Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [139]
It was going on dusk by the time the water finally boiled. They argued about whether it was really necessary to scald the bird before plucking, and Deanna went ahead and pulled the long, stiff wing and tail feathers; she couldn’t remove the softer breast feathers without tearing the flesh, since the bird was already cold. Eddie deferred to her expertise. She was surprised her hands still knew the motions of plucking and squeezing out pinfeathers after so many years of grocery-store birds or none at all. In recent years she’d hardly eaten meat. But nearly every weekend of her childhood she’d helped butcher a chicken or two. This carcass was impressively large by comparison, even after she’d stripped it naked. Eddie helped her to lift it by the feet and dunk it into the boiling pot for a full minute, and later, to hold it over the flame to singe off the down feathers, and he steadied the bird while she used the ax to chop off its head and feet. He also managed to drag the heavy pot to the edge of the fire pit and continued to build up the coals while she settled down on the flat boulder to eviscerate their prey.
“Leaving the dirty work to the womenfolk,” she muttered, not really minding the task but still faintly put out with Eddie for being so cheerful this morning while she was dying on her feet. She put both hands deep inside the bird and gently loosened the membrane that attached the intestines and lungs to the body wall. He watched, impressed, as she pulled the entire mass out in a single glistening package and used her knife to cut carefully around the excretory vent, freeing the mess of viscera, which she set on the boulder beside the carcass. She poked through it, extracted the heart, and looked at it closely, then pitched it to Eddie, causing him to yelp. She laughed. “Anything you’re willing to eat, you ought to be willing to look under its hood first. That’s what Dad used to tell me.”
“I’m not squeamish; I just never cared for bird guts. I’ll gut a deer over a turkey any day.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know—personal preference. It’s not so delicate. You don’t have all those crops and craws and things to deal with.”
“Oh, I see. This is a more skilled surgery than you’re qualified to handle.” She cut the skin all the way down the length of the tom’s long neck after carefully examining the wounds that had killed it. It was a good, clean head-and-neck shot: Eddie had done well. The carcass wouldn’t be riddled with the hazard of tooth-cracking bird shot, as had so often been the case with the squirrels and turkeys that neighbors gave to her dad. She reached in with two fingers to pull out the damaged esophagus and windpipe. “Boy, he had a voice, this guy. Look at that.”
“He has gobbled his last.”
“He has,” she agreed.
“I can’t believe you,” he said. “The happy carnivore.”
She looked up. “What? Humans are omnivores. We’ve got meat teeth and fiber teeth and a gut that’s fond of both. I know a little bit too much about animals to try to deny what I am.”
“But I shot a bird off your precious mountain. I thought for sure you’d grab the gun and shoot me.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
He flashed his one-sided grin. “You know me. I like a challenge.”
She rinsed her hands in a bowl of water, then set to the task of washing every inch of the carcass, looking it over for the last pinfeathers. After it was clean and dry she would rub its skin with salt and a little oil. “It’s just a turkey,” she said after a minute.
“What do you mean, ‘just a turkey’? You won’t even let me squash a spider in the outhouse with my shoe.”
“A spider’s a predator. You kill that gal and we’ll have a hundred flies in there, which is not my idea of a good time.”
“Oh, right, predators matter more.” He went to the firewood pile for another armload of kindling.
She shrugged. “I won’t say this guy didn’t matter. Everybody in Zeb County can’t be up here shooting turkeys, or they’d all be gone by full dark. But something would have gotten him sooner or