Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [120]
Once we’re under way, by about the sixth bird or so, we establish an informal division of labor and a rhythm sets in. I stick mostly to plucking and killing. I do not like the killing part, and find the best thing is just to move decisively. There is the usual unavoidable nonmetaphorical instant of recognizing exactly what it takes to enjoy chicken dinner, but I resist the temptation to deconstruct the process further. It’s miserably hot, which highlights the delight of working elbow deep in guts and wet feathers. Wasps continually alight on the chicken carcasses and buzz at our ears when we shoo them. Sidrock has picked a severed head from the pile beneath the funnels, and, squatted beside a tree, he is working the beak open and closed and poking at eyeballs. Jed has arrived, and before he starts plucking, he grabs a chicken foot and exposes the white ribbons of tendon with his jackknife. Then he shows Sidrock how to make the chicken claw open and close by tugging on the tendons. Sidrock is openmouthed in wonder. “Go show your mom,” says Jed slyly, and the little boy tears off for the house with the claw in one hand. Flopped in the shade beneath the four-wheeler, Mark’s dog is hot-mouthing a rooster head. The deep red comb has gone yellowish pale, and when the dog settles in to gnaw it from the skull, the sound reminds me of the one I hear in my own head when I am chewing gristle.
Jed joins in, working and jesting with the rest of us. But there are new lines around his eyes, and after an hour he puts down his knife, lays back across the ATV seat, puts his cap over his eyes, and sleeps. No one says anything, but we know we are seeing the absolute weariness of grief.
Forty-three chickens go through our ragtag assembly line. I am not staying for supper, but I wish I could because on the way to the car I walk past the charcoal grill and catch the scent of beer-can chicken, which is made by roasting a chicken in the vertical position with an open can of beer stuck up its hinder. A final indignity, I suppose. The whiff I catch on my way to the car makes my tummy grumble, and the stinky feathers clinging to my boots do nothing to diminish my appetite.
As for our meat chickens, they are growing at an alarming pace. Within two days of delivery they were sprouting wing feathers and already they are approaching Cornish hen dimensions. It’s tough to love the meat chickens. They stomp around thick-legged and flat-footed, and when I turn them out on fresh grass or give them sweet corn on the cob, they peck some, but mostly they just sit and wait for ground feed. The free bread they ignore entirely. They are nearly impossible to move in the chicken tractor, lollygagging confusedly. Rather than startle forward when the back of the tractor bumps them in the butt, they often flop over and rest quietly while it rolls over them. We gave them chicken starter to begin with, but now that they’re coming on, we’ve switched them to hog feed, since it’s cheaper than chicken feed. The one time they show life is when I replenish the feeders, at which point they trample and ram each other without mercy. Once for the sake of my own entertainment I filled a mason jar with feed, capped it, and set it in the pen just to watch them peck madly at the glass. They are clearly bred solely to generate protein, and in the first couple of weeks I had to build three different temporary boxes for them, increasing the size each time. Once we started free-ranging the layers I switched the meats over to the chicken tractor, but still, every night I have to drag them into the garage, as the chicken tractor isn’t strong enough to withstand more aggressive predators, and just the other day I saw a fisher (basically