Killing It

by Camas Davis

  A renowned eau-de-vie producer in the region, Monsieur Gros turned out a tiny production, but he had been making small-batch eau-de-vie (“water of life”) for several decades. This described just about every producer I met in Gascony: renowned, tiny production, decades of knowledge. Monsieur Gros made eau-de-vie de fruits, an unaged brandy made by fermenting and twice distilling ripe fruits like pears or apples. But he was also known for another type of eau-de-vie. The story goes that one day, Monsieur Gros and his wife stood in the doorway of their stone distillery, looking out at all their grapevines, and, as if for the first time, they saw the wild chèvrefeuille, or honeysuckle, growing between the vines. “We should drink that,” his wife said. And so they began transforming all those pink and purple flowers into liquid in the form of honeysuckle eau-de-vie, a most quintessential form of Gascon alchemy. Just writing this makes me smile. I bought as many bottles as I could fit in my suitcase.

  After our visit to Monsieur Gros, Kate took me to the prune farm near her house, where I tasted prune eau-de-vie, as well as candied prunes, chocolate-covered prunes, and just plain prunes that tasted nothing like what I’d had back home. They were full of sugar, but with a touch of musk and a lemony acidity. On Fruitway Road, the Italian plum orchard we lived across from had once been nationally renowned for the prunes its plums were turned into, but by the time I’d entered elementary school, the orchard’s owners had abandoned it. What was it that had allowed Gascony’s plum orchards to thrive and Alvadore’s to fail? It was as if at some point Alvadore’s inhabitants had just stopped seeing all the potential around them. We couldn’t see the honeysuckle. And even if we had been able to see it, we were no longer in possession of the proper stories, stories that would tell us what to do with it, stories that would reawaken our own spirit of débrouillardise.

  * * *

  —

  MONSIEUR GROS’S honeysuckle story reminded me once again of how very difficult it can be to truly see. How many times had he and his wife gone out to look at their vines and never really noticed the honeysuckle and its potential? How many times had I bought meat and never really seen what I was buying?

  Annie Dillard wrote that seeing is most often a matter of verbalization, or expression in some form or another. “Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes,” she wrote, “I simply won’t see it.” Writing, for so much of my life, had done this for me.

  “But there is another kind of seeing,” Dillard wrote, “that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.”

  This is what choosing to stand on the other side of a pig did to me, the side opposite from where I’d stood for thirty-two years, the side that required me to pick up a knife, to read the road map of the pig’s anatomy, to endow each muscle with its own story.

  As time beat on in France, I wished to rely solely on each moment’s light, which I imagined to be the bright, obtrusive kind, imprinting itself on my neglected silver gut. This made me an increasingly poor communicator with the people I’d left back home, however. At first I’d written diligently to Will, and to my family and close friends—I’d even tried my hand at writing a few Facebook and blog posts—but as my time working in the cutting room and at the market pushed me more and more into the present, I became less interested in describing my experience to anyone. And while I sensed that this would reinforce the distance that had likely formed between me and those I loved back home, I didn’t really care. It felt reckless, but that silver light kept catching me in its particulate wild glow.

  And so I forgot my friend Sonya’s birthday. I forgot that my friend Jill was about to have her baby. Had I forgotten Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, too? What else had I forgotten? Who else?

  Will. I had forgotten to call Will on his birthday, and I didn’t realize it until two weeks later.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to a mostly frozen, very delayed image of him over Skype. “I’m just so . . . caught up here.”

  Will assured me, over and over again, that it was fine. He didn’t care. He understood. He employed all the right phrases—“I want to give you the space you need”—that one should when they wish to sound confident and unselfish. But in his voice I sensed the tremble of a growing hurt.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t care about his birthday, but somehow it hadn’t remained a priority while I was in France. I was too busy opening my eyes to see. And this, I realized, was probably as good a reason as any not to be with someone, at least in the way I had so hastily chosen to be with Will. I love you AND I want to be alone. I love you BUT I want to be alone. There is danger in seeing, too. You come to unscrupulous conclusions. You make hard decisions. You will always suffer consequences.

  That night I dreamed that I’d returned to Will’s house. I was disoriented in the dream and felt as if I were losing my eyesight. Things in the house had been moved around. I couldn’t make my way around all the furniture. I didn’t recognize the place at all. And my teeth, how they ached.

  EIGHTEEN

  Two holes had torn in the fabric and I could not stop looking through them. The fabric was translucent, made of loosely woven black mesh, nailed from the top of the barn doorway to keep out the flies or dust or detritus, perhaps, once, long ago. The elements had worn the fabric, torn it away from the doorway, so it was tattered, flapping in the wind, with two fist-size holes in it. Through the holes, the blue sky, a wispy Gascon cloud, a fir tree. This is what I took hundreds of pictures of at Jehanne’s ferme auberge, where she showed Jonathan and Kate and me how she raised fattened ducks and geese the old-fashioned way, with a beat-up metal funnel and some grain.

  I took the pictures of the holes in the fabric with a new camera that Will had given me before I left for France. At the end of our last, awkward phone call, he’d asked me to send photos meant just for him. The photos I’d sent in bulk e-mails to friends and family hadn’t done it for him. “Special photos,” he said, “with the camera I gave you.”

  It was an innocent enough request—maybe even romantic in its own way. And besides, I owed him for having missed his birthday. But it made me impatient. I didn’t really want to take photos for Will, or anyone else. I didn’t want to feel obligated to anyone, even this man I had fallen in love with. This man I was not sure I would feel the same way about when I returned home.

  Give me a little space, I wanted to say, a little time, some room to grow. But I’d moved in and then left in a hurry and was now out of reach and unwilling to share. I could understand his worry. And then all I had to show him was picture after picture of those two holes interrupting that dark veil of material to reveal the blue sky.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WE ARRIVED, Jehanne showed us the open-air barn and pasture that lay beyond, where her ducks and geese sauntered and waddled in the open yard and dipped their beaks in troughs of grain. The gray and white down of the geese resembled that of the Canadian variety we grew up being chased by, the ones our neighbors on Fruitway Road kept for fun, presumably, although I never understood why, because they were loud and mean and provided little in the way of companionship. Jehanne’s geese had much shorter necks and legs, and they seemed a good deal calmer.

  Underneath the barn’s roof, and closed in by temporary plastic netting, fifty or so ducklings lay in the shade on the ground, their new black and yellow feathers fuzzy and soft, sticking out in every direction, alive to the new air around them.

  “These ducks are young,” Jehanne said, speaking pragmatically. “We want to protect them from the elements in here for a few more weeks.” She noted that they could eas
ily move around and probe the dirt with their beaks. She did not like to put them in cages. “Once they’re older, we’ll rotate them on our various pastures.”

  “For the last two weeks of their sixteen or so weeks of life, we do the gavage,” Jehanne explained. Gavage is the French term for what we in America have dubbed “force-feeding,” although the direct translation is “to gorge.” “We do gavage the old way.”

  Kate explained that industrial foie gras birds are typically raised in individual cages or cramped barns and that they are often force-fed for a shorter period of time with larger quantities of food at each feeding.

  Jehanne calmly corralled one of the older geese into an enclosed area of the barn. She sat on the ground and coaxed the bird between her legs to keep it from flapping its wings. She then grabbed what looked like a weathered metal funnel with a slender, slightly longer-than-normal stem, used it to scoop up a half-cup or so of wet-looking corn from a bucket, squeezed the sides of the goose’s beak to open its mouth, and gently inserted the stem of the funnel a few inches down the bird’s throat. Jehanne pressed on a loop of metal at the middle of the funnel to release the corn, several kernels at a time, while she massaged the goose’s neck.

  “She’s inserting it into the bird’s crop,” Kate explained, “which sits at the base of the esophagus. That’s where the corn ends up. It doesn’t go directly into the stomach. Over time, the bird releases the food from the crop into the gizzard and then the stomach.”

  After about fifteen seconds, Jehanne removed the funnel and the bird waddled off.

  “That’s it?” I asked. The goose seemed completely unfazed, although of course I could not be sure what the bird felt, and were I a different kind of person in need of a different sort of narrative, I could lay an entirely different story onto what I saw.

  I tried to imagine what gavage might feel like if it were done to me. I pictured myself gagging. I would likely have a hard time breathing, and the stem of the funnel would surely hurt my throat. But I was working off the assumption that the goose and I had the same anatomy.

  Kate explained that ducks and geese don’t have teeth, and they normally swallow their food whole, storing it first in their crop. They also swallow rocks and pebbles, which end up in the gizzard. Once the food moves from the crop to the gizzard, those rocks and pebbles grind up the food before it’s digested. Because of this particular system, the bird’s esophagus is actually quite flexible and resilient, unlike a human’s. Ducks don’t have a gag reflex, either, because their breathing and feeding apparatuses are separate. My natural empathetic assumptions about what it might feel like for the goose were entirely off base.

  I imagined that the goose felt at least a little discomfort, but, judging by its response, the process didn’t seem to cause physical pain. Discomfort and pain are two very different things, after all. I experience discomfort almost every day, when a bug bite itches or when I get a splinter or a seat belt becomes too tight around my chest, but pain is something I generally try to avoid and never want to inflict on others. Is causing discomfort acceptable to some people but not to others? Are discomfort and pain the same in some people’s minds? Discomfort was part of life here on Jehanne’s farm. But she seemed to be saying that pain was where they drew their line.

  I could see how much work it was to do it Jehanne’s way, how it might be tempting to mechanize the whole thing, to keep all the birds in cages so that you didn’t have to hold the bird in your lap and be reminded that it was a living creature. But this seemed like the only respectable way to do it, if you were going to do it. If I could not find anyone back in the States who raised foie gras like Jehanne did, I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat foie gras at all.

  * * *

  —

  JEHANNE WALKED US around the corner of the barn to their small processing plant. Outside, a tall man with a shaved head and a trim black goatee was in the process of killing a batch of Jehanne’s ducks. Kate explained that the man was Jehanne’s informally adopted son, a once wayward kid she’d taken under her wing long ago. He wore spotless white pants, a white butcher’s smock, and a white rubber apron that hung down to his ankles, and he stood in front of a contraption that looked like four traffic cones turned upside down and tied to a tripod. Beneath it he’d laid a burlap rag on the gravel to catch the blood, a gesture that seemed more ceremonial than practical.

  Two duck feet stuck out of the top of each cone. Jehanne explained that before killing each duck, they placed it upside down in the cone to keep it from flapping its wings and to calm it. The opening at the small end of each cone was just big enough that the duck’s head and neck could be gently pulled through so that it wasn’t scrunched up.

  The man opened one of the duck’s beaks and quickly stuck the tip of a knife through the thin top palate of the bird’s mouth and into the brain. After pulling the knife back out, he stuck it into the duck’s neck, directly into its carotid artery, to bleed it. This was more or less the same procedure I’d witnessed at the abattoir two Sundays earlier. Scramble the brain-body communication so it can’t feel pain. Then drain the blood. Do it quick. Don’t mess it up.

  I thought of the stories my dad told me about killing chickens as a child, how his grandma chopped the head off with a hatchet, and the headless chicken chased him around the yard. Jehanne’s birds were not struggling or running in the instant of their death. They were still and calm when the lights went out.

  Once the duck bled out completely, the man passed each bird through an opening in the wall of the building and Jehanne motioned for us to follow her inside. A heavy dusting of feathers covered the floor. Red-tinted water flowed into a drain.

  Two women and a man worked to rid the ducks of all their feathers. First the man dipped a duck into a vat of hot water. “To loosen the feathers,” Jehanne said. Then, he held the duck above a contraption that looked a bit like a pinball machine with a system of rapidly moving rollers and rubber fingers that pulled the majority of the feathers away from the carcass, leaving the skin intact. When he was done, the two women hung the birds from the ceiling by their feet and removed the rest using their fingers, a knife, and a wet towel. Before passing these cleaned duck carcasses through another window, they cut through the skin at the base of the neck and pulled the neck skin down toward the ground so that it hung loosely from the carcass but remained attached.

  “We use the neck skin to make chou farci,” Kate said. “You stuff it with foie gras or with ground duck meat. Jehanne serves it to her guests here and cans and sells it to customers at the market.”

  Kate pointed to the creamy yellow fat underneath the skin. “The birds have so much fat on them that when you render the fat from just one duck, you have enough to properly confit both legs.”

  Confit refers to the process of cooking any ingredient, but usually meat, at a low temperature for a long time in copious amounts of fat—enough fat to cover the ingredient, in fact. The fat is usually from the same animal the meat came from. Someone had long ago figured out that if you feed the birds a lot of corn, the bird will have enough fat for you to confit the legs in, a process that turns the meat succulent and tender. And if you place the confited legs in a jar and cover them with rendered fat before sealing it, the meat will be preserved until you open it months—even years—later. Without that fat, all manner of traditional duck preservation methods would not exist.

  In the next room, a young woman butchered the ducks, still warm. First she put her entire hand inside the cavity of the bird and pulled out the organs, separating out heart, lungs, spleen, and liver, which, by far the largest of the organs, was the color of burnt caramel, with a bit of creamy yellow mixed in. The liver appeared to have taken up the majority of the inner cavity of the bird. Kate told us the duck carcasses weighed eleven to twelve pounds and that the liver accounted for 10 percent of that weight. Would that enlarged liver have been painful? Uncomfortable? Do we have fatty livers,
I wondered, given the way many of us eat? Possibly, but we go about our lives anyway.

  With just a few swipes of her knife, the woman magically pulled the entire main skeleton, including the rib cage, spine, and neck, out in one piece and tossed it into a big pot. Two breasts, two wings, two thighs, and two legs remained, all held together by a sheath of duck skin and fat. The resulting patchwork looked a bit like a deep-yellow and dark-red Rorschach print of muscle, fat, and skin.

  “They cut it this way,” Kate explained, “so they can control exactly how much skin and fat stays on each piece. They use every part of this bird for a different product, and the amount of skin and fat on each is very important.”

  Jehanne explained that she preferred to hot-butcher her birds so that every part was as fresh as possible for salting or cooking, and then she shooed us out of the cutting room. As we took off our hairnets and white coats, I asked Jehanne if I could have the recipe for her foie-gras-stuffed duck prosciutto.

  “I don’t think the recipe will work anywhere but here,” she said.

  I laughed.

  “She’s not joking,” Kate said. “It will be difficult to find foie gras in the States as fresh as this.”

  * * *

  —

  TWO WEEKS LATER, Kate took some of her students and me back to Jehanne’s ferme auberge for lunch. French, German, Swiss, American, and Spanish tourists filled the dining room, which felt a bit like a ski lodge, with its vaulted ceilings and long, wooden communal tables. For the first course, we were served flutes of sparkling wine and tastes of Jehanne’s salted, dried duck prosciutto. For each course, Jehanne stood up on a stool to tell the entire room what we were about to eat, and as the courses progressed, we cheered every time she did so.