The Slaughter of the Hens

The dry, frayed ends of autumn, the garden charred by successive waves of night frosts, the scent of wild grapes in the air. Outside the kitchen’s back door, a small metal barrell stood over a fire waiting on a slow boil, set up by my grandfather early on. Nearby a makeshift table – old planks placed across two carpenter horses – covered with yellowed newspapers; large bluish canning jars at one end of the table, each sterilized in a bath of scalding water and later each snuggly fitted with a hen’s cleaned out carcass to be cooked, then placed on shelves in the dirt floor cellar, making their first appearance on the Sunday dinner table during winter months. My grandmother, rotund and lacking any sentimentality for most animals, least of all pigs and chickens, waited in a rough cloth apron with years of use, a small sharp knife in hand easily cut into a dozen dead hen’s bodies like a knife through soft butter. The chopping block, a weathered piece of old black oak, its surface marked with grooves where many an ax head fell and left its mark. With a wave of her hand she signaled grandfather to begin the slaughter. A few feet away, within a temporary wired enclosure, unknowing hens milled about pecking the grassy area for what would be their last meal. Grabbing each hen by its feet, he laid her body on one side, her head almost on the edge of the block and with the speed of a sudden lightening bolt, brought down the axe, the hen’s head dropping to the ground, it’s neck squirting blood like a garden hose, then tossed as the first of many that would grow into a pile of her dead sisters. Yet there was always a hen that sensed her fate and managed to get back on her feet and dash off headless, as if defying death itself while her eyes were spared the gruesome sight of her headless running body and not so much as giving a cheering cackle to so heroic a try.