The domesticated turkey has only one obligation in this life, but it’s a big one, and there’s no getting around it.
The bird in my backyard had to die, and it was my job to off her.
Shortly before my killing spree
Like a lot of people, I had been swept away by the back-to-the-land craze. (In my case, “the land” was a fenced lawn in Liberty City). And like a lot of people, I had fallen into a trap that snags many a would-be one-man slaughterhouse: I had grown attached.
The turkey had won no friends when she left splats of freshly digested grains and greens all over the lawn, but I had dutifully hosed them off the back porch most nights when I came home from work. She muscled aside chickens half her size, if she thought a meal was at hand, and it was kind of funny the way she hurried flightlessly across the yard to greet her visitors. Her friendliness terrorized my two young nephews, who met her eye to eye on walks from the back door to the swimming pool.
I liked having a turkey around. But as her day of reckoning approached, things changed.
For the first time, her homeliness vexed me. She was filthy, with ruffled, dingy-white feathers, warty visage and a scalded flap of skin dangling obscenely from her throat. When she pecked at the back of my head one afternoon as I reclined on a deck chair, I swatted her with a rolled-up National Geographic. When she scratched at the gravel a little too close to my toes I kicked her with a malice that startled me. She seemed puzzled for a moment, then scratched again. A second boot sent her waddling away.
I had officially cut my ties.
The following afternoon, I sharpened my father’s old hunting knife. As a consumer, I know I’m responsible for the deaths of countless cows, pigs and chickens — not to mention a few turkeys. That’s fine. But sometimes I’m nagged by the suspicion that it’s too easy to eat meat that has been processed and reconstituted, when an agribusiness has shrink-wrapped away any reminder of a life that had mooed or clucked. Hopefully someday, I am quick to pontificate, I will eat only meat from animals that I have raised myself. In my benevolence, I will ensure good lives and humane deaths for the creatures over whom I have been given dominion.
Turns out that’s easier said than done.
Before the turkey, there were chickens. In March, I brought home four fuzzy pullets from the feed store in town, and I gave them a nursery of wood chips piled into a cardboard box that I stowed in a corner of the garage. An old bar lamp, hung low, completed the incubator.
They were tiny. I dropped June bugs into their box, and the lucky chick would snatch it up in her beak and dart away, trailed by others intent on stealing her snack. When long, sleek feathers replaced their baby down I moved them outdoors into an unused dog pen in the backyard. There, I had constructed a rickety chicken house from old wooden campaign signs left over from my neighbor’s years on the school board.
Before long, my romantic notions fixed upon the prospect of a home-raised Thanksgiving turkey. To my dismay, however, every agricultural extension report I found on the Web cautioned against the intermingling of the species. Chickens are notorious carriers of the blackhead parasite, which infiltrates the intestines and can wipe out a whole flock of larger birds in no time. But the turkey poults were on sale for half price, and the helpful lady at the feed store said her own turkeys and chickens were getting along just fine together. That was all the encouragement I needed.
I left the store the proud owner of three young turkeys. Occasional chirps warbled from their cardboard box as we drove home through a spring downpour. Upon arrival, I deposited the poults safe and dry inside the chicken house. When I waded out to check on them a few minutes later, however, two of them had wandered outside into the mud and the third had lodged itself beneath a floor joist. All three were thoroughly soaked. I scooped them up, dried them off with an old bath towel and returned them to their new home. Ten minutes later, we did it all again. And again.
They were none too bright, these turkeys, but they grew quickly. Before long, two of them learned to fly onto the roof of the chicken house and then over the 8-foot fence that had kept them out of the main yard. Once freed, they pecked muscadine grapes and weeds and even the dry dog food from a dish on the patio. When the dog wasn’t roaming the neighborhood, she chased them half-heartedly, until scolded.
For my part, I bought a pair of cowboy boots and a few pearl-snap western shirts, changed the birds’ water every day and shoveled out the chicken house when it stunk. Clipping their wing feathers failed to ground them, so I gave all of them free reign of the backyard. One of the chickens disappeared, but the others began to lay eggs. My nephews thought it was Easter all over again.
One turkey still hadn’t learned to fly, but the other two discovered my garden plot hidden behind a back fence. They feasted daily on cherry tomatoes and more muscadines, and by August the big tom was ready for slaughter. My dog did the honors. The tom had no problems flying over the fence, but he had yet to master the return voyage, and the dog cornered him, killed him and left him in the grass. His body was limp and hot when I got home from work. I carried him around to the side yard and, following Internet instructions, dunked the carcass, yanked out his feathers and carved him up. Eight grapes, his last meal, spilled to the ground.
I fed my family with pride that week. I chunked his meat into quiches so that no one would be reminded of the tom that had gobbled, and I slung his detritus into a trash bin behind the local Dairy Queen.
A week later, I found a second turkey in the same spot. She was just as dead, but she had been lying there overnight, and her body was cold and crawling with ants. I buried her carcass to keep away the varmints and dogs. As I shoveled, I calculated the wasted expense (probably $30) and rued her wasted life and particularly my own ineptitude.
That left one turkey, the flightless runt. I couldn’t risk another dog attack. On a Sunday afternoon, my brother Dan came over to supply the moral support and I set about preparing for slaughter.
When the turkey saw us she thought it was meal time, so she ran to her pen. I cornered her. She didn’t fight. I held her muscular white neck and ran the knife across her jugular vein. Nothing happened.
“The knife’s not sharp enough,” I said.
I tried again, pressing harder this time, and red blood sprayed across her 5-gallon water can. The turkey squawked and waddled out of the pen and onto the lawn. I slit her throat again and she walked a little farther away and stood with her head lowered as the blood dripped into a viscous pool in the grass.
I had not prepared for this. My guide, the Internet, had told me she would meet her death in wild, flopping convulsions, not with quiet resignation. She closed her eyes and stood very still.
“Is she dead?” my brother asked.
I touched her, and she looked at me drowsily. It was so pitiful that I couldn’t help but laugh, and before I knew it, I was crying as well – then sobbing. Standing at a safe distance, my brother chortled as he wiped his eyes behind his sunglasses.
I cut her again, and she fell and the convulsions began. Dan had seen enough. He ran to the garage to fetch the ax and a wooden board, and I chopped her head off. When she was finally dead, the boo-hooing stopped, and we got down to business.
We tied her feet and hung her upside down so the blood could finish draining from her body, and I repeated the steps I had practiced on her brother only a month earlier.
After butchering, the runt weighed only 12 pounds. She’s wrapped in plastic and foil and sitting in my freezer, where she awaits the fourth Thursday of November. On that day, I will serve her up, my first and last home-grown Thanksgiving turkey.