by Anna Journey
Following Allis’s instructions, I spread the wings of my starling and used my pointer finger to feel for the divot in the bird’s collarbone—the point at which the incision would begin. The first cut was surprisingly easy to make. The lightest pressure slit the skin of the starling’s breast, without puncturing the muscle beneath. I ran my scalpel from the bird’s collarbone down to its cloaca, the posterior opening for the intestinal, reproductive, and urinary tracts. Pulling back the starling’s skin felt similar to pushing apart the fuzzy velveteen of a ripe peach. I thought the bird’s guts would tumble out, but its muscles and organs stayed put, chilly and compact as a fist. There was very little blood—just the pink jellied fingerprints I kept smearing across the pages of my spiral notebook that browned in the air like the curled edges of roses. To skin the starling, I grasped the slimy edge of the incision between my left pointer finger and thumb, tugged upward, and used small strokes of the blade of my scalpel to sever the pearlescent networks of white microfibers—“the cobwebs”—that connected the skin to muscle. As more and more of my bird peeled open, I ran a water-dunked paintbrush over the underside of the skin dotted with yellow fat deposits. The chunks resembled remnants of caramel flan stuck to an aluminum baking pan. I also noticed bumpy follicles in which the tips of the feathers were rooted on the opposite side of the skin. “This is so meditative,” one of the architects said, nose bent over her bird. Allis strolled around the room, peeking over our shoulders, and then switched the low-key indie rock playing on her Internet radio station to Ella Fitzgerald.
After skinning the bird’s breast, I used my thumbs to pry out its plum-like interior: a process called “removing the body.” “You’ll hear a sound like Velcro,” Allis said, “when you crack the patella.” The bird’s “knees,” the assistant Jenn added, are in different places than our own—they’re way up inside, like secret hips. “So don’t think of your own anatomy while you do it,” she urged. I found the hidden joints, cracked the patella with a satisfying crunch, changed my dull scalpel blade, and severed the pink, meaty region known as the “tail butt” from the lower vertebrae. I then tugged out the body—a pink and purple heart-shaped water balloon with a long pencil-neck—and snipped the top of the spine at the base of the skull with a wire cutter. I dropped the body into a white paint bucket for waste materials labeled “Meat Bucket.”
After flipping the bird’s neck inside out, like a wet sock, and scooting the skull down through the tube and out of the chest cavity, I had trouble locating the eyes and “releasing the ears.” Birds do have ears, I discovered, though not external cartilaginous ones like ours. They have small oval holes on their heads hidden beneath their feathers. Jenn helped me skin around the ear holes and locate “the blueberries”—the eyes—one of which I accidentally popped in its socket with the tip of my scalpel. Gripping the firm stalks of the optic nerves with my tweezer, like the taproots of dandelions, I yanked them out and dropped my starling’s pair of eyes—one whole and one punctured blueberry—into the meat bucket. I then scrubbed my hands and took my lunch break, unwrapping my turkey and Havarti on wheat.
I stared at the raised paw of a taxidermied raccoon on the counter. As a kid, I got a thrill out of keeping a piece of something that had once been alive—that fact made its own kind of magic. But why exactly is a rabbit’s foot lucky? “They’re apotropaic,” my father, still encyclopedic in his factoids, later informed me. The adjective describes something with the power to ward off evil or avert bad luck. “That’s why we knock on wood,” he said. That’s why I picked four-leaf clovers from the special patch by my swing set or kissed my plaster life mask of John Keats before taking that English Romanticism exam, or why I bought on Etsy a skull-faced mermaid voodoo doll with a purple-sequined tail to which I could pin written wishes.
In Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture, scholar Bill Ellis traces the mainstream popularity of lucky rabbits’ feet during the twentieth century to fetish jewelers in the black districts of New Orleans. The superstition comes from African American conjure and concerns the belief that witches often shape-shifted into rabbits, so they could scamper around unnoticed, casting their evil spells. Ideally, Ellis notes, a hunter must use a silver bullet to shoot the supernatural creature. Cutting off a rabbit’s foot (preferably in a cemetery, by the light of the moon), was a way to possess the magical bones of a witch, or contain one’s own personal piece of wonderment, in order to manipulate and govern its intent.
After lunch, we scooped the brains of our starlings to the jazz tunes of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. As the punchy, melodious duet “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” began, I looked up to see if anyone else got the joke. Everyone was busy squinting and scooping in serious concentration. With the well-mannered jazz and craft tables and jabbing knives, our gathering could pass for a quilting bee directed by David Lynch.
My first sight of the starling’s brain startled me: out came a tacky fuchsia ooze instead of the solid chunks of grey Jell-O I’d expected. “I thought it would look like a human brain,” I said, “only smaller.” Jenn said the brains liquefied after the birds were frozen. “I don’t know why,” she added. “Ice crystals,” said the high schooler, Church, without looking up, as he stirred his bird skull with the scoop. “Ice crystals form and chop up the brain.” This was the first thing Church had said in a while, aside from his shyly muttered introduction, and the women at our table glanced at him in surprise or amusement.
I continued to hear bits of conversation, likely unique to a taxidermy studio, that delighted me—especially the banter between Allis’s neon-haired teenage apprentices, Ally and Becca: “I’m getting a piebald python.” “One of the smoky ones?” “I like the high whites.” “Is the accent on the second syllable of ‘reticulated python’ or the first?” “The most humane way to kill a rattlesnake is to freeze it.” “Have you got rat feet down?” I also enjoyed the fact that Becca, skilled in the craft of skinning and stuffing beasts, slipped into the body of one each time she donned a cartoon rodent costume for her part-time job at Chuck E. Cheese’s. “They won’t let me wear my piercings inside the mouse suit,” she sighed.
The figure of the animal, from Chuck E. Cheese’s furry burlesque to the apocalyptic fables of Ted Hughes’s poetry collection Crow, continues to captivate our imaginations. The tradition of the beast fable is, in fact, one of our most ancient literary genres. In A New Handbook of Literary Terms scholar David Mikics defines the beast fable as “An economically told story with a moral, in which animals dramatize human faults.” We can trace the genre’s origins back to the ancient Greek writer Aesop, a storytelling slave who lived on the island of Samos during the sixth century BCE.
The most famous example of a beast fable in English may be Geoffrey Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, composed in Middle English during the late fourteenth century. It tells the story of a sly, smooth-talking fox and an anxious, but ultimately clever, rooster. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the genre surged in popularity due in part to the vast success of the French writer Jean de La Fontaine, who published the multiple volumes of his Fables from 1668 to 1694. Many of La Fontaine’s fables, which he composed in verse, belong to the Aesopian tradition of anecdotal stories about animals endowed with human speech and who represent human qualities. In the opening poem of his epical twelve books, La Fontaine declares:
I sing those heroes, Aesop’s progeny,
Whose tales, fictitious though indeed they be,
Contain much truth. Herein, endowed with speech—
Even the fish!—will all my creatures teach
With human voice; for animals I choose
To proffer lessons that we all might use.
“Allis, will you look at my meat window?” I asked during the second day of class, employing the term for the vertical incision made along the middle joint of a bird’s wing. I had picked the slit free of tendons and flesh, leaving, I supposed, the bones and surrou
nding skin as clean as the frame and panes of a freshly wiped window. After I’d “fleshed” my starling by hand as best I could, with my scalpel and wire brush, I took my specimen to one of the small rooms off the hallway, so I could use a machine called “the fleshing wheel” to grind off any remaining lumps of fat and to blast the tough-to-scrub area of the jagged tail butt. The fleshing wheel resembled a woodworker’s lathe, with a hubcap-sized, rotating, circular wire brush under which I held my bird, watching, with satisfaction (and with my mouth shut), pink slivers of flesh go flying.
I packed my starling’s empty skull and orbital sockets with clay, tamping it down with the brain scoop, and pushed the wired glass eyes into the clay, like ball-head pins. I then lathered my bird with green dish soap, rinsed it, rolled the damp body in a plastic bin of powdery “chinchilla fluff” (volcanic ash) to absorb any oil, and blow-dried the dusty feathers at an open window. As Church blasted his bird with a hair dryer beside me, he belted out show tunes from Les Misérables, his bird’s wings and neck rippling and bobbing theatrically in his outstretched hand. Back at the table with our starlings, which were beginning to look like whole animals, we wired the legs and wings in order to pose them. Although I’d thought skinning and fleshing would be the most challenging parts of taxidermy, because of the guts and gore, it was the wiring process that had me grumbling “motherfucker” and cursing my bird. As I tried to feed the sharpened point of the wire through the hollow spaghetti-thin bones, I kept poking holes in the dry skeleton, bending the wire, and jabbing my own fingertips. Ally patiently tugged out my mangled wire, clipped new pieces, and helped me feed them through the joints of the wings until both limbs held their shapes. She also showed me how to wire the limp sock of the neck with a foam tube bent in the S shape of a plumbing pipe and stuff the chest with a cotton body. Because of my sewing experience, I neatly stitched up my starling’s stuffed breast with a needle and black cotton thread.
The final verse of “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” in which the wounded maid whose nose was ripped off by the blackbird gets stitched back together, reminds me of sewing up the body of my starling: “They sent for the king’s doctor, / who sewed it on again; / He sewed it on so neatly, / the seam was never seen.” The taxidermist’s ability to hide the seams—those threads that join dead flesh to fabric—is what makes the vanished animal flutter back to life. That surprise resurrection is precisely what underlies the whimsical recipe for a novelty dessert containing live birds described in the sixteenth-century Italian cookbook Epulario. When the pie was sliced and the songbirds burst out, the dinner guests would gasp and clap with delight. And although the origins of the nursery rhyme remain mysterious, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Shakespeare may be responsible for provoking the ditty. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch demands of a clown: “Come on; there is sixpence for you: let’s have a song.”
After I’d taken home my bird, which I’d groomed to hide the pale slivers of down beneath black feathers (as the creature would do for itself in life) and wired its feet to a ghostwood branch, I tried to think of a name for it. My first instinct was to go for humor. The rhyming “Oh My Darling Starling,” said quickly, with an Elvis drawl (“Oma Darlin’ Starlin’”), came to mind. There was also the version that made use of my new jargon and carried an absurdist Cartoon Network–character flair: “Meat Window.” I discovered, though, that neither name would stick. The bird appeared too dignified and realistically posed for my jokes. It seemed remote, bittersweet. It was always “the starling.”
Poliquin observes the beast fable’s humor is, necessarily, a dark one, rooted in the eat-or-be-eaten rule of survival—that brutal ethos of the barnyard. In taxidermy, she argues, humor often fizzles out because the moment of recognition so essential to fable—that instant we’re able to see ourselves in the drama of the animals—is no longer accessible. We can no longer project ourselves into the world of the story because “[d]eath is too bluntly visible.” Morals and movement recede into material fact (this flesh is dead), the smile fades, and the creature brings instead “a dark terminus to the fable tradition.” As Poliquin reminds us: “the animals have lost the fight.”
In one of my father’s stories—which, to me, feels like a beast fable—he and his friend Pete faced their blustery high school football coach, Jim Baddley, after practice. Coach Baddley hollered at the team, calling them “wormy slackers,” and suggested that, since the boys were so dainty and delicate, he was beginning to believe they needed “fur-lined jock straps.” My father glanced at Pete and folded his hands behind his back. When he got home, he rummaged in his desk for a box containing the rare black squirrel hide he’d tanned earlier that year. He claims he stayed up late, his door locked, gluing the hide to the cup of a jock strap and smoothing the folds to fit the concave angles. Several days later, my father presented the undergarment to Coach Baddley with a ceremonious bow, observing that, at his advanced age, it was he who would need a fur-lined jock strap to see him through the next football season. Fortunately for my dad, Coach Baddley howled uproariously, slapping him on the back, and showed off the contraption to the school’s other coaches, vowing to wear it to the first game of the season.
“Most hunting stories have the same plot,” Poliquin suggests. Certainly my father’s heralded his pluck and pride. And although humor seemed to elide my attempts at naming my bird, my father was able to revise the ordinary narrative of his hunting trophy to create a wild fable infused with humor. In an era of 1950s conformity, he challenged an authority figure through his wit and resourcefulness. My father’s story says, “I stood up for myself.” The would-be Aesopian moral: “Brains over brawn.” A fur-lined jock strap alters the fable of the squirrel pelt—that once-earnest object, that tangible proof of a vanquished foe—into a critique of conventional masculinity. The football field becomes a landscape of camp, a subversive burlesque. It’s Mississippi surrealism in service of a young man’s imaginative acts. And Coach Baddley recognized the value, as well as the humor, in that.
My starling still doesn’t have a name. I haven’t given up, exactly; I’ve just grown okay with the ambiguity. It’s “my bird” or “my starling.” I believe the story it allows me to tell about myself may be a simple one: Death scares me, but during those days at Prey I wasn’t afraid to touch it. For two nights in a row after the workshop I had skinning dreams, though I don’t remember their plots—just flashes of skin and scalpels and those stretching cobwebs. I also began to look at my fat black cat differently. As I stroked Jellybean’s belly, feeling her brisk heartbeat and ripples of skin, I thought, “You’re a sack of guts covered in fur.” Later, lying in bed reading, I absentmindedly felt my own right forearm. I turned to my husband. “My bones feel like bones,” I said. I can now imagine what people’s fat deposits look like on their inner thighs or buttocks, or how my own microfibers might shine in the bedside light. I think this is what doctors must conjure. Or morticians. Or cops. Hematologists must picture human-shaped knots of blood pushing carts at the grocery store. And in the bodies of shoppers who stoop to squeeze oranges in crates cardiologists must notice a floating row of beating hearts. I search for images or glints of story in a word or gesture: nine women and a boy deciding “winter or summer plumage” as they touch the bodies of their future birds; my father’s hunting trophy turned fur-lined jock strap; Allis leaving the doe-eyed creatures of Disney for the grit and complexities of flesh. Those impossible resurrections—baked blackbirds flying from a pie. My bird is beautiful. I don’t have a name for it. I opened it up and entered as if turning the first page of a story.
THE GOLIATH JAZZ
I.
I was a senior in high school, in May 1999, when my mother told me the curly-haired boy who’d once sung with me in our church’s children’s choir admitted to murdering his older sister in 1995 and burning down the family house. In a plea bargain with the DA, Matthew Harper had received thirty-five years without parole for bludgeoning his sister with a rolli
ng pin; stabbing her in the back with a large kitchen knife and penetrating her heart; then setting the house on fire as their mother and grandmother slept. For a number of seconds I sipped my coffee without speaking. “Matt?” I finally asked. I hadn’t thought about the Harper tragedy in years; and Matt’s full name now sounded like a stranger’s. “Matt who played David in David and Goliath?” The same fourteen-year-old boy I remembered singing the lead part in the Junior Choir’s rendition of David and Goliath as the biblical hero who slays the ogreish Philistine warrior with a rock from his slingshot later murdered his sister, Anne Harper, on Thanksgiving morning, 1995. This was three years after his starring role in the musical sermon, at our Episcopalian church. After killing Anne—a twenty-year-old junior at Hollins College who’d returned to northern Virginia for the holiday—Matt poured gasoline around her body sprawled in the living room and went upstairs to dribble fuel oil outside of their mother’s bedroom door. (Since the separation, their father had lived elsewhere.) Matt then set the redbrick house on Ryers Place ablaze. Although a neighbor was able to rescue the grandmother from her basement apartment, their mother Elizabeth Harper suffered first- and second-degree burns before she fell from a second-story window while trying to escape, breaking her back. She later refused to testify against her son. Matt was eighteen at the time he fled the burning house, flinging his blood-slick shoes into a shallow drainage creek.