As she spoke I remembered the conversation I had two months ago with the contractor who’d seen the little girl ghost. After he told me the story he took me on a tour of the house, helpfully pointing out different structural elements of the house that we should be aware of. Toward the end of his visit he showed me a carving someone had made in the wooden floor of the center hallway. It was in the crude penmanship of a young child. It read: MARY.
After hearing the ghostly kitchen noises that night, Brent and I spent the rest of the weekend picking the apples from our trees. It seemed like a fitting way to celebrate the anniversary of finding the Beekman on our annual apple-picking excursion. After we’d picked all of the fruit from the trees that had been planted by the house, we walked up into the far field to pick the tiny sour apples from the few ancient trees that stood in the corner of the property. They’d be good to add to cider if nothing else.
Standing under the gnarly black branches of the overgrown hillside trees, we could look out over the brilliant orange-and-yellow blanket of the valley. Who knew when these trees were planted, and how many generations had picked their fruit? Were they around when Mary was a girl? Was the woman in the kitchen last night making a pie from apple harvests long past?
Maybe it wasn’t just a coincidence that we’d been visited by former Beekman inhabitants on our first-year anniversary. Maybe they were just waiting until we were enough of a permanent part of the Beekman’s story to include us in their midst.
It felt nice to be acknowledged.
Chapter Thirteen
In the advertising world, Thanksgiving no longer exists. If you were a bedridden invalid with television as your only link to the outside world, you’d hardly even know it came and went. (Of course if you were a bedridden invalid with television as your only link to the outside world, perhaps you wouldn’t feel very thankful anyways.)
It’s not that surprising that advertisers no longer acknowledge the holiday. It was always nothing more than an annoyance to retailers—a day when Americans took a break from shopping to celebrate their good fortune. But to American businesses, what good is good fortune if you aren’t spending it?
Brent and I were resolute in celebrating our first Thanksgiving at the Beekman in the most authentic, least commercial manner possible—namely, by being thankful. As the chickens began laying fewer and fewer eggs in the waning light, and we harvested the final tough, frosty leaves of kale, we finally had time to take stock of the previous year. It would have been hard for us to have been any fuller of thanks. We had a root cellar brimming with harvest, substantial year-end bonuses, all sorts of new friends and neighbors, and, of course, each other. I was actually beginning to feel nervous about all we did have to be thankful for. This was more than a boy from Wisconsin was ever supposed to have.
Maybe that was why, that first frigid Thanksgiving morning at the Beekman, I had a peculiar sense of dread.
“Don’t wear that coat,” Brent said when I entered the kitchen in my favorite corduroy winter jacket.
“Why not?”
“You don’t want to get blood all over it.”
I headed back upstairs and threw on an old flannel barn coat. Thanksgiving morning used to be one of my favorite times of the year. As a child I used to come downstairs and watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in my pajamas while my mother and father wrestled the stuffing into the turkey. But at the farm we didn’t have a television. And we didn’t have a Butterball. What we did have were three turkey hens and a tom contentedly clucking away out in the barn, pecking at their morning grain. What one of them didn’t know was that it was having its last meal.
“Do you have the Absolut?” Brent asked me. I opened up my jacket to show him the bottle tucked in the inside pocket. We were following Martha’s tradition of boozing up the bird before slaughtering it. Supposedly squeezing a baster full of alcohol down the bird’s throat before decapitating it would lesson the resulting flailing and flapping of the headless torso. And the less the beheaded fowl flopped, the less bruising there was supposed to be in the meat.
As Brent walked ahead of me to fetch the hatchet from the barn, I quickly unscrewed the bottle’s lid and snuck a large swallow. The all-too-familiar burn reminded me of a Thanksgiving that fell somewhere in between those idyllic childhood ones and now, specifically the Thanksgiving I hosted in the penthouse of my first New York boyfriend—a crack-addicted, high-end male escort who warned me against using his turkey baster for its intended purpose. It apparently had been employed in various orifices completely unrelated to poultry.
Back then I was more concerned with internally marinating myself with Absolut. Unlike a turkey, however, it didn’t numb me. It gave me the courage to lose my head, flail about wildly, and bruise myself. Part of me couldn’t believe how far I’d traveled from a child watching parades in pajamas, to a drunken drag queen stepping over crack pipe shards on the kitchen floor, to a middle-aged gentleman farmer about to slaughter his own dinner. Maybe it was the sip of vodka, but I was suddenly and intensely thankful for all my Thanksgivings.
I was standing next to the chicken coop when Brent returned with the hatchet, joined by John.
“Which one are you gonna take?” John asked. I stared at the four birds, pecking the ground and cooing.
“I dunno,” I said. “It’ll come to me.”
I didn’t realize how literal I was being until Brent opened the door to the pen. One of the turkey hens waddled right over to me, perhaps mistaking me for John, who entered the very same door every morning to scatter grain. She chirped impatiently at my feet, no doubt pissed that I wasn’t tossing flakes of feed onto the ground. Their daily ration had been increasing exponentially over the past few weeks in advance of this very day.
The tom, behind her, spread his tail feathers to appear more intimidating. His neck waddle turned from a mottled blue and white to scarlet red in warning. As is the case in most of the animal kingdom other than humans, he was far more decoratively beautiful than the three comparatively plain females. It was his looks that would save him from the ax. It definitely paid to be a flamboyantly good-looking turkey on a farm where Martha Stewart-style matters.
I suddenly felt very tired. I’d slept fitfully the night before, as I’d had many conflicting emotions about the deed I was about to do—some obvious, some personal, and some simply silly and vain.
I’d proudly told all of my friends and colleagues of my turkey-slaughter plans, just as I had when I quit smoking after my drag days. I somehow felt that the more people who knew of my goal, the less likely I would shirk from accomplishing it. Even so, I still had doubts about my own motivation and resolve.
As I stared at the hen at my feet, the doubts rushed in manifold. Why was I doing this? Some answers were easy: I liked good food. I know from experience that this heritage breed turkey we’d raised ourselves would taste infinitely better than a frozen Butterball from the supermarket.
It was also a comfort to know that although I may be killing one bird today, it will at least have had a relatively quick death after a happy life—unlike the vast majority of factory-farmed birds brought to American Thanksgiving tables.
Still, some of my motivations were more difficult to explain. Why didn’t I just have Farmer John or a neighbor slaughter our bird? There were plenty of good reasons for me to consume a bird that had been healthily and happily raised on my own farm. But there didn’t seem to be one logical reason for me to actually kill it myself. I pay money for people to handle services for me all the time. We have a cleaning woman who comes once a week in the city. We pay the Laundromat on the corner to wash and press our dress shirts. I pay taxi drivers to drive me around the city. These are all tasks that I can do myself but have no particular qualm paying someone else to do for me. And as far as I can tell, they have no particular difficulties accepting my money. Why, then, don’t I just pay John or another experienced farmer to take care of this unpleasant task?
Part of the answer was curi
osity. While I paid others to help me clean, cook, and drive, those were also all tasks that I’ve done myself many times and have simply chosen to delegate. If I’d been born into privilege and had all my chores done for me since birth, I probably would be just as curious to give a washing machine a whirl simply to see what I’d been missing. Just as I was curious to put seeds in the ground to see how much produce I could bring to my own table, I was also curious to see whether I could take the same journey with my meat.
But as I stood there staring at my victim, I realized that the biggest motivator for what I was about to do was honor. The simple truth was that these particular birds don’t exist for any other reason than to be killed and eaten. And, as it was, I stood to be the biggest beneficiary of that fact. Not my dinner guests. Not the farmer who sold them to us. Not Farmer John. Not the Price Chopper supermarket. Me. The Moi Chopper.
It was I who would have the satisfaction of being nourished and of nourishing my friends and family with this bird. The very least I could do was take care of the unpleasantness in getting to that point myself—mano-a-poultry.
The hen that had run up to me when I entered the coop hadn’t left my feet. I supposed that meant that she would be the one. I bent over to pick her up and she cuddled into the crook of my elbow with no resistance. She chirped and cooed exactly as she had done every day since arriving at the farm.
Brent, Farmer John, and I headed to the opposite side of the barn where we’d set up a thick stump from the woodpile. As we walked by the chicken coop, only one of the roosters was outside futilely pecking the frost-covered ground for bugs. As I passed with the hapless turkey in my arms, he looked up to the sky and crowed IT HAD TO BE YOU.
Once at the chopping block station, Brent unscrewed the top from the bottle of Absolut and inserted the turkey baster. I gently held the hen’s head back and she opened her beak slightly. Brent squeezed the contents down her throat. She didn’t resist at all, other than a slight sneeze after swallowing. In fact she seemed quite eager for more, pecking at the baster like I used to tap on my empty glass at a bar. Brent obligingly gave her one more baster-full. I’m not sure if it was just wishful thinking, but she seemed to relax into my arms even more.
Farmer John cleared the light dusting of snow off the chopping block, and I laid the hen down sideways. She didn’t squirm or try to right herself. Perhaps the vodka was working as intended. John used both of his hands to hold her body in place while I used my left hand to gently hold her head. I was sure to cover the one eye that was looking up at me. Even though I knew that her prehistoric brain was unable to add two and two together to understand that she was about to undergo division, I didn’t want the swinging hatchet to be the last thing she saw.
Brent handed me the hatchet.
There was no more delaying.
Whack.
Goddammit. I’d practiced for two days chopping kindling until I could finally sever a three-inch-diameter branch with one swoop. But unlike a dead branch, the turkey’s neck was soft and kind of bouncy. My worst fear was realized: I hadn’t made a clean cut.
Whack. Whack.
I swung the hatchet two more times in rapid succession. The bird did struggle after the first unsuccessful chop and, surprisingly, even more so after the last. John held the thrashing body down with his hands, and I was left clutching the hatchet in one hand and the head in the other.
John quickly grabbed the headless bird by her feet and carried her upside down into the garage, wings still flapping. He expertly wrapped a pre-tied slipknot around her talons and hung her from a beam over a trash barrel. The blood first flowed out in a steady stream, but quickly subsided into a steady dripping.
I stared at the dangling bird, wings akimbo, as it emptied. With the drama over, I noticed that the glove on my left hand was torn between the thumb and the forefinger, and that my own hand was throbbing in pain. Taking the glove off, I realized that the reason the first swing of the hatchet didn’t sever the bird’s head was because I’d hit my own hand. I sliced through the glove and rather deeply into my flesh. Brent took a look and, like most of my illnesses and injuries, declared it minor.
John quickly moved on to begin his morning chores, and Brent and I went inside to clean the wound and fix breakfast while we waited for the turkey to drain completely of blood.
When I’d explained to my colleagues at work that I planned on killing my own turkey, most of them were less grossed out by the killing part than the dressing details. “You’re going to pluck it yourself?! What about the guts?!” To me, this was far less daunting than the executioner’s task. We all have blood and guts. And like anyone careening toward forty, I was growing acutely more aware of them as my body began adding its various aches and ailments to its permanent collection.
But also, like anyone smack dab in midlife territory, I was beginning to truly realize that there was some point in time, either just about to happen or just past, when there would be fewer Thanksgiving Days left for me rather than more. Sometime down the line, Brent (who is four years younger than I and far healthier) would probably be sitting down at a Thanksgiving table at which the turkey had been alive more recently than I had.
As the magnitude of dying starts to sink in (or, perhaps more frighteningly, the “minitude”), the plucking and gutting part of dying begins to seem fairly insignificant. It’s the irreversibility of what comes before. I was starting to really understand the existential comfort behind my mother’s explanation for most any unpleasantness in life: what’s done is done.
After breakfast I returned to the garage with several buckets of scalding water to finish what I’d started. It was important, I’d read, to remove the intestines and fecal matter as quickly and cleanly as possible so as not to contaminate the meat. So first I plucked the feathers near the bird’s anus, which was not hard to find considering that she had (like most of us will) made good use of it during her final moments.
Then using a hunting knife borrowed from John, I carved a small hole into her flesh just wide enough for me to insert my clenched fist. Pulling out the viscera proved easier than I thought. Most of it fell out in a clean clump onto the gravel of the driveway. Removing the hen’s internal organs seemed no more stubborn than gutting the fish I used to catch as a boy. Part of me was a little disturbed at the thought of how unattached everyone’s insides must be to our outsides.
Bubby showed up at my side and carefully sniffed around the turkey’s internal organs, deciding which to devour first. At least it would make the cleanup easier.
Once hollow, I dipped the carcass into the hot water to loosen its feathers slightly, and began the arduous and monotonous task of plucking. The repetitive act of finding and pulling each feather was sort of meditative—along the same lines as plucking petals from a daisy. “He’ll taste good…He’ll taste good not…” Soon the turkey began looking less like it did just an hour or so ago, and more like the familiar pale pimply flesh of a supermarket turkey.
Except it seemed smaller than a Butterball.
Much smaller.
More like the size of a small chicken. A very small, very flatchested chicken.
Brent came out to check on my progress.
“That’s it?” he asked, inspecting the denuded hen.
“A bit wee, isn’t it,” I said, holding it up with my fist firmly jammed up its ass.
“How many pounds is it?”
Together we found the hanging scale that John used to weigh buckets of milk.
“That can’t be right,” I said, looking at the dial. John came and looked over our shoulders.
“Nope. That looks about right,” he said, chuckling.
We had seven people arriving from the city for an old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner. I did some quick calculations in my head.
“That means we’re going to have less than a quarter pound of turkey apiece,” I said.
Our prize turkey, for which we had paid the exorbitant sum of five dollars earlier in the summer—about t
hree times what a Butterball turkey would have cost us, even more if we factored in feed—weighed only four and a half pounds.
“Why don’t you kill another one?” Brent asked.
I held up my bloody hand in reply.
“Well, maybe some Indians will come by and share their bounty,” Brent joked.
Eight hours later we were clearing the dishes off of the Thanksgiving table. Other than the flour and sugar used in the recipes, every dish served on our Thanksgiving table came completely from the farm. The turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn casserole, squash, pickles, sour cherry sauce, apple cider, homemade cornbread stuffing, and pumpkin pie were all provided courtesy of the ground underneath the Beekman. It probably wasn’t much different from the Thanksgivings that the early Beekmans shared. Our guests were amazed at the bounty. I doubt even Martha could have put together a better spread. Well…
The turkey carcass had been picked clean, of course. Everyone got about two bites, which made up for in flavor what they lacked in size. The meat wasn’t as tender as the flavorless supermarket turkeys, and the breasts were far smaller and leaner, but our turkey had a delicious flavor—almost like roasted grain and nuts, with a hint of yellow apples.
All of our guests enjoyed the running commentary on each dish—the history of the garden and seeds, how everything was harvested, the process of canning and preserving it all. It was different from most Thanksgivings I’d been a part of. It was less about stuffing ourselves to excess, and more about how miraculous it was that there was a full table of food in the first place. I couldn’t help but think that was supposed to be the point of the holiday all along. I also couldn’t help but think that my role as an advertiser contributed to the misperception of food as a commodity whose value was distinguished mainly by calorie count and serving size. Boasting about the size of one’s holiday turkey is really only genuine when one had something to do with feeding it.
The Bucolic Plague Page 11