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.
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 gotten attached.
Shortly before my killing spree
Oh sure, 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 and a warty face. A scalded flap of skin dangled 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 level of 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 recently I had been nagged by the conviction that it’s too easy to eat meat that has been processed and reconstituted. It’s too easy to let some agribusiness conglomerate shrink-wrap away any reminder of a life that had mooed or clucked. Hopefully someday (I am always pontificating) 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.
Before the turkey, there were the chickens. In March, four fuzzy pullets came home with me from the feed store in town. Their nursery was a pile of wood chips in a cardboard box, which had been stowed in a corner of the garage. An old ceiling lamp, hung low, provided the incubator’s warmth.
They were tiny. When a june bug dropped into their box, the quickest chick would snatch it in her beak and dart away, trailed by the others intent on stealing her snack. When long, sleek feathers replaced their baby down they were moved into an unused dog pen in the backyard. There, I had constructed a rickety chicken house from old 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 official report on the Internet cautions against the intermingling of the species. Chickens are notorious carriers of the blackhead parasite, which infiltrates the intestines of fowl 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 turkey chicks, called poults. Occasional chirps warbled from their cardboard box as we drove home through a spring downpour. Upon arrival, the poults were deposited 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 soaking wet. 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 then again.
These turkeys were none too bright, 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-high 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 halfheartedly, until scolded.
Living up to my new status, 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 they took free reign of the backyard. One of the chickens disappeared, but the others began to lay eggs. The nephews thought it was Easter every day.
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. The family 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 but still warm when I came 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 onto 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 recently deceased, and I slung the rest of his carcass into a trash bin behind the local Dairy Queen.
A week later, a second turkey was lying dead in the same area She had been killed during the night, and her body was cold and crawling with ants. I buried her carcass to keep away the varmints and dogs. While shoveling, 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. She was cornered and didn’t fight. I held her neck in my hand, feeling how muscular it was, and ran my knife across the jugular vein. Nothing happened.
“The knife’s not sharp enough,” I said.
I tried again, pressing harder this time, and 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 pool in the grass.
I was not ready for this. My guide, the Internet, had said my turkey 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. Soon there were a few tears mixed with the laughter. Then the laughter was gone and I was only weeping. Standing at a safe distance, my brother chuckled as he wiped his eyes behind his sunglasses.
I cut her again. 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 off her head. When she was finally dead, the tears stopped and we got down to business.
We tied her feet and hung her upside down so the blood would finish draining from her body, and I repeated the steps I had practiced on her brother only a month earlier.
After butchering, the runt dressed out at 12 pounds. Now she’s wrapped in plastic and foil and sitting in my freezer, where she waits for the fourth Thursday of November. On that day, I will serve her up — my first and last home-grown Thanksgiving turkey.
