Coop

by Michael Perry

  Tonight in the strip mall as we revisit the other words we promised each other that day (gratitude…devotion…trust…unity…), my eye is continually drawn back to reverence, and how the animation of the word requires more than simple respect or careful talk. I am thinking reverence requires presence and attention, and that I must bestow reverence on my wife if I wish it to fall gently on my children. Looking up from the vows between us, I see a delicate brown fleck set against the blue of Anneliese’s right eye. I discovered the fleck the first time Anneliese allowed me in close, but haven’t noticed it in some time. I need to look my wife in the eye more often.

  We hold hands on the drive home, and while Anneliese goes to the house I close the chickens in the pump house. They are mostly roosted and fluffed. As she always does, Little Miss Shake-N-Bake has settled in the wood chips on the floor. The struggle to roost is a challenge beyond her at the end of day. The Speckled Sussex is exactly where I left her earlier. I refresh her saucer of water, turn out the light, close the door, and drop the hook in the eye. Then go in the house and to bed, and begin the fourth year of my marriage.

  Mid-afternoon of the next day I look up from the desk in time to see the Speckled Sussex step tentatively out of the pump house. She continually cants her head to the side and shakes it like a swimmer with water in the ear. I’m sure some poultry expert could diagnose this. I just stare at her. She steps carefully, and when she pecks at the grass she is tentative, but it seems a good sign that she’s up and about.

  And so it is disappointing when I open the pump house door the following morning and there she is flat on the floor, stiff as a board, dead as a nail. Well, shoot, I think. Picking the feathered corpse up by its feet, I walk down past the burn barrel and sling it deep into the ravine. Fox food. Unless the coyotes find her first, and they probably will. Ever since we began free-ranging them, I’ve been compulsive about counting the chickens whenever I see them. I adjust the tally in my head, take it down from a dozen to eleven.

  On a humid overcast morning three weeks after the death of his son, I meet Jed in Chippewa Falls. My stepmother-in-law is letting me salvage her old pigpen, and Jed is bringing his trailer to haul the panels, which are too long to fit safely in my truck. The old pen is back in the brush and weeds, so everything is woven in the overgrowth. It takes a lot of ripping and tugging to get the panels loose, and the steel T-posts are even harder to free. We’re in the middle of a month-long drought and the rock-hard dirt holds them like concrete. I am a complete doughboy in comparison to Jed, but we do have enough shared raising that we know how to hit the traces in unison. At one point we’re reefing on a panel, trying to lever it free with a length of pipe, when the whole works collapses, smashing my little finger and raising a walnutsized lump on my forearm. “That hurt?” he asks, chuckling gleefully. “Pretty much,” I say, smiling back.

  We load the panels and head on down to Fall Creek. I have some dead trees that need felling, and Jed has brought his logging gear. I have a chain saw, but a couple of these trees are monsters. In my twenty years making ambulance calls I’ve found more than one squashed corpse whose last act on earth was to sink a saw blade into a tree trunk. Jed has been logging every winter for years (and is furthermore a graduate of logger safety school), so it makes sense to ask for his help and stay out of the way. It takes him less than two hours to fell, limb, and section up the trees; the same task would have taken me at least two days. While he logs, I run the tractor back and forth, dragging away limbs and pulling the larger sections out into a nearby field where I can cut them into firewood lengths later.

  When we’re done and Jed has thrown his gear in the truck, Anneliese comes out. We talk about how he and Leanne are doing, knowing full well there’s no sufficient answer. We are talking for much the same reason we have been working together this morning: there are things that have to be done, and also we are finding reasons—quite literally minute by minute—to keep moving. The word closure is tissue paper over a tar pit. In these early days the best you can do is find ways to stop screaming while your psyche begins the sand-grain trickle of sorting the nightmare.

  So we talk some. And then we say seeya like we always say seeya—no lingering, no look of meaningful intent, just seeya. As the truck and trailer rumble out of sight around a bend in the driveway, Anneliese and I hold hands and ache for the pain we cannot absorb on behalf of those we love.

  I use the salvaged posts and panels to expand the pigpen. The pigs tear into the new sod, their tails spinning. I am watching Cocklebur snout through crab grass roots when she pauses, dipping her head up and down. When I look in closer I see she has teased an angleworm free from the dirt and is feeding it backward into her mouth with flicks of her almost prehensile lower lip.

  The soybeans didn’t survive the weeds, but the sweet corn is thriving. Each day I cut and feed the pigs several stalks. They eat the cobs and chew the leaves. We have also come into another cheap pig-food bonus—our friends Kenneth and Virginia Smote have an excess of goat milk, and they have been saving it for us. Once a week we bring it home in buckets, and each day I mix it with the expired baked goods. Kenneth claims he has raised fine pork on goat milk alone, and I have promised him some pork chops in time. We don’t have enough refrigerator space to store all the buckets, and by the end of the week I am decanting some diabolically clotty fondue, but those pigs slurp it right down. On the downside the buckets don’t seal well and we have a bumpy driveway; I have noticed that on real warm days the inside of our van smells of curdled goat.

  We have a number of apple trees on the property, and when the first windfalls dropped I happily gathered buckets of them for the pigs, but I have been frustrated. The first time I tipped them into the feeder, the sound of them tumbling against the plastic brought the pigs a-bounding. How disappointed I was when after a few nibbles they wandered disinterestedly away. I couldn’t bear the idea of free pig food going to waste, so for a few days I took to making worms-and-all apple smoothies in the blender and stirring them in with the bread and goat milk. The smoothie technique worked, but after several days of cleaning the blender, I settled for just lobbing a few over the fence now and then. I did come past the pen one afternoon to find Wilbur gazing at me with a big red apple in his mouth, and I admit I imagined him on a sterling silver platter and said “Hold that pose” out loud.

  The pigs are getting big. Jed told me I’d know they were ready to butcher when they wouldn’t fit between my legs at a straddle, but (A) Jed’s about five-foot-five—if he followed his own advice he’d never butcher a pig bigger than a schnauzer, and (B) you gotta be kidding. Tom, the old-timer in the valley, says four pounds of grain equals one pound of gain, but I haven’t been keeping track, plus there’s all the goat milk and expired cinnamon rolls. He also says any pig over 250 pounds is starting to run more to fat than meat. My brother-in-law Mark says I should just raise them as big as I can get them. As he put it, “I figure every additional inch is two more pork chops.”

  I ask around, and someone says there is a fellow who will come out to the farm and do the butchering. His name is Muzzy. I give him a call, ask if he’ll come and eyeball the pigs, let me know if they’re getting close.

  My sister Kathleen and brother-in-law Mark are butchering their chickens, and I’ve gone to lend a hand. Mark once helped me resurrect my beloved old International pickup, so I owe him pretty much forever, and furthermore, I’m treating this as a refresher course in case we decide to butcher our own chickens this year. I haven’t butchered chickens since I helped my brother John about six years ago. Mark and I wade into the chickens and each grab a bird. The things are huge and solid—I feel like I’m cradling a feathered bowling ball. Mark has rolled up four tin funnels and nailed them to a horizontal plank attached to the back of his chicken tractor. We stick the birds headfirst down the funnels. When all four funnels are occupied, Mark grabs a butcher knife, fishes out the head of the first chicken, extends the neck and with one quick motion, severs the hea
d, and moves to the next bird. The funnels keep the birds from flapping all over creation (while the idea of a chicken running around with its head cut off tends to be used in a humorous sense, the reality is much more unnerving, and more than one farm kid recalls the freakout of zigzagging across the yard two steps ahead of a spasming two-legged gore-geyser that seems to be matching zig for zag) while also allowing the blood to drain to the ground.

  When the blood is down to a slow drip and the legs stop kicking, I grab two birds by their feet, pull them from the funnel, and carry them over to where my father is heating a large pan of water over a propane burner for the purpose of scalding the birds, which loosens their feathers for plucking. The scalding is tricky—immerse the bird too long or at too high a temperature, and you begin to cook the skin and it will tear when you pluck; too briefly or at too low a temperature and the feathers fail to loosen, and plucking becomes even more of a chore. As to the perfect temperature for scalding, experts agree: the experts disagree. Dad finds it helps if you plunge the bird up and down slowly, which seems to increase the penetration of the hot water.

  Next Dad gives the bird a turn on the automatic plucker. My brother John built the plucker himself and its main feature is a rotating drum bristling with rubber fingers. Dad lays the chicken on the drum and turns it this way and that. The fingers snag the feathers and sends them flying into a pile. As the day progresses they collect on the lawn like a soggy pink-tinted snowbank. The plucker gets about 90 percent of the feathers (lately we have been eyeballing an improved model), but the rest require manual labor. At eye level between two trees, Mark has rigged a line threaded with a series of blunt hooks. The hooks are sized so that the shin of the chicken will easily fit but the foot catches. Most of the remaining feathers can be plucked by hand, although we do break out the pliers now and then. At the very end we use a handheld propane torch to singe the pinfeathers, which blacken, curl, and burn away to nothing. If you hold the flame in one place too long, the skin begins to contract and you are quite literally cooking chicken. Next Mark and the neighbor lady cut the feet loose at the joint, eviscerate the birds, and put them in tubs of water to cool. A hose is placed in the tub and allowed to run at a trickle so the water stays cold and refreshes itself, rinsing away what is officially known as skack.

  Once we’re under way, by about the sixth bird or so, we establish an informal division of labor and a rhythm sets in. I stick mostly to plucking and killing. I do not like the killing part, and find the best thing is just to move decisively. There is the usual unavoidable nonmetaphorical instant of recognizing exactly what it takes to enjoy chicken dinner, but I resist the temptation to deconstruct the process further. It’s miserably hot, which highlights the delight of working elbow deep in guts and wet feathers. Wasps continually alight on the chicken carcasses and buzz at our ears when we shoo them. Sidrock has picked a severed head from the pile beneath the funnels, and, squatted beside a tree, he is working the beak open and closed and poking at eyeballs. Jed has arrived, and before he starts plucking, he grabs a chicken foot and exposes the white ribbons of tendon with his jackknife. Then he shows Sidrock how to make the chicken claw open and close by tugging on the tendons. Sidrock is openmouthed in wonder. “Go show your mom,” says Jed slyly, and the little boy tears off for the house with the claw in one hand. Flopped in the shade beneath the four-wheeler, Mark’s dog is hot-mouthing a rooster head. The deep red comb has gone yellowish pale, and when the dog settles in to gnaw it from the skull, the sound reminds me of the one I hear in my own head when I am chewing gristle.

  Jed joins in, working and jesting with the rest of us. But there are new lines around his eyes, and after an hour he puts down his knife, lays back across the ATV seat, puts his cap over his eyes, and sleeps. No one says anything, but we know we are seeing the absolute weariness of grief.

  Forty-three chickens go through our ragtag assembly line. I am not staying for supper, but I wish I could because on the way to the car I walk past the charcoal grill and catch the scent of beer-can chicken, which is made by roasting a chicken in the vertical position with an open can of beer stuck up its hinder. A final indignity, I suppose. The whiff I catch on my way to the car makes my tummy grumble, and the stinky feathers clinging to my boots do nothing to diminish my appetite.

  As for our meat chickens, they are growing at an alarming pace. Within two days of delivery they were sprouting wing feathers and already they are approaching Cornish hen dimensions. It’s tough to love the meat chickens. They stomp around thick-legged and flat-footed, and when I turn them out on fresh grass or give them sweet corn on the cob, they peck some, but mostly they just sit and wait for ground feed. The free bread they ignore entirely. They are nearly impossible to move in the chicken tractor, lollygagging confusedly. Rather than startle forward when the back of the tractor bumps them in the butt, they often flop over and rest quietly while it rolls over them. We gave them chicken starter to begin with, but now that they’re coming on, we’ve switched them to hog feed, since it’s cheaper than chicken feed. The one time they show life is when I replenish the feeders, at which point they trample and ram each other without mercy. Once for the sake of my own entertainment I filled a mason jar with feed, capped it, and set it in the pen just to watch them peck madly at the glass. They are clearly bred solely to generate protein, and in the first couple of weeks I had to build three different temporary boxes for them, increasing the size each time. Once we started free-ranging the layers I switched the meats over to the chicken tractor, but still, every night I have to drag them into the garage, as the chicken tractor isn’t strong enough to withstand more aggressive predators, and just the other day I saw a fisher (basically a weasel on steroids) cross the driveway. When I’m gone, Anneliese has to drag them back and forth. The garage is deeply pungent, and every time I go in there I am reminded of my shortcomings. None of this would be an issue if the chicken coop was done.

  The laying hens, on the other hand, are great fun. They follow me to the office in the morning and tap on the glass of the storm door. If I rattle a tin tray of feed, they come running. I catch and feed them grasshoppers. They are not pets as such (their siblings, the ones that remained with our friends Billy and Margie, actually jump into your arms for cuddle time), but they are engaged and surprising and fun to watch. Sometimes when the deadlines are really closing in I wander down and let them eat feed from the palm of my hand just for the relaxation of it. I can envision a time when all a man would want is a porch, unoccupied time, and chickens in the yard.

  Jane is not growing at the rate of a meat chicken, but she is holding her own. When I put her in the football hold my arm gets tired before she does. I’ve begun taking her along in a backpack while I’m doing chores. Yesterday when we approached the pigpen and the pigs did their usual woofing and galumphing, I heard a funny noise behind me, kind of a slobbery chortle, and when I craned my head I could see Jane smiling at the pigs and I realized I had just heard her very first out-loud laugh.

  Nighttime, however, has not been so joyous. After settling into a groove in which she slept most the night, suddenly Jane’s begun waking up and bawling. Last night after Anneliese had tried feeding her and she was crying again, I took my turn. I went through my whole repertoire of tricks—rocking, bouncing, pacing around the kitchen island sixteen times in the ambient glow of the microwave light—and nothing worked. Finally I gave her my knuckle to suck, and as she latched on I felt a slight snag and there was your answer: her first tooth breaking through.

  I was down tending the meat chickens when Muzzy the butcher rolled into the yard driving a shiny red diesel truck with a winch and boom mounted in the bed. Custom Butchering & Scrap Iron, it says on the driver’s side door. He seemed to step from the cab while the truck was still in motion, already in stride as his feet hit the driveway. I was a ways across the yard, but I could see he was long-legged and cowboy-slim. His bill cap rode high and looked big for his head. The brim wasn’t tracking with the rest of
him—it pointed leftward. He was wearing a silver pistol in a black leather holster. The pistol rode loose, with the handle tipped out, and I noticed he had no fingers on his left hand.

  He was stomping toward me, but he was looking down toward the pigs. The female was visible beside the feeder. “Oh, she’s nice!” he said. “That’s a good one! From here I’d say about two-twenty!” I shook his hand—the one with fingers—and walked him down to the pen. While walking I shot a glance at the hand and could see it had been patched up with flaps and grafts. Wherever those fingers went, they didn’t go easy.

  “Oh, look at that big guy!” he said, pointing to the male, who had come snuffling up from the back of the enclosure. “He’s nice and thick through the shoulders. He’d be ready now. He’ll go about two-fif…no…I’d say two-sixty.” He had clambered over the gate and was right in there now, hands spanning the hog’s front shoulders, poking and squeezing some. “Dandy!” he said. “That’s great, thick through the shoulders like that.” He was looking up at me and smiling, proud as if he’d raised ’em for me. Naturally it felt good to hear that the guy liked our pigs.

  “The female, she’ll go about two-thirty,” he said, revising his original estimate upward. “Yah, you could butcher ’em anytime. Give my wife a call and she’ll set it up.”