Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

The next day, my friend Joel, an Oakland public school teacher and former Deadhead, came over with his children, Jackson, ten, and Margaret, eight. They spilled out of the car, and Joel bounded up the stairs of our apartment. Joel and kids were interested in keeping bees and wanted to get the full experience before they got their own hives.

  Margaret couldn’t believe how cramped our apartment was.

  “There’s something everywhere!” she said.

  It was true that, over the year, things had gotten pretty messy. We had bee boxes stacked up against one wall. The extractor had arrived in the mail a few days earlier and dominated one corner. I had acquired various farm implements—shovels, rakes, pruners—which hung in our laundry room. The pantry was overflowing with canned tomatoes and pickles. The kitchen table was so stacked with books about building cob ovens and keeping goats that there wasn’t much room for anything else. The fall crop of lettuces was germinating on the windowsills. I had acquired more fly strips to battle the increasing numbers. The two survivor ducks were living on the back stairs.

  The house where Margaret lived was very neat and orderly, and there were rules about what belonged inside and what belonged outside. I gave that up when I started urban farming. There’s a principle in intensive urban farming called stacking functions. I told Margaret about the concept.

  “See, these extra bee supers are also our coffee table,” I said as I showed her around. “And the deck is a garden and a bee yard.” I felt like Pippi Long-stocking giving a tour of Villa Villekulla.

  Joel and Bill lifted the honey super off the bee escape and ran into the house before the bees could figure out what had happened. The super was heavy with honey. Inside the fragrant, beeless box were ten frames, crammed in like library books. When we pulled one up, it was revealed to be a big chunk of sealed honeycomb, like a slab of gold within the frame.

  We lifted out each frame, scraped off the wax-capped honey with a serrated knife, and spun it in our shiny new stainless-steel honey extractor. Before the invention of the extractor, in 1865 by a beekeeper named Major Hruschka, people mashed the entire honeycomb and strained the honey from the wax, which took many days and attracted pests. Hruschka realized that it would be easy to remove the honey from the sturdy frames by using centrifugal force. He concocted a spinning device in which the frames could be mounted and the honey would fly out.

  We made the kids give the hand-cranked extractor a spin. Centrifugal force launched the honey out of the comb and onto the stainless-steel wall of the extractor. Then the honey dripped down and collected at the bottom, where a spigot opened to let it pour out. Commercial beekeepers use plug-in knives, automated de-cappers, and motorized extractors, and they heat and filter their honey. Instead, Joel and family steadied our extractor, which had a tendency to keel over, cranked it as hard as they could, then let the honey drizzle out into a few quart-size mason jars.

  We were all sticky with honey and buzzed from licking our fingers and chewing on the leftover wax, which reminded Margaret of chewing gum. We extracted eight quarts of honey in less than an hour. When we lived in Seattle, it took days to get the honey out. Our new machine was impressive indeed.

  “If you get bees, you’re welcome to borrow this,” I told Joel.

  I could see it in his eyes. Hear it in the giddy laughter of his children. Smell it in the heady liquor splattering on the sides of the steel tank as we spun, the scent wafting up into the nostrils of the person cranking the handle. Soon, I predicted, Joel’s house would be as big a disaster as mine.

  He and the kids took home jars of honey. I brought one to the chubby elder monk who lived across the street in the monastery. When I handed it to him and pointed at the beehive on our deck by way of explanation, he gazed up at the hive, eyebrows furrowed. After a moment, he seemed to understand. He smiled and snuck the jar deep into his yellow robes. Without a sound, he turned back into the temple and disappeared.

  After cleaning up, we returned the now-empty honey super to the hive on the deck. The bees simply went to work salvaging any remaining honey and wax and cleaned up the mostly empty frames. I felt a little niggle of guilt. Bees have never been truly domesticated—they are not tame and didn’t really depend on me to live, as Harold and the chickens did. My bees, in fact, were of the same genetic stock as wild bees, bees who make their homes in trees. All we could do was offer them a home and hope it was enough to convince them to stay.

  I couldn’t help but relate to the bees. Their box, like our lot, was a temporary thing—a home for the moment. At any time, the bees could decide to leave, and wherever they relocated, they would make wax and store honey. I realized that that would be our fate, too: wherever we ended up going after the lot was bulldozed, we would build a garden, keep chickens, set up beehives. It’s just what we do.

  As for raising meat birds, Bill was still unconvinced. I was too attached to the survivor ducks to ever kill and eat them. Harold was my last chance to prove my box of poultry hadn’t been a dismal failure.

  Bobby started going barefoot most of the time, which is dangerous in our neighborhood, where the streets and sidewalks almost uniformly glitter with broken glass. When I told him about Jack Chan’s plans, he said, “Condos?” and looked dazed. “Here?” He looked at the abandoned brick building across the street. Then he shuffled off to sweep the street, which he did nightly.

  I picked my third—and presumably last—crop of tomatoes. The lettuce started to taste bitter. I expected to see bulldozers any day now. My watermelon, coveted thing, was growing despite the setback. It hadn’t heard the news of the impending destruction. Worried that I might harvest it too late or, worse, too soon, I asked around for advice on how to tell if a watermelon is ripe. No one in the city could help us.

  Bill and I went to see some farmer friends who live in Mendocino County, about three hours north of Oakland. They had draft horses and forty gorgeous acres of row crops, and I felt a little self-conscious when I told them I was an urban farmer. I was micro-scale compared to what they were doing. I knew that they resented having to drive into the city to sell their vegetables, but they had to go where the population center was. Growing food in the city cut out that step.

  Over a dinner of their farm’s roast beef and potatoes, the youngest son of our farmer friends—a strapping boy of seventeen who already knew how to build a barn and castrate a pig—told us how to tell if a watermelon is ripe. You look at the spot where the melon has been lying on the ground, he told me. If it’s a pale, pale yellow, it’s ready.

  After a restful day, we drove back to Oakland, the watermelon on my mind. Coming back to the city from the country takes a few hours of adjustment for me. I’ll wander off and not lock the car door, for instance. A farmer once said that the only time you have to lock your car in the country is during zucchini season. If you don’t, you’ll wind up with a passenger seat full of oversized vegetables. But if you value your car battery in the ghetto, you better lock your door.

  Feeling relaxed and open, ready to apply the farmer-approved method on my melon, I walked toward the scrambling watermelon vine. It was Indian summer, still warm during the day, but the nights had become chilly, and it was getting dark sooner. I wondered why construction on the condos in the lot hadn’t started. It would be rainy season soon.

  I had to look under a few leaves before my brain could accept the truth: The watermelon had vanished. Wrong bed? No, there’s the vine. I gingerly traced the splay of the plant, from the mound where it had first emerged to the tip where the fruit had been. Had been. Where the watermelon had been lying, its weight (five pounds?) had pressed down into the soil and made a depression. The divot was the only thing left. I crept upstairs and cried.

  Motherfuckers.

  There were suspects, of course. Lou, the collards harvester, being number 1. But there were so many. Some of the corn had gone missing recently, too. I wondered if people in the neighborhood could sense that the garden was doomed. That the yellow spray-painted property lines ha
d marked the garden as weak or crippled. As when wolves take down a weak member of a herd, the garden became a target. But the callousness, to take my one and only watermelon, even if it was doomed, boggled my mind.

  And I wailed when I remembered that I wouldn’t be able to save the seed, pass it on to someone else’s garden once mine was bulldozed. Worst of all, I would never know how the Cream of Saskatchewan tasted. I couldn’t just go buy one.

  I wanted to find the culprit, strap him in a chair, and ask him a few questions. Like: Did it shatter when you cut into it? Was it creamy on the inside? Sweet tasting? The best goddamn watermelon in the world? This fucked-up neighborhood. Bobby? Did he do it? That son of a bitch. I looked out my window. Bobby was sitting barefoot in his lawn chair in the middle of the street.

  I burst out laughing. Let them build condos here. I dare them. Lunatic Landing. Crackhead Townhouses. Broken Window Live/Work Lofts.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mindful of Thanksgiving, Lana invited Harold to live out his days in her warehouse.

  I demurred. I wasn’t a hobbyist with a pet. I was a farmer with a turkey on my hands whose feed-to-weight ratio had reached a plateau. I had fed, groomed, defended, loved, spoiled, named this animal. And now it was time to harvest him.

  On the big day, I woke up late and filled with dread. I puttered around the kitchen. I boiled several pots of water and poured them into a large metal vat outside. Read the paper. Found the ax. Tied up my hair in braids. Finished a novel I had meant to return to the library. Sharpened the ax. Put on my dirtiest clothes. Cleaned out the fridge. Set up a chopping block. Boiled more water. Then, as the afternoon sun streaked the November sky orange, I realized that I hadn’t seen Harold around.

  Not in the backyard. Not on his usual perch on the stairs. Not in the neighbor’s backyard. Harold was supposed to die at my hands but was nowhere to be found. I’ll admit it: I was relieved.

  The previous night, I had been a wreck. The facts were before me. This Thanksgiving, I was not going to be a consumer buying a free-range turkey. This year I was a producer. Against all odds, one of my turkeys had made it to harvest weight, and I better kill him now before someone else did. But first I had to figure out how to do it.

  Seated at my kitchen table after dinner that night, I had flipped through The Encyclopedia of Country Living’s newsprint pages until I came to the poultry chapter. Carla Emery writes, “I don’t think much of people who say they like to eat meat but go ‘ick’ at the sight of a bleeding animal. Doing our own killing, cleanly and humanely, teaches us humility and reminds us of our interdependence with other species.” I had nodded my head and quickly turned to the section titled “Killing a Turkey.”

  Emery’s words of wisdom:

  “The butchering process with a turkey is basically the same as that with a chicken except that your bird is approximately 5 times bigger.”

  “First, catch the bird and tie its legs.”

  “The turkey may then be beheaded with an ax (a 2-person job, one to hold the turkey and one to chop).”

  Lying in bed, I had worried that I would botch the execution, that Harold would feel pain, that his feathers wouldn’t come off, that I wouldn’t be able to clean the meat properly. So I visualized, I rehearsed. First, ax to neck, then bleeding, then defeathering, then cleaning. I mumbled a macabre lullaby before falling asleep.

  But now I wouldn’t get the chance to practice what I had memorized. Harold was smarter than I’d given him credit for, I thought. He knew what was afoot and simply flew away.

  Bill had to work, so Joel had come over to help. Eager to teach his children about where food came from, he brought his ten-year-old son, Jackson. The three of us stood in the garden, the sound of the traffic from 980 roaring by, a vat of steaming water and a sharpened ax nearby. We wondered what to do.

  Then I spotted Harold. He was perched on a low fence in the garden, a place he had never ventured before, watching us. “There he is!” I yelled. It was weird, as if he had known. Harold stood and adjusted his perch. I picked him up; at twenty-eight pounds he was quite an armful, but he liked being held and didn’t struggle.

  Jackson smoothed Harold’s iridescent feathers and looked with wonder at the giant snood that dangled over his beak. The turkey’s voluminous wattles billowed below his neck like an old man’s jowls. I told Jackson about Harold’s life over the past six months, his adventures, his grief over Maude, and his future: on our Thanksgiving table. Jackson’s blue eyes, hidden behind a giant pair of glasses, darted around. Then he blurted out, “I don’t want to see it.”

  So I tucked Harold under my arm, took Jackson over to a weedy patch where the watermelon had once grown, and showed him how to pull weeds. Then I faced a task that, hell, even I didn’t want to do.

  Harold and I, there in that squat lot, embodied the latest endpoint of centuries of mutual dependence. The only reason Harold existed at all was that he and his ancestors had made a Faustian bargain with humans: guaranteed food, shelter, and the opportunity to pass on their genes in exchange, eventually, for their life. Paradoxically, to be killed was a way of life for Harold.

  Though Harold had become a postmodern turkey—named, citified—his death, when viewed in the context of his species, was part of being a turkey. As the naturalist Stephen Budiansky points out in The Covenant of the Wild, “All of nature’s strategies for the survival of a species, strategies which include domestication, include suffering and death of individual members of that species.” Harold’s mother, some breeding hen at Murray McMurray, lives on. In an indirect way, Harold’s mother and I were cooperating so that we could both survive.

  Of course, we meat-eating city dwellers don’t have to kill something to survive. We merely go to the store with some cash in hand. How many people would eat meat if they had to kill it themselves? This was the question I had pondered for six months as I watched Harold grow from a puffy chick into a full-grown turkey. I eat meat, I like eating meat, it is part of my culture and, some might argue, my heritage as a human being. While Harold had to die, I had to kill.

  At the grocery counter or farmer’s market stall, the cost of the meat I bought factored in the cost of the bird’s life—feed, housing, transportation to market. A small portion of that cost included a kill fee. I had been comfortable allowing someone else to be my executioner. And suddenly, all the meat I bought, even though I had considered it expensive at the time, seemed underpriced.

  We burned a little tobacco in an oyster shell, as a new-agey friend had recommended. She said it was a Native American tradition that showed the animal’s spirit which way was up. The !Kung people, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, ask forgiveness of an animal’s spirit. Budiansky tells us, “They don’t pretend there is no ethical cost, or guilt even, inherent in the act of killing the animal.” With this in mind, I whispered into Harold’s ear my thanks and asked for forgiveness.

  Although I usually call myself an atheist, a lonely universe offers little comfort to a person confronting death. I thought of my father, a voracious hunter and fisherman who, even after my mom left him, never came back from the land. He had tried, in his subtle way, from a great distance, to instill in me some of his beliefs about nature as a god of sorts. In my life as a city dweller, though, pantheism had mostly eluded me. But to hold Harold, this amazing living creature, and to know that his life force would be transferred to me in the form of food, felt sacred.

  I stroked his warm, warty head. The folds of skin were soft and pliable, punctuated with small wayward hairs. I could feel his heart beating, slowly.

  It’s true that eating meat springs from a violent act, that in that way meat is like murder. But it is not an act filled with hate. I had murdered the opossum. But Harold I had raised in a loving, compassionate way, with good food, sunshine, and plenty of exercise. Harold had had a good life, and now he would have a good death—quick and painless—at the hands of someone he knew, in a familiar place.

  “OK, Joel. Ready?” I asked.
/>
  Mrs. Nguyen, who is the only practicing Buddhist in the house, perhaps sensing our murderous plan, dropped her blinds loudly.

  Joel looked nervous but steadfast; I could depend on him. After all my stalling, it was almost dark by the time we finally laid Harold’s neck across the chopping block. For his part, Harold seemed resigned, bored, as if this scene had played itself out a thousand times before. I swung the ax. I swung again. Harold had a really big neck.

  Muslim tradition says one must look an animal in the eye until its soul departs. I was satisfied that Harold and I had had a sufficient dialogue. He gobbled once, a warning sound that he regularly made. It made me a little sad to think that in the moment of his death he might have been scared.

  It was a solemn moment. I hefted what was once Harold to a bucket in order to bleed him out. Though headless, he thrashed mightily, and the bloody neck stump pointed accusatorily toward me. I felt relieved, a little ashamed but giddy.

  After his body stopped thrashing, I lowered it into a large pail of steaming hot water. His tremendous girth displaced some of the water, which flowed over the edge and into the garden. After fully submerging the body for a few seconds, I pulled it back out into the air. Joel and I sat down and plucked the feathers like a couple of old farmhands. They slipped off in clumps.

  I could finally take a deep breath. I looked around the garden—only a few fall crops had been put in. Bill and I were expecting the bulldozers any day. We had become glum and unmotivated gardeners. The billboard that overlooked the lot had a public service ad warning against sexual predators. BART clattered by. A few loud teenagers shuffled down the sidewalk but didn’t look in. Killing Harold, we thought, was one of the last things we would do in this garden.

  Joel and I made small talk, discussed how the death had gone, how beautiful Harold’s skin looked beneath the feathers, how tasty this homegrown turkey would be. As the feathers flew and more and more skin was revealed Harold started to resemble a turkey you buy at a store, wrapped in plastic and defrosted in the sink.