Jim Hazard
Chicken DinnerI know there are people who’d rather not hear this, but
there was a time I loved chopping the heads off chickens. I did my
chopping in Aunt Lucy’s basement, helping my Uncle Lyman.
Beheading chickens hasn’t become what you’d call a
lifelong interest. In fact I haven’t done any of it since about 1950. I’ve
eaten a lot of chickens, and cooked a lot of them since then, but none
came with feathers, head, and feet attached. Someone had done the removal
for me. A little package of brand name pieces done up in a back room and
wrapped ahead of time – that’s what the word "chicken" came to mean.
It seemed, after WWII people needed to put the nasty
details of everyday life out of sight. The war and the Depression had
given them their fill of ugly truths, enough to last a lifetime. Maybe so,
or maybe now that iceboxes were refrigerators, they just wanted to appear
a little better than they really were and had the ready cash to buy that
feeling. Maybe. Or maybe things just happen and nobody really thinks about
it.
My Uncle Lyman was a thinker though. A throwback. He
kept a maple stump in his sister Lucy’s basement for splitting fireplace
wood and for chopping the heads off chickens he bought by the crate.
In another regard he was "modern." He was divorced. His
wife Arlene hated being a firefighter’s wife and finally left him to marry
a junior high school science teacher who worked regular hours and had all
summer off. Lyman had always been a big quiet man, a head taller than
anybody, smiling sadly at this inflammable world of ours. When his wife
left him he was unchanged except for being quieter and gentler.
I think he was relieved too. He had made himself a
promise as a kid that he would never punch a time clock in a steel mill,
he would have a job that gave him a good living and lots of time off to
fish and hunt. A firefighter was it.
On his day off Lyman and I would carry the crate of
chickens their last mile from the trunk of his Hudson to the basement. I
took them out of the crate one by one and delivered them to my uncle, who
held them down on the stump and delivered the blow.
Beforehand I’d watched him sharpen the hatchet till the
curve of the cutting edge was, by his own testimony, sharp enough to shave
the stamp off a letter. Just because they were chickens didn’t mean you
could be careless about their final moment.
"Do you think they feel it when you hit them?" I asked
him.
"I get it over fast so they don’t know what hit ‘em."
"If you cut the head off, does a chicken know what’s
going on? O mean, does the head know – do the eyes see?"
He gestured with the hatchet for me to pass him another
chicken from the crate, and as I did he answered my question. "You look
them in the eye, they’re looking back at you." He held the chicken down
onto the stump, exposing its skinny neck. The hen was a little wild-eyed,
but when have you ever seen a chicken that wasn’t wild-eyed? They start
out as these fluffy little Easter card peeps and grow up to be – no
offence to chicken lovers, but I’ve never met a full grown chicken that
didn’t look totally psycho.
The hen was talking to itself as the hatchet fell and
went on talking when its head dropped to the basement floor. The stump of
its neck spurted blood and my uncle set the chicken body onto the floor.
It ran off, bumping into the washer and heading for the coal bin until it
sort of wound down and lay on its side scratchy the basement air with
lizardy feet.
"Think the head saw the body running away?"
Pause. "Only the chicken knows." My uncle respected that
I would have questions about this business, but he didn’t want it to
become too large an interest in my life. There were stories of the men who
worked in the slaughter houses of Chicago stockyards becoming possessed
with a passion for blood, a rapture that made them virtual Jack the
Rippers. Said my uncle, "We just do this, Jimmy. It’s a job. You do it,
you don’t talk about it a lot. There will be other things in life like
that."
So we worked our way through the crate of chickens,
smoothly as any execution squad in the civilized world, doing what had to
be done if there was to be the Sunday dinner we all revered.
Down in Aunt Lucy’s basement I began to see chickens in
a new light. I’d always suspected that chickens were secretly mechanical,
that feathers were the ingenious covering for their metal bodies. Their
eyes especially looked factory made. I’d seen cockfights in the backroom
of a Mobilgas filling station. The fight was just like in the movies, the
floor all sawdust and the men with cigars and fists full of paper money
betting up a storm. I’m sure the fights were illegal, but no one seemed
concerned about that and no one was upset that there were a couple of kids
hanging out. Our town was a short distance down the shore of Lake Michigan
from Chicago, with a tradition of providing a play space for some of
Chicago’s favorite illegal events. I imagine cockfights were one of the
earliest, along with bare knuckle prize fights. Indiana along the State
Line was a tolerant jurisdiction for Chicagoans who were having troubles
in their own jurisdiction. And of course the Illinois side of the line
served up the same tolerance for Indiana’s crooks and hustlers.
In the cockfight, when the roosters went at one another
it was as if they were furious wind-up toys. In a bullfight, the bull is
clearly a flesh and blood animal and so there is the tragedy of its death.
But roosters…even their voices sounded mechanical to me. Every movement,
fighting or just scratching in the backyard (in the forties a certain kind
of person still kept chickens in the backyard), every chicken gesture had
a jerkiness about it that made me suspicious.
My suspicions were swept away in Aunt Lucy’s basement.
Not only did our chickens bleed and die with different personalities, but
they were revealed to be pure flesh, not metal, under those feathers: I
dipped them in hot water and plucked them clean of their feathers,
including the pesty black pin feathers. Lyman was fast on the job but
delicate at it too. I remember a man at the cockfights whose rooster was
so wounded in a losing battle that he grabbed it by the head and spun it
around, wringing its neck, and then tossed it into a garbage can. Most of
the gents present laughed at the gesture, but not all. Some made an effort
not to see it. Lyman would have looked away. No, I think if he were there
he’d have popped the guy. He was known in the fire department as the one
who had gone back into a burning building to bring out a widow’s parrot
and her picture of her husband in his Doughboy uniform. What we did in the
basement, for our Sunday dinner, was not a joke to him.
I remember watching one chicken head that lay on the
floor beside the chopping block. It was clucking quietly, looking more
bright eyed and intelligent than I’d ever seen a chicken look. I looked
into its eye and felt I was being seen and that the clucking was directed
at me. The mouth opened and closed, as if the chicken were gasping for
breath or searching for a word. I put my finger into the open beak with
the same blank need I once had putting my finger into a running electric
fan. The beak clamped onto my finger and the eye in the side of the
chicken’s head bulged with the effort and with the coming of its own
death.
"Jeez," my uncle said. "Take that poor thing off your
finger. That ain’t a thing to play with." I explained what had happened
and he advised me to let the poor things alone. It was their bad luck to
be born chickens and we shouldn’t add to it. "Let ‘em die in peace, Jimmy.
Seems kind of crappy, doesn’t it? To be a chicken…" He shook his head and
went back to the ages old job of making food. He was a big man, not just
tall but big in his chest and shoulders and back. He talked very slowly in
a deep voice and had sad eyes even when he laughed. Wise guys assumed he
was dumb because he wasn’t quick. I knew that wasn’t so.
Sunday, at dinner, I wondered which individuals from the
basement we were eating. I was glad I wasn’t born a chicken just as I was
glad I hadn’t been born where bombs had fallen just a few years back. I
was, though, glad these chickens were born. They were delicious, and it
felt as if we were all in something big together – the chickens, the
potatoes from Idaho, the spiced apples from Michigan, the talkative family
around the table there in Indiana, the table itself brought over from
Wales and made of trees that were chopped down in England, the land of
Robin Hood and Charles Dickens.
I watched Uncle Lyman eating chicken. Probably it was
just how I was seeing things that Sunday, but he did seem to be eating
with a delicacy that the others didn’t have. Probably it was my
imagination, but he seemed to put the drumstick bone down with unusual
care and look at it for a second before he went on eating. I saw
melancholy and gentleness, not so common in that family of rough hands and
loud voices.
Later in his life Lyman would fall from the fire engine
exhausted after fighting a three-day refinery fire that threatened the
whole town. He broke his back in the fall. He would have to retire early
from exciting and dangerous job. Not too long after that he host his left
leg to diabetes and began to shrink physically. I saw him as a raisin in
all that trouble – that is, growing smaller and smaller, wrinkling around
his own sweetness, growing sweeter and more patient by the day. He lived
now with his sister, Lucy, in a big bedroom/apartment upstairs. When I
visited him, he would turn off the television and put down his newspaper,
take my hand in both of his and pat it. He didn’t say much but he always
seemed to know something about me--college grades, new job, new car--and
he’d ask a question or two. Once when we were talking a young pigeon
landed on his windowsill and he talked about the colors on its neck and
how pigeons cook up real nice in a pie if you have enough of them. "Once
down near Richmond we shot fifty or sixty of ‘em and made pigeon pies with
vegetables and the works. They kept ‘em in a big freezer and had more damn
pigeon pies than they knew what to do with." He smiled at the thought of
himself back then, the l930s. "We wanted to shoot up the whole world and
eat it in those days – well, it was the Depression so we had good reason.
But who the hell did we think we were?" He chuckled at the thought of
himself back then. "Big shots…that’s who we thought we were."
What a smile on his old face as he held my hand as
firmly as was able and tipped his head towards the stump of his leg. "Some
big shot…huh, Jimmy?"
Jim Hazard is a regular writer for Milwaukee Magazine.
He is currently at work on a collection of personal narratives under the
title My Life Among the Grown-ups. |