Today's lesson: Don’t be a chicken

Perhaps taking neighborliness beyond its natural habitat, last weekend I helped my neighbor butcher his chickens. Raised in the suburbs, the only things I had ever killed before were my own brain cells. So shoving a reluctant bird headfirst down into a cone of death, taking a knife to its neck, making the cut (svttt), and watching the blood drain from its carotid artery can get a fella thinking.

Ninety years ago, my grandparents fled the countryside, leaving behind the wind-swept traces of generations’ worth of hand-plucked chicken feathers. Fifty years ago, my parents fled the city, stopping just short of the chicken-killing precincts. Ten years ago, I fled the suburbs for the locavore culture of the country, leaving behind memories of bouts of diarrhea from thousands of cheap, industrial-produced, corn-stuffed, antibiotic-injected, chicken-y flavored nugget thingies that my digestive system would frisk and attempt to detain, but they always managed to break loose and bolt. ...

“Too much information.”

“I know, I know.”

Whoa, did you just hear that? That’s what I’ve lived with. Ever since I agreed to help my neighbor kill chickens, my mind has engaged in a Socratic argument with itself. On my right shoulder stands the Angel of Reason, on my left an angel I call Little Courage.

It’s chicken-killing day. It only stands to Reason I have Little Courage. Let’s listen in:

“But your kind neighbor helped you put radiant heating in your basement, didn’t he?” asks Reason as I eat my Cheerios at dawn. “He replaced your car’s distributer cap, remember?”

“Yes, and I’ve agreed to kill chickens with him,” Little Courage says, “but I cannot help noting that PEX tubing and distributer caps aren’t sentient beings that kick, cluck and look you in the eye as if fearing the worst.”

I pull up to my neighbor’s house hoping he had been called away for the weekend by a terrible family tragedy. But no, he was there, under an open-air canopy with the cones of death set up over a wheelbarrow, the cauldron under a stick fire, the gutbuckets and butcher’s table. I at least had the sense to bring my portable radio and my collection of old-timey mountain music – the Louvin Brothers, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, you know: chicken-killing music – in an effort to set the mind and gag reflex at ease.

Reason says, “Do you realize every one of these singers has slaughtered chickens as a matter of course in un-monumental moments, so un-monumental that you’ll never once hear them singing about killing chickens?”

“I know,” says Little Courage, “and clearly they’ve moved on to weightier matters of killing – that of drowning unfaithful paramours in cold, cold rivers.”

“Exactly. No biggie”

I prepared the evening prior by watching chicken-slaughtering videos on YouTube. My neighbor now demonstrates – the quick, lethal slash, the crimson fountain, the cool expertise that disregards the sounds of struggle, the lopping off of the head, the surprisingly playful sound made when tossing the head into the plastic bucket, the dipping of the carcass into hot water, the plucking, the eviscerating, the dark stench of innards exposed to daylight, the putrid price of sacrifice, and the astonishing efficiency of rendering a bloody mess into a handsome roasting bird.

One bird down. A couple dozen to go. He hands me the knife. He backs off and gives me space to work it all out.

“Good call on the music,” Reason says. “Look, even the pine trees seem more relaxed.”

“Oh, Lord, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks,” says Little Courage.

I enter the chicken pen. There’s one. Grab it.

“Come on, it’s just like snatching a football in a scrimmage,” Reason says.

“No, it’s not,” says Little Courage. “It’ll be like snatching a freaked-out chicken.”

Little Courage was exactly correct. Grabbing a freaked-out chicken is just like grabbing a freaked-out chicken. Bird in hand, Little Courage has a question:

“You know, I’m just wondering, is this ethical, capturing a creature and killing it? I mean, I’m just saying.”

“Really? You are really going to go there?” says Reason.

“Yes.”

“Shut up and kill the bird.”

I hold the chicken upside down by the feet and gently maneuver it into the cone until its head emerges through the hole below. It cranes its vulnerable neck.

“Come on, come on, Mr. ‘Buy Local’ evangelizer,” says Reason. “You watched ‘Food, Inc.’ and made everyone else watch it, too. ‘Know thy food supply,’ remember? Well, it’s right there. Get it over with.”

“But don’t you see, I wasn’t hardened to this life – the blade, the blood, the horror, the horror. I’m still a rattled refugee from the Chicken McNugget. I still need nursing.”

“Look, since the dawn of the hunger pang, people have slaughtered animals, eaten them, burped, and settled in for the sleep of the just. You’ve never been a participant in the first phase of this most basic of rituals. You’ve been the coddled beneficiary of someone else’s dirty work. Your grandparents are looking down from heaven right now, shaking their heads and questioning the wisdom of having ever ventured beyond their family farm’s furthest fence post. Don’t be a wimp. Kill the bird.”

Oh God, help me please.

I grab the chicken’s head. I imagine a calamitous future with a diet centered only on rice, beans and leafy greens and a neighbor who will never again replace my distributor cap. I angle the blade as instructed, carefully positioning it in the soft spot between the feathers just below the jaw line.

Courage. Reason. Reason. Courage. It’s all the same. I clinch the blade handle. A banjo plays.

“Sorry, old girl, but I don’t make the rules.”

Svett.

My Lord.