Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [120]
The good news was that we were nearly done. I encouraged the rest of the adults to go ahead and wash up, I had things in hand. They changed out of the T-shirts that made them look like Braveheart extras. The girls persuaded Eli to retire the talking heads and submit to a hosing-down. Our conversation finally relaxed fully into personal news, the trivial gripes and celebrations for which friends count on one another: what was impossible these days at work. How the children were faring with various teachers and 4-H projects. How I felt about having been put on the list.
That question referred to a book that had been released that summer, alerting our nation to the dangers of one hundred people who are Destroying America. It was popular for nearly a week and a half, so I’d received a heads-up about my being the seventy-fourth most dangerous person in America. It gave a certain pizzazz to my days, I thought, as I went about canning tomatoes, doing laundry, meeting the school bus, and here and there writing a novel or essay or whatever, knowing full well that kind of thing only leads to trouble. My thrilling new status had no impact on my household position: I still had to wait till the comics were read to get the Sudoku puzzle, and the dog ignored me as usual. Some of my heroes had turned up much higher on the list. Jimmy Carter was number 6.
“When you’re seventy-four, you try harder,” I now informed my friends, as I reached high up into the turkey’s chest cavity from the, um, lower end. I was trying to wedge my fingers between the lungs and ribs to pull out the whole package of viscera in one clean motion. It takes practice, dexterity, and a real flair for menace to disembowel a deceased turkey. “Bond. James Bond,” a person might say by way of introduction, in many situations of this type. My friends watched me, openly expressing doubts as to my actual dangerousness. They didn’t think I even deserved to be number 74.
“Hey,” I said, pretty sure I now had the gizzard in hand, “don’t distract me. I’m on the job here. Destroying America is not the walk in the park you clearly think it is.”
Someone had sent me a copy of this book, presumably to protect me from myself. A couple of people now went into the house to fetch it so they could stage dramatic readings from the back jacket. These friends I’ve known for years uncovered the secrets they’d never known about me, President Carter, and our ilk: “These,” the book warned, “are the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at ‘ordinary’ Americans….”
All eyes turned fearfully to me. My “Kentucky NCAA Champions” shirt was by now so bloodstained, you would think I had worn it to a North Carolina game. Also, I had feathers sticking to my hair. I was crouched in something of an inharmonious yoga pose with both my arms up a turkey’s hind end, more than elbow deep.
With a sudden sucking sound the viscera let go and I staggered back, trailing intestines. My compatriots laughed very hard. With me, not at me, I’m sure.
And that was the end of a day’s work. I hosed down the butcher shop and changed into more civilized attire (happy to see my wedding ring was still on) while everybody else set the big picnic table on our patio with plates and glasses and all the food in the fridge we’d prepared ahead. The meat on the rotisserie smelled really good, helping to move our party’s mindset toward the end stages of