke up. Every morning, without fail, his cry would go out across the sleeping town. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” and the children and the shopkeepers and the school teachers and the workers in the factory would blink their eyes and stumble out of bed and begin their day.

One day a new man arrived in town. He came from up the river and over the hill, from the big city where there was always so much going on that they said the city never sleeps. He laughed and laughed at a whole town waking up to Roland. “In this day and age,” he laughed, “when you have flat screen TVs and satellite cable and iPods and blogs and reality TV, you trust your waking up to a rooster?” And then he laughed some more.

The townspeople blinked, not from sleep, because it was broad daylight when the city man said this, but because they’d truly forgotten that it was Roland, a Rhode Island Red, that woke them up every morning. “Why,” said the city man, “don’t you turn that bird into a good nourishing soup and get your fancy fire barn siren to blast you awake?”

The townspeople rubbed their eyes, not because it was the first thing in the morning, because it was really half past noon, but because the city man had suggested such a thing. “Turn our Roland into chicken soup?” they all said to each other looking this way and that, from the fire barn where the siren lived on top of its tall tall tower to the barn where Roland lived near the edge of town in his plain chicken coop. “Turn our Roland into soup?” they asked and looked, and looked and asked some more. The city man, seeing them so stunned at the idea, thought they were all nincompoops.

“Well,” he said, “if you’re not going to kill that chicken, I will,” and off he rushed to find Roland and put him in the pot. The townspeople didn’t know what to think and so they just stood there and watched the city man running up the streets and down the alleys looking for Roland to put him in the pot. Then one little girl yelled out “hey the city man looks exactly like a chicken running around with its head cut off” and that broke the spell and all the townspeople rushed to the edge of the town to save Roland from the city man and his soup pot.

When they got to Roland’s chicken coop, they peeped inside and there was Roland fast asleep on his perch with his head tucked under his wing. He’d done his duty like always waking up the town that morning and now he was taking his afternoon nap. “Shhhhh,” said the townspeople as they backed away from the chicken coop on their tippy toes. “Let’s make sure Roland gets all the rest he needs so he can wake us up again tomorrow.” And they whispered among themselves, “we’ll never give up our Roland and turn him into soup and he will always be our wake up call no matter how many sirens we have.” And that was the way it was in that town forever after and the city man was never heard from again.