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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment