peacock
My peachicken has turned out to be a cock which means that in three years if he survives dogs, foxes, weasels, mink, and internal worms, he will have a tail-spread of four feet. He has one trick: he runs up to anyone holding a cigaret [sic] and snatches it away and eats it. He has eaten two hot cigarets so far.
letter to Elizabeth Fenwick, February 12, 1954, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 67–68.