CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY film covered it. It looked like the ear now. A dead eye. The feathers were sparse around the head, torn and bloody. There were long scratches and bits of flesh loose in the small holes. She bent staring at the corpse, her mouth open. Its yellow feet were half curled. Something very small and black moved jerkily through the ragged feathers of the neck. She dropped the broom and stood back. For whole minutes she frowned, fumbling with a thought that would not take shape. Then the fussing at the tray broke into a squabble at one end. One of the birds shrieked and leaped into the air, flapping and clawing at one of the combs still bowed into the tray. She saw the long head dart down and strike with closed beak at the head below it. She closed her eyes and swallowed a little trickle of her own vomit. “ They pecked it to death.” She went quickly to the door and out, leaving the light on. The clock said six when she came back into the big kitchen. She turned on all the lights in the room and made a cup of instant coffee. As she sat down at the table she saw her boots. Smears of green slime on the soles and toes, straws and short white feathers sticking to it. She took them off and put them by the door. An isolated screech from the garage signaled the others to begin. “ They’re just learning,” she muttered to herself. Her daughter trailed into the room with a school workbook under her arm. The child passed coolly to the chair opposite her and put the workbook on the table. “ I thought you did all that last night, Abby.” The child curled her legs up on the chair and tucked her bare feet elaborately under her nightie. “ I saved the arithmetic for this morning. I count better in the morning.” The woman eyed the stubby hand turning colored pages. She drank deeply from her cup. When she saw the flat light and shadow of her face shining in the wetness of the bottom she got up and took the cup to the sink. The next forty-five minutes she spent in the basement cleaning out the big chest freezer that had come with the house. She buttered the breakfast toast and kept it hot in the oven. She put the clips into her daughter’s hair gently. When her husband came out, the eggs were at their crisis and she slid them in front of him just as the film began creeping over each yellow eye. When his ride came he swung outside with his coat half buttoned and shouted at her through the closing door. “ Today!” The geek o f an old circus would bite their heads o f f . Felt nothing . . . She spread purple jam on her daughter’s second piece of toast and poured more coffee. “What today?” asked Abby. “ Oh . . . ” She drank coffee, “ I promised your father I’d get rid of ■the chickens today.” She looked for her reflection in the dark fluid. “ I don’t mind them,” said the child. She bit carefully into the toast, lifting her lips clear of her teeth so the jam would not smear her face. “ I like getting up early in the morning. Then I can read or do something and it’s as though school didn’t take so much of the day because there’s time before I have to go. But they aren’t pretty anymore. It’s like they were two birds. First soft and yellow, and now sharp and white. It’s funny, isn’t it?” The child’s eyes, half amused, waiting to see by the mother’s face whether they should be amused. The woman looked into her cup. “ You’d better get your coat. The bus will be out there soon.” The child ducked her head and scrambled out of the room. The woman listened to the odd isolated screech from the garage. They seemed to quiet down as the sun climbed. “ I like this place, don’t you, Mama?” The child’s voice close to her. She lifted her head and threw out an arm to take the child to her. “ Yes, Abby. I just get myself into jams sometimes and wish we were back in an apartment and had to take a walk to see a tree.” She lifted the child’s hair out of the coat collar and arranged it in a dark spray across her shoulders. The soft round eyes smiled up at her. “ You mean like getting a box full of baby roosters instead of baby hens?” “ Yes. Like that.” The house ached around her when the child had gone. She made beds and swept and washed the dishes. “ Let’s buy a house with some land!” she mocked herself as she tucked in sheets. “ I ’ll have red hens in the dooryard and we’ll save an enormous amount on eggs, and maybe buy a calf in the spring to fatten for beef.” The corners of her mouth sank deep into her cheeks with the memory of her own fantasies. She went to the table with a pencil and a notepad and sat doodling figures and counting on her fingers. The fifty yellow chicks in the box marked “ Cockerels” in two-inch- high red letters had cost five dollars. Then she had fed them the most expensive egg-layers mash for four months before they started to crow and she realized her mistake. Cockerel, it seemed, was a sex rather than a breed. The lumber for the perch had been ten dollars. The bales of straw, the disinfectant. The final number beneath the line struck her as ridiculous. She added the column again. When the same number came up she reached for the telephone. “ Mr. Jarvis, this is Mrs. Rossich out on Gate Lane.” “ Yes, Mrs. Rossich, I’ve got some very nice veal liver this week. And if you want a good Sunday piece I’ve got a leg of lamb here. I know you like . . . ” “ No, Mr. Jarvis, I’ll have to call you tomorrow about my order. I wanted to ask you a question.” She stared at her right hand. It held the pencil whitely and circled round and round, darkening a thick ring on the note pad. “ 1 have fifty . . . forty-nine young roosters, Mr. Jarvis. They’re five months old and in good condition. I wonder what you might give me for them?” Her face was suddenly damp. The hand was quite still, pressing the pencil’s point down in one place. “ It’s kind of you to think of me,” buzzed the telephone, “ but I buy all my poultry from the wholesalers. It’s inspected that way, you know. But I could pack them for your freezer when you slaughter them. That’d run about twenty-five cents a bird. Be pretty economical. Or if you don’t have a freezer I can rent you space in the locker here. The Callan family who were in that house before you bought it, they did that until they got their own freezer.” The hand with the pencil arced a dark line down to the total beneath the line of figures. “Mr. Jarvis,” she said, “ how do you slaughter roosters?” “Well, you just pluck them as quick as you can, singe them, and gut them.” “ But Mr. Jarvis, how do you kill them?” The sweat was beading now. Beginning to run a little. “ Why, how do you think, Mrs. Rossich? You cut off their heads.” The “ Yes” was so clear in her mind that she never realized she hadn’t said it. She put the receiver back in its cradle and stood up. Yes, she thought. You take off their heads. The geek of an old circus would bite their heads off. The vague memory of some tale came to her. A large needle that pierced the brain so quickly that they never knew. Felt nothing. A hundred old stories and phrases came welling up, “Wring a chicken’s neck,” a man’s huge hands giving one wrench at the bony head and it comes off in his hand with a spout of blood from the quivering neck, a boy laying a squawking hen on the ground and, planting his shoe across the neck, gives one hard yank at the yellow feet and the blood sprays up over his pantleg. The body walks afterwards. Or is alive till the blood is gone. Her right hand was on the doorknob. Her left hand clenched her yellow rubber gloves. She had forgotten the hatchet. She went to the tool drawer for it. “ Slaughter,” she thought, is a formal and disciplined word. He used it in its tight original sense. A processing for victual consumption. The other, the splaying limbs and horror, the scenes of crimes and battlefields, the flinging of children and catching them on bayonets just out of their mothers’ reach, all that is metaphor, simile, the thing, in fact, which is not.” She slid the crusted boots on and •went out through the door. “ To slaughter,” she thought at the blank sky. “ To butcher.” She walked out past the vegetable plot to the woodshed. “ The vegetables are all right. Pumpkins and beans and Brussels sprouts sitting there not bothering anybody. Just a raid on the slugs once in a while. A steady weeding. That turned out all right.” She stood staring at the piled wood beneath the open shed. “My own mother killed a chicken every Sunday when she was young and hauled .on the ropes that pulled the pigs up for bleeding.” The pictures in her mind had names and phrases attached. “ Mother,” soft face, glowing eyes, a sunbonnet from some old magazine illustration. “ The hens in the dooryard,” the goldenhaired woman with the peaceful face. “ But I grew up on the thirty-second floor, and all the hens were in picture books, red, with pleasant expressions.” She slipped on the yellow gloves, drove the hatchet into a section of log till it bit and then hefted the chunk of wood in both arms. She carried it back and set it up on end beside the door of the garage. The roosters scuffed and chuckled inside. “ I want to do it,” she thought. She turned the doorknob, took one long step into the full murk of the air they breathed and grabbed at a bird. Warm. His chest frail in her hands and his wings quiet beneath her gloves. There was only a faint surprised cluck and the swoop of his head trying to stay at its normal altitude while his body ascended to the level of her waist. The others io % OFF 1 WITH THIS ^COUPON. I Custom Metal Frames $.10 an inch Large Selection of Posters, Cards and Prints... Denise & Jan (formerly o f Frame Factory) U-Frame LIP AC Compare Our Prices Please! Original Works Limited Editions Mon. - Sat. 11-7 Fri. 11-9 Sun. 12-6 219 N.W. Couch 2 2 3 -9 5 0 2 46
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