Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [132]
Once you professed in gospel meeting, you were allowed to pray and give testimony Sunday morning, but in order to take the sacraments you had to have been baptized. We were of the Anabaptist persuasion, eschewing infant baptism, trusting instead that when the Lord so moved us as believers we would seek out the workers and request to be included at the next baptism, a full-immersion ceremony usually held in a river or farm pond. I never got baptized and therefore never “partook of the emblems,” as we used to say. I do remember helping pass them around the room, and how heavy the glass felt, and how I focused intently on handling it so as not to spill it, and how it seemed imbued with a heaviness far exceeding a glass of juice. As the emblems circled, each baptized person took a pinch of the bread and a sip of the wine that wasn’t wine. Following the bread and wine, we sang a final hymn, and church was over. It rarely went over an hour. We rose and shook hands all around. You made sure you got everyone, young and old. It was an informally required formality. The grown-ups visited, and then we sorted our hats and coats from the pile in the kitchen and stepped back into the outside world for six more days.
When I went to help my sister and brother-in-law butcher their chickens, the thinking was that I would build up some sweat equity credit and they would help butcher ours, but now they won’t have to. Our neighbor Terry—with whose family we split the original meat chicken order—has arranged to have his chickens butchered by a local Amish family. They can process up to fifty chickens per day, and since Terry has to haul his bunch over there anyway he asks if we’d like to buy a ticket to ride for our seventeen (originally twenty: one DOA, one terminal splay-leg, and one crunched by the chicken tractor). At first I hesitate, strictly out of hammerheaded pride (turning my chickens over to be butchered by someone else impinges on my delusions of self-sufficiency), but then I visualize the leaf pile of bills, Post-its, and rough drafts covering my desk, and it hits me that sometimes delegation is the better part of valor. Later I bolster this line of thinking with the justification that we are supporting the local economy, although to what extent I am not sure since we will be charged only two bucks a chicken. All arrangements have to be made by mail, so once we commit, Terry sends a letter to a man named Levi confirming the date and time and number of birds, and we mark the calendar.
The birds are ready. They have grown at a steroidal rate on their hog feed and now clomp around the confines of their pen like clucking sumos. As a man I think the bigger the better, but Anneliese finds their growth rate unnatural and would like to try raising some leaner heirloom varieties next year. We have managed to veganize them slightly by shifting their fence so they can peck at greenery, but they still lack the verve for foraging that we see from the layers, who frequently hit the yard in a flying wedge, driving autumn’s last grasshoppers before them like desperate fleeing popcorn.
I no longer believe all I believed when I sat in my chair in the white clapboard house, but I am not prepared to scoff. There is enough derision in the world. That is not to say I