LONG AFTER my brother wanted to stay home on Sundays with his friends, I still loved our country outings. When Mom and I got home from church—Dad never went—we’d change out of our good clothes, then make the thirty-mile drive to her parents’ farm near Success, Dad at the wheel. I never heard my father gripe about these visits. Maybe he felt grateful that his in-laws welcomed him. Since his mother had signed over the Crozier farm to his brother, Dad hadn’t set foot on the land his father had homesteaded, just a few miles down and across the road from where Mom had grown up.
For hours, my cousins Diane and Lou-Anne and I would sweep and decorate and make tea in an abandoned wooden granary we’d turned into a playhouse. There were no windows, but we’d nailed a thrown-out curtain on the wall to make a pretend one, and we kept the small door open. We had our own fly swatter, its rubber flap cracked and limp, and a curled, sticky ribbon hung from the ceiling. You couldn’t tell what colour the ribbon had been originally. Now it was black with old dead flies.
Uncle Lyn stored a rusted pot-bellied stove inside the granary. With its detached tin chimney pipe it took up most of the room, but it was perfect for the imaginary meals we cooked for the imaginary crew that came at harvest time. We saved Black Magic boxes from Christmas and patted mud into the pleated paper cups to make chocolates. Several times we coaxed Diane and Lou-Anne’s youngest brother to eat one, and he didn’t even make a face. There was always a barn cat begging to be fed, a different one each summer, sometimes with the tip of an ear torn off by another cat, its fur ragged. We’d tame the cat enough to come inside and lick cream from an old saucer with the pattern worn off, but it would never let us pet it.
My favourite part of the day was the killing of the chicken for Sunday supper. Nothing that bloody or exciting took place at our house in town. Grandma would pick out the bird she wanted from the hen coop, and Grandpa would grab it around the wings, flop it onto the chopping block and cut off its head with a hatchet, leaving the neck intact. The cousins and I leaped back to avoid the spurting blood while the chicken flapped madly around the yard, almost flying. Grandma told us the bird was trying to carry its own soul up to its maker. She often said funny things like that. She’d been born in what they called the Old World, in her case Wales, and she’d passed on a lot of superstitions to her children. On New Year’s Day, for instance, a woman couldn’t be the first person to walk through the door or your household would be cursed. A shoe left on a table at any time of the year brought bad luck to the owner of the house. Though Grandma never mentioned the effects of getting splattered red by a headless chicken, I thought that would surely be the worst, a hex that could last a lifetime. That didn’t worry my boy cousins, who ran after the chicken till it skidded to a stop in the dust and fell down dead.
By then, my two other aunts and their husbands had arrived at the farm. Once they’d greeted one another and talked about the weather, all the men, including my dad, left the house to “check the crops.” Uncle Lyn always said this with a big grin. He was the youngest of Mom’s siblings, and he acted goofy and boyish when Grandpa was around. Uncle Lyn was the only one who paid attention to me and my cousins in our playhouse. Sometimes he’d stop by for tea, pouring golden whiskey into his cup from a mickey tucked in his overalls and sticking out his little finger as he gripped the handle to make us laugh.
Once the men had gone outside, the women got to work in the kitchen. Auntie Glad, the oldest of Mom’s sisters, told Grandma to sit at the table. “Get off your feet for a while,” she said in her bossy voice. “We can do this without you.” I sat beside Grandma because Auntie Glad, who didn’t have kids herself, hated it when her nieces or nephews got in the way. My Aunt Kitty, who, according to Mom, had got the best of everything when they were kids, scalded the chicken in a big pot of hot water on the wood stove to loosen the feathers. The sisters took turns plucking, then pulled out the pinfeathers. Mom passed the naked bird over the flames that sparked and hissed from the stove’s open burner to singe the hairs. The smell in the kitchen reminded me of the time my brother had burned the hairs on his arm with a cigarette lighter, only worse. It was hard to imagine that the roasting chicken would soon smell so good.
The best part of all came next. My mom and my aunts, for no reason I could understand, gave me first dibs to clean out the inside of the chicken. My cousins thought I was the crazy city kid, but I didn’t care. I loved reaching my hand inside the warm hen and pulling out the slippery package of intestines, gizzard, heart, liver and sometimes, if I was lucky, a string of small, translucent eggs, pale yellow and firm between the fingers but without the hard shell.
After supper, before we left for home, I’d sometimes go with Grandma to lock the chickens in for the night. I let her herd them on her own from the run into the coop, swinging her apron in front of her. I didn’t get too close; there was one hen who’d tried many times to peck the freckles on my ankles. Grandma raked out the old straw, and I helped her scatter the new. She let me toss yellow seeds from a burlap sack onto the dirt floor. I jumped back as the hens rushed towards the feed. Outside the coop, Grandma closed and snibbed the door. “Sleep tight, girls,” she said.
Grandma walked back to the house after that, but I stayed behind until the hens had finished eating, staring through the screen that covered half the door to let in the fresh night air. Some of the hens seemed to hover in the dusk of the coop. I knew they were perched, but I couldn’t make out the rafters. Their feathers seemed brighter than during the day, as if a flashlight had caught one after another in its electric eye. The smell was almost indescribable: a whiff of wet feathers, though they were dry now; dust that had tufted from their feet when they’d pecked the seeds; an acrid pungency from the white droppings that spotted the floor. Every few seconds there’d be a soft cluck, then silence, and a sound close to whispering. What was the secret they were sharing?
It would be a few years before I sat in squirmy silence with the other grade 8 girls to watch a film about “human reproduction.” We learned there were eggs inside our bodies too, so small most of us would never get to see them. Were they as beautiful, I wondered, when magnified and held up to the light? Watching the dust motes flicker in the projector’s beam, I dreamed myself back to my grandmother’s kitchen, my hand warm with blood as I pulled from the hen the necklace of tiny eggs, singular and lovely as amber beads. How I longed for something as exquisite inside me.