The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [33]
All I could see when I closed my eyes, the first few nights after working there, was turkeys. I saw them hanging upside down, plucked and stiffened, pale and cold, with the heads and necks limp, the eyes and nostrils clotted with dark blood; the remaining bits of feathers—those dark and bloody, too—seemed to form a crown. I saw them not with aversion but with a sense of endless work to be done.
Herb Abbott showed me what to do. You put the turkey down on the table and cut its head off with a cleaver. Then you took the loose skin around the neck and stripped it back to reveal the crop, nestled in the cleft between the gullet and the windpipe.
“Feel the gravel,” said Herb encouragingly. He made me close my fingers around the crop. Then he showed me how to work my hand down behind it to cut it out, and the gullet and windpipe as well. He used shears to cut the vertebrae.
“Scrunch, scrunch,” he said soothingly. “Now, put your hand in.” I did. It was deathly cold in there, in the turkey’s dark insides. “Watch out for bone splinters.”
Working cautiously in the dark, I had to pull the connecting tissues loose.
“Ups-a-daisy.” Herb turned the bird over and flexed each leg. “Knees up, Mother Brown. Now.” He took a heavy knife and placed it directly on the knee knuckle joints and cut off the shank.
“Have a look at the worms.”
Pearly-white strings, pulled out of the shank, were creeping about on their own.
“That’s just the tendons shrinking. Now comes the nice part!” He slit the bird at its bottom end, letting out a rotten smell.
“Are you educated?”
I did not know what to say.
“What’s that smell?”
“Hydrogen sulfide.”
“Educated,” said Herb, sighing. “All right. Work your fingers around and get the guts loose. Easy. Easy. Keep your fingers together. Keep the palm inwards. Feel the ribs with the back of your hand. Feel the guts fit into your palm. Feel that? Keep going. Break the strings— as many as you can. Keep going. Feel a hard lump? That’s the gizzard. Feel a soft lump? That’s the heart. O.K.? O.K. Get your fingers around the gizzard. Easy. Start pulling this way. That’s right. That’s right. Start to pull her out.”
It was not easy at all. I wasn’t even sure what I had was the gizzard. My hand was full of cold pulp.
“Pull,” he said, and I brought out a glistening, liverish mass. “Got it. There’s the lights. You know what they are? Lungs. There’s the heart. There’s the gizzard. There’s the gall. Now, you don’t ever want to break that gall inside or it will taste the entire turkey.” Tactfully, he scraped out what I had missed, including the testicles, which were like a pair of white grapes.
“Nice pair of earrings,” Herb said.
Herb Abbott was a tall, firm, plump man. His hair was dark and thin, combed straight back from a widow’s peak, and his eyes seemed to be slightly slanted, so that he looked like a pale Chinese or like pictures of the Devil, except that he was smooth-faced and benign. Whatever he did around the Turkey Barn—gutting, as he was now, or loading the truck, or hanging the carcasses—was done with efficient, economical movements, quickly and buoyantly. “Notice about Herb—he always walks like he had a boat moving underneath him,” Marjorie said, and it was true. Herb worked on the lake boats, during the season, as a cook. Then he worked for Morgan until after Christmas. The rest of the time he helped around the poolroom, making hamburgers, sweeping up, stopping fights before they got started. That was where he lived; he had a room above the poolroom on the main street.
In all the operations at the Turkey Barn it seemed to be Herb who had the efficiency and honor of the business continually on his mind; it was he who kept everything under control. Seeing him in the yard talking to Morgan, who was a thick, short man, red in the face, an unpredictable bully, you would be sure that it was Herb who was the boss and Morgan the hired help. But it was not so.
If I had not had Herb to show me, I don’t think I could have learned turkey gutting at all. I was clumsy with my