Slaughter Day

I spent three days slaughtering, plucking, eviscerating and processing meat birds for the family. I let them go longer than usual this year, the biggest weighed almost 18 pounds and the boned breasts were averaging about four and half pounds each once I’d trimmed them out.

It’s a dirty job, you can’t slaughter anything without getting bloody and when it’s one after another for hours on end, you’re pretty well covered by the end of it. I crate the birds up right off the pasture in the morning, then place them, ten to a cage, and when I’m ready draw them out of their pen one at a time, carefully and calmly by their legs. I hang them from a length of baling twine suspended from a branch on the big maple in front of the house. They will sometimes flap, but after a minute or two they stop moving and I put my hand on their breast and calm them with a few words of thanks. I do this with every bird, probably for myself as much as their sacrifice. I have a small, extremely sharp puuuko knife I got from a neighbor as a gift fifteen years ago, and after extending their neck to bare the skin beneath the feathers, I draw it across their bright red throat and remove the head in a single movement. There is always a short pause as the body of the bird tries to work out what has become of it and then the fight or flight movements kick in and birds will begin to flap their wings as if they were flying away. The movement makes the branch they are suspended from shake and dance in a weird rhythm in synch with the sound of the wings. It takes everything about three minutes to leave this world, no matter how you dispatch them. It starts as a flurry and a rush, blood spraying from the arteries, feather flashing white and then red. The movements diminish, slowly, almost as if they were scripted, and then there is a renewed flurry until it drops off again, slower, fading, one wing after the other, left, right, left, right…left…right…

The dogs hung out nearby on the grass, aware of everything but feigning indifference to it all. Every so often one of them will look at me with baleful eyes and then quickly look away, hoping they hadn’t done whatever the chickens did. The weather was perfect; not too warm, yet not too cool and the skies were clear with only an occasional cloud. Every once in a while, the sheep would drift past nibbling at the lawn, and while I didn’t speak for most of that time, I listened to a podcast about the fall of Byzantium, then an Englishman reading John Cheever short stories, and later a mix of Pat Metheny then Kool and the Gang. At some point it just got quiet and I stayed in that place for so long I forgot the music had stopped.

A friend dropped by on the first day when I was doing the slaughter part and he ran the birds through the scalder and the plucker and then helped clean everything up when we were done. I sent him home with a nice big bird and then went inside, cleaned up and made chicken livers with Marsala wine, sea salt and thinly sliced white onion. As tired as I was by then, I was twice as hungry and that meal tasted in that moment as good as anything I had ever eaten in my life. My wife poured a glass of wine and sat with me in the candlelight after I’d finished eating and we talked about our children and what a great week they had. I was bone tired but deeply satisfied with my day, with everything.

The next morning after chores I moved into the sugarhouse kitchen and broke the birds down into parts: legs, thighs, breasts and wings. I tossed the small scraps into a bucket for the hogs and the necks and feet and stripped carcasses were bagged up into one-pound portions for chicken stock. Most of the day I was alone, but my neighbor dropped by with his girlfriend and he helped me for a couple of hours before they headed out on their last motorcycle ride of the season. I gave him a nice boneless breast for their dinner and we said goodbye.

When all the totes were filled with chicken parts I started to wrap them in freezer paper; whole double breasts, two one-pound thighs, three legs at a pound and three quarters and wings, eight to a pack, and then the drumettes eight per pack as well. The dogs spent the entire day sleeping on the gravel just outside the door of the sugarhouse, they knew I was inside and the smells must have been especially nice to them because every time I opened the door they’d look up at me and lick their chops, and thoughts they may have had about the slaughter day long forgotten. About an hour before I finished for the day, I put a pot on the hotplate and poured in a couple cups of water and threw in the hearts and gizzards and brought it to a boil. I strained out the organ meat and when it had cooled, I cut it into rough chunks and then added it back to the broth and divided it into bowls for each of the dogs, oldest to youngest in that order. They know the drill and they watched as each one received its due in silence, without any sign of competition or aggression, They turned to their bowls as I placed them down and stayed at it until they had long been licked clean.

I made wings for dinner. I don’t fry them, I just season them and roast them in the oven until the meat starts to fall away from the bone, and then I tossed them in a homemade sauce of tomato puree, cider vinegar, melted butter and roasted hot peppers. When they were ready my youngest son stood at the kitchen island with me, eating them as if his life depended on it, neither of us talking while we ate.

I understand that when I tell people these things it must sound very small and unimportant in the bigger picture, especially when everyone is worried about uncontrolled immigration, or war in the Ukraine, or political corruption, or the failing economy, or whatever major issue looms over the daily landscape of what passes for the USA these days, but it seems significant to me. I learn something new every time I do this, I get better and better at each part of it, and yet it never gets old. There is always some kind of beauty, some new knowledge I pick up, some sense of wonder or revelatory meaning in the way the chicken is put together, the way people just show up when I need them, some tidbit of information about some civilization four thousand years ago that sounds like it just happened last week that makes me pause and consider not only what I have heard or seen, but why I am here and how important this is if we are to make it through this troubled time.

I have no idea why we are here and at this stage of the game I no longer worry about discovering the answer. We are here and that’s enough. I have things to do and if it helps feed my family and my friends, if I help build the soil of just one more acre before I go, or build a flock birds that finishes up as nice as this one did, even watch the clouds for a minute as they glide across the face of the Earth as effortlessly as ripple on a lake, it was more than worth all the dirty, difficult, unpleasant and trying parts combined.