Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [95]
But when I called to arrange to pick up our turkey, the owner had changed his mind, perhaps after pricing his own Thanksgiving feast. What a blow. We needed a turkey! By expanding my search on Craigslist, within five minutes I’d tracked down a thirty-five-dollar bird in an unfamiliar Central Valley town several hours away. No trip is too far when you have a turkey in your sights. I printed out driving directions and we got in the car.
“People always think a farm is a green place with a tractor running through it,” Owen remarked as we surveyed the mangy patch of land abutting some railroad tracks. “It’s not always like that. This farm is not the classic.” No, it was not. This farm was strewn with rusted car parts, overturned boxes of trash, empty 2-liter soda bottles, crushed cans, and downed trees, and through this WALL-E wasteland wandered dozens of chickens, cats, dogs, and three bloated, broad-breasted white turkeys—the standard factory breed. The bearded proprietor ambled through the debris and grabbed up a fat, hiccupping bird that he placed in a laundry bin in the back of our car. “You gonna—?” He made a throat-slashing motion and grinned. I gave him cash. The turkey may well have ingested STP, Mountain Dew, and crystal meth, but I remain confident that she was never polluted by an antibiotic.
We loved her instantly, perhaps because she was such a tragic figure. If a turkey could get a bad boob job, smoke a pack a day, and drink three martinis with every lunch, she would resemble this wheezing, sclerotic bird. From supporting the weight of an oversize breast, her scrawny, scaly legs were bowed and she staggered and lurched. Moreover, separated from her companions, she showed signs of depression. She barely ate, we couldn’t get her to drink, and she passed her days in one corner of the yard, staring at a fence post. It seemed terribly wrong that she should spend her final weeks in such a funk.
A real farmer would have shrugged and sharpened his ax. But I’m a fake suburban farmer and announced my intention to find her a companion, in part to alleviate her woe, in part because having a turkey was so freaking cool that I wanted another. My mother called to say that she really hoped I’d stop with “this whole turkey thing.” Apparently, backyard chickens were cute and trendy; turkeys were creepy and redneck.
There might be something to this. Owen and I went to collect our second turkey, a Narragansett turkey—after dark, when the proprietor got off her shift at McDonald’s—from a farm that could have been the setting of a horror movie, complete with boarded-up house and a ramshackle barn crammed to the rafters with squawking poultry. This turkey was, however, truly stunning—slender and nimble, with a long, velvety neck and mottled dark feathers. I handed over forty dollars cash and we drove away as fast as we could.
This second turkey was far too attractive for his pudgy, clumsy bride, but they hit it off instantly. The heritage bird ran very fast around the yard first thing in the morning, flapping his wings and trilling musically while the factory-bred girl stood there, phlegmatic and blinking. How could I kill one or even both of them when they were just settling into their new home? I couldn’t.
I had shelled out seventy-five dollars and driven all over Northern California, and I still didn’t have a damned turkey.
I bought one at Whole Foods.
A few weeks later, though, it became clear that the turkeys had to go. The hen could not make the leap onto the roosting pole, and at night she huddled directly beneath the other birds so that in the morning she lurched out of the coop spattered, sometimes blanketed, in feces. Meanwhile, her dopey boyfriend loped around the yard, whooping and whistling loudly enough that I began to worry about our neighbors.
“The turkeys are gross,” Mark said one morning.
“You’re just realizing that?” said Isabel.
“They’re funny,