We began before dawn as the day I had feared for years arrived, the day every one of them would have to be killed. I realized death doesn’t smell like other things, especially nothing living with the exception of chickens, though when we had to put down both barns the air was worse than death by the time darkness fell.
People used to say they could smell our farm from a mile up the road. The scent carried on hot summer nights when everyone who drove up and down our concession had their windows rolled open so the breeze could blow in and mess their hair. When they crested the rise, the aroma would attack them, make them gag, and sting their eyes so that they’d stop and shout at us if we were working on the free-run area near the road. They’d holler we had no business putting that kind of belligerence in the atmosphere and that we were a hazard to public health.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the vegetables and strawberries they consumed grew in the stuff that caused the stench or that the creatures who created the offal produced their eggs for breakfast or their breasts and drumsticks for dinner. If I told them that and started rolling up my sleeves, they’d drive away in a cloud of dust because most people are chicken.
I didn’t tell them I couldn’t take the smell either, the way it hung over our property and stayed in my nose even when I went away. It couldn’t be washed off. It couldn’t be driven away. It was a fact of life that came with what we did. They should have been grateful we filtered the air from the barns before we released it. It would have been ten times worse if we hadn’t.
When winter came, we had to keep the doors of the two large sheds shut because poultry and December don’t mix well. Cold air kills.
No matter what the season, people need their scrambled eggs or their hot evening meal. To the average person a chicken is a sign of plenty. Politicians campaigned on the platform of a chicken in every pot. No matter where a person goes in the world—Africa, South America, Europe, Asia, from the poshest restaurants to the poorest villages—there is always chicken on the menu. Even people who refuse to eat the flesh of another creature will crack an egg in a pan without giving their sunny-side-up a second thought. The poultry business is one of the few truly universal forms of livelihood along with funeral parlors and brothels. You’d think people would realize all three possess their own dimensions of feculent aromas.
Feculent. I learned that word one summer when the ventilation system in the west barn broke down. If we hadn’t gotten it up and running in a day, the pullets would’ve asphyxiated themselves on the overheated vapors from their own waste. In the winter, they don’t succumb to their own guano but are so sensitive to cold their hearts stop if the barn dips below forty degrees Fahrenheit. The feathers on a chicken are a lousy reminder that the dinosaurs went extinct the moment something upset the perfect balance of their climate. Those ancient reptiles had feathers, too. If chickens had been intended to survive in the cold they would have hatched with fur.
It is a wonder we had so many chickens in our barns. The moment I stepped in the door all I saw was a sea of white heads pecking away in the perpetual daylight of the pullet rows. They never seemed to rest. I often wondered if they ever rested, and if I turned out the light on them, would they dream? As Hamlet would say, ‘Aye, there’s the rub.’ And what would a chicken dream if it did fall asleep?
When they are slaughtered, they must know fear, but do they experience that foreshadowing of fear that is anxiety in us? I know what that fear is because I felt it, deep down in me, right to the core of my soul, the night Ma and I rushed Dad to the emergency room at the hospital and we just sat by ourselves in an empty room lined with rows of chairs, a perpetual light burning above us in the windowless enclosure, wondering if he was going to make it.
And when he didn’t, I held my sobbing mother in my arms as her heart broke. I looked the rows of chairs and they reminded me of our barns, of the portholes through which our hens poked their heads in order to peck and eat and drink and lay and survive without realizing they weren’t leading a life as much as they were aimed at sustaining someone else’s existence, fixated on what they were doing because the others were doing the same thing, and none of them had any idea that there might be another life they could lead. I would rather be anything in this world than a chicken.
In our hatchling shed, where we had to keep the heat up high, we lost over seventy per cent of all the new arrivals. Those have to be the worst odds an animal can face. Chickens are susceptible to a sneeze. That’s why we had to feed them antibiotics. Among livestock, they are the invalids of the food industry. They exist only when all the conditions for their survival are met, and there are so many variables to the business I’ve wondered if a bad thought wouldn’t be just as lethal to them as a failed heater or an errant virus.
All things are delicate in their own way.
Chickens possess a kind of marvelousness that leaves me fascinated. My grandmother used to chop off the feet of a hen she was preparing for dinner and show me how one pull on a cord in the back of the leg could make the claws grab and pick up a pencil.
I would turn the foot over in my hand, examine its scales, the pinkish hue of the claws, and wonder why the bird had evolved not only to possess the means of holding on to a tree branch but bear the weapons with which it could fight back against the world. The birds I knew, the pale descendants of ancient wild chickens that once populated the high branches and open air, were so docile. We bred the beauty out of them when we redesigned them to be food, and part of that beauty resides in the intricacy and craft that goes into a chicken.
The eyes of a rooster, for example, are finely filigreed in a yellow membrane at the edges of its lids as if someone crocheted a fine band of lace around their field of vision, so the bird has something better to look at than a bleak life spent in a shed or a barn. But what moves me more than anything about the thousands and thousands of birds I’ve raised and that I either killed or sent away to die is that they do not accept death, at least not physiologically. Something in them fights back when they encounter their finality.
Before he moved on, my older brother taught me how to butcher a bird for the pot, saying, “Winner winner, chicken dinner,” like a carnival huckster—which he became. He got fed up with the poultry business and declared all such winged creatures to be terminally stupid. I can’t say I agree with him, but to make his point he showed me how to kill a chicken both humanely and inhumanely.
In industrial abattoirs, chickens are grabbed by their ankles, hung upside down, and dipped in a bath through which a high voltage current flows for a millisecond. That short shock doesn’t kill them. It only stuns them, so that when their throats are slit supposedly they don’t know what is happening to them. The idea is that to be insensate is to be immune to suffering and horror, at least to the point where death is not death but a state of extreme confusion. Is that humane?
The humane way my brother showed me was to corner a chicken in a place from which it could not escape, an actual corner for instance, and after the chicken raised its talons at him and fought back and flailed in a cloud of feathers, he’d grab the bird’s body under one arm as if he was playing the bagpipes and snap its head with the other hand. The twist could be a problem because a chicken can turn its head almost three hundred degrees. If the rotation weren’t beyond the point where the neck snapped, the bird would suffer even more. That method of butchering was sickening to watch because the neck made a terrible cracking sound. I winced and he told me that was nothing.
The next time he caught a bird, an old, motley rooster that I knew would be tough and sinewy when served, he grabbed it, stroked its neck gently to calm it as it blinked and tilted its cockscomb from side to side as if it were trying to make sense of the situation, and drew his fingers through its long, plumed tail, reminding me how nice it looked. Then he stretched the bird on an old stump we kept in a corner of the rooster shed, a solid piece of an old oak trunk we used as a butcher’s block, grabbed a cleaver off the bench beside the stump, and severed the animal from its head with one swift blow.
I threw up.
The rooster’s wings flapped madly. My brother held it up by its feet as the thing tried to fly. It’s body decided it could live without its head. The head lay in the sawdust shavings on the shed floor. The body attempted to set off in search of a better life without its brain. The neck and the wings splattered blood everywhere. When the flapping stopped, the body became limp. My brother sank the cleaver point into the stump, tilted the carcass upside down, and exclaimed, “That, little bro, is what you’d pay money to see in a horror show.”
As I tried to wipe my mouth clean, I sputtered that what he’d done was worse than anything I’d read about in history books. Beheading was the way traitors and unwanted royal wives were executed. I pictured Charles I stepping onto the balcony of Whitehall Palace one cold morning, his torso attired in three white shirts so he’d be warm and the public wouldn’t see him shiver and think he had pangs of cowardice. I imagined Mary Queen of Scots. I’d seen her pearls in a travelling museum show in the city. One of her ladies-in-waiting had retrieved them from the pool of blood. She had refused to remove them for her executioner. Some were tinged brown. And the French Revolution – I didn’t even want to go there. I’d just finished reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
The idea of losing one’s head is one of the most savage things human beings have concocted; yet that form of death always carried a sense of nobility. The headsman wasn’t for common criminals. A person had to be someone important to die that way. I stared at the rooster’s head in the sawdust shavings on the slaughter area floor, nudged it with my toes as it blinked, and realized it was wearing a crown, maybe a fool’s coxcomb, but a crown nonetheless.
My brother pointed to the block. “That chunk of tree has meaning for us,” he said. “It’s a piece of the last tree our great-great-grandfather pulled from the soil of our farm when he pioneered here, and he kept it knowing we would see what he’d done to the forests and earth. Everything dies, buddy boy. Everything dies so that something else has a chance to live. You’re here because of all the birds we’ve put into other people’s mouths. Remember that. We didn’t want to raise chickens for a living. A chicken farm is always the farm of last resort, a kind of consolation agriculture for those who couldn’t manage other types of crops, sane crops, crops you can pick from a tree branch or pull from the earth and shove right into your mouth. The old guy started by farming wheat, but when the West opened up, the market for grain from hereabouts fizzled. He wanted to plant an orchard but figured the trees would take too long to bear fruit. Everyone else was growing hay or vegetables, so he became a chicken man. And there you have it. That’s the story of why we’re here.”
He held up the carcass by its feet. It was still bleeding. My brother had blood splattered on his face and on his work smock. It was even on me. He began by pulling the major feathers from the tail and then switched on a plucking vacuum—we were one of the few poultry farms in the area with such a suction device and therefore could sell the birds to local restaurants and butcher shops as “Fresh Killed.”
With the feathers gone, he slit the bird along its stomach and with his right hand in a heavy rubber glove pulled out the entrails. He held up a few organs—the liver being choicest among them—but tossed them aside.
“We used to have a call for those. People made their own paté, but now it’s just as easy to buy it in the jelly block from a meat counter. It’s all spiced and seasoned, ready to spread on bread or crackers. It doesn’t look like it came from any living creature. That’s what we do to food. We disguise it, make it into something it never was. People couldn’t tolerate it otherwise.”
He handed me the naked bird.
“Take it in to Mom. It’ll be on the table tonight.”
The carcass was still warm.
When a person goes into a store to buy a chicken for dinner, the meat is chilled. It feels like it is dead. It doesn’t resemble a chicken to the eye or the touch. It isn’t a chicken. It is meat that needs to be cooked. In grocery stores there are rotisseries where the chickens revolve around a glowing element in a kind of Ferris wheel in a box, and when they come out, sometimes covered in barbecue sauce but more often than not just roasted with a bit of butter rubbed on their skins to create that crispy quality, they are put under a heat lamp in a display case, each in its own little plastic boat as if they are survivors of a maritime disaster waiting to be plucked from the sea in their tiny pods.
Hens have it much easier, though that statement needs to be qualified. They eventually meet the same fate when their usefulness for purposes other than meat have been exhausted. Their lives are a monotonous purgatory spent in a barn where the lights are kept on twenty-four hours a day. A week in such a place would kill a human being. But hens are strong creatures, either because they don’t take in their surroundings or because they choose not to care, though choosing not to care would give them credit for being more intelligent than they probably are.
Brains come with a cost because those creatures that have them not only suffer, they know what suffering is. I don’t know if it is better to be aware or not be aware. I am certain that pigs—there’s a pig farm down the road and the hog man’s daughter and I were considered a couple – know the score and feel for one another. If I pass them in a truck on the highway as they are travelling to the slaughterhouse, I can’t look at them. I can’t meet their gaze. When I see a load of chickens stacked on each other I don’t feel the same sense of despair. Maybe I’m immune to their fears or maybe they just don’t know any better.
In the long sheds, the poultry barns that people complain about because they catch of whiff of the guano we shovel out several times a day, the hens are lined up literally drumstick to drumstick, their heads locked in place and poking through ‘neckings’ as we call them, so they can eat what we put in front of them and lay their eggs.
They’d trample their own produce and break the white shells as they drop if we didn’t have a system where the hens drop their loads on a small conveyor belt that brings the eggs into the washing chamber. There the shells are scrubbed and graded for size. Sometimes, if we’re not busy, we candle the eggs ourselves to make sure there are no blood spots inside them.
We do our best to keep the hens from the roosters, but there’s a kind of immaculate conception thing that happens on chicken farms and heaven knows how some of the pullets get impregnated. Maybe the Lord looks down on the hens in their white feathers, their heads framed by a veil of metal, their beaks bobbing up and down as they eat or drink, and says, “Maybe this will save you. Maybe you can be the chicken who lays the golden egg,” or some such rot. I always imagined these things but never told my brother.
He would have laughed at me.
Or, perhaps he did think these things, perhaps thought them too often, and maybe when he lied down on a sunny day in the backyard hammock and looked up at the sky when he should have been busy with me and Dad in the barn, he saw a billowing white cloud cluck across the sky and wanted to follow it.
On an August morning, just as the sun was rising and the roosters were doing their chanticleer “I can sing louder than you” routine from their shed without even being able to see the sun outside and maybe sensing dawn with some sort of weird chicken sixth sense, I called up the stairs to tell my brother Mom had breakfast on the table and there was no reply. I entered his room. He’d torn open his pillow and emptied the contents around his room as if he’d had a pillow fight or wrestled with an angel and lost.
Granted, it was goose down, not chicken feathers. They haven’t made chicken feather pillows since before the First World War, but the entire room was covered in feathers and opening his door merely raised them up into the air so they floated like dandelion fluff or milkweed seeds. The sun was coming in through his drapes and each feather reminded me of a tiny angel, perhaps the spirit of a former bird who had looked me in the eye during its terrible, purgatorial life, and declared that it had a soul even though I fought the urge to acknowledge such tripe.
I knew my brother had to leave.
He’d stopped eating.
He couldn’t put a bite in his mouth, whether it was from a chicken pie or a breaded fast food cutlet.
I think he understood too much about what we were doing. He was twenty five, had outgrown the rebellious teenager thing. He’d watched a heavy metal rocker bite the head off a chicken during a concert at the local fairgrounds and on the way home, as I sat in the back seat necking with the hog man’s daughter, he turned to me and said, “I can’t take it anymore.”
My Dad said it was because my brother had seen too much of the world.
In Portugal, my brother must have suffered something close to a nervous breakdown.
He told me about having lunch one day in a sidewalk café in Lisbon.
“That country is really beautiful. I ordered the sardines because a man I met, a Portuguese guy, said that sardines and chicken were their national dishes. I should have had the chicken. When they brought out the plate of fish, the heads, eyes, and all, were still on them. They’d been roasted so their skins were black, but their eyes were still shining and staring at me. I paid the check and left. Thank God for the cheese, bread, beer, and olives or I would have starved. And the oranges are brilliant. After I’d finally gotten enough to eat, I was walking aimlessly around the streets of the Alfama where the light cuts like a knife between buildings, especially late in the afternoon, and on the shadowed side of a street there was a shop that sold souvenirs. I was looking for something for Mom. I chose some bird tiles because the birds didn’t look like chickens, but as I went to the far side of the narrow store there was a whole wall of these hand-painted black chickens. I asked the clerk what they were, why they had all those roosters. He understood me.
“‘Ah, sim! Sim!’ he said, meaning yes. Those black roosters with their red combs, brightly painted, are called barcelos. They’re supposed to be the national symbol of Portugal. I asked why on earth they would choose to have a chicken as their national bird. I mean, Americans have an eagle – vigilant, warlike, dangerous – and Canadians have their loons and geese. But the Portuguese chose a chicken, a barcelos. You know what he said?
“‘The barcelos represent honesty, integrity, trust, and honour.’
“ I bought the biggest honking one on the shelf for Dad, the one he keeps on the kitchen table. I mean, what’s a chicken? And as I walked around the streets until I was dog tired and sat down and had a glass of wine in a barzinho, I watched all the people passing by, their eyes fixed on the ground as if they were searching for something they’d dropped as they hurried from shop to shop, and I realized they saw the world in an entirely different way, in a way that said life was about patience and perseverance. And I could see it everywhere, even the sidewalks. The sidewalks aren’t cement slabs like the ones in town. They’re mosaics composed of millions of small, perfect, pale stone cubes laid together in a mortar of sand. Think of it. Think of the people who create the sidewalks of Lisbon, laying cube after cube. And I thought of home, our farm, and our poultry.”
After he told me that story, I knew my brother wasn’t going to stick around the farm. He had reached the point at which one has to stop raising animals for slaughter, that point when the farmer looks at his herd or his flock or his brood and understands each creature not merely as something he raises to make money but as beings, physical and, yes, spiritual, that brim with vitality and the inexplicable desire to keep existing. And I knew once he’d gone inside the head of a rooster or a hen he would have to leave the work he’d been raised to do since he was a small boy. My brother reached that point where he not only understood his flock, but where he saw each bird, each pullet with its neck tethered to the feeding system, each rooster fighting for its space against its fellow king birds, and he saw them as symbols of nobility and life.
Maybe that’s why he and Dad painted the giant roundel with a red and black cockerel on it, surrounded by maple leaves, and hung it on the west face of the barn like a barn star. The west barn is what someone sees as they come over the crest of the road toward us. They highlighted the Portuguese bird with the words O Por Bem Barcelos as the farm’s motto: All to the good for Chickens. It was my brother’s tribute to the life he left behind, its traditions handed down over three generations, and to the birds that lived to die.
People often pulled into our laneway and asked if we were Portuguese. They seemed disappointed when I told them we weren’t, that the roundel on the barn was purely a fanciful decoration my brother and father had dreamed up as a kind of blessing or benediction on the brood. That’s what the agriculture inspector was looking at two days ago when I walked out of the barn and found him staring at the roundel. He asked me what the motto meant and whether it was Latin. He said he didn’t know Latin or any other foreign languages except for a smattering of high school French.
“Well,” he said handing me a summons printed on official Ministry of Agriculture stationery, “for the good of all the other chickens within a five hundred mile radius, you’re going to have to close down your operations, exterminate your stock, and make sure every last feather is either carried away or plough under.”
I stared at the paper. I couldn’t believe I was being ordered to destroy my brood, hens, roosters, chicks. Even the eggs had to go. I’d heard that avian flu might be coming to our county but figured the antibiotics we fed the stock would stop all that. I was wrong. I tried to explain the antibiotics.
“No,” he shook his head, “that won’t stop it. It has spread and we tested hens you sent to the processing plant and traced them back here. Most of your chickens are infected or will be infected in a day or so. I’m sorry to give you the bad news.”
“I don’t have a bulldozer. Am I on the hook for the extermination and the disposal? I’m not sure we have land enough for a mass grave.”
He guaranteed me that part of the bill would be covered by the province and the federal government. He said the exterminators would put a tent over both barns and a small covering on the rooster shed and the egg sorting building.
“When it’s all covered over, we pump in the gas. It won’t take long. We’ll provide a hazmat crew. Part of the bill is on you and I hope you have insurance to cover this sort of thing.”
My father had let it lapse.
I knew the local inspector. He was a cousin of the hog man’s, and even though I’d broken up with the girl my license had been renewed twice yearly. I thought everything was in good order.
The extermination crew arrived the next morning about 3:00a.m. I think they startled the roosters from their sleep.
The men were dressed in white coveralls, their heads helmeted with only plastic portals revealing the masks and respirators over their mouths and noses and eyes that signaled there were human beings inside the suit.
I was going to lose the farm. I would have to take my Mom out of the home and put her in the care of the county. This was defeat, not just for the birds but for everything that had been my life.
One of the men left the door open to the rooster shed and a Rhode Island red flew out and perched himself on the crest of our house. There weren’t supposed to be any escapees.
In the darkness, with the buildings covered and sealed and my chickens inside and anticipating only another day of the constant monotony of their lives, the valves on the gas canisters were opened. I could hear clucking from inside the barns, then squawking as a kind of madness must have broken out among the flock. I knew they were suffering, but there was nothing I could do to save them.
The inspector who had shown up with a coffee in one hand and clipboard in the other pointed to the red atop my roof.
“That’s going to be a problem. Got a shotgun?”
“I don’t want to put a hole in my roof,” I said. “I have a gun, an old hunting rifle of my father’s, but I don’t think he ever shot one of his chickens. We never had any fugitives, at least not until now. The birds seemed to like it here for as long as they were fed and useful to us.”
The government man was talking into a handheld two-way when I noticed the barns had gone silent.
At that moment, just as the dawn was approaching and the sun’s bald and glowing head rose above the far end of our property, the rooster began to crow. It crowed three times, stopping between each burst of ignited energy and sound, and looked down at me as if to say, “So this is what it comes to.”
The hazmat men opened the barn doors and began to carry out the limp birds by their legs, tossing their white bodies into dumpsters. I wanted to cry, but instead, and I’m not sure what possessed me, I looked up at the barcelos, the living cockerel to whom my farm had been dedicated, and saluted.
The rooster flapped its wings and stretched its neck as if it were about to crow again when a shot broke the dawn. The sun appeared to stand still in awe for a moment before the day could begin.
