kill chickens

I'm working on a more substantive piece but while you wait for that, here's an appalling little story I drag out when the conversation gets dull. When we moved from a Victorian townhouse in the city to a two acre plot in the middle of nowhere, we took a stab at the 'gentleman farmer' thing we'd seen on TV. Our Sapphic goat-farming friends down the road lent us a tiller and we set about carving out an eight-hundred square foot vegetable garden. I meticulously laid out a grid of irrigation hose according to my carefully drafted and color-coded scale drawing, which was to be gravity fed by a pair of rain barrels I had salvaged and out rigged beneath the gutters on the barn. This isn't the real story so I'll abbreviate. Our labors were repaid with enough zucchini to feed an army, a thirsty looking row of corn, and a plot of tomato plants so heavily guarded by the most gigantically menacing spiders I've ever laid eyes on that most of the fruit was left to return to the soil from whence it came. The broccoli, eggplant, beans, carrots, celery, and assorted others were no-shows (we watched as the promising young foliage was devoured by who knows what). We decided this was an awful lot of work for a side dish so we moved on to the main course. With the indoor project of petting and naming boxes of chicks and ducklings ongoing, I set about building a pretty ambitious chicken coop and customizing a doghouse for the ducks. In hindsight that energy would have been more judiciously spent on fencing the entire property. By mid-summer every duck, in seeming defiance of my effort to corral them into their house at dusk, was carried off by mister fox or run over by cars. A neighborhood dog shredded over half of the chickens in a fifteen minute lapse of vigilance. Three hens survived along with a rooster the boys had named 'Charming'. By the following year when we had bought another dozen chicks, 'Charming' had grown resentful of his name and would demonstrate this on the legs of anyone who ventured too close. It was his own misfortune to one day try this on Michael- who happened to be carrying a stick. Daybreak was quiet for a time after that until four of the twelve new chicks turned out to be roosters. Googling "kill chickens", Michael printed out detailed instructions for the most humane way of thinning out the roost. I stole into the coop in the middle of the night and re-quartered 'Red' ('Charming's heir apparent) in a dog crate. Ever the careful planner, I awoke before dawn so the children wouldn't discover my murderous intent and strung 'Red' up by the heels on the clothes line. Comforted by the idea that in using this method he would painlessly slip into the arms of Morpheus, I inserted a paring knife, blade forward, into the side of his neck close to the bone and pulled forward. It turned out not to be the expeditious event I was counting on, his continued strained clucking and the advancing daybreak threatened to expose me. I relocated him to the barn where I positioned him, hanging from the rafters over a plastic pail while I took the boys off to Meeting. Ending this birds time on earth was not an easy thing for me, it was precipitated by an anxious dread and carried out with weakness in the knees and heartfelt contrition. It was to my own horror then, that when we arrived back home four hours later, my discovery in the barn was a knocked over pail of blood and no body. It wasn't until I was able to locate the source of a labored gurgling sound behind a stack of boxes that I realized it was my new onus to replay the execution, which I accomplished this time by sawing into the wound with a bigger knife. The second time around I became a little bit more the guy at the end of "Night Of The Living Dead", the Hero with an unpleasant but comically necessary charge. The effrontery of this zombie bird not to die! It was ultimately a blessing that the remaining three roosters were able to tap directly into this primal instinct by one day tearing up a bed of carefully tended begonias. In broad daylight (the boys were in school) I stormed the coop grabbing one after the other of them, swinging them against a fence post on the way out and chopping their traitorous little heads off with an axe. After taking only about fifteen minutes to mete out my hat-trick of revenge I discovered that the previous notion of 'humane' had been misdirected. ('Swift and certain' trumps 'calculated yet contrite'). Also that a chicken [spookily] doesn't need it's head to crow. Really, given that he aims it indiscriminately at the dirt, a hen's back feathers, beloved garden specimens, or people's shins, he is from the day's first ray of sun, begging for someone to take it off. The quieter hen can be forgiven that lapse of discretion for her eggs. From then on our roosters joined store-bought vegetables in the soup pot with a proscribed alacrity. I assumed the sobriquet 'Mr. Fox' for the purpose of making truthful explanations to the children and Michael has stories of his own about denuding and un-stuffing the noisier end of the bird, stories which he displays a higher level of gentility than I in not sharing.