If has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was cool and rainy, no good for farmers to pick corn, so some of them came and sat in the Chatterbox Cafe for a while and tried to be a comfort to each other by telling a few familiar jokes. Roger and Rollie and Harold and Virgil Berge, sitting in the back booth, began with a few clean ones about animals walking into a bar and asking for a drink, and a cannibal joke, and the pig-in-the-apple-tree joke, and the ventriloquist who spends the night at the sheep farmer’s, and the one about the Norwegian trying to get into heaven. Then Harold started one about a seed salesman who was traveling through. His voice dropped as he came to the part where the lady tiptoes out to the privy in the moonlight and her dog follows her, and everyone leaned in close, and Mr. Lundberg and Bud and Russell came and huddled over the booth, waiting to be killed by this beloved old classic, and he said, “So Clarissa seen a petunia growing near the path and bent down to pick it up…and the dog he…” and Harold, who has been under a lot of pressure lately, began to slowly explode. He leaked air out of his nose and his ears. He gasped and whinnied, tears running down his face, he grabbed on to the table, out of control, he stood up and motioned to be let out, but they were starting to leak too and couldn’t move. He attempted to climb over them but was too weak. He tried to say the punchline, but it wouldn’t come out. So he fell down on the floor and crawled out under the table.
Uncle Al was there, having a bite of meat loaf. He told me later, “You know, some people only know how to tell a joke, but Harold knows how to make people laugh.”
Strange for my uncle Al to eat in a commercial establishment, seeing as he is married to Aunt Flo, whose cooking can make the lame walk, but this was a cool fall day when we were butchering chickens in her backyard, and Uncle Al is a gentle man who has no stomach for killing. He loves to eat fried chicken but not one whom he knew personally, so he killed a couple hours uptown as the rest of us executed forty-seven chickens that Dad brought in from Uncle Larry’s farm the night before. There had been forty-eight chickens but one got loose when we emptied them out of the gunny sacks into Al’s garage to spend their last night. She flew up in my face, a burst of feathers that made me let go, and took off like a bat out of hell. Dad went after her but he is seventy years old. The chicken tore around the trash barrel and down the alley. The others milled in the garage all night, mumbling to themselves—that it wasn’t fair that she got to go when they had to stay, that if anyone got to go, then everyone should go—and finally the sun came up and a young rooster sang and about nine o’clock we arrived and sat down to have coffee. My mother had been up since four and had drunk three cups of coffee already, on account of a dream in which someone was chasing her. “I always have bad dreams when we butcher chickens,” she said.
“Your problem is, you drink too much coffee,” said my dad. “Coffee makes you sleep light, so a bad dream wakes you up. Me, I sleep right through my bad dreams, they don’t bother me at all, not even the worst nightmares.”
But it isn’t that. My mother feels bad about butchering and so do I. Dad and Aunt Flo are country people, and in the country you do as you like, but Mother and I grew up in town, so we worry more about what people think, and when you have forty-seven chickens in the garage, you know the neighbors are talking. People in Lake Wobegon don’t slaughter chickens anymore, not in their backyards; it’s not considered decent. Oh, you might do one or two, in the evening, but forty-seven in broad daylight, a chicken massacre—people would think you’re common. People buy chickens at Ralph’s; they come in plastic bags, big white cold oblong things.
For our sake, to accommodate squeamishness, Aunt Flo tried to give up butchering and be content with storebought chicken, but it was against her principles. She cooks to bring happiness, it is part of her ministry, so to put tasteless chicken on the table is to preach false doctrine. She believes in the goodness and worth and beauty of chicken. Any fool can cook a hunk of cow, whack off a slab, slap it on a platter, and call it dinner, but chicken is delicate and has got to be done right. The chickens in the store were pumped full of feed and kept drugged and in the dark and you could taste the misery of the bird in its meat. Aunt Flo’s philosophy is to let them run free, to feed them table scraps and delicacies and talk to them while you feed them, to keep them in chicken bliss right up to the moment their heads hit the block.
Once, on a trip to Minneapolis to visit relatives, she was dragged by them to a swank restaurant where she sat dazzled by crystal and silver and white linen, and ordered…chicken—or La Poulet Alia Cacciatore de Jardinera à la Estragon con Piña Colonna—and it was borne to the table in a golden dish and served with a flourish, but underneath the hoopla and publicity was a pitiful corpse of an unhappy creature, which to her represented the wretched dishonesty of these times, and she pushed it aside and decided it would either be vegetarianism or butchering. And there we were on a fall morning about to do business in the backyard.
“Well,” Aunt Flo said, standing up to rinse out her coffee cup, “I don’t think those chickens are going to butcher each other.”
My mother already had two big pots of water on to boil, my dad had sharpened the ax blade, and out we went, into the wet cold yard. The chickens fell silent in the garage when the back door slammed. I looked in the alley for the forty-eighth chicken. “Well,” we said, “we might as well get started.”
My parents and Aunt Flo have been butchering chickens since long before I was around to help, so they don’t really need me. My dad kills them, my mother plucks them, and Aunt Flo cleans them. When he’s done killing, my dad helps with the plucking, and then they all help clean. My job hasn’t changed since I was a child: I help out here and there doing this and that, but mainly my job is to select the chicken and catch its legs with a long wire hook and grab its ankles and carry it to my dad, who takes care of the rest.
When I opened the side door of the garage, a volunteer chicken flew up and I grabbed it and there was the first one. I turned and walked back to the garage and put my hand on the knob and heard the whack and went in for the next one.
All the chickens had to die, so it wasn’t like I had any real power; I was only a lower-level bureaucrat trying to keep things going smoothly. I didn’t have the power of clemency, so why did they look at me that way—why did I feel cheap? I closed the door behind me and stood in the dim light with my hook and work gloves, the chickens milling away from me, and I took a deep breath and snagged one and it cried out, “Oh no, gosh no, please no, don’t do this,” and I took it to my dad and handed it over and turned my back, not wanting to watch as this creature, who had been alive in my hands just a moment before, now—whack—was gone. I didn’t want to see the blood or watch my mother at the big boiler on the back step or smell the hot wet feathers when she dipped the carcass in boiling water, the hiss, the ripping of feathers. Didn’t want to look and didn’t want the neighbors to see me, so I strolled back and forth from the garage to the block, as if I was taking them to the doctor, as the crowd in the garage got smaller and smaller, and then I thought: You really ought to kill one yourself before they’re all gone. This is something you should know how to do if you eat meat, otherwise you better stick to celery. You’re dishonest, I said to myself: you come from an honest family that faces life and death, but you live like it’s a story and you made it up—it’s time you become an adult and kill a chicken. Eight chickens left, and then six, and the fifth one, I watched my dad do it.
He’s a one-handed butcher. Holds it by the legs in one hand, flops it down, and the ax in the right hand is already up high on the backswing and down whack and the head drops like a cut flower and the blood runs out in the dirt. My uncle Larry paints a line on the chopping block and places the chicken gently down on its belly with its beak on the line, and that line hypnotizes the chicken—it lies very quietly, staring cross-eyed at the yellow line, thinking about infinity, and then suddenly it stops thinking. Uncle Larry likes to swing the ax with two hands. My dad uses one.
We were down to two chickens unless No. 48 walked in, so when I took out the next-to-last one, I said, “Maybe I’ll do the next one.” Okay, he said. I caught the last chicken. I was glad to be getting rid of it, the last witness to the massacre. My dad said, “Want me to hold it for you?” I shook my head. My mother said, “You be careful, now.” Imagine going to bat against your first chicken, you cut your own foot off, and walk funny the rest of your life, a stiff walk, like a chicken.
I got a grip on the chicken’s legs and swung it up on the block and hauled off with the ax and hit down hard and missed by two inches. I had to pry the ax out of the wood and now I was mad. I swung again and down it came dead center whack and at the same time I let go and the chicken took off running. It had no head. It dashed across the yard and out in the street and was gone—I never saw a chicken move so fast. I guess without the extra weight they can really go.
My dad explained afterward that when I missed the first time and planted the blade in the block, the blade got hot. So when I cut the chicken’s head off, the blade cauterized the wound and stopped the flow of blood, and you had a running chicken in pretty good shape except with no brain.
We took off after it down the street and around the corner and up and across the neighbor’s yard. A highspeed chicken. It raced through flower beds and bounced off fences, pure energy, no thought, kept going—fast. Ran over two little kids in a sandbox. Ran past a couple of dogs, who looked up and decided not to get involved with it. My dad and me trotting along far behind. We heard the squeal of brakes when two cars stopped and the headless chicken tore across Main Street by Bunsen Motors, just as Harold came tottering out of the Chatterbox Cafe, weak from his privy joke. It sped past him and he vowed to give up coffee from now on. It went up behind the cafe toward Our Lady Church, losing speed. Mrs. Mueller was standing by her garbage can and she has a face that would stop a clock. It slowed down the chicken to where she was able to trip it and grab it. She took it in and rebutchered it and plucked and cleaned it and put it in her fridge, but my dad and I didn’t know that until hours later. So when we came wheezing along the alley and saw a chicken walking toward us with its head on its shoulders, we were momentarily confused.
It was the forty-eighth chicken, of course, and we chased it in behind the church and cornered it against the fence and snatched it and took it home. Then Mrs. Mueller called. We said, “You can keep it.” We put on a pot of water to boil and drove out to a cornfield my dad knows about where it’s shady and the corn has matured more slowly. We picked three dozen ears of sweet corn and raced home to the boiling Water and put in the ears and had a wonderful vegetable dinner along with potatoes and beets and some squash. It was delicious. That was Thursday. I imagine that tomorrow we may try some fresh chicken.