Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [118]
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STEVEN L. HOPP
The girls returned carrying rooster #1 upside down, by the legs. Inversion has the immediate effect of lulling a chicken to sleep, or something near to it. What comes next is quick and final. We set the rooster gently across our big chopping block (a legendary fixture of our backyard, whose bloodstains hold visiting children in thrall), and down comes the ax. All sensation ends with that quick stroke. He must then be held by the legs over a large plastic bucket until all the blood has run out. Farmers who regularly process poultry have more equipment, including banks of “killing cones” or inverted funnels that contain the birds while the processor pierces each neck with a sharp knife, cutting two major arteries and ending brain function. We’re not pros, so we have a more rudimentary setup. By lulling and swiftly decapitating my animal, I can make sure my relatively unpracticed handling won’t draw out the procedure or cause pain.
What you’ve heard is true: the rooster will flap his wings hard during this part. If you drop him he’ll thrash right across the yard, unpleasantly spewing blood all around, though the body doesn’t run—it’s nothing that well coordinated. His newly detached head silently opens and closes its mouth, down in the bottom of the gut bucket, a world apart from the ruckus. The cause of all these actions is an explosion of massively firing neurons without a brain to supervise them. Most people who claim to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, really, are not even close. The nearest thing might be the final convulsive seconds of an All-Star wrestling match.
For Rooster #1 it was over, and into the big kettle for a quick scald. After a one-minute immersion in 145-degree water, the muscle tissue releases the feathers so they’re easier to pluck. “Easier” is relative—every last feather still has to be pulled, carefully enough to avoid tearing the skin. The downy breast feathers come out by handfuls, while the long wing and tail feathers sometimes must be removed individually with pliers. If we were pros we would have an electric scalder and automatic plucker, a fascinating bucket full of rotating rubber fingers that does the job in no time flat. For future harvests we might borrow a friend’s equipment, but for today we had a pulley on a tree limb so we could hoist the scalded carcass to shoulder level, suspending it there from a rope so several of us could pluck at once. Lily, Abby, and Eli pulled neck and breast feathers, making necessary observations such as “Gag, look where his head came off,” and “Wonder which one of these tube thingies was his windpipe.” Most kids need only about ninety seconds to get from eeew gross to solid science. A few weeks later Abby would give an award-winning, fully illustrated 4-H presentation entitled “You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day.”
Laura and Becky and I answered the kids’ questions, and also talked about Mom things while working on back and wing feathers. (Our husbands were on to the next beheading.) Laura and I compared notes on our teenage daughters—relatively new drivers on the narrow country roads between their jobs, friends, and home—and the worries that come with that territory. I was painfully conscious of Becky’s quiet, her ache for a teenage son who never even got to acquire a driver’s license. The accident that killed Larry could not have been avoided through any amount of worry. We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second.
I wondered how we would get through this afternoon, how she would get through months and years of living with impossible loss. I wondered if I’d been tactless, inviting these dear friends to an afternoon of ending lives. And then felt stupid for that thought. People who are grieving