Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (12 page)

CHAPTER TEN

M
indful of Thanksgiving, Lana invited Harold to live out his days in her warehouse.

I demurred. I wasn’t a hobbyist with a pet. I was a farmer with a turkey on my hands whose feed-to-weight ratio had reached a plateau. I had fed, groomed, defended, loved, spoiled,
named
this animal. And now it was time to harvest him.

On the big day, I woke up late and filled with dread. I puttered around the kitchen. I boiled several pots of water and poured them into a large metal vat outside. Read the paper. Found the ax. Tied up my hair in braids. Finished a novel I had meant to return to the library. Sharpened the ax. Put on my dirtiest clothes. Cleaned out the fridge. Set up a chopping block. Boiled more water. Then, as the afternoon sun streaked the November sky orange, I realized that I hadn’t seen Harold around.

Not in the backyard. Not on his usual perch on the stairs. Not in the neighbor’s backyard. Harold was supposed to die at my hands but was nowhere to be found. I’ll admit it: I was relieved.

The previous night, I had been a wreck. The facts were before me. This Thanksgiving, I was not going to be a consumer buying a free-range turkey. This year I was a producer. Against all odds, one of my turkeys had made it to harvest weight, and I better kill him now before someone else did. But first I had to figure out how to do it.

Seated at my kitchen table after dinner that night, I had flipped through
The Encyclopedia of Country Living
’s newsprint pages until I came to the poultry chapter. Carla Emery writes, “I don’t think much of people who say they like to eat meat but go ‘ick’ at the sight of a bleeding animal. Doing our own killing, cleanly and humanely, teaches us humility and reminds us of our interdependence with other species.” I had nodded my head and quickly turned to the section titled “Killing a Turkey.”

Emery’s words of wisdom:

“The butchering process with a turkey is basically the same as that with a chicken except that your bird is approximately 5 times bigger.”

“First, catch the bird and tie its legs.”

“The turkey may then be beheaded with an ax (a 2-person job, one to hold the turkey and one to chop).”

Lying in bed, I had worried that I would botch the execution, that Harold would feel pain, that his feathers wouldn’t come off, that I wouldn’t be able to clean the meat properly. So I visualized, I rehearsed. First, ax to neck, then bleeding, then defeathering, then cleaning. I mumbled a macabre lullaby before falling asleep.

But now I wouldn’t get the chance to practice what I had memorized. Harold was smarter than I’d given him credit for, I thought. He knew what was afoot and simply flew away.

Bill had to work, so Joel had come over to help. Eager to teach his children about where food came from, he brought his ten-year-old son, Jackson. The three of us stood in the garden, the sound of the traffic from 980 roaring by, a vat of steaming water and a sharpened ax nearby. We wondered what to do.

Then I spotted Harold. He was perched on a low fence in the garden, a place he had never ventured before, watching us. “There he is!” I yelled. It was weird, as if he had known. Harold stood and adjusted his perch. I picked him up; at twenty-eight pounds he was quite an armful, but he liked being held and didn’t struggle.

Jackson smoothed Harold’s iridescent feathers and looked with wonder at the giant snood that dangled over his beak. The turkey’s voluminous wattles billowed below his neck like an old man’s jowls. I told Jackson about Harold’s life over the past six months, his adventures, his grief over Maude, and his future: on our Thanksgiving table. Jackson’s blue eyes, hidden behind a giant pair of glasses, darted around. Then he blurted out, “I don’t want to see
it
.”

So I tucked Harold under my arm, took Jackson over to a weedy patch where the watermelon had once grown, and showed him how to pull weeds. Then I faced a task that, hell, even I didn’t want to do.

Harold and I, there in that squat lot, embodied the latest endpoint of centuries of mutual dependence. The only reason Harold existed at all was that he and his ancestors had made a Faustian bargain with humans: guaranteed food, shelter, and the opportunity to pass on their genes in exchange, eventually, for their life. Paradoxically, to be killed was a way of life for Harold.

Though Harold had become a postmodern turkey—named, citified—his death, when viewed in the context of his species, was part of being a turkey. As the naturalist Stephen Budiansky points out in
The Covenant of the Wild,
“All of nature’s strategies for the survival of a species, strategies which include domestication, include suffering and death of individual members of that species.” Harold’s mother, some breeding hen at Murray McMurray, lives on. In an indirect way, Harold’s mother and I were cooperating so that we could both survive.

Of course, we meat-eating city dwellers don’t have to kill something to survive. We merely go to the store with some cash in hand. How many people would eat meat if they had to kill it themselves? This was the question I had pondered for six months as I watched Harold grow from a puffy chick into a full-grown turkey. I eat meat, I like eating meat, it is part of my culture and, some might argue, my heritage as a human being. While Harold had to die, I had to kill.

At the grocery counter or farmer’s market stall, the cost of the meat I bought factored in the cost of the bird’s life—feed, housing, transportation to market. A small portion of that cost included a kill fee. I had been comfortable allowing someone else to be my executioner. And suddenly, all the meat I bought, even though I had considered it expensive at the time, seemed underpriced.

We burned a little tobacco in an oyster shell, as a new-agey friend had recommended. She said it was a Native American tradition that showed the animal’s spirit which way was up. The !Kung people, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, ask forgiveness of an animal’s spirit. Budiansky tells us, “They don’t pretend there is no ethical cost, or guilt even, inherent in the act of killing the animal.” With this in mind, I whispered into Harold’s ear my thanks and asked for forgiveness.

Although I usually call myself an atheist, a lonely universe offers little comfort to a person confronting death. I thought of my father, a voracious hunter and fisherman who, even after my mom left him, never came back from the land. He had tried, in his subtle way, from a great distance, to instill in me some of his beliefs about nature as a god of sorts. In my life as a city dweller, though, pantheism had mostly eluded me. But to hold Harold, this amazing living creature, and to know that his life force would be transferred to me in the form of food, felt sacred.

I stroked his warm, warty head. The folds of skin were soft and pliable, punctuated with small wayward hairs. I could feel his heart beating, slowly.

It’s true that eating meat springs from a violent act, that in that way meat is like murder. But it is not an act filled with hate. I had murdered the opossum. But Harold I had raised in a loving, compassionate way, with good food, sunshine, and plenty of exercise. Harold had had a good life, and now he would have a good death—quick and painless—at the hands of someone he knew, in a familiar place.

“OK, Joel. Ready?” I asked.

Mrs. Nguyen, who is the only practicing Buddhist in the house, perhaps sensing our murderous plan, dropped her blinds loudly.

Joel looked nervous but steadfast; I could depend on him. After all my stalling, it was almost dark by the time we finally laid Harold’s neck across the chopping block. For his part, Harold seemed resigned, bored, as if this scene had played itself out a thousand times before. I swung the ax. I swung again. Harold had a really big neck.

Muslim tradition says one must look an animal in the eye until its soul departs. I was satisfied that Harold and I had had a sufficient dialogue. He gobbled once, a warning sound that he regularly made. It made me a little sad to think that in the moment of his death he might have been scared.

It was a solemn moment. I hefted what was once Harold to a bucket in order to bleed him out. Though headless, he thrashed mightily, and the bloody neck stump pointed accusatorily toward me. I felt relieved, a little ashamed but giddy.

After his body stopped thrashing, I lowered it into a large pail of steaming hot water. His tremendous girth displaced some of the water, which flowed over the edge and into the garden. After fully submerging the body for a few seconds, I pulled it back out into the air. Joel and I sat down and plucked the feathers like a couple of old farmhands. They slipped off in clumps.

I could finally take a deep breath. I looked around the garden—only a few fall crops had been put in. Bill and I were expecting the bulldozers any day. We had become glum and unmotivated gardeners. The billboard that overlooked the lot had a public service ad warning against sexual predators. BART clattered by. A few loud teenagers shuffled down the sidewalk but didn’t look in. Killing Harold, we thought, was one of the last things we would do in this garden.

Joel and I made small talk, discussed how the death had gone, how beautiful Harold’s skin looked beneath the feathers, how tasty this homegrown turkey would be. As the feathers flew and more and more skin was revealed Harold started to resemble a turkey you buy at a store, wrapped in plastic and defrosted in the sink.

Looks were deceiving, however, as I still had to clean out the guts. Joel and Jackson did not want to stay for that part. I waved goodbye to them and took Harold upstairs. Alone in the kitchen, a place where I had cooked innumerable meaty meals, I got out the
Encyclopedia
again and turned to the “Cleaning the Bird” section.

Harold’s body was still warm when I laid the carcass across a paper-lined table and made the first incision.

First I removed his crop, the baggy sac near his neck, filled with grain and greens he had eaten that morning that hadn’t made it to the gizzard for digestion. I identified the trachea. Then, after a few precise cuts near the pooper, coached by Carla Emery, I eased out most of Harold’s viscera with one steady pull. The curlicuing small intestine, the healthy dark liver, the pert heart and foamy lungs. The gizzard was round and covered in silvery skin. Curious, I made a slit down its tough side and examined the contents. Along the muscle walls was a green and yellow paste. It looked like wasabi but smelled like swamp. Within the goo were a few pebbles and a lot of smooth pieces of glass. Harold had been an urban turkey through and through.

I buried the inedibles in the compost. Everything else I took from Harold I used. I chopped off the feet—I knew a punk who wanted those, even though she said she wouldn’t eat a bite of him. Her girlfriend wanted his wing tips, the dark-feathered ends of his three-foot-long wings. She said she’d use them for a costume. Their dog got his swampy gizzard. The enormous turkey neck was ringed with yellow fat, which boiled up into a rich gravy.

By the end of the process,
The Encyclopedia of Country Living
’s pages were marked with blood. And brining in the fridge was a heritage-breed turkey that I had raised from a day-old chick. The poultry package—bought with a credit card and priority-overnighted—had turned me into a farmer.

Now that my work was done, I had to trade in my straw farm hat for the paper one of a chef. God sends meat, and the devil sends cooks, as the proverb goes. As I morphed from farmer to gourmet—the fussier, snobbier element of food production—I worried about how my turkey would taste. On the advice of Carla Emery, I let him “rest” in the fridge for a couple of days so the meat would be more tender. If his flavor was off, his entire life would have been wasted. The burden felt heavy, and as Thanksgiving approached, I fretted more than usual. While this was a heavy load to carry, it was exactly what I had hoped for: meat had become a sacrifice—precious, not a casual dalliance.

On the big day, I put the turkey in the sink and trained a light on the body. I picked away all the little feathers and tweezed the wayward hairs. I made a few strategic cuts in his fatty skin and slipped in garlic cloves, herbs, and butter. Then I anointed his whole body with olive oil and salt. Once I placed the turkey in the oven, a wake became a dinner party.

I invited Mr. Nguyen over for dinner, but he shyly demurred. Willow arrived with a pot of stewed greens. Bill anxiously awaited the results of the meat experiment. Joel had a family engagement and couldn’t make it. By dinnertime, ten guests had arrived. We toasted Harold before eating. I had snuck a sample before serving, so I already knew how good the turkey tasted. His thigh and leg meat were the color of milk chocolate. His flesh was perfectly moist, buttery and savory. His skin crackled. Everyone agreed—each bite was special. Bill gnawed on a drumstick and closed his eyes with pleasure. It was the best turkey he had ever had.