Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [135]
“Tell me another story from your childhood,” she says when I finish. So I tell her about the little boy who fell asleep in church on Sunday, and she giggles. Surely she is filing a few index cards of her own. One day she will draw one composed on this night, about her benignly freakish parents and how they dragged her around in a tatterdemalion van that smelled of pig feed and home-brewed goat cheese. And then she begins to sing: O Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true… It is a song her mother taught her, and her voice hangs in the air with the purity of starlight.
Terry arrives before dawn, and like thieves we load the chickens into his trailer. They are thickly feathered and hefty in my hands and armpit warm where my thumbs stick beneath their wings. Because we make our raid early we don’t meet much resistance, and when we pull a tarp over the trailer only a few disgruntled clucks seep through the canvas. Terry tells me the Amish family will be expecting me at five that evening, and then he drives off, the trailer lights stoplight red in the dark yard. I should be butchering those chickens, I think, one last time, then I console myself with the knowledge that Amy, Anneliese, and I have been butchering our own deer on the kitchen table for three years now, and then I review the mental jumble of other things I can do today other than pluck and gut seventeen chickens, and I think, Well, OK.
It’s cold, gray, and windy when I drive into the Amish family’s yard ten hours later. As I turn around and back up to the trailer where it is parked beside the house, several straw-hatted heads pop out of the woodshed. Young boys at work. When I have some trouble adjusting the hitch, one of the boys scurries away to a shed and returns with a wrench and hands it to me silently, but then when I still struggle they jump in to help manfully, the way young boys do when they want to demonstrate their abilities. Finally the cup clunks in place over the ball and I lock the hitch in place, then let myself into what I assume was the garage before these carless folk moved in. Now it is a large room jammed with countertops on sawhorses, galvanized tubs of water, coolers, tubs of chicken feathers, and some fourteen pint-sized chicken pluckers—barefoot children in long dresses and overalls, working beside several adult women and teenage girls. When I walk in, the smallest children draw toward the women and look furtively from behind their skirts. There is only one man—Levi—and he greets me with a smile. “We are almost finished,” he says. Some of the coolers are already packed, so I begin loading them. The women are still bagging chickens—long gone are the stolid white-feathered beasts of the morning, replaced by pale yellow carcasses, headless with naked pointy wings and their drumsticks neatly trussed. In one galvanized tank the carcasses float in the water like giant waxy bobbing apples.
The little boys hustle to help me tote the coolers, clustering busily, heaving and ho’ing in a further attempt to prove their mettle. By the time we get the coolers in the trailer, the women are bagging the last of the chickens. Levi and I review the handwritten bill and tally, and as I write the check the little girls in bonnets peer up silently from behind Mom, and then I am back in the car and away.
Back home after supper and with the baby asleep in bed Anneliese and I get out our vacuum sealer and start sealing pieces and double-bagging whole birds. The carcasses are huge—a couple of them top eight pounds on the kitchen scale. When we feel we have enough whole birds bagged, we clear the kitchen island, round up knives and cutting boards, and start chopping the remaining birds into pieces, removing the drumsticks and wings, fileting the breasts, saving the backs for stock. Amy is already up past her bedtime but she is so eager to help, we tell her she can