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IT’S TIME.
First, catch the chicken. Tiptoe into the bobbing, pecking flock. Pick one, any one. Grab it. Hold it close as it squawks and struggles. You’re sure it knows what’s coming. Run with it in your arms into the woodshed. Lay it across the chopping block. Keep one hand firm on its feet. Turn it so its neck stretches out. Don’t look at its eyes. With your other hand, reach for the hatchet. Aim and CHOP as hard as you can. Hold the headless, thrashing carcass away from you so the blood doesn’t spatter your Sunday dress.
Bled out? Now feather it. Pull backward against the roots. A good featherer can have a bird stark naked in a minute. You’re not a good featherer yet. You’re only eight.
Enter Father. Rolls a section of newspaper into a cone shape, lights the wider end with his Zippo. Taking the denuded body from you, he singes off the short, tenacious sprouts of pinfeathers between its legs.
The smell stays with you the rest of your life.
Into the kitchen. Enter Grandmother. Slicing a neat episiotomy north of the tail, she opens the bird and removes its guts in one neat grab, careful not to break the gall bladder and render the meat inedible. Sometimes she finds an egg. A treasure.
Within the hour, the chicken, once alive and running, is dead and simmering on the wood stove.
The smell stays with you the rest of your life.