In the morning I rig a fence for the meat chickens. One of them developed splay-leg a week ago. I tried taping its legs together like it said to do in the chicken book, but he didn’t get any better. He couldn’t walk, so I put him within reach of the food and water, but the other chickens stampeded over him. “That’s because chickens are small in the head,” Amy said. Over the course of several days he declined, and today I find him dead, which makes me think I should have knocked him in the noggin early out of mercy.
Three days after the move, I have to leave to participate in a literary festival, but it is only a few hours from here and the hosts have graciously offered a place for the whole family to stay, so we’re turning it into a mini-trip. We have arranged for Anneliese’s sister Kira to watch the livestock. I still haven’t quite got all the layers trained to roost in the coop instead of the pump house, so to save Kira the trouble of rounding them up at night I decide to rig a makeshift fence. While trying to finish the fence in a rush the same morning we are leaving, I manage to knock the roll of steel chicken wire over just as one of the layers is making an inquisitive pass. It’s one of those slow-motion moments where I can see the heavy roll falling and the chicken boop-a-dooping along right into its path, and sure enough even as I lunge for the roll it falls whump right on top of the chicken. She looses a horrid squawk and runs off when I lift the roll, but she is limping badly. Before we depart, I type up a letter of instruction for Kira and leave it on the kitchen table. It gives a fair summary of our progress here in the Year of the Coop:
Hi Kira:
First and foremost I shall apologize for (A) the cobbled-up state of my chicken operation, and (B) the length of this set of directions, which far exceeds the complexity of the tasks at hand and will take longer to read than the time required to actually care for the animals.
PIGS
They oughta be fine, really. I have put feed in their feeder and they have water. If you have time on Saturday, lug a pail of goat milk (in the fridge behind first garage door—keypad is broken, use opener on windowsill over kitchen sink) down and pour it in their handcrafted blue plastic trough. Then watch in wonder as they snarf it down, sometimes blowing bubbles out their snoots. If you have some spare sweet corn, throw it at them. You are allowed to scratch the pigs if you wish. There is a scratching stick conveniently placed near the fence for just that purpose. Please do not attempt to ride the pigs or take them to town for tattoos and piercings.
CHICKENS
I have done my best to eradicate all the chickens but have attained only about a 50 percent kill rate so you still have to feed the survivors. One black hen might be limping because today I—wait for the irony here—dropped a gigantic roll of chicken wire on top of her. You really have to aim, and even lead them a little in order to do that, which is not easy with a heavy roll of chicken wire.
The white chickens are basically meat cell replicators on legs. Pigs with feathers. Dumber than a box of, of, of, well, feathers. In the morning, open their little flap door and set them loose to run wild and free (within the confines of their fence). To access the compound, undo the netting where it is held in place on the coop with a drywall screw. You can load their feeder right up, they’ll eat at it all day. Replenish their water. The hose is strung right over there. Don’t forget to turn the water off when you’re done because it leaks and also Anneliese has a little lecture she gives to people who leave the water on, if you’d like I can recite it by heart. I usually put their water and feeder out during the day but you can probably leave it in, that way if it rains the feed won’t get all sogged up. The feed bag is right inside the coop. There should be a little cup inside the bag but I might have forgotten to put it there. Fill the feeder up again at night, please.
The layers are mad at me because I penned them in today. They like to run free, but by penning them up I save you the trouble of running after them at dusk. It’s a nice little evening frolic, and I rather enjoy it, but then that’s me. So just turn ’em out in the morning, reload their feed and water (you probably gotta reach in under the netting divider to get to the feeder and waterer), and shuck 3–4 cobs of sweet corn (under the white plastic bucket under the brick) for them. If you think of it and have time, take the rake and give them some lawn clippings. It keeps them occupied and lends an earthy flavor to the eggs they don’t lay. When you do open the gate to open and close their coop door, keep an eye on them: they are alacritous little buggers and will shoot right out on you. The gate as you will see is held in place by tension and two nails. The chickens tend to put themselves in at dusk, and should be waiting for you to close the door.
That should cover it. Call me at any hour with questions. There are no dumb questions, Kira, only questions that make me chuckle condescendingly.
We are very grateful that you are willing (or guilt-laden enough) to help us out like this.
I usually get paid by the word.
Pig-butchering day dawns crisp and sunny, cold enough that the chickens are fluffed out on the roost. The coolness makes it a good day for handling meat. I’m happy for that, but as I work around the garage—bagging the garbage, sorting the recycling, wrangling plastic pails for the morning’s bloody work—I keep catching the pigs in my peripheral vision, and I’m surprised at the leaden patch of dread in my gut. This day was booked the second I wrote the check for those pigs, and when I brought them home I was bringing them home to be butchered. It has ever been the intent, and that won’t change, but until the sun rose this morning the concept existed in the abstract. The pigs are not pets. They have taken just enough nips at me that I know they would afford me no courtesy given the chance, and I watched them crunch up that rabbit, but still: I liked having them around. They were genial in their grunty, hoggy ways. I’m musing along like this when I hear the truck coming, and once Muzzy hits the yard, all introspection ceases. He roars right past me, straight down to where the hog pen is, and by the time I’m down there he’s already backed around and is stripping out cable from his hoist. The pistol is holstered on his belt. “Let me know what I can do to help,” I say. “I could use a bucket of water,” he says. I jog back up to the house, the young kid eager to please. I’m waiting for the bucket to fill when I hear the pop! of the first shot.
I’ve told Amy it can be up to her if she wants to help with the butchering, but I didn’t think she should be out there for the killing. I’m not sure why—she loves to go hunting with me, and last year she was at my side in the tree stand when I shot a deer. She tromped through the swamp and then sat there patiently in the cold for two hours without sound or complaint, and when I shot the deer, I put her on the blood trail and she followed it right up to the carcass, at which point she exclaimed, “Oh! A nice plump doe!” But these pigs—I don’t know.
When I return with the water, both pigs are down and bleeding out. The thing with pigs is you have to lance the carotid as soon as they hit the ground, or they flop around horribly. They’re back in the paddock a ways, so I get the tractor and a chain to move them out to the truck to save Muzzy the trouble of threading the cable down through the gate and fence posts. Muzzy has hooked the hocks on a length of steel with a large eyelet at the center. While I feather the hydraulics, he hooks the chain to the eyelet, then takes a couple of wraps around the loader, and I back out of the paddock, the pig swinging head down until I lower it to the grass beside the truck, where Muzzy dives in with his knife, severing the front legs.
“Where’s your daughter?” he asks.
“In the house,” I say. “I figured that was best.”
He pauses with the knife in midair, looks straight at me. “Well, I’m going to tell you I think that’s a mistake.” He lets the statement hang there a bit. “She should see this. Kids can learn a lot from this. Pig’s very similar to a human. Sometimes I take the guts and eyeballs into the science class at the school, so they can study ’em.”
He goes back to cutting, and I go to the house. Amy and Anneliese are working on a ho
meschool lesson. It turns out Amy has watched the slaughtering from the upstairs window anyway. They are both a little unnerved. I ask Amy if she wants to come out. She looks at her mother. Then she looks at me, a little hesitant. “It’s up to you,” I say, “but the man thinks you might learn some things.”
“OK,” says Amy, and so we all trek out. Jane is sleeping, so Anneliese takes the portable monitor.
Almost immediately Amy is engrossed. “What’s that?” she says, pointing to the rumpled skin of one pig already flopped in the loader bucket. Muzzy works fast. “That’s the skin,” I say. “See the bristles?” “Oh,” says Amy, then, “Ooo, look at the eyeballs.” And then it is full-bore biology lab. Muzzy’s knife flashes as he circles the pig, the skin falling in a drape as he works. When he gets ready to split the belly, he stops and gives us a serious look. “Who’s the shortest one here?” Amy raises her hand. “OK!” says Muzzy. “You get the job!”
“What job?” says Amy.
“I need someone to crawl in there and push the guts out!”
Amy looks at Muzzy, then looks up at me. “Whaddya think?” I say, breaking into a grin. She looks back at Muzzy; then you can see it dawn on her that he is joking. “Noooo!” she says, giggling. Muzzy laughs happily and starts peeling the guts out. But he keeps stopping, using his knife as a pointer, urging Amy to get closer, to have a good look. “See that? That’s the spleen!” He cuts it free and splits it, points out the vascularity, tells her how it can be injured in a car crash. He gestures toward the underside of the liver. “That’s the gallbladder!” Amy is fascinated. When he shows her the heart, he explains how it works and how a pig heart is like a human heart. “Sometimes they use parts of pig hearts in people,” he adds. Amy is soaking it in. He lays the lungs on the ground and dissects them, showing her how the air goes in and out. Then he asks, “Are you going to smoke cigarettes?” Amy shakes her head solemnly. “If you smoke, your lungs will have all kinds of black spots inside them,” Muzzy says. Then he slings the lungs in the bucket. They land with a slickery flop.
When it is time to halve the pig, he produces a monstrous steel hacksaw and plugs it into an inverter outlet on the truck. When the pig is split, he rotates one half out to show Amy how the brain lies tight in its case. She squats down and has a good look. “I can see his teeth!” she exclaims.
I have backed the pickup down to the butcher site and lined it with plastic. Muzzy swings the winch boom over the bed of my truck and slowly lowers the pig as I guide the halves into the bed. Then he starts in on the second pig, Amy at his elbow from start to finish. Muzzy continues in the professorial vein, but we also get him going on stories. He has been working the entire time with his fingerless hand stuffed in an athletic sock, the thumb protruding through a hole in the fabric. He keeps a small meat hook pinched between his thumb and the palm of the hand, snagging the meat and skin of the pig as need be to set up the cut. What the heck, I think, and just plunge in: “So what’s the story with the missing fingers?” In more delicate company I might have anticipated gasps and umbrage, but Muzzy launches off as if he thought I’d never ask.
“Corn picker!” he exclaims, almost triumphantly. “Took these three fingers right off, and degloved this one.” I’ve seen a few degloving injuries in my day. I know he would have seen the bone sticking out naked as a Halloween skeleton, the skin stripped away. “So they amputated that.”
“What about your thumb?” I asked. “Is it a toe?” The thumb looked a little flat, and I know they do that with toes.
“NO!” says Muzzy, emphatically. “They tried to do that. But I told ’em, I need that toe. I was a truck driver at the time. You use your toes all the time—shifting, pressing the gas…Nope, I wouldn’t let ’em take the toe.
“I was in the hospital for eight days. Four days after I got home I was back to butchering.” The palm of the hand looks padded, like a mitt. “They took meat from my forearm to build it up,” says Muzzy. “Then they covered it with skin they took from my leg. My leg hurt worse than anything else.”
His thumb looks cold in the sharp air. The white sock is wet and reddish with blood. “No, the sock keeps it warm,” he says. “Cold’s not the problem. It’s got good circulation. Cold don’t bother it.” He looks at me with a reckless grin. “But you stick it in a bucket of hot water, and I’ll go to the moon!”
When both carcasses are in the truck and Muzzy is gone, I pull the plastic sheeting around the pigs and drape a logging chain back and forth over the plastic to keep it from blowing loose. Then Amy and I drive the pigs north to Bloomer, where we will turn them over to my friend Bob the One-Eyed Beagle. “Tell him to save the fat,” says Anneliese as we are leaving. “I want to render the lard.”
I delight as usual in having Amy as my copilot. Bombing down a country road in a pickup truck with my daughter has become one of the signal joys of fatherhood. Throw a couple of dead pigs in the back and you’ve got yourself a Hallmark card on wheels.
Trucking the carcasses up north is clearly a violation of local food principles, but loyalty trumps all, and the Beagle and I served on the same fire department together for over a decade. Furthermore, he is a good citizen and a fine butcher. And finally, only a shortsighted churl would pass on the opportunity to haul his homegrown pigs from a one-handed butcher with two eyes to a one-eyed butcher with two hands.
After we unload the pigs and see them swaying on their hooks, Beagle gives Amy a tour. She gets to see the knives and saws and the cold steel tables, the massive half-cows hanging. She takes it all in, and turns to look at me with her eyebrows raised when the Beagle gives her three guesses to identify the one carcass different than all the others, before revealing that it is a skinned bear. While the Beagle demonstrates the vacuum sealer, I think how grateful I am for those friends of mine who can do more than just sit and type; these friends who have fundamental skills and trades reflected in the condition of their hands. It is good, I think, that in the hubris of the digital age this little girl be given a look at the more gristly bits of existence.
We’re just nine miles from New Auburn, so I drive up to the farm to visit Mom and Dad. Mom says there is a chance of an early first frost tonight, and their neighbors Roger and Debbie need help getting in the last produce. Mom joins Amy and me in the truck, and we drive the dirt road to where Roger and Debbie have their fields in the pines. We load their Gator with pumpkins and squash and watermelon and gourds, and when it is full, Roger makes the run back to the shed.
Before we leave Roger and Debbie encourage us to take whatever we like. We load up a little bit of everything and then head over to help my brother John and his wife Barbara pick all of their pumpkins and get them under cover. John and Barbara supply our family’s jack-o’-lantern carving party every year, and some of their pumpkins are such monsters that John uses the skid steer to shift them. We’ve picked up Amy’s cousin Sienna on the way over, and the two of them are yakking and scampering through the vines, picking pumpkins small enough for them to lift and carry over to the pile. When all the pumpkins are picked and tarped, we head back to Mom and Dad’s again. We need wood shavings for the chicken coop, so Amy and I go to the lumber shed and fill several bags from the fragrant mound of piney curls beside the planer.
Back in the house, Jed has come for Sienna. We wind up in the living room where we wrassled when we were kids, only now we sit in chairs and just talk, and talk for a long time. A little bit about how he’s getting along, of course, but also a lot about nothing in particular. When I look back at this day—from rising early to prepare for the pig slaughter right up to this easy moment—I wonder at how much can be had when there is no clock in sight, no destination pending. On the drive home it is cold enough that I turn the truck heater on, and by the time we pass Bloomer, Amy is asleep.
CHAPTER 10
Sunday mornings when I was a boy I worshipped the Lord in a white clapboard house. I sat in a straight-backed chair against a hard plaster wall. In the summer the plaster was coo
l, and in the winter it was cold. The windows were narrow and tall, and the glass was ripply—a distracted little lad could rock in his seat and roll a shimmy through the trees. Sometimes when the snow was heavy on the ground and the living room was radiator warm, the boy got drowsy in his sweater and corduroys. When his head lolled back, it rang soundly on the plaster so that the windowpanes—resting loose in their fractured putty—buzzed like snares, the racket signaling that someone was snoozing along the path of righteousness.
The lady who owned the white clapboard house emigrated to this county in a Conestoga. Having read many cowboy books, I knew Conestogas were for pioneers. I would study the frail woman sunk in the worn chair with her Bible across her knees and thrill to think that once she was a young girl peeking from beneath the flapping canvas of a prairie schooner. Imagine: to worship the Lord beside a pioneer! I can no longer conjure the lady’s face. I remember she had yellowish white hair, which she wore pinned atop her head, as did all of the women in our church. I remember the voice of her son the church elder guiding us quietly from hymn to prayer to homily, the King James cadence of thee and thou, of shalt and wilt, and in the winter the big Jungers furnace in the corner with its blue flame wavering. For a hallowed hour this house was holy, and we were the chosen ones, cradled separate from the world.
I loved our church of no churches. I loved the little white clapboard house.
I did not doze off because I was bored.
I dozed off because I was cozy.
Within the house there were the chairs against the wall, and a row of folding chairs before those. We had no assigned seats, but tended to gravitate to the same place every Sunday. There was Florence beside the Jungers, and her sister Vivian beside her, and their stepmother Myrtle—all three of them sturdy women who sometimes fished lace hankies from deep within their edificial busts, an utterly asexual move that nonetheless widened a young boy’s eyes. Along the wall, sunk so deep in an ancient wine-red velour couch that their kneecaps came to chin level, were the three Jacobson boys, teenaged grandsons of the woman who came here in the Conestoga. Mrs. Doury’s granddaughters and daughter-in-law sat in adjacent chairs, and depending on the Sunday, a handful of other worshippers might round out the congregation. Mrs. Doury’s son-in-law John served as elder, meaning he directed the service. The bread and wine (grape juice and a slice of Wonder Bread) sat beneath a white handkerchief on an end table at his side.
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