Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  After the body was clean of offal, I cut it from the coat hanger, leaving two white rabbit paws hanging in the plum tree. I felt a surge of nostalgia for this moment. Here I was, like a peasant woman, killing my supper, white furry paws hanging among dark plums, me wearing a bright blue apron with a pair of kitchen shears in the front pocket. The mise-en-scène of the tree, the bench below it, a mat of nasturtiums twinkling in the shady spot, the propagation table with trays of small sprouts emerging.

  I understood everything about the dinner I would have that next evening, after the meat rested for a day. I had seen the rabbits born, I had carefully fed them fresh greens and snacks from the garden, the Dumpster of Life, and Chinatown. I even knew their personalities. This white rabbit had been the largest of the group—and the bully, always beating up his smaller brothers and sisters—so he made the most sense to kill first.

  I hesitated at the entry to the garden, in that boundary between farm and city. Across the street, near the vestibule of the abandoned building, there was a crackhead guy on his hands and knees, searching for something on the ground. He stood up and walked around in circles, examining a dollar bill, ripping off the corners.

  I’ve never been scared of this man. He has never talked to me or even approached me. But today, with the body of the rabbit still warm in my arms, I felt as if I might actually scare him. If he looked over at that moment, if he could think clearly, if he could see what I had done, would he be just as disgusted with me as I was with him? I would explain that I was very hungry and needed comfort. And perhaps he would say the same to me.

  Not wanting to scare the downstairs neighbors, I swaddled the slightly bloody carcass in my blue apron and carried it upstairs, thinking about my mom. When my sister and I were children, Mom was making the most of her situation. And wasn’t that what I was doing, too? Another restaging of the uniquely American fascination with the agrarian lifestyle. Looking back on my parents’ history and comparing it to my present, I recognized that if my parents were Utopia version 8.5 with their hippie farm in Idaho, I was merely Utopia 9.0 with my urban farm in the ghetto, debugged of the isolation problem.

  I cheated and used salt to make a brine to draw the blood out of the rabbit. Before I submerged it, I admired the rabbit’s lean lines. The saddle—the meaty back section—is the prize cut, and many restaurants serve only that. As hungry as I was, I wouldn’t be wasting anything. The back haunches looked well exercised, plump. I put the fur and the head in the freezer for when I got around to learning how to tan the hide using the brain—an old Davy Crockett-era trick. One day I’d make an awesome rabbit-fur-lined sleeping bag. The entrails went into a hole I dug next to a fig tree—they would provide nutrients.

  My plan was to invite Bill for dinner. For the past three weeks, I had been eating to survive, mostly grazing while in the garden, so we weren’t eating together much. It felt important to be making a whole, hot meal, and I was proud to share the meat of my labors with my beloved Bill. Though he is a scruffy auto mechanic who would be happy to subsist solely on burritos, he happens to have one of the best palates I’ve encountered. He can sense the presence of secret herbs in fancy restaurant dishes, artfully describe a perfectly ripe peach as if it were a vintage wine.

  With the rabbit, there was plenty to share, and so I was doing what a primate hunter does with a big kill: distributing it. A chimp researcher mentioned in The Primal Feast, Craig Stanford, noted that “chimps use meat not only for nutrition; they also share it with their allies and withhold it from their rivals. Meat is thus a social, political, and even reproductive tool.”

  I had been working on the bad-breath thing (flossing maniacally), and I hoped that once I shared some meat with Bill, he would, well, you know, give a little back. Only Bill wasn’t a chimp. The meal had to be good if I was going to get any.

  The next day, I followed my sister’s recipe, which came via Mamie. While I fried the rabbit pieces in duck fat, I thought about my sister. She had her own version of utopia, too. She had gone from an SUV-driving, Botox-using Los Angeles lifestyle to a happy, quiet existence in a rural French village. Perhaps it was her hippie DNA expressing itself, or maybe Mamie’s thrifty influence, but in France, Riana had gotten into crafting her own soap and making her own cloth diapers. We were both planted in places wildly different from Idaho, and yet our hidden traits were coming out, adapting to make something new.

  Once the pieces of rabbit had turned golden, I poured a bottle of my wine over them. In a 350-degree oven, the meat cooked for an hour with sprigs of thyme and cloves of garlic. I set the table and called Bill to dinner. I served generous portions of the rabbit: two pieces of the saddle for each of us. I spooned a few stewed plums and some sauerkraut next to the rabbit.

  We sat down for our first meal together in a long time. The meat was flaky but firm, and redolent of garlic and herbs. Bill took a bite, and I watched him carefully.

  “This is better than chicken,” he said, smacking his lips and slicing off another piece of juicy meat. Then, be still my heart, he gave me a sloppy kiss before stuffing more rabbit into his mouth.

  It was the most flavorful rabbit I had ever eaten. While I chewed, I couldn’t help but think of the white rabbit that had been killed so that we could eat. I was thankful that he had been born and thrived on my farm. His flesh became my flesh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In the end, they got Bobby.

  I wasn’t there, but a graffiti artist on our street told me about it.

  The city came again and dragged away the numerous abandoned cars and collected the belongings Bobby had built up since the last purge. The man with a clipboard was there again, and when Bobby walked over to him, the police arrived and arrested Bobby.

  They told him if he didn’t stay off 28th Street, they would put him away. “We’re all doing something illegal on this street,” I said to the graffiti guy.

  “Shit, yeah.”

  “I’ve got all these animals, you’re tagging buildings, Lana had that speakeasy, Grandma has her underground restaurant. . . .”

  “But Bobby was out in the open,” he said.

  Someone power-washed the street. A FOR SALE sign went up near where Bobby had once lived.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  On day twenty-five of my monthlong experiment, I passed by Grandma’s and saw a new sign posted. Another fish dinner. My mouth watered, remembering the tender catfish, the golden cornmeal coating. I had to tell Bill, because someone had to enjoy that food. When I got home, he was in the tub.

  “Want a dinner from Grandma?”

  He nodded.

  “Fish or chicken?”

  “Fish.”

  About ten minutes later, I found myself seated in Grandma’s kitchen, looking through her photo album. Her kitchen was small but orderly, with colorful oven mitts decorating the walls and a lethal set of knives above the stove. Cast-iron pans bubbled with oil. I was late, but Grandma was willing to make me up a meal.

  I sat breathing in the cooking smells through my pangs of hunger—or not hunger, exactly, but a heady desire to eat something besides a salad or rabbit or apples.

  “I’m making meatloaf and potatoes tomorrow,” she told me as she bustled around, breading the catfish, then dropping it into the hot oil. “I wish I had some collards.”

  Could I have imagined her words? I mean, I had hoped that things were going to work out like this, but . . .

  “Er—I have a whole bed of collards,” I said.

  “Did you hear that, Carlos?” Grandma yelled, and brought Carlos into the room. He was tall and skinny and wore a red baseball hat. He had had a stroke, so he was legally blind.

  “I have a big bed of collards. I could harvest them for you tomorrow,” I offered.

  “Good,” Carlos muttered.

  “I have some Swiss chard. I could bring that, too,” I said.

  “No. Do. Not. Bring. Swiss chard,” Carlos asserted and walked back into the front room.

  �
��He hates chard,” Grandma whispered. “Now, I can pay you for the collards,” she said.

  “No, no,” I said. “You just make me one of your dinners. We’ll trade.”

  My dad had told me that hunters often experience a sort of giddy high upon making their kill. As I walked down her stairs, past the flowers and the pebbles, and then past her boys, I experienced a thrill that must be similar to the hunter’s high. Tomorrow, I was going to eat, and eat good.

  The next morning, after my usual meal of grated young pumpkin and a mug of minted green tea, I went out to the lot and harvested the entire bed of Southern Georgia collards. They had been growing for four months now, but unlike the lettuce, they loved the heat and were still thriving. Also, I had been side-dressing them with rabbit poo. Every week I had cleaned out the rabbits’ cages and tossed the black circular turds next to the collard plants. The greens had grown lush and large; their big leaves sucked in the sun and grew larger and larger.

  For lunch I had my usual salad, with lettuce, roasted beets, a boiled egg, a bit of leftover rabbit, and an apple. Around two o’clock, I finished soaking and washing the collards and walked them down MLK to Grandma’s house. The four grocery bags full I carried would eventually melt down to just one pot of greens. When I handed them to Grandma, she squealed.

  Later, I went back to collect my dinner and brought Bill with me.

  We sat in Grandma’s kitchen and watched her cook as she told us fishing stories. Carlos joined us at the table with a small bottle of Cisco, a red malt liquor, glad that I hadn’t brought any Swiss chard. One time, she and Carlos caught one hundred catfish, Grandma said. They had to put them in the bathtub to be cleaned. Grandma showed us a photo of the fish in the bathtub.

  “Hon, you want cake or cobbler?” she asked.

  I began to salivate. To eat cake, something made almost entirely out of flour and sugar, a dense load of carbs, well, I would take that. Especially when the cake had pink frosting. Technically, based on my rule number five (Bartering allowed, but only for crops grown by other farmers), I was cheating. Grandma wasn’t a farmer. She was a hunter-gatherer. But for me, after almost a month of the 100-yard diet, I started to see boundaries and categories in a different way. Farmers, who had lately become cult figures, were just trying to survive. My snobbery around food had evaporated. Plus, I really wanted some cake.

  Bill and I returned home, lugging our almost bursting Styrofoam takeout containers down the dark street.

  Then we saw Bobby.

  He had relocated one block up. He looked good. He had clean clothes and was wearing shoes.

  “They’re taking care of me now,” he said as we hugged, and he gestured to the big guys in front of Grandma’s. I felt bad. Why hadn’t I helped him?

  Bobby told us he had a new place with a “million-dollar view”—of the highway. He pointed to his spot, and I saw he had built an altar on top of an electrical box to mark it.

  “I love you guys!” Bobby yelled.

  “We love you!” I yelled. And I meant it. We really missed Bobby.

  I lived off Grandma’s dinner for three days, like a cougar feasting on a deer. I was happiest about the fish, because I knew Grandma had caught it herself, and I remember the photos of her standing there, proudly holding up her mess of fish. The rest of the food—the homemade potato salad, the mac and cheese, the fluorescently pink cake, a dab of collards from my garden—it was good, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Two days before August 1, I saw a newspaper lying in our lot, in the duck area. It was early in the morning, and I didn’t have my glasses on. I peered down but didn’t see any of the ducks waddling back and forth.

  When I walked out to the duck yard, I was greeted by silence. The birds had been massacred. One of the ducks had been ambushed while he slept—he still had his head tucked under his wing. Another had made it—or been carried—over the pen’s gate. The geese were dead, too, on opposite sides of the yard, as if they had tried to fend off whatever had killed them but had been divided, finally, and died alone.

  It was a beautiful sunny day, still cool in the morning as I stood there looking at the grassy area littered with feathered corpses. White feathers on green—it was strangely peaceful. The animals had only a small puncture or two on their backs.

  I kneeled down to touch their bodies in the grass. They were freshly killed, still warm. Peg, our hillbilly neighbor, walked past wheeling a bundle of laundry.

  She called in, “Everything OK?”

  “No,” I said. “They’re all dead.”

  “I saw ’em. A pack of stray dogs run outta here around six this morning,” she said.

  Stray dogs—this place was really getting third world, apocalyptic.

  She continued on to the Laundromat down the street. And I got my pruners and cut off the birds’ heads. I wasn’t as sentimental as I had been with Maude or the duck and goose killed by the opossum. I let these birds bleed into the ground.

  Later I carried the bodies upstairs and hung them from the shower rod by their webbed feet. I put some water on to boil. Even in my despair, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful they all looked, hanging there like bounty from a hunting trip. My bathroom had been transformed into a hunting lodge.

  I had never experienced such abundance in all my time on the farm. Two geese and five ducks. What usually is a celebration of a farm animal’s life, the melding of its body with mine, became a salvage job. I wondered if it was prudent to eat the meat at all. But I was hungry, and the work of processing them became a meditation.

  I plucked until my fingers ached. The goose feathers were particularly small and difficult. Bill helped. He plucked his outside, setting the feathers free to swirl around the neighborhood with the tumbleweaves. I collected mine in a bag, hating to see anything go to waste. I planned to make a pillow or a down vest.

  I placed the duck and geese bodies in the fridge. Luckily, there was plenty of room, as it was almost bare. Then I got out my cookbooks.

  As I read Elizabeth David, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie, and The River Cottage Meat Book, I realized that the mass killing of my waterfowl, as tragic as it was, had opened up my culinary horizons. Usually with a duck, I would roast it, eat as much meat as possible, then boil the carcass for broth. With the windfall on my hands, I could make some recipes that, because of frugality, I had never dared.

  I sliced off the breast meat from a few of the ducks. Following the recipe in Charcuterie, I re-created a gamey but delicious duck prosciutto I had had in France. To make it, I simply rubbed the breasts with salt, added a coating of pepper, and stowed them in the fridge for a few weeks. The geese I put in the freezer to make goose sausages at a later date.

  Chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the author of The River Cottage Meat Book, would be my guiding light. He inspired me, going on in his British way about duck confit: “Having a jar just sitting in the larder, bursting with savory potential, makes me salivate every time I see it.”

  A confit is meat preserved by storing it in a thick layer of rendered fat. First I had to render the fat. So the next day—after the usual twenty-four hours of rest for the meat—I turned the oven on low. I placed the breastless ducks in various cast-iron pans and cooking trays and set them in the oven. Every hour or so, I poured off the pan drippings. Once the legs were cooked through, I placed them in a jar and poured the rendered fat over them.

  I wouldn’t say the meat was the best I’ve ever tasted. Because the fowl hadn’t been immediately bled out, it had too much blood in it to serve it to company. But I was a hungry urban farmer, and in saving the meat, I felt almost as if I had saved the birds.

  The 100-yard feast (or fast) came to a close. I simultaneously wanted to suck down a cup of coffee and to never let the experiment end. I would miss that slightly hungry, spry feeling. I would miss having my choices limited. I would miss my intimacy with the garden. When I was eating faithfully only from her, I knew all of her secrets. Where the p
eas were hiding, the best lettuces, the swelling onions.

  When I went back to shopping at the supermarket, all those choices would open up again. I could choose from forty-seven different kinds of French cheese. On a whim, I could eat pizza. Or gelato. These are the wonderful things about life—and I made them more precious by not partaking for one short month.

  On the eve of July 31, I surveyed the kitchen cupboards. I was down to my last few bottles of plums. I had stripped the last corncob that morning. There were two eggs left. The last honey jar had three fingers of honey remaining. A little bit of sauerkraut marinated in the fridge. A few jars of jam lingered in the pantry. The vat of balsamic vinegar, made from the wine, quietly transformed in the corner. The duck in the confit jar burst with all that savory potential.

  In the garden, I looked at the vegetables I would be eating in a few weeks. I anticipated the dry bite of the orange-fleshed, strangely warty Galeuse d’Eysines squash, the crunch of the sweet corn, which still hadn’t ripened. The Brandywine tomato that started green in June and turned only slightly pink by the end of July. The forming heads of the crinkly Melissa cabbage. My friends the zucchini plant, the bean vine, the apple tree, which somehow never ran out of fruit.

  Hanging in the plum tree, the white rabbit paws danced in the wind. I walked over to the beehive and held my ear to the box. Whistling and rumbling. Who knows what the bees thought of their new home, but they hadn’t left.

  I had fed myself from my little plot of land, it was true. I had survived, thrived even, through a mix of luck and moxie. But I couldn’t have done it alone—I had needed the help of the creatures and plants and people around me.

  In the end, the brussels sprouts never formed heads; the stalks were lined instead with some frilly leaves, which I fed to the rabbits and chickens. Toward the end of the summer, though, I harvested cucumbers and tomatoes every day. These I distributed to Peg and Joe. They didn’t seem surprised. Peg just said, “Oh, OK,” when I handed her a bag of the drop-dead ripe tomatoes and crispy lemon cukes.