A chicken that had adopted George came to grab for something beneath his banging treadle, nearly getting its head mashed. “Where did you come from?” he said. “Hasn’t Lucy locked you all up yet?”
The chicken was the bizarre result of one of his minor experiments. For a while he had simply let various breeds of chickens run together and mix themselves up as their inclinations led them. After all, every once in a while a crazy mixture bred true and turned out to have some new and superior characteristics. He got a kick out of it. He had had Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orpingtons, Leghorns, and a few little black bantams. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened, but although all the other chickens had turned out to be at least recognizably half and half, this one seemed to be an equal mixture of all four. It was black and red and yellow and dirty-white, and it was about three-quarters of the size of a normal chicken. It had the thick under-down of a Buff Orpington in various shades of yellow. There was Rhode Island Red on its wings and tail and Leghorn in its white neck and head and startling red eye. When it had first begun to feather out he had hardly been able to believe what he saw, and he had taken it aside from the others and fed it extra corn. He wanted to make sure it survived because he wanted to see what happened to it. Because of the corn, it began to follow him about—as though it felt more at home with him than with those whose haphazard cohabitations had produced it. It had never laid an egg as far as he knew, and he wondered if it was sterile, like a mule, or just lazy.
He would talk to it in an imitation of the desultory and witless sounds emitted by a foolish old hen who had neither chicks, unhatched eggs, a juicy food discovery, nor a laid or unlaid egg on her mind. The chicken would talk back to him and whenever he had human company he introduced the chicken and conversed with it for the visitor’s amusement. It was such an improbable creature that it was like a walking parlor trick.
“You good-for-nothing freak. What are you doing here?” he asked it again. He stopped the wheel, took off his glove, and tested the knife against his bare thumb. He flicked his glove at the chicken. It side-stepped with a mad squawk that sounded exactly like “Look out there!” and then came back to peck at his hand when he reached down for the glove.
“Don’t you ever get enough to eat? I ought to eat you!”
He waved the knife at it. “You better make yourself scarce in the morning. I’m liable to get you in spite of myself.” He went on pumping the treadle, feeling his feet begin to get heavy as the stone disk whirred against the blade.
Before he went to bed he hauled up as much water as would fill the boiler and the tub. The well was acting almost normal again, but he still felt tense when he pumped it and relieved when he had finished pumping.
As he made his trips past the turkey pen, he looked over at the dark masses of them roosting on their poles and wondered what they would bring this year. Turkeys were a lot of work. In order to have them as big as possible for the Thanksgiving market, he got the hens to set early in the year—so early that he always had to worry on a cold spring night for fear some poults would become lost from their mother and freeze to death. He would go out searching for chilled poults on those nights, and if he found any he would bring them into the house to revive them.
It was wonderful, though, to see how fast turkeys would grow, given enough food and space to scratch around in. By September the scrawny ugly adolescents had become big birds gulping down corn by the bushel, shoving and fighting each other for it, though there was plenty for all. They preened their magnificent white-tipped feathers in the Indian summer sun and strutted about so dignified one minute and so ridiculous the next. One kernel of corn down its Sunday throat would set a bird running in distracted circles, stretching out its neck and uttering frightened exclamations.
They were as brainless as a creature could be, and susceptible to all sorts of diseases. An epidemic of swellhead could not only wipe out a whole flock, but so contaminate the ground that turkeys could not be raised in the same yard again for at least three years. On the other hand, they were the last hope of the harvest year. If they were good plump birds and sold for a halfway fair price, they made up for the winter slump in the cream checks.
Saturday, November 11
As soon as breakfast was over, George took his knife and went out and scattered a little corn in the yard. He could stick a turkey the right way only about half the time. The proper procedure was to grab the first bird to fight its way to the corn, thrust the knife up through its open mouth into its tiny brain, and try to sever the right nerve there. If the right nerve was cut, all the muscles in the turkey’s skin went completely limp for about ninety seconds, which was long enough for an accomplished picker to strip off the feathers while the bird was still not really dead. But after those few moments the muscles would tighten again when all life ceased and rigor mortis set in. And if the knife went too far too swiftly, then rigor mortis set in immediately, tightening around every last pin feather so that the turkey had to be scalded before it could be picked.
He missed on the first bird. He left it beating its wings against the frozen ground, circling the axis of its dead feet. He missed on the second one, too—he hadn’t quite got on to it yet. He picked them both up and took them to the house.
Big as the steaming boiler was, the turkeys seemed almost too big to go into it. He lifted the first turkey almost to the ceiling and then plunged it into the boiler. With the plunge of that first turkey the smell of the little damp house was established for the long day. It was a smell of fresh heated blood, sodden feathers, filthy feet and legs, and recently functioning innards.
Until that first turkey went into the boiler, the house had smelled of the new oilcloth that had come two days before and of the top-grain leather of Lucy’s new nickel-plated skates hanging on the wall, waiting for the first ice.
Lucy and Rachel held the turkeys between their knees, yanking out handfuls of hot, oily feathers and dropping them into bushel baskets. They worked fast because they knew they would probably have more any minute. As they shifted the turkeys from side to side, the long claws raked their forearms and the dangling beaks pecked against their ankles as though the turkeys were struggling to obtain revenge from the other side of death.
At noon George quit with a pretty fair record behind him. About half of his sticks had been successful, and Rachel and Lucy had only had eight birds to pick completely. He hung up his stained overall jacket on the porch and went into the kitchen. The birds were piled on the kitchen table, waiting for the finishing touches.
He looked at them with pride while he washed up. “Well, I wonder how much those swindlers’ll give us this year,” he said cheerfully. “They’re certainly prime turkeys if I ever saw any. Some of those two-year-old toms will go better than thirty pounds. Perfectly fattened, too. Look at these nice yellow breasts and drumsticks.”
Rachel and Lucy had spent all morning in the smell, and the yellow breasts and drumsticks did not seem appetizing.
“Look at the way their feathers have matured, too. Won’t have many pinfeathers to dig out, that’s a cinch.”
He paused again, but no enthusiasm came to match his own. It just wasn’t like the old days, when families worked happily together.
Cathy did not like being penned in by the dining room chairs and she stretched up her arms to him and cried to get out. “Oh Katy!” he said. Then he began to sing. “K-K-K-aty! Beeyootiful Katy! You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore! When the m-m-moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.” Cathy stopped crying to listen to her name in the song.
“She wants to pick, too,” he said. “She’s going to make a good farmer.… Watch, Lucy, that you get that bird nice and clean. If you don’t get those little fuzzy feathers out from under the wings and over the shanks there, somebody else just has to do it, you know.”
He unfolded a wing of Lucy’s turkey and pointed to the bluish-gray fuzz that had warmed its armpit. Lucy scraped her fingers into the hollow a
nd got out the fuzz. “That’s the way,” he said. “You can get to be a fine picker if you just watch what you’re doing.”
By midafternoon there were twenty-five turkeys piled on the kitchen table. Their snake-scaled legs drooped in a maze of flexed toes and spurs, making Lucy think of the tangled crisscrossings of the multiplication tables.
“If a turkey has three toes on each foot and one spur on each foot, and there are twenty-five turkeys, how many toes and spurs are there?” It was one of those tricky thought-problems where you were supposed to forget, despite the reminding “eaches,” that a turkey had two feet. That was the sort of trick she never fell for, but then when she turned her paper in, it would always turn out that in all those different things to multiply she had made some silly mistakes in her tables or her addition.
When her father said her name she knew that he was going to make her get a pencil and paper and figure it all out. That was the kind of problem he liked to give her—something that had to do with the farm. But what he said instead was almost as bad. “Lucy, here’s a fine kid job for you now. Mother will fix you a pan of warm water and find you a nice thick little rag and you can start washing off those feet good and clean.”
He lifted a turkey from the top of the pile and laid it on the wash stand. He stretched its legs out over the pan, and showed her how the process should go. “Make sure you spread out the toes, so it’s nice and clean in there between them,” he said.
The ball of the gray-brown wrinkled foot was curiously soft and spongy, and her thumb pushed way into it as she steadied the toes. The toes were firm along the rim of bone on their upper side, but they too were thickly padded with skin and muscle on the walking part, and softer than a person might have expected them to be. “Make sure you wash all the way up the leg, too. Get it good and clean at the knee joint there, where it hooks onto the drumstick.”
Lucy knew her 2’s all too well. Forty-eight more feet to go after this one. “They sure are different from chicken feet, aren’t they?” she said.
“Why sure,” George said. It pleased him to have her notice things. “Look at all the weight they have to support on those feet. They have to have some padding, don’t they? Just like my shoes are thicker than your shoes.”
He liked leaving her with a big job like that. It was important for her to learn to work at something until she got it finished. He and Rachel extended the dining room table, and covered it with newspapers, and began going over the birds for the last time. They dressed them New York style, with the big feathers of the wings and tails left on.
Before packing each turkey, George hooked its feet to a scale. The biggest tom weighed thirty-six-pounds—nearly three times what the young hens weighed. “Look at that! I told you they were going to be big, didn’t I?” He read the numbers to Rachel and she wrote them down. If he got gypped on the weight, he wanted to know about it. Last year he had shipped to a local wholesaler, but the price had been so low that he decided to try this New York outfit which had quoted him a much more reasonable rate—twelve cents a pound live, and thirty cents dressed, if the birds were top quality. Of course there would be nothing he could do about it if the buyers called these birds low-grade or even unsalable. They would be fifteen hundred miles away from him and they could shyster him any way they wanted to. But they wouldn’t get any more turkeys from him next fall, either. That was the only retaliatory weapon he possessed—not to do business with somebody who had cheated and exploited him. He could find somebody else to cheat him next fall.
They packed two barrels that totaled nearly four hundred pounds. Conceivably they could get a check for a hundred and fifteen dollars for this batch and another check at least as big for the batch they planned to ship next week.
George rolled the barrels back out to the porch. The birds were too warm and too well insulated to freeze, but the temperature was perfect for refrigeration. He would haul them in to the depot tonight after the chores were done and supper was over. It was already dark—time to go and milk.
After supper Lucy fell asleep in the rocking chair. Her mother came and woke her and undressed her and put on her soft, fuzzy new sleepers. It was a comforting feeling to be dressed as though she was still a baby like Cathy. Sometimes if she fell asleep in the car at night her mother would make her father carry her into the house and then she would put her to bed this way. Lucy always tried very hard to fall asleep in the car so she could have this happiness of being so drowsy, so unable to do anything for herself, of having somebody else doing everything for her. Then she would lie awake after she had been put to bed, just enjoying the feeling.
On this night it was her mother who carried her to bed, and after she was tucked in, she heard her father saying, “Rachel, what are you doing, waiting on a big kid like that and lugging her around?”
“She was so tired,” her mother said. “She had to work too hard today. Those turkeys were too heavy for her to hold on her lap all day. A child her age should play on Saturday. Play and read.”
“Phooey! She can’t do half the work I could at her age. I tell you, this isn’t the way this country was built! Kids her age helped make wheat farms out of this tough old prairie sod.”
Lucy lay listening to them talk about how the country was built. They both talked about it a lot, especially when they talked about what she should be doing. She often wondered just how a country did get built. After a while the song that had been in her head all day crowded out their voices.
It was a song the primary room had been learning for Thanksgiving from the green books Miss Liljeqvist passed out every Friday afternoon. Little Songs for Little Children, it said on the cover. The Thanksgiving song went:
There’s a big fat turkey out on Grandpa’s farm
And he thinks he’s very gay.
He spreads his tail into a great big fan
And he struts around all day.
You can hear him gobble at the girls and boys
Cause he thinks he’s singing when he makes that noise,
But he’ll sing his song another way upon Thanksgiving Day.
Once more she went over all the things about the song that confused her. For one thing, she had never seen a turkey that seemed gay. And she was annoyed that the person who wrote the song thought that “farm” and “fan” rhymed, and she wondered, as she wondered about so many songs and poems and stories they had in school, why it was always Grandpa’s farm and never Daddy’s farm. And why did it seem to be making fun of the grandfather and why did it sound as though there was only one turkey on the farm?
And something else about the song bothered her much more than these other things—bothered her so much that she always felt a little sick to have to sing it. She didn’t know why it was, but the turkey in the song seemed so different from the ones she had worked on all day. She always felt so bad about that one turkey, but never about any other turkey.
Will was feeling enough better to dare to hope he would be home by Thanksgiving. The wound which had threatened to burst apart with every cough now appeared to be holding together after all. The nurse helped him get out of bed and into a chair for the first time since he had entered the hospital.
He found he had to concentrate rather desperately on relaxing some muscles that screamed for relief and tensing others that would hold him up and balance him. “Five minutes,” said the nurse on her way out the door.
Oblonsky looked across the bed at him. “One becomes grateful for such small things, eh, Mr. Shepard?”
“Yes sir, you put your finger on it,” Will panted, gripping the arms of the chair. It was too stiffly padded and it was a little too high from the floor for him, but still he was grateful for that chair, even though its overstuffed back felt like a bushel basket between his shoulder blades and its rounded, unyielding seat like a granite mountain-top.
“It is part of the instinct,” Oblonsky said. “The only instinct that really has anything at all to do with the course of the world. The one that is such a c
omplete handicap to most of us and such a necessary and profitable advantage to the very few of us. The instinct that makes us accept any degradation so long as we can continue to exist.”
Not being a professional talker like Oblonsky, Will was always finding himself saying something that came out so different from his thoughts.
“Well, while there’s life there’s hope,” he said.
“I suppose that is one of the most successful slogans ever used by any class of exploiters—governments, rich men, preachers, doctors—especially doctors. Yes, we are all so grateful to all these people for giving us hope to live, so that they can continue to exploit us.”
Will hadn’t had any idea of how weak he had become. The nurse had said five minutes. It must be twenty by now. At last she came and helped him back into bed.
Oblonsky waited till she was gone. “Ah, now, Mr. Shepard, I’ll wager ten to one that you are nearly smothered in gratitude for being back in the very bed that you were so grateful to escape from a few minutes ago. Am I right? You are grateful once more to the exploiters?”
Will was too exhausted to argue; he let the words go out on a breath that was going out anyway: “You might say so.”
That afternoon Murdoch came in. “Never hit a man when he’s down,” he said. “At least wait till he can sit up.”
Will had been waiting. “Another little ride?”
“Yep. I need to do some more pretty carving.”
“No you don’t. I’m not going to fool with this any more. I never would have got into this if I’d had any sense.”
“Yes you would. You might have held out for a few more weeks. Then you would have had no choice at all.”
“There’s never a time in his life when a man doesn’t have a choice.”
“There are thousands of times when a man doesn’t have a choice! They would have brought you in here too weak to sit up and we would have put you to sleep and I would have operated.”
The Bones of Plenty Page 36
