“They crow and the neighbors don’t like it,” he explained.
“They are pretty.” I shoved my hands down in my pockets.
“Pretty, no pretty, all gotta go. No pain, though.” He tugged the first one’s head down a little and sliced its neck expertly with his razor sharp knife. Blood poured down into a bucket beneath the cones. The legs tensed, but within seconds there was no movement at all. “See, no pain.” He moved on and did the other two birds exactly the same. “Now, they’re meat.” He pointed over to a giant sink-looking thing full of scalding water and to a metal tub with rubber fingers on the inside. It kind of looked like the inside of a washing machine. “Into the scalder, then the picker, then I take off the feet.” There was a little slide-through place on the stainless steel counter. “Then to the ladies to remove the insides, clean, chill, and package.”
“How long does it take?”
“Only a few minutes. Times how many birds you got.”
He led the way back outside, where Elliot had already pulled the crates off the truck and stacked them next to the back door. I placed my hand on the crates and heard the birds shifting inside them. I did my best to clear my mind of the images of the adorable baby chicks that once sat in my hand. I remembered hearing about a Native American custom to thank the animal for its life. I don’t know if that’s a real thing or something I saw in one of Dad’s movies, but it felt right, so I did it. Thank you for providing meals for me, my friends, and my customers.
Elliot and I loaded up, and I wiped away a few tears with my left hand in between shifting gears, pulling out of the gravel lot. I was thinking about how I would have to do this several more times before the summer was through. The rest of this batch, and then the next set.
“Hey, you drive stick pretty good.” Elliot was blatantly trying to get my mind off it.
“For a girl?” I sniffled a little and was almost back to normal.
“No, for a city girl.”
“Yeah, well, Liv made me learn.”
“Now that girl’s a pistol.”
“Yep.” Now I’m starting to talk like Elliot. “You wanna get some lunch?”
“Sure. There’s more places to eat in Ontario.”
“How far is that?”
“About five minutes. Go that way.” He pointed to the right. “How about KFC?”
I started to get torqued, but when I looked at Elliot’s face he had a shit-eating grin plastered all over it.
“Funny. Real funny.”
After lunch we went back to the processor to get the birds and found them all sealed up in plastic, labeled, and sitting in a shopping cart near the front. I went in and paid the lady, and Elliot and I loaded the birds up. It was a little strange handling the carcasses of what was only this morning my birds. I tried not to think about who was who. As Bud said, “They’re food now.”
When we got to the house, there were three cars parked near the gate, with customers eager to get their birds from us.
“I’ve been waiting for two weeks for these.” A lady in a huge station wagon popped out a bunch of wadded up grocery bags and had Elliot load her up with several chickens. She pulled out her checkbook and jotted down my name and her signature. “How much I owe you?”
So, this is a little convoluted, but if the person buys more than five chickens, for fryer/broiler chickens, which these are, we charge $2.00 per pound. That’s easy enough. When I started to use my phone to add the weights, Elliot motioned for me to put it away. We did a rough estimate of the weight (up to the half-pound), rounding down mostly, and doubled it for her total.
The next customer was a man in an AC/DC t-shirt, who continually stroked his long, gray beard like it was a dog. He wanted only three birds, so we charged him $2.50 per pound.
The last customer was a tall man in blue coveralls, who wanted four broilers, but because he always gets four roasters (the larger birds) later on, we charged him the lower rate.
Elliot shoved the check and cash into a white zippered bag marked Chicken Sells (spelling) that he shoved into the jockey box, as he calls it. We left the truck unlocked and walked back to the house. Elliot went out to check on the goats, and I let Frodo out to do his business. A few minutes later, there was a honk from the road, telling me another customer had shown up. The honk was repeated three more times, once when I was halfway to the truck.
“I don’t know why you gotta charge so much for these birds.” A portly woman in her fifties with grayish-blond hair stared blankly at me. She had just rolled down the window of her pristine cream-colored 80’s model Cadillac De Ville, and I could feel the cranked up AC issuing from the car like an ice box.
“Sorry, the feed we use is kind of expensive. But we think it makes the birds healthier and taste better.”
She pushed her lips open and sighed like a balloon losing air. “Ugh, well, sure it tastes good. These ones are the only chicken Martin likes me to use in his mole. Alright, give me seven of them, the bigger ones. That’ll
