Childhood: Headless Chickens, Freezer Meat, and Other Murderous Beasts, part 2

Our chickens, though, were the diabolical gift that never stopped giving. Trauma, that is.
Dad had worked as a boy on family-owned small farms in Utah and Minnesota as a boy, so he knew what that work is really like. But nostalgia was working Dad's controls, not caution, so as soon as we arrived in Malad he set about creating the farmyard of his daydreams. The first step: lots and lots of chickens. "You see," he explained, "they cost almost nothing to feed, and you get lots of eggs every day, and you can sell the ones you don't eat, then eventually you can even eat the chickens. The house we're renting even has an old log chicken house all ready to use. Amazing, right? Won't it be fun to have a nice flock of chickens?"
One key detail he omitted from this rosy picture: it was eleven-year-old me and nine-year-old Chad with total responsibility for the chickens. Even Jared, just six, had to help sometimes. It wasn't that the work, or the discipline of trudging down to the chickenhouse morning and night without fail, was too much for us. The winter months with their subzero temperatures were a trial, though. For months we had to carry pans of hot water down for the chickens, but it would always refreeze before our next trip. The real problem was that the chickens themselves were so freaky. Their little wet-looking combs. Their beady, reptilian eyeballs. The way they turn their heads aside to look directly at you. Their scaly three-toed feet. Their noisy irritation when we rummaged under them for eggs. Their pecking beaks! And just so darned many of them: Dad went all in from the start, buying 80 newborn chicks all milling around in one Chiquita Bananas box. It's easy to love the idea of chickens when you never actually have to touch them.
We turned out to have 79 hens and one psychotic rooster. Every single time one of us entered the chickenhouse, he commenced attacking and never let up until we closed the door on him. Chad and I quickly developed a sort of military routine: one of us, wielding a wooden yardstick, stood guard over the other, who would quickly (though never quickly enough!) put down water and food and collect eggs. The rooster--whom we never named, as he didn't seem to us to deserve one--would dart here and there, feint, flutter, lunge, yell, assault. We couldn't decide which job was worse--directly facing off with the rooster for those long minutes, which also meant you became his primary target; or facing all those grumpy hens and trying not to drop an egg (or the whole basket!) when the rooster outmaneuvered his guard and PECK! savaged your Achilles tendon. We tried, weakly, weekly, to explain to Dad how terrifying the rooster was, the whole experience, really. He just said "Bah! Bah! You great big boys are afraid of a chicken?"
We were almost glad when one night a rogue raccoon (?) sneaked into the coop and slaughtered half the hens. Forget the "almost": that dang rooster was still there, but now we could get out of the coop in half the time! Happy days are here again!
One day--maybe we were sick--Dad had to care for the chickens himself. We advised him to take the yardstick; he just scoffed. He came back fifteen minutes later and told us he'd just killed the rooster. "That son of a bitch kept attacking me!" ("YES, WE KNOW!") "So I grabbed a two-by-four and hit him in the head."
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! The rooster is dead! The nightmare is gone!
Ah, but the chicken ordeal wasn't, not nearly. Soured now on the whole idea of a permanent flock, Dad declared that we would be slaughtering every single chicken. We would--he'd wield the axe, we'd catch them by the feet and hold their heads steady against the chopping stump.
You know the expression "running around like a chicken with its head cut off"? It exists because that's exactly what happens. You grip the back legs with both hands, like a bat handle, and turn your head--not just to avoid looking, but against an arterial spray in the eye. WHUMP! goes the axe, and you let go...and the headless body jumps, flops, flaps, comes right for you like some terrifying voodoo legend come true.
It takes a long time to kill 40 chickens one at a time with an axe. Years, I think.
We put their corpses, plucked, into the giant freezer chest in our basement. We were still taking out and thawing the tough little bodies for dinner a year later, alternating between cuts from the whole cow we stored there each year.
At that point, I found a new terror lurking in our bare dark cement basement. I watched a movie--an absolutely awful movie, but in entertainment-scarce Malad we took what we could get--screened by the high school for Halloween, called Salem's House of Crazies. I'm sure that was the title, though even IMDB doesn't list it; it was that bad. It was a collection of short horror stories, much like the later Creepshow movies. In one story--the only one I remember at all--a man argues and argues and argues with his wife, then snaps and kills her with an axe. (Flashback to the chicken slaughter.) He cuts her into pieces, wraps her in butcher paper, and puts her in a big freezer just like ours. One of the pieces is identifiable as an arm: you can easily pick out the crook of the elbow. The fingers eventually work their way out. The killer, all unaware, opens his freezer one day to take out some meat for dinner. The frozen arm leaps up somehow, grabs his throat, and throttles him where he stands. Freed now, the arm creeps steadily, extending and flexing, crawling away to find other victims. It strangles several others before being vanquished.
Now, my brothers must have had their turns being sent down to the cold dark scary basement for meat for dinner--but it seemed like it was always my turn. That freezer arm like in the movie could be lurking anywhere! Open the freezer with the fingertips and jump back. Look down inside oh so gingerly. Close the lid and jump back again lest it try a last-minute lunge. Or was it under the stairs, prepared to reach around the bare wood step and drag me down? You never saw someone run up stairs so fast as preteen me with a package of steaks.

Childhood: Headless Chickens, Freezer Meat, and Other Murderous Beasts, part 1

The Disney films of my childhood had it right: if you want to apply an immediate stranglehold on a kid's feelings, one that will still shake him awake terrified and gasping well into adulthood--use animals. Separate Dumbo from his mommy. Give Ol' Yeller rabies and force his people to shoot him. Kill Bambi's mom.
Real-life animal-induced traumas work even better, and I've certainly had my share. When I was six, I had a pretty sweet deal: my dad cleaned the Biology building on the Brigham Young University campus in Provo--which meant I could spend a couple hours each week filling my hungry eyeballs in the Reptile Room. Gila monsters, chameleons, horned toads, lizards...and more snakes than I thought there could possibly be in the whole world. Cages on shelves, stacked as high as a tall adult's head, all the way around the 30' X 30' room, with only a thin glass layer between me and copperheads, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, and, in an 8' X 8" cuboid cage in the center of the room, insanely huge snakes as big around as a man's waist, eight feet, ten feet, twelve feet long! I couldn't get enough of looking, especially at those monsters in the middle.
One evening I was watching two scaly titans in the center cage, noticing how they neither quite ignored each other nor ever commenced open hostilities, and gee, what would they do anyway, try to swallow each other? or maybe the boa would try what he does...but no, how could the boa constrictor squeeze another snake to death, and...where was that boa, anyway? Oh, he's right there--wrapped around the outside of the cage. And there's his head, sailing smoothly my way like Kaa in The Jungle Book, mouth closed but forked tongue flicking and dead black eyes gazing through my tiny soul and clearly meaning business. I had enough nervous-mammal sense to scamper out the door, just ahead of the unmistakable THUNK of a fist-sized head hitting the door I thought to close behind me.
Henceforth, the very sight of a snake terrifies me. Garter snakes might as well be car-length cottonmouths.
Our first year in Malad was a rough one for animal-related trauma. My family adopted our first cat, a juvenile female Siamese mix we named Socks. In those days, the Mormon church hadn't yet adopted their three-hour-block format for Sunday meetings. Instead, we'd attend Sunday School (everybody) and then Priesthood (boys) or Junior Relief Society (girls) first thing in the morning, then return in the evening for an hour-and-a-half Sacrament Meeting, which typically featured speakers, most of them deadly boring but a few polished and interesting. Mom and Dad let us stay home from a few Sacrament Meetings each year, when certain favorite movies would air on TV: The Ten Commandments, The Sound of Music, and The Wizard of Oz. If only we'd stayed home that Sunday night!
We three boys trooped dutifully across the slush, exhaling breath plumes in the January cold. My mom started backing down the driveway. There, in the glaring headlights, pure horror that still shakes me: little sweet Socks, who knew nothing of cars or tires or getting out of the way, her head and front end bloodied and immobile while her hindquarters thrashed violently. Dad was still in the house, probably looking forward to a couple hours' kidless quiet, and we had no better plan than to hand him poor Socks and beg him through tears, "Help her! Help her!" He had no better plan than to set the suffering cat into the sink, to at least avoid painting the whole kitchen in blood.
He told us to get back in the car and go to church.
Until recently, I thought this was unbearably cruel of Dad. Like, our poor Socks is suffering horribly! Do you have any idea what nightmare I just saw in the driveway? This stupid church meeting is so important compared to that? What is wrong with you?
But now I see myself in his position, and I understand he did the best anyone could. Instead of a nice quiet evening, maybe a little 60 Minutes: three boys crying like it's the end of the world, which for them it actually is, a rapidly dying little cat, no vet, no help, no good way out of this. I never asked him, but I feel sure what he did is: send us to church as a mercy, keeping us in the dark as to details; then stand with Socks for the couple minutes she had left on earth, speaking softly to her and patting her kindly.
Kindly, I believe, despite his habitual grumble that he "didn't care for cats." A decade later, he was still grumbling--but my sister caught him early one weekend morning at the stove, cooking scrambled eggs especially for Mom's cat Pretty. (What can I say: we didn't name animals very imaginatively.)
I do know that when we returned from church that awful night, Socks was dead and sealed in a shoebox. Dad told me I could bury her. I dug the hole and put the box in, then the whole family stood around her grave while Mom said a prayer. We cried a lot. A couple nights later I sat up in bed and begged out loud, "Sooooocks! Come back! Please come back!" I marked her grave with a spare scrap of plywood about the size of a school textbook, shaped like the state of Nevada, on which I scraped with a paring knife the name "Socks."