Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (20 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Tour de France was on. My sister called to say that the racers had passed through her tiny village. To the embarrassment of her husband, she brought an American flag to wave. My sister sometimes wears a tank top that reads, in English, BULLETPROOF BABE.

She wanted to know how the rabbits were. The young bunnies had grown plump and cute and were driving their moms crazy. I finally took them out of the cages and let them run free on the deck, where they would fatten up.

Meanwhile, I was starting to look very thin. One friend used the word “gaunt” and made a sucking noise, drawing her shoulders up and in. It was true, my pants had gotten a little baggier than usual. I cinched my belt buckle on a never-before-used hole. I weighed myself at a pharmacy: 128, my high school weight.

After almost three weeks of vegetables and the odd sprinkling of duck, I was getting hungry for some rabbit meat. I had enjoyed the rabbit in France so much. The meat was tender and light, not heavy like the fatty duck. But I was, as I had initially worried, finding it difficult to kill, clean, and eat a fellow mammal.

Riana’s French in-laws—especially the eighty-year-old matriarch of the family—were rooting for me. She had given Riana the skinny on how to kill and clean a bunny. She used a pair of pruners to make a cut in its throat. To clean it, “Mamie says you just pull off its pajamas,” Riana reported.

These relatives were gold mines of culinary information. On the last day of my visit to France, I had bought some escargot plates at a flea market. Over dinner that spring night, I asked Chantal, Benji’s mom, about cooking snails. While taking a mental inventory for my newly hatched plan, I remembered that I had quite a few snails who lived and bred on my artichoke plants. I wondered if they might add a protein boost. But I had no idea how to cook them.

“You boil them,” Chantal said in English with a classic French accent. She looked like a small fox, with reddish hair and large brown eyes, seated at the table. Her hands were graceful and quick and punctuated her instructions. “First you keep them away from food—how do you say?” She looked at Benji. “Starve them. Then cook them in water for an hour.” Dress them up by frying them in garlic and butter, she added. Benji said that at that point, the mollusk was usually removed from its shell to have its poop sack excised, then stuffed back into the shell. Sounded easy. (I have yet to get that desperate, though.)

Chantal’s parents, Mamie and Grandpa, had been farmers and wine-makers, and they had raised rabbits their whole lives. When the Germans occupied France during the war, they took all of Mamie’s rabbits, including her breeding stock. The family nearly starved to death. That was why Mamie and Grandpa continued to raise rabbits into their eighties. Bunnies were a symbol of survival.

Although my parents didn’t depend on them for survival, their bunnies had been a good source of protein. One night I called my mom to get her thoughts on rabbit killing.

“Boy, did they multiply!” she said. “You have to kill them just to keep their numbers down.”

“So how did you actually do it?” I pressed. It’s one thing to hear a story about our childhood bunnies and my mom’s biology lessons on the farm, but another when I was going to have to execute one. The French could cut a rabbit’s throat, but I was sure I would botch that delicate operation.

“Well, I can’t believe I could do this,” she said, “but I’d bash them in the head with the blunt end of the hatchet, then chop their heads off.” And then, I imagined, she would pull off their pajamas.

“I still have the hatchet. Do you want it?” Mom asked. “It’s Swiss-made, just needs to be sharpened.”

On day twenty-two, the day before I was to do my first bunny kill, the hatchet arrived in the mail. I wondered if doing these things—reenacting my mother’s chores on the farm, learning about a process from my elders—would somehow help me understand better where I came from. As I looked at the hatchet, I giggled at the thought that most daughters are given their mother’s jewelry or silverware when they reach a certain age. I had received a dull hatchet.

I walked out to the deck and grabbed a white male rabbit from the litter. He squealed when I picked him up by the scruff of his neck, as if he knew his fate. I cradled him against my body, but he still struggled. Once we walked into the garden, the rabbit went limp. I set him on the grass under the plum tree. He sniffed and chewed on the round leaves of a nasturtium. He looked beautiful under the tree, as if he belonged there, as if he was home. His white fur contrasted with the dark leaves of the plum, his haunches resting on the orange flowers of the nasturtium.

I didn’t bash his head. I decided to put the hatchet on a windowsill—an art object/family heirloom. Instead, I used a method that I had watched, step by step, on the Internet.

I put the bunny’s neck under the wooden handle of a rake. Then I stood on the handle and pulled the rabbit’s back legs upward. There was a faint crunching sound as his neck dislocated. Knocked unconscious, the rabbit jolted a little. Then I cut his throat with a sharp pair of pruners. Bright red blood dribbled out onto his fur. I looked him in the eye the whole time, watched his eyes fade and become cloudy and opaque.

Killing Harold had been a Thanksgiving sacrifice, a mercy killing, and a coming-of-age for me as a farmer all rolled into one. This time I just really needed to eat. Though this experiment was a self-inflicted folly, eating a rabbit was going to erase my chronic hunger pangs and give me a few whispers of satiety. That made something that seemed barbaric—killing a cute bunny—very necessary.

I hung the rabbit in the plum tree to bleed. I used a coat hanger and tied the back legs with baling twine to make skinning the rabbit easier. I made a few hesitant cuts with a pair of kitchen shears until the pink flesh under the fur revealed itself. Then the pelt started to peel off, just as Mamie had promised. I had to make only a few more strategic cuts before the whole hide came off, inside out. Underneath was a layer of skin and blood vessels.

As I did the work I whistled and was only slightly paranoid that a neighbor would pass by and try to talk to me, figure out what I was doing, and run screaming from the scene. I was obscured by the plum tree but still felt a little exposed.

Once the fur was removed, it was just a matter of gutting. The entrails spilled out via gravity, making the word “offal” make a great deal of sense—they literally fell out, and they were kind of awful. I couldn’t believe how big the stomach was, but I shouldn’t have been surprised, as rabbits have several stomachs to digest all that vegetable matter. The bladder was see-through and held a tablespoon of yellow urine. Per the suggestions of the French, I left the kidneys attached, at the back of the carcass. I removed the heart and the liver, which consisted of four dark red lobes, and one small green sac (the gallbladder, which I would later separate out).

I killed and dressed (or undressed, as the case may be) my first bunny in ten minutes. A chicken takes at least thirty minutes, a duck over an hour—another benefit of the rabbit.

The rabbit started to look like those I had seen in the French market. His lines were good—he had plump haunches. To see the flesh that I helped make was a blessing.

I wondered how a vegetarian would have fared on this experiment. She probably wouldn’t have been as flip as I had been and would have carefully sown chickpeas and beans. But it’s hard to grow enough soybeans to make tofu on a small bit of land. I knew that I couldn’t have survived without eating the rabbits I had raised.

After the body was clean of offal, I cut it from the coat hanger, leaving two white rabbit paws hanging in the plum tree. I felt a surge of nostalgia for this moment. Here I was, like a peasant woman, killing my supper, white furry paws hanging among dark plums, me wearing a bright blue apron with a pair of kitchen shears in the front pocket. The mise-en-scène of the tree, the bench below it, a mat of nasturtiums twinkling in the shady spot, the propagation table with trays of small sprouts emerging.

I understood everything about the dinner I would have that next evening, after the meat rested for a day. I had seen the rabbits born, I had carefully fed them fresh greens and snacks from the garden, the Dumpster of Life, and Chinatown. I even knew their personalities. This white rabbit had been the largest of the group—and the bully, always beating up his smaller brothers and sisters—so he made the most sense to kill first.

I hesitated at the entry to the garden, in that boundary between farm and city. Across the street, near the vestibule of the abandoned building, there was a crackhead guy on his hands and knees, searching for something on the ground. He stood up and walked around in circles, examining a dollar bill, ripping off the corners.

I’ve never been scared of this man. He has never talked to me or even approached me. But today, with the body of the rabbit still warm in my arms, I felt as if I might actually scare him. If he looked over at that moment, if he could think clearly, if he could see what I had done, would he be just as disgusted with me as I was with him? I would explain that I was very hungry and needed comfort. And perhaps he would say the same to me.

Not wanting to scare the downstairs neighbors, I swaddled the slightly bloody carcass in my blue apron and carried it upstairs, thinking about my mom. When my sister and I were children, Mom was making the most of her situation. And wasn’t that what I was doing, too? Another restaging of the uniquely American fascination with the agrarian lifestyle. Looking back on my parents’ history and comparing it to my present, I recognized that if my parents were Utopia version 8.5 with their hippie farm in Idaho, I was merely Utopia 9.0 with my urban farm in the ghetto, debugged of the isolation problem.

I cheated and used salt to make a brine to draw the blood out of the rabbit. Before I submerged it, I admired the rabbit’s lean lines. The saddle—the meaty back section—is the prize cut, and many restaurants serve only that. As hungry as I was, I wouldn’t be wasting anything. The back haunches looked well exercised, plump. I put the fur and the head in the freezer for when I got around to learning how to tan the hide using the brain—an old Davy Crockett-era trick. One day I’d make an awesome rabbit-fur-lined sleeping bag. The entrails went into a hole I dug next to a fig tree—they would provide nutrients.

My plan was to invite Bill for dinner. For the past three weeks, I had been eating to survive, mostly grazing while in the garden, so we weren’t eating together much. It felt important to be making a whole, hot meal, and I was proud to share the meat of my labors with my beloved Bill. Though he is a scruffy auto mechanic who would be happy to subsist solely on burritos, he happens to have one of the best palates I’ve encountered. He can sense the presence of secret herbs in fancy restaurant dishes, artfully describe a perfectly ripe peach as if it were a vintage wine.

With the rabbit, there was plenty to share, and so I was doing what a primate hunter does with a big kill: distributing it. A chimp researcher mentioned in
The Primal Feast,
Craig Stanford, noted that “chimps use meat not only for nutrition; they also share it with their allies and withhold it from their rivals. Meat is thus a social, political, and even reproductive tool.”

I had been working on the bad-breath thing (flossing maniacally), and I hoped that once I shared some meat with Bill, he would, well, you know, give a little back. Only Bill wasn’t a chimp. The meal had to be good if I was going to get any.

The next day, I followed my sister’s recipe, which came via Mamie. While I fried the rabbit pieces in duck fat, I thought about my sister. She had her own version of utopia, too. She had gone from an SUV-driving, Botox-using Los Angeles lifestyle to a happy, quiet existence in a rural French village. Perhaps it was her hippie DNA expressing itself, or maybe Mamie’s thrifty influence, but in France, Riana had gotten into crafting her own soap and making her own cloth diapers. We were both planted in places wildly different from Idaho, and yet our hidden traits were coming out, adapting to make something new.

Once the pieces of rabbit had turned golden, I poured a bottle of my wine over them. In a 350-degree oven, the meat cooked for an hour with sprigs of thyme and cloves of garlic. I set the table and called Bill to dinner. I served generous portions of the rabbit: two pieces of the saddle for each of us. I spooned a few stewed plums and some sauerkraut next to the rabbit.

We sat down for our first meal together in a long time. The meat was flaky but firm, and redolent of garlic and herbs. Bill took a bite, and I watched him carefully.