by Camas Davis
THIRTY-FOUR
Twelve multicolored roosters were sweating, shitting, and scratching at one another in the back of my car, and I was not headed to a cockfight.
Earlier that morning, on the advice of a farm foreman whom Jo and I had met down in Scio, I’d driven about forty-five minutes south on I-5 to a livestock auction in Woodburn, in search of old roosters, the kind of birds traditionally destined, after a long, healthy life, to be placed in a heavy-bottomed pot, along with button mushrooms and sweet pearl onions, bright-orange carrots, bay leaves, celery, and thyme, and then covered with rich, tannic French red wine. I was looking for roosters so old and tough they needed at least a day of marinating, and another full day, if not two, of stewing. Muscled, well-exercised guys who’d developed their hefty, toned stature not by way of steroids or limited exercise in cramped indoor spaces, but simply by living how a bird should live—outdoors, moving, jumping, flapping, pecking, shitting, eating, fucking.
I’d recently learned from a chicken farmer that chickens raised for meat in America are typically slaughtered at around five to seven weeks old. I was looking for five to seven years old. But when I’d bid on these twelve birds, their formative years were largely a mystery to me. I’d had to look these birds up and down and rely on intuition.
What I did know for certain was that these twelve roosters were destined for twelve different pots that would be stirred by twelve different people, the kind of people who wanted to learn how to kill their own dinner. I’d dubbed the class, my first chicken slaughter class, “Real Coq au Vin,” after the classic wine-infused French stew, a recipe that traditionally calls for older roosters. By “real” I also meant that everyone in the class would start from the beginning—with a live bird. Levi Cole and I would teach the students how to kill the birds as painlessly as possible and then how to turn the birds into food.
I’d split the roosters up evenly between two large dog carriers I borrowed from Levi and a few cardboard boxes that I’d carved breathing holes into. It was no verdant pasture, but it was at least triple the amount of space provided to the chickens I’d seen riding in open-air cages stacked twenty deep on the backs of many a large semi driving down I-5, most likely factory-farmed birds headed to slaughter. Nevertheless, I was worried about the birds. I worried that they were thirsty. I worried that they were worried. I also worried that teaching twelve students how to kill these birds was a really bad idea. What if someone didn’t kill their bird right? What if people cried?
What if? What if people did cry? Why this inclination to ensure that everyone was comfortable, that no one had to feel or think too hard about anything? Wasn’t the point of this class precisely to help people understand that things can go wrong, that killing animals well required skill, practice, and commitment, and that we might be better off if we acknowledged that fact?
After fifteen minutes of driving alone with the roosters, my friend Jill drove up behind me, honking and flashing her lights before pulling into the lane next to me. After being let go from the city magazine and then giving birth to her daughter, Jill had enrolled in a film course, and for her final project she was making a short documentary about my class. Her classmate Amanda rolled down Jill’s backseat window and pointed a video camera at me.
I flashed Amanda an awkward smile, the kind of smile that says, I know that you know that I am unsure of what I am doing here, but I’m going to go ahead and smile anyway, and kept driving as Jill matched my speed.
* * *
—
EARLIER THAT MORNING, after we’d arrived at the auction’s vast dirt parking lot, filled with gooseneck trailers and pickups, semis and four-wheel drives, I’d wondered whether bringing a film crew was a good idea. And when the gruff, permed woman working the main office, clearly miffed by our presence, chewing her gum methodically, informed us that the auction had a strict no-camera policy, I was secretly relieved. But then Jill intervened with her Texan brand of golly-gee charm and changed the woman’s mind.
“This is just for a class,” Jill said innocently. “We’re students. We’re just practicing! But we’ve got consent forms and everything, just like the real thing!”
The woman sighed dramatically. “Fine. Go ahead,” she said between chews. “If you’re gonna bid on birds . . . [chew, chew, chew] . . . you’re gonna . . . [chew, chew, chew] need one of these.” She handed me an index card with a number on it.
And then we entered the pungent and labyrinthine complex of open-air barns, fenced outbuildings, and cordoned-off patches of cracked asphalt and dirt that made up the Woodburn Livestock Exchange. We stopped first inside a covered, rodeo-like arena where a man paraded a hulking steer in front of a crowd of thirty or so men standing in dirty jeans and rubber boots, cowboy hats and Carhartt vests. As we watched the proceedings, thirty pairs of eyes darted from the steer to Jill, Amanda, and me, the only women in the room.
Next door, more men picked through row after row of small farm equipment laid on the dirt ground in flea market fashion. There were big silver shears, lengthy coils of green hose, rolls of used chicken wire, banged-up aluminum troughs, disassembled rabbit hutches, half-used bags of feed, and balls of frayed twine.
Outside, in a dry field cordoned off by temporary plastic fencing, men stood in groups of two and three admiring giant, used blue and green tractors.
While the sounds of crowing roosters and mooing cattle bombarded us, the rhythmic chants of the auctioneers, calling out from their respective jurisdictions, hypnotized us into a quiet lull. I had no idea what they were saying. Maybe I had no business bidding on twelve roosters with my students’ money. But would the students have otherwise done this on their own? Someone had to do it.
* * *
—
“EXCUSE ME,” I said to an older Vietnamese woman, the only woman I’d seen since we left the auction office. “Where are the birds?” Jill pointed the boom mike between us.
The woman shrugged, not understanding me.
I flapped my arms like a bird. “Chickens? Roosters?”
She laughed and pointed behind her.
We rounded the corner of the main barn and came upon a small, open-air shed stacked floor to ceiling with cages of birds. Each of the five dozen or so roomy wire cages temporarily housed one, two, or three birds. A trio of fluffy white chickens with decorative crowns of feathers huddled together in one cage. A classic black-and-white hen clucked down at them. Several night-black cocks nearly three feet tall crowed to the crowd. At least I thought they were cocks: they had the red cockscomb I’d always associated with a rooster’s essential identity, but then I noticed eggs in some of their cages and I began to seriously doubt my assessment criteria.
The people around me talked to one another, pointing at various birds. I assumed they knew how to tell a rooster from a hen better than I did. In the other areas we’d wandered through, I’d seen mostly white and Latino men. In the bird room, I was surrounded by men and women, speaking to one another in their native languages of Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese.
A red-faced white man walked in, his plaid flannel shirt tucked neatly into a pair of pleated khakis that clung tightly to his bulbous paunch, and the room shifted noticeably. We leaned forward as a group, nearly one body with many arms and legs, angling for the best birds, the plumpest birds, the oldest or the youngest or the prettiest.
I had my eyes on that trio of fluffy white ones. They weren’t tall, but they were wide in girth, so I assumed they’d be meaty. I had no idea how to tell their age, but I figured the auctioneer would tell us. He didn’t. At the very least, I was sure they were not Cornish Crosses. I’d recently learned that most birds we eat in America are of the Cornish Cross variety, a crossbreed built to grow fast—and develop large breast muscles in a small amount of time—and thus be ready for slaughter at that five- to seven-week mark. Several farmers who’d attempted to pasture Cornish Crosses had told me that i
f the birds were allowed to live past that age and their breeding lines hadn’t been closely monitored, their small legs, unable to hold up their heavy upper body, often gave out. Or they’d have heart attacks. Or they’d die of thirst because they couldn’t walk to water. I wasn’t interested in Cornish Crosses. I wanted a sturdier bird.
The auctioneer opened his mouth and began speaking nonsense.
“Numma-numma-NUM-NUM-bwana-bwana-DOO-DOO-canna-canna-FIE-FIE.”
I thought I saw the auctioneer point at my white fluffies, heard the number ten, panicked, and foisted my number up in the air. I felt like I was back in France again, making wild and incorrect assumptions about the meaning of what I’d heard.
More jumbled sounds burst forth from the auctioneer’s mouth. I raised my hand a few more times and then “SOLD!” Jill let out a whoop. I’d forgotten, momentarily, that I was being filmed. The crowd’s collective body, with its one hundred eyes, turned to blink at me, then at the cameras and microphone, then back to the auctioneer. Had I just bought a bird? I wasn’t entirely sure.
A young woman separated from the group and stepped toward me. She was about my age, maybe a little younger, in jeans, a faded jean jacket, and muck boots.
“You just bought those three birds for twenty dollars each. You know that, right?”
Her lips were frosted with a gloss whose pink hue reminded me of the colors of the Lane County Fair, which I’d grown up going to in the early eighties. Like sunlight shining on cotton candy. Light. Please be my light, I thought.
“I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Twenty dollars is way too much for those birds.”
“Which birds did I buy?”
She pointed to the fluffy, thick white birds I’d been eyeing.
“I wanted them! Perfect!”
“What do you want them for?”
“Umm, to eat.”
“Those are Silkies. Nothing but feathers. You won’t find any meat on those bones.”
“What? Jesus.” I was already halfway through my budget and I’d bought only a quarter of what I needed. “Tell me how this works. I’m teaching a slaughter class and I want old roosters. How do I know for sure they are roosters?”
She looked at me funny, held her hand up to silence me, watched the auctioneer’s mouth for a few seconds, and then surveyed the crowd with her blue eyes. The man standing in front of me held his card up.
“Put your number up,” she told me. “Starting bid was five dollars.”
I raised my hand. The auctioneer looked straight at me and pointed.
“Siiiix. Siiiiiiiix. Numma-numma. Bwana-bwana. Siiiix.” Another hand went up.
“Bids are going up by twenty-five cents now. Put your number up again. This is a big rooster,” she said, pointing toward a yellow-and-black fella.
“Wuuuun. Twiiiiigh. Sold!” The crowd turned and blinked at me once again. My new friend explained to me that I’d just bought the bird for six dollars and fifty cents.
“This is way too fast,” I said to my new teacher. “Thank you.”
“So are you on TV or something?” she asked.
“Um. No. My friend is just filming for her film class.”
“You guys from Portland, then?”
“Is it that obvious?”
She didn’t answer. “So you’re teaching city folk how to kill roosters?”
“Yes. That’s the idea.”
“Truth is, we could use the same classes out where I live,” she said.
After she helped me garner a few more winning bids, I’d met my quota.
“Now what?” I asked her.
“Get your total from the guy and go pay at the office. Then you get your birds.”
I hadn’t really thought about this part. Now I was going to have to transfer, with my own two hands, nine very large, feisty-looking roosters and three not-quite-so-menacing white ones into my car.
“Right. Okay. I’ll be right back.”
“You’re gonna need my help,” she said.
“I probably am.”
* * *
—
WHEN I RETURNED, my new friend spoke in hand gestures to two older Chinese women who looked to be in their eighties. About half of the crowd had left. Jill and Amanda rolled camera.
I didn’t want to bother my new mentor any more than I already had, so I brought one of the dog carriers over to my twenty-dollar Silkies. When I unhinged the door latch, they backed away into the corner. My palms were sweating. This was not something I did every day, wrestling chickens into the backseat of my car.
As I reached into the cage, the sharp wire edge of the door caught my forearm and traced a long bloody line from my wrist to my elbow.
“Shit,” I muttered.
I tucked my head, neck, and shoulders into the cage and got hold of one, albeit precariously. But before we both made it out, the bird grabbed on to the mesh floor with his claws. His body was quite tiny—there would indeed be very little meat on these bones—but his strength greatly outweighed his stature. Jill and her crew moved closer to me with their cameras. The cut on my arm began to burn. My face burned, too.
I pushed the bird’s body in the direction of his grip, to confuse him into thinking I was letting him go, and this caused the Silkie to briefly loosen his claws such that I was able to fully extract him. I tried to wedge open the door to the dog carrier with my foot, but the bird was struggling out of my sweaty hands, a fan of white feathers thudding against my chest.
The young woman returned at exactly that moment and opened the door for me, closing it swiftly after I’d gotten the bird safely inside.
“You have to do it fast,” she said. “Don’t loiter in front of the cage. Don’t think too hard. Just approach, open it quietly, move your hands up real fast so they don’t know what’s happening, and then grab them around their wings so they can’t flap.”
“Okay. Got it,” I said. Blood dripped from my arm to the ground.
“And watch their claws. Those’ll get you worse than that cage got you,” she said.
And all this before you’ve killed the rooster for dinner.
THIRTY-FIVE
After they’d spent a few nights ensconced in a makeshift chicken-wire run that Andrew helped me build in his side yard, I transferred the birds, again somewhat awkwardly, back into their carriers and drove them to the same urban farm where Jo and Adam and I held our first pig butchery class.
By the time I arrived, Levi already had two large pots of water going over a couple of propane burners he’d set up on the paved driveway near the barn.
“Good morning!” Levi said. He had a habit of resting his hand on his throat whenever he was nervous, and he was doing it now.
“You ready to kill some chickens?”
Was anyone ever really ready?
Together Levi and I walked the carriers over to a tall patch of grass that a few of the farm’s employees had cordoned off with temporary fencing. One by one, the roosters strutted out into the makeshift pasture and began to run in circles and figure eights, exploring their new landscape. They also occasionally started fighting—whether playfully or seriously, it was not entirely clear.
Jill arrived with her camera. I still felt conflicted about all of this being filmed, especially the slaughter part. Would the presence of a camera somehow abstract the whole thing for the students, not to mention anyone who would end up viewing Jill’s movie?
Levi found a straggler left in one of the carriers, which he tilted in order to coax the bird out. The bird slid to the ground but did not stand up. His breathing seemed labored, his feathers askance, wet almost. Something was wrong. I became aware of how hot it was outside—it was June, not the best month for a chicken slaughter class. Sweat began to drip from my armpits. What had I done?
Jill moved in closer with her camera.<
br />
“We’re going to have to kill this one now,” he said.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“It looks like maybe he broke his leg. Might have overheated, too. Not sure,” Levi said. The bird wasn’t dead, but he looked like he might be better off if he were.
Maybe I’d left them in the car too long. Maybe I’d put too many in one carrier. All of my worrying about the birds had not prevented this casualty.
Levi cradled the bird in his arms and pet his head.
“What happened to you, old fella?” Jill zoomed in on Levi. “Let’s not film this one,” he said. Jill didn’t turn her camera off.
I followed Levi to his table of tools: scalpels, blunt-nosed scissors, latex gloves—all instruments he used to keep people alive in his day job as a nurse. Feeling guilty and mournful, I held the bird’s body upside down in my hands, as Levi had taught me. He killed the bird quickly. I could feel the slowing rhythm of a body going from tense to slack, from live to dead in less than thirty seconds.
“Well, that sucked,” Levi said. He was right. It was difficult. Of course it was. But it would have been worse for the bird had we not killed it right away.
* * *
—
AFTER A FEW MORE PREPARATIONS—laying out buckets for guts and feathers, setting the farmhouse table, making sure we had enough of Jill’s media releases—the students began arriving. A local, and very opinionated, food blogger showed up with his own video camera, followed by a man who immediately began quizzing me about my knowledge of a classic coq au vin recipe penned by the famous French chef Paul Bocuse. I wasn’t familiar with Bocuse’s recipe, and the man seemed disappointed. I got the sense that he was convinced that the class would not be authentic enough for his taste, but I appreciated his clear knowledge of French food. He’d even brought a platter of thinly sliced head cheese that he’d made himself.