Bob,

I had no idea where your barber story was going and when it got there I was surprised. A freshly killed deer? I didn’t see that coming. Now what do you say to your barber who is proudly showing off the recently dispatched Rudolph? Presumably he was at work and had either been or was going to be at work for a reasonable amount of time. Is the back of a pickup truck really the best place for a bloody carcass? Where the freak was he taking it?

I’m a farmer’s son. Not a very good one. I grew up, nearly, in an abattoir and was very familiar with dead animals. While I love animals, cows are both stupid and tasty. Which works out very well for the moral and the hungry. But I’ve never killed a cow.

I showed little aptitude for farming as a child and I didn’t get better. There was one occasion where my father sent me to kill a chicken. Chickens are stupid and tasty too. I learned very early on how to incapacitate a chicken. I forget exactly how now — I don’t have much occasion to practice — but you pick a chicken up and stroke its neck just the right way. The chicken will become suddenly listless as if it were dead or comatose. And it will stay that way for the longest time. It’s true and alarming.

It’s also true that when you cut a chicken’s head off it runs around like crazy spouting a fountain of blood where its head used to be. It’s not nearly as funny as it sounds. In fact, it’s quite messy and alarming. Especially if you’re 8.

I was about 8 when my father sent me out with an axe with the intention of beheading a chicken and proving my masculinity. There was a block of blood-stained wood I remember intensely. It wasn’t a normal part of the killing process but I put the chicken to sleep with the neck thing. It laid there still. The axe was heavy and rusted. I could barely lift the axe. I wasn’t so much worried about ending the poor chicken’s life as I was worried about the headless chicken run that would follow shortly thereafter. I wondered if, because I had put it to sleep, that it might not run, that it might just lie there, and leak blood quietly. I’m quite sure I was dead set against it. I’m quite sure I didn’t want to. I’m quite sure that my dad thought it would do me some good to kill the chicken. I’m not sure if he thought it would help form me as a man. I wielded the axe poorly. I must have missed on my first chop. I wasn’t good with hammers or bats either. The chicken roused from its hypnosis and gave out a cluck and fell off the block. I dropped the axe and caught it again and it flapped in my face, feathers flying about. I set it back to sleep and laid it out on the block again.

I was traumatized after. I’m traumatized telling this story. I don’t know how traumatized I was at the time. I know that I usually preferred to draw or read comic books or sing to the cows. I didn’t want to see the headless chicken run. But I was more anxious about having to catch the crazed complaining chicken again. It might have been the second, it might have been the third chop of the axe that dispatched that poor chicken’s soul. Without her head, and without her soul, she roused from her hypnosis and ran around, just as I had fretted, wings aflap, webbed foot over webbed foot, blood sputtering. The head meanwhile matted in blood on the block.

I never killed another chicken. At least not directly.

SS