by Linda Byler
“Dat!” Lizzie cried. “Isn’t there something we can do?”
Dat shook his head as the trembling of Clyde’s limbs increased. He shook like an aspen leaf in a summer thunderstorm, almost as if his legs had a power all their own. His nostrils flared in and out as he breathed in small, gasping, sucking sounds.
“Lizzie, I don’t think so. I don’t know. I should have been more careful. It’s not even noon yet, and he just became overheated, I guess.”
“Can you call a veterinarian?”
“I suppose I should. If you’ll stay here, I can go, but honestly, Lizzie, I’m afraid he won’t make it.”
“Why does he tremble like that?”
Dat lowered his head as he turned to walk down the field lane to use the neighbor’s phone. Lizzie called after him.
“Dat, could we try and cool him down with water?”
“Let me talk to the vet first,” Dat said.
Meanwhile, Mandy had run to the house, looking for Mam, but she couldn’t find her. Now Mandy came flying along the field lane, her skirts billowing around her knees, her face pale with fright. She slid to a stop when she saw Clyde standing under the locust tree.
“He’s up!” she cried.
“Yes, but Dat doesn’t think he’s going to live much longer,” Lizzie said.
They stood side by side, their nearness giving strength to each other. Lizzie was grateful she did not have to stand out there all alone with this suffering, broken horse. Tears pricked her eyes as she watched Clyde struggling to breathe. Poor, poor boy, she thought.
Then he folded, his limbs buckling, until he slowly sank to the ground. Lizzie cried and reached toward him, helpless, unable to do anything. Mandy stepped back, wrapping her arms around her own waist.
Clyde rolled over once, his legs stretched out, and, for one heart-stopping moment, Lizzie thought he had died. But his side rose and fell, his breathing accompanied by a deep grunting sound.
“He’s never going to make it!” Mandy whispered.
And then Lizzie decided to pray. Whether God heard her or not, and even if he seemed far away, she needed to call on him right now and ask him to do something. They could not afford to lose this good, strong workhorse—God would surely know that. So she prayed, turning away from Mandy and toward the remaining team of horses who still waited quietly at the field’s edge.
God, you are going to have to look down here and help us. Please let Clyde live because we really need him. Whatever your will is, I guess, but please, please, please let Clyde make it, she prayed.
“Lizzie!”
Lizzie turned to see what Mandy wanted.
“Look, I think he died!”
She turned and saw that his sides were no longer heaving quite as heavily, but he was definitely still breathing on his own. “No, Mandy, he’s just quieting down.”
It seemed like hours until they heard Dat return. He was half-running, half-walking, his hair and beard blowing back in the breeze. He was panting as he reached them.
“Is he dead?”
“No, he’s still breathing,” Mandy said.
“He is, isn’t he?” Dat said, bending down to peer into Clyde’s frightened eyes. “Well that’s something.”
He straightened up.
“The vet will be here soon,” he said.
“What can they do for him?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. I just feel awful about this. I’m so ashamed to even have the vet look at him. He’ll think I’m some horseman, working my horses until they die of exhaustion.”
“Dat, you didn’t. You didn’t,” Lizzie said. She felt like hugging Dat, she pitied him so much, but she didn’t, because that was just how their family was. They never hugged, because it would be too embarrassing for a grown girl to hug her father. But she wanted to anyway.
A white pickup truck came bouncing in the lane, a cloud of dust rolling behind it. The driver slammed on the brakes and hopped out. He ran to the side of the truck, quickly stepped into a pair of clean, white coveralls, and then ran to kneel beside Clyde.
“Beautiful animal,” he said quietly, touching, kneading, taking the horse’s temperature, shaking his head, and muttering to himself. He ran back to the truck, asking Dat to come help him. Lizzie and Mandy watched wide-eyed as they prepared a huge plastic bag of solution. There was a small plastic line attached, which looked very much like the I-V line Mam had around her wrist when she had pneumonia.
“Mandy! Mandy!” Lizzie breathed excitedly. “I guarantee he’s going to make it now. They’re going to put all that stuff in him.”
They watched breathlessly as the vet attached the plastic line to a long, sterile needle which glinted in the sun. The vet jammed the needle into Clyde’s shoulder muscle as Dat held onto the huge plastic bag. Clyde never moved or winced, so for a heart-stopping moment, Lizzie thought again that he had died.
There was silence then, everyone barely daring to breathe, as the life-giving solution trickled directly into the horse’s veins. The locust tree’s leaves swirled in the hot breeze as a horse snorted behind them, the chain on his collar clanking against the jockey stick.
Dat turned toward the waiting team as the vet watched the I-V fluid dripping into the horse. A grasshopper leaped past Clyde, and Lizzie wondered if God cared about the little grasshopper as much as he did about Clyde. Probably not.
Lizzie jumped when the vet lifted his arm and whooped. Dat grinned.
“Looks like he’s gonna make it!” the vet said. Sure enough, Clyde’s gasping, grunting breaths were slowing down now to an almost normal rhythm. The perspiration still ran down the sides of his stomach, but his trembling was visibly subsiding as Clyde relaxed.
Dat explained to the vet what had happened. The vet nodded as Dat described in detail how Clyde worried himself, prancing and tossing his head while the other horses conserved their energy for their work.
“He won’t be worth too much for the rest of the summer, at least for a couple of months,” the vet said when Dat finished.
Lizzie and Mandy heard Mam calling for them in the garden, so they told Dat they had to go. The girls walked slowly down the lane, troubled about Clyde. And Dat. When they reached the garden they told Mam and Jason and Emma what had happened.
“Surely God was with them when Clyde didn’t die,” Mam said.
Lizzie said nothing then, but later that evening she asked Emma if it was possible that Clyde lived because she had begged God that he would.
“Why, of course, Lizzie,” Emma said.
“You think so?”
“I’m sure God heard you.”
Every time Lizzie watched Clyde contentedly grazing in the pasture, his beautiful copper-brown color glinting in the sun, tossing his magnificent head until his black mane rippled, Lizzie thought about God. He was probably kinder than she had thought, she realized.
Chapter 36
That weekend, Dat built a nice chicken coop for Mam. It was a tiny wooden building with a tin roof and plenty of windows to let the sun in on winter days. Along one wall was a row of tin nests, or boxes, with wooden perches along the front where the chickens sat to lay their eggs.
A long trough on the floor contained the chicken feed, or laying mash, as Mam called it. A round container that was upended into a tin tray held their water. Lizzie never could figure out how you could set that large container full of water upside down in the tray and have only a small amount trickle out at a time. Just enough came out to allow the chickens to have a satisfying drink of water but not so much that they could slop around in it.
Lizzie disliked milking, but she loved horses. For her, chickens fell somewhere between love and disgust. She liked to gather the eggs, as long as the chickens didn’t have a crazy notion in their heads about hatching the eggs they sat on. Mam said that a “cluck” or a mother hen, had a natural maternal instinct to remain seated on the egg she had laid so it could hatch into a baby chick.
Thinking about the yolk
turning into a baby chick was disgusting for Lizzie. But she loved to eat eggs—fried, scrambled, soft-boiled, just any which way, with salt, pepper, or ketchup. They were delicious. Mam often made an egg in a nest for Jason. She began with a slice of bread, cut the center out of it with a small drinking glass, buttered the “frame” of bread on both sides, and then laid it on the griddle. She broke an egg into the hole in the center, then fried it until the bread was browned and the egg set.
So Mam’s chickens were a good thing, providing their family with fresh eggs every day, until egg production dropped drastically. When Lizzie brought in only five eggs from the flock of 21 chickens, Mam said it was time to butcher them. They would need to do the entire cleaning, laundry, and baking on Friday so that on Saturday, when all the girls were home, they could help butcher chickens in the morning.
Lizzie sat at the table, trying to get herself in gear for a job she dreaded. She was tired and discouraged as she thought ahead to Sunday. Her last weekend in Allen County had left her extremely irritable and insecure. She hadn’t yet had the nerve or the energy to talk to Emma about things. Marvin was grouchy and slept, or pretended to sleep, the whole way home from the singing. So far, Lizzie was getting no real help in this whole business of how you went about finding a husband, especially one who didn’t milk cows or wouldn’t suddenly decide to move to another county. Her questions were totally unresolved.
Lizzie stuck the tines of her fork straight into a whole chocolate cake cooling on the kitchen counter and pulled on a small piece. She went back for another before Emma told her that if she wanted cake, she could cut a piece for herself, put it on a plate, and eat it.
Lizzie ignored her. When she heard Mam say that she was ready to start butchering chickens, she tried to ignore that, too.
“It’s time you girls learned how to butcher chickens,” she said, doing her best to get them all motivated. “You can’t be a good wife until you learn,” she said, smiling at Emma.
Emma beamed. “Of course, I want to learn,” she said happily. “I would love to be able to butcher and can my own chickens.”
“I’ll have to teach you to make homemade potpie, too,” Mam said.
Lizzie snorted but not loud enough for them to hear. Wasn’t that just so Emma-ish? Planning all her cozy housewife duties a year or so in advance. She still loved old houses with homemade quilts and rag rugs, and baking bread and jelly rolls, and all sorts of other impossible things.
“I’m not going to help,” Lizzie announced loudly, pulling out another forkful of cake.
Mam kept washing dishes and without turning her head, said, “Oh yes, you are.”
The emphasis was very strongly on the “Oh,” so Lizzie knew there was no use arguing. She had often watched Mam butcher chickens, which was, in Lizzie’s opinion, the most horribly unnecessary thing to do when you could go to town and buy chicken already butchered, quartered, cleaned, and sealed in a package.
Mandy didn’t mind butchering. She had helped Mam take the insides out of a chicken once, and she said she found it quite interesting. Not Lizzie. So far, she hadn’t been able to stay in the kitchen long enough to watch. The warm, wet chickeny smell sent her into the living room, swallowing desperately to keep from gagging.
But that Saturday morning Mam carried a kettle of boiling water out the door, and Emma carried another as Lizzie and Mandy pulled on shoes. Dat had already chopped the chickens’ heads off neatly with a hatchet, and so the chickens were ready to be dunked into the boiling water. That step was to make the feathers easier to pluck. Lizzie started swallowing as she approached the chicken house, trying with all her being to help along with this gruesome task. Mam was already bent over the steaming water, holding waxy yellow feet as she swirled a dead, headless chicken in the hot water. Emma grabbed a chicken, held it by its feet, and followed suit.
“Here!”
Mam handed the gray, sodden, headless chicken to Lizzie, the water running off the ghastly-looking feathers as a sickening, steamy smell wafted toward her flinching nostrils.
She swallowed gamely and reached out for the scaly, yellow feet. Gingerly holding both feet with one hand, she started plucking the feathers a bit tentatively from one side of the bird. Blood dripped onto the snow from the severed neck. Lizzie held the gruesome thing as far away from her snow boots as she possibly could until her back started hurting.
“Why are you leaning over like that?” Mandy asked, plucking feathers with nimble fingers, blood splattering all over her shoes.
“Look at your boots!” Lizzie shrieked.
“It’s only chicken blood. It’s not going to hurt me,” Mandy said sensibly.
So Lizzie knew for sure that she was all alone in hating this task. Mandy and Emma laughed and talked, Mam hurried into the house for more hot water, and no one seemed to be sharing her disgust for the dead chickens.
After the chickens were plucked, Lizzie offered to clean up the feathers, anything she could desperately think of to avoid going into the kitchen. She knew Mam wanted to teach her how to “dress” a chicken. In Pennsylvania Dutch, the process was called “taking it out.” As Lizzie raked the feathers, she wondered why English people said “dressing” the chicken. Probably because they were more fancy than Amish people, they wanted to make it sound as if they were dressing the chicken up in a fine suit of clothes. Besides, if they would say “taking it out,” someone might think they were going out to a fine restaurant with a chicken. But how did the term “dressing” ever get started? What they were doing was more like undressing the chickens’ feathers. The English language was strange, she decided, just like Pennsylvania Dutch was.
When she opened the kitchen door, her cheeks red from the cold, a small pile of raw, dismembered chicken pieces stood on the counter. Emma was holding a plucked chicken while Mam stood beside her, patiently instructing Emma in how to dress it. Mandy was looking over Emma’s shoulder, her eyes wide, interested, and wanting to learn, Lizzie could tell.
“Lizzie, this slop bucket needs to be taken down to the fencerow,” Mam said, swiping at a stray hair with the back of her hand. No wonder she uses the back of her hand, Lizzie thought, swallowing hard. She bent to pick up the stainless steel bucket of unimaginable objects with waxy feet floating around in it and carried it across the yard, down the field lane, and over another grassy area before heaving the contents of the bucket into the fencerow.
Dat had opened the garage door and was sweeping the forebay of the horse barn, pushing the wide broom in short little bursts.
He stopped, looked at Lizzie, and laughed when he saw her expression. Pushing back his hat, he called, “Are you happy butchering chickens?”
Lizzie gave him a withering look, and he laughed again, bending his back to resume his sweeping.
“Oh, Dat!” was all she said, hoping he knew she didn’t find him or her job funny.
“I ‘took out’ a whole chicken,” Mandy announced triumphantly when Lizzie returned.
“Good for you,” Lizzie said dryly.
Mam was cutting the cleaned chicken into pieces and packing the pieces onto trays, which she then set out on the back porch to cool thoroughly before she started canning the meat. Lizzie carried the trays out to the porch, thinking about how the chickens had died with goose bumps all over their skin. They were probably so horrified at the massacre in the chicken yard as Dat started brandishing the hatchet, that they all broke out in goose bumps of pure terror. She had noticed that the eyes of the dead chickens were open extremely wide, which only underlined the fact that these chickens died a most awful death.
She pitied chickens anyway for having to sit in tin boxes and lay one painful egg after another. Then people came along and took away what the hens wanted to keep and what they hoped would hatch into children. She wondered if the clucks forgot about their eggs a few minutes after laying them. Were their brains developed well enough to wish they could have a whole family of baby chicks?
They couldn’t be too smart, Lizz
ie thought, or they wouldn’t eat bugs and worms or any insect they could catch. Chickens ate almost anything you tried to give them, even chewing gum that had already been chewed, so they couldn’t be too bright.
“Someone has to guard that meat,” Mam said. “I don’t want the cats taking all this good chicken.”
“I’ll watch out for them,” Lizzie offered.
That, plus having no enthusiasm for the job, was why she never took out a chicken, she guessed later. Between guarding the trays of chicken, taking the slop bucket to the fencerow, and caring for Susan and KatieAnn, Lizzie escaped touching the insides of the chickens that day. When there were only a few more to take out, Emma alerted Mam to the fact that Lizzie had not cleaned one bird.
Mam sighed and then looked at Lizzie and the remaining chickens.
“Mam, I’ll learn next time, all right?” she said quickly.
“Lizzie, you should do at least one now.”
“You’re getting tired of it, and I don’t know the first thing about it,” Lizzie reminded her.
So Lizzie ended up not dressing chickens that day. Emma told her she didn’t pity her if she couldn’t make good chicken potpie or chicken corn soup after she was married.
“I’m not going to get married, so don’t worry about me,” Lizzie shot back.
Emma looked at her teasingly. “Didn’t look like it Sunday evening!”
“What do you mean?” Lizzie asked, her face coloring to a deep pink.
“Oh, nothing,” Emma said, turning to wipe down the counter.
“What? What?” Mandy asked, fairly hopping up and down.
Mam stopped dressing chickens long enough to raise her eyebrows at Lizzie. “You didn’t say anything to us,” she said, smiling.
And so, while they finished the job and cleaned the kitchen afterward, Lizzie let the whole story of her first weekend with the young people tumble out. All her feelings of insecurity and her real fears. She wondered aloud how she could play Ping-Pong with such a nice-looking boy one moment, and even go for a walk with him, and then be left set, “like…like chicken innards in the fencerow,” she said as she finished her miserable outburst.
