The two chickens hung upside-down by their feet from the clothesline, limply flapping occasionally like rags in the summer breeze, but for the most part just limp, seemingly resigned to their fate. Mother approached each one. Whack-whack went her butcher knife, and plop-plop went the heads into the dusty yard below.
Having been pecked many times by chickens while gathering eggs, I didn’t especially like them, and as Mother went about her task it never occurred to me to feel sorry for the birds. Still, I winced with each whack, avoiding the sight of the flopping, headless carcass as long as I could, and was always grateful that Mother never expected me to take over this particular chore.
My own part was hard enough as it was. Once the whacked chickens stopped their flopping, they were taken down from the line and brought to me. I was in charge of a large bucket of boiling water, into which I dipped the birds for a few moments to loosen their feathers. When they were cool enough to touch, I pulled out the feathers, then held the carcasses briefly over a fire in our trash-burning barrel, which loosened the stubborn pinfeathers that remained lodged in the skins.
At this point, I handed them back to Mother, and she would complete dressing the critters and getting them ready for the skillet. As I worked, though, I couldn’t help but think back to when these chickens first came to our farm.
Some distance from our hen houses, where our egg-layers lived, we had a brooder house, a small wooden structure about twelve feet square that was intended as a heated abode for baby chicks. It had two doors, one big enough for people to come and go, and one just for chicks that opened onto two side-by-side garden plots. (Access to these plots was alternated from year to year, the idea being that the chicks’ droppings would fertilize the plots; it wouldn’t do, however, for one particular plot to become “over-fertilized.”)
Every year, the first week in March brought a bustle of activity as the brooder house was cleaned, the heaters that kept the baby chicks warm were checked and made operational, and the glass water jars and grain feeders were cleaned and ready to be filled.
Finally, the big day arrived. I could hardly wait to get home from school to see the tiny arrivals — they were so cute, like little fluffy toys. Mother always ordered five hundred chicks, which she brought home from the hatchery in cardboard flats, twenty-four-inches square by eight inches high with two-inch holes in the sides for ventilation, and carried into the brooder house. So much chirping greeted us when the lid was lifted — along with the pungent aroma of their droppings. The babies, no more than three inches high, were carefully taken out of the box and gently placed onto the warmed cement floor, where they toddled around, bumping into and tumbling over each other while they inspected their new quarters. Mother and I couldn’t help but laugh at their awkward antics.
I enjoyed helping out with them, which gave me a chance to scoop the little birds up in my hands and play with them a bit. It was Mother, however, who was truly the “Mother Hen” for the chicks, the mistress of the brooder house. She made sure their feeders and water bottles were kept full (even if it was I who did the filling), that the house was kept just the right temperature and that the chicks didn’t escape into the chill of the early spring winds and rains.
Toward mid-April the weather warmed up enough and the chicks’ downy fluff had turned to more insulating feathers, and it was time for them to come out into the world. I propped open the door leading to the garden plot and watched. The birds clustered near the door and looked out, blinking at the bright sunlight. This was something new, and they were confused, unsure what to do, cheeping their bewilderment.
Finally, one brave soul stepped to the door and stuck his head out, then perched on the threshold and stood there a moment, cocking his head this way and that. Tentatively he stepped out into the yard. This wasn’t so bad! What’s that — food? Peck. Nope, a rock. Peck. A bug, yum. Peck by peck he ventured farther, and eventually the others followed, drawn both by curiosity and the fact that nothing bad had happened to their leader. Each day they became more courageous, nibbling more of the bugs and grass and requiring less of the expensive “indoor” feed. Come nighttime they were herded back into the brooder house where they would be protected from foxes, coyotes, and other predators.
Mother took good care of her chickens. This was no idle hobby, after all. All year long Mother sold the eggs gathered from our laying hens, and when the brooder-house chickens reached sufficient weight for eating, they too would be sold or go onto our own dinner table. The chicks Mother bought every year were an investment, and she intended to get a return on the hard-earned money she had paid for them. Accounts on the birds were kept as meticulously as those for the rest of the farm; every bit of grain pecked up, as well as every chick that died before reaching maturity, which happened often, was tracked. In time, several of the youngsters would be added to our egg-laying group and the qualifying eggs from them (intact and of proper weight) were sold to the hatchery, where they would become the next brood of baby chickens, starting the cycle all over again.
By July the chicks reached adulthood, no longer cute babies but mature gray leghorns; the drab-looking hens were definitely outshone by their rooster companions who strutted fancily around the yard, flipping their combs and waving their long tail plumes as they pursued each romantic conquest. In their bird-brained ignorance, life was pretty pleasant for these two-pound pullets, and ignorance truly was bliss for them, considering that most of them by now had pending dates with an iron skillet.
To the chickens, people had always been a source of food, nothing to be afraid of, so Mother had no problems walking into the brooder-house yard, grabbing up a couple of fryers by the legs, one bird in each hand, and hauling them off, squawking, to the clothesline. You know how the rest of that story goes.
After I cleaned the chickens and handed them off, I never hung around to watch while Mother pulled out the innards and cut the birds into frying pieces. I came to regret this when I became a bride because buying a whole chicken and cutting it up myself would have been by far much cheaper than getting one already cut up, and I could have saved my young family quite a bit of money.
At least I had learned how to fry a chicken — and from the master! That often became my chore once I was old enough to take it over, although even then we often shared the task, she dredging the pieces in her special blend of flour, salt, and pepper, then passing them to me to snuggle into the sizzling fat awaiting in the huge iron skillet. Mother never had to call anyone twice for dinner. The aroma of the crispy, golden poultry and its companion mashed potatoes and gravy drew the diners promptly. No one ever tired of Mother’s wonderful fried chicken, and I have never, ever tasted any as good as hers — not even my own. It’s just not the same.
Some might think we were heartless, to take adorable-looking chicks only to raise them to be eaten. Those folks never lived on a farm.
It’s not that my family and other farmers didn’t like animals. They did, and took good care of them, but there was no room for sentimentality. The animals were not pets. They were a commodity, as much a part of the business of farming as the sowing and growing of corn, hay, and alfalfa. Even dogs and cats had clear-cut responsibilities, to ward off predators and keep vermin under control; they neither expected nor got special status.
I’m sure my mother never considered herself a business woman, but she was. I recall her sitting at the kitchen table at night with the checkbook, bills, and accounting book laid out before her. Granted, the only pies that graced our kitchen were edible ones and not on charts. Still, Mother understood profit and loss as well as any banker, and her keen business sense provided stability and even a few luxuries for her family in a time when such extras were hard to come by. What I learned from the example she set was and is beyond price, and although the money she made from selling eggs and frying chickens may not be considered much to crow about by many of today’s standards, it certainly wasn’t chicken feed.