Yet I wouldn’t for a minute think of fobbing the job off onto Anthea or anyone else. It feels somehow just and necessary that I do it myself, that I let Anthea lay the puffed-up, panting body of the chicken against the block, that I slap my left hand around the creature’s small head as if covering a child’s coin purse, stretch out the neck, and with my right hand lift the machete over head and bring it swiftly down, as if driving a nail with a hammer, cutting cleanly through the neck with one stroke. I drop the head into the bucket beside the block, and Anthea tosses the body aside, to let it pump out as much of its blood as it can before the heart stops, and its body staggers in smaller and smaller circles, and finally flops over onto the concrete floor, quivers, shudders, and is dead. The dogs, who know what is happening now, are locked outside the butcher shop, barking wildly, almost joyfully, to be let in.
Forty-eight times I do this. Then we fill the double sinks with water that’s hot enough nearly to scald our gloved hands and gather up the still-warm bodies and dip them, and working in a kind of mindless fury, we yank the feathers out by the handful, tossing them in the air, hurrying, pulling feathers with both hands, before the skin of the hens cools and the feathers set and can’t be pulled out without tearing the flesh. We cover ourselves, each other, the entire room with feathers — making a bloody, gruesome mess of everything inside those four walls. We stack the naked, headless bodies of the chickens on a counter top, one on top of the other, until we have them arranged in a neat pile, a pink, squared mound of flesh, and all that’s left now is the removal of the innards, evisceration, which we do together, standing at the counter side by side with our slender knives, enlarging the anus, reaching into the body cavity and pulling out the organs, separating the liver, gizzard, heart, and kidneys, which we stuff into small plastic bags, and when we have washed the body in cold water, we shove the bag of organs back inside the cavity. Our long, white aprons and knitted wool caps and our faces, hands, and rubber boots are splashed with blood. Feathers and guts are stuck to us everywhere, as if we have been tarred and feathered by an angry mob. We are breathing hard. We have been at this for hours and are nearly done.
We wrap each body in plastic and again in paper, and now it is simply meat, food, protein and fat, ready to be delivered to the little Keene Valley Supermarket or picked up later today by our special-order customers — forty-eight organically fed, free-range chickens, a luxury item here in the Northcountry, hundreds of miles from any gourmet restaurant or store, sold at a price that’s competitive with mass-produced, chemically fed, chain-store chickens. I pity those poor sick creatures that, unlike our more fortunate hens, are dosed with antibiotics and spend their entire lives packed in tiny boxes under bright lights in food factories somewhere in Maryland or Arkansas, birds from start to finish raised, fed, watered, killed, plucked, and packaged entirely by shiny machines, never touched by human hands. Our creatures, we believe, have been provided with lives worth living, and they repay us with their healthy, clean bodies.
This, I have convinced myself, is our little battle won. It’s me and Anthea and the girls against Tyson’s and Frank Perdue and the industrialization of the food chain, and for us it justifies the carnage and the stress and high feelings that the bimonthly killing arouses in us. There’s still something of the ideologue inside me, I guess. All these years later. It explains why we find ourselves at the end of the day standing there, bloody and feathered and smelling of gore and guts; it tells us why we are near tears, panting, our chests heaving and our legs weak; and why we look at each other like suddenly estranged lovers. We’re doing it, by God, for a reason. It’s political.
“I never get used to this,” Anthea said and lighted a cigarette and with a shaking hand passed it to me and lighted another for herself.
I smoked and said nothing. There was still work to do, the cleanup. The dogs, sensing the fun was over, had drifted off, so I swung open the door of the butcher shop and let fresh air and late-afternoon sunlight into the room to dispel the smell of wet rust and motor oil, the odor of spilled blood and opened bodies — the stink of fresh death.
But there was something else, it was the residue of my dream of Africa, a stream of vague, almost erotic feelings that had been released in my sleep and then got left behind when I awoke and the dream dissipated and I could no longer call the generative images and story back to mind — a range of forgotten emotions that the killing of the hens today had summoned and now had suddenly brought forward and that unexpectedly and against my will had taken on the hard focus of a specific desire. I said to Anthea, “If I had to be gone a while, do you think you could run the farm? Could you handle it okay?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. Sure, I could. For how long?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a few weeks, maybe longer. Maybe less. Depends on what I find out there.”
“Where?”
“Liberia. Africa.”
Anthea stared at me in disbelief. “Geez, Hannah, you sure? I mean, Africa. How old are they now, your sons? I mean, if they’re…” She stopped herself mid-sentence. “What’re their names? You told me once, but I forget.”
Their names, yes. “Dillon and William and Paul.” When I left Liberia the names of my sons were Fly, Worse-than-Death, and Demonology. I didn’t tell that to Anthea. I added the numbers, the years since I had left Africa, and said, “Twenty-four for William, the twins are twenty-three,” and finished her sentence for her, “… if they’re still alive.” But I did not tell her that when I left our home in Monrovia they were fourteen and thirteen. Little boys. She could work out the numbers if she wanted to, but I knew that she wouldn’t, because she’s a kind woman and loves me.
“All right. Go ahead, and don’t you fret the farm, honey. Me and the girls can keep the place running like clockwork. Stay out there in Africa as long as you need to.”
“Let’s get cleaned up,” I said. “You pack the chickens in the cooler, and I’ll hose this place down. Then let’s take a swim. You up for it?”
“Too damned cold! You got to to belong to one of them whatchacallits, polar bear clubs, to swim this time of year,” she said, and peeled off her bloody apron and cap.
BUT IT WASN’T too cold after all. Nan and Frieda drove in from the orchard, and a little later Cat joined us on the porch, where by then we were drinking beer and yacking in our usual way — I think Frieda was trying to convince Nan to join her on a climb in the Ecuadorean Andes in November, while Anthea and I teased the two, saying there was no way they could handle altitude with their kind of drug use. I sent Cat for the towels, and when she returned, we tossed our empty beer cans in the trash, and the five of us walked arm in arm across the lawn and cut through the field in front of the house, making our way gaily down to the river.