Murder, She Wrote

Today I took 3 roosters and one old hen to this guy whose number on my phone says "Nelson Chickendude," to have him "process" them for me. Process is the farmer word for butcher. Although butcher is also the word for butcher.

I'm trying to be a farmer, and use the meat that I'm raising off my own land - I buy chicken in the store, so I should use the actual chickens at my house, the ones I can't use for eggs. The difference is when I buy the chicken at the store, it doesn't have a face, and I didn't raise the chicken from the cute little fluffy chick, keeping it safe for four months and fighting off hawks and then taking it to Nelson's house in a box where they meet his knife in his backyard.

I met Nelson on Craigslist at Christmastime, he came and took a few free roosters I had to start his own flock. So we kept in touch because we both love raising chickens. So he said bring your roosters when you have too many, and if you're going to eat chickens anyway, at least you'll be eating healthy chickens.

Somehow I was on his porch, and his wife ushers me in and they introduce me to their son, who is actually a Chinese foreign exchange student, and then I take my box of live chickens and put them on the porch while the kid speaks Chinese to his real family into his cell phone. Nelson is sharpening his knife and I'm thinking, wow, maybe I should find out his actual last name he does have a knife and I'm also wondering if the Chinese kid is disappointed that he traveled thousands of miles to live in the valley with a guy who kills chickens.

Anyway, I don't stay for the actual murder, I go to the grocery store and shop for Nathan's birthday party, and then I come back and there are my chickens without any feathers, looking all skinny and then we're talking in his kitchen as he's cutting them up until they look like the chicken you get at the store in a package, except there are all these other pieces like guts and in my one old hen there was the egg she was going to lay today and I just feel my already stricken heart sink lower, because she was an older hen and wasn't going to last much longer, but still, she had made an egg, and behind that fully formed egg was a string of smaller and smaller yolks, like 4 of them, all in a line, forming inside her, all these eggs for tomorrow and the next day and the next, all organized, her amazing surprise, every day, on the nest. All hopeful.

This is why I couldn't be a surgeon, because all this insides of us are just so regular, we're all made of these tubes and meat and lungs, without the whimsy of feathers and personality, life is too real. Or maybe I can learn that we are a mixture of all these things - real meaty muscles and bones, and tubes and passageways, and then that soul that colors everything and gives you - well, soul.

It's hard to write about my roosters, even though they performed their function, they would have ended up being dinner, that's what extra roosters are for -- if you hatch it yourself, you must have a have a mighty hard heart to eat it.

I'm still trying to shape myself into a true farmer and not get attached. But I think that hen and her hopeful eggs did me in. I can't go see Nelson again for awhile, maybe never. I think I'm not starving, and the mom in me can only raise hens, give away the roosters, gather the eggs, and bury the old ones when they fall.