My first encounter with death was filled with blood and trauma. As it should have been.
It had to be a Sunday morning in the fall of 1955. It also must have been early on Sunday morning because I was not yet in church with my Grandmother. Grandma always took me, and later my two younger sisters, to our very conservative Free Methodist church on Sundays. But I was not there yet. It must have been not long after first light on a Sunday morning in the early fall.
I was up the hill at Mrs. Brown’s house. Yes, that was her real name. She was the mother of Ron Brown, a good friend of my father’s from when they were in high school. My parents rented the small two and a half bedroom, one story frame house down the hill from them and had done so almost from the day my Father returned from Korea with a well disguised case of what we would now call post traumatic syndrome. Back then he was jumpy.
Mrs. Brown was that woman used to conjure all the stereotypes of long-suffering but good-hearted American farmer wives from that century and the one before. She was short and plump, I suppose it would be kinder to say, “stocky,” but I remember her as round as Mrs. Butterworth. Her hair was graying and pulled back in that low-on-the-neck bun favored by sensible women of her generation. She wore a dress, what she, no doubt referred to as a “house dress.” It was in some nondescript, pale color and printed in a nondescript simple pattern, not in any way outstanding, or garish. The purpose of these house dresses was to preserve modesty, not to draw attention to the wearer. And over this she wore a long apron. The kind that looped over the neck and tied in the back at the waist. I think she must have worn an apron often because almost all my memories of her include the apron, often being used in various ways as something else–sometimes as a hand towel, sometimes as a basket for carrying fresh tomatoes or ears of ripe corn from the garden, or as a hot pad when removing pies or casseroles from the oven, sometimes as an impromptu wash cloth to clean my face or even as a mop for drying sweat from her forehead. This particular morning she was also wearing a pair of tall black rubber boots that were sized to Mr. Brown’s feet. She sometimes wore them if she was working in the chicken coop or in the barn.
And she carried a hatchet.
Mrs. Brown was preparing to kill some chickens for Sunday dinner. She asked if I wanted to help. I always said yes to adults who asked if I wanted to help. And I always had believed I was helping, until this morning. This morning I was sure I intended to help, but by the time it was over, I was certain I had not.
In the 21st Century, it bears saying that Mrs. Brown was neither cruel, nor dangerous. She was a sweet and kind woman who had spent her life on the farm. Our little town had grown outward enough to, at first, encroach upon her farm and eventually, to swallow it completely. Bit by bit, they sold off a little acreage at a time until they held only the two houses and about ten acres next to the railroad right of way. It was by no means, a rich retirement, but Mrs. Brown and her husband continued to put in a large garden every year, to support an old yellow dog and a few barn cats, to keep some chickens in a coup for fresh eggs and for occasions like this–Sunday dinner.
I often went up to Mrs. Brown’s house. It was one of two destinations I was permitted away from my home at the tender age of five. Our street was still made of dirt and set off from the rest of the streets in town. It was only used by a very few people, three houses on our section coming from the railroad tracks, a turn and six more before it was crossed by the road that led to the dump. Our street, Munson Street, just a half block long, was a safe place to play or cross even for one so young.
Mrs. Brown was a bit like a grandmother to me and certainly a “safe” destination for a small child. On this day, she was headed to the chicken coop. Normally her chickens roamed the yard without constraint. We’d call them “free range” today. Back then we called them chickens. It was unthinkable that you wouldn’t let a chicken roam around the farm, foraging harmful bugs off the garden plants and helping to keep the nitrogen levels high in the pumpkin patch. But we have pesticides and chemical fertilizers for that today. So we can keep the chickens locked up in wire cages. Back then, Mrs. Brown would head to the nests looking for fresh eggs for breakfast. The hens that weren’t producing were sometimes moved from the egg production line to the meat production line. That’s what Mrs. Brown was doing this morning…counting eggs and making decisions about mortality.
Mrs. Brown knew exactly what she was doing. She knew which hen nested where. She could sneak the eggs right out from under a sitting hen if she wanted.
“You check those nests down low,” she instructed.
I tried to put my hand under one of the birds and she clucked and flapped her wings and eyed me sideways out of one of those weird chicken eyes with that even weirder chicken eyelid. It unnerved me. I tried to screw my courage up but every time I moved my hand near the nest, the chicken flapped and I was certain she would peck right through my skin into blood and bone.
“No, honey. Like this.” And Mrs. Brown put one gentle hand on the back of the chicken’s neck and briefly covered its eyes with her thumb. With the other hand open and palm down, she slipped under the sitting bird. Then she finished a stroking pet to the back of the neck and on down the bird’s back with the hand that had served as a blindfold. “That’s a good girl,” she crooned and sort of magically produced a warm chicken egg in her other palm. It seemed all of one smooth movement created by a body which had done it thousands of times in her lifetime.
“You try it,” she said to me and so I petted the next chicken on the head and neck and back and the bird clucked but not excitedly. It even seemed contented. My thumb wasn’t big enough to cover the bird’s eyes so I held my petting hand up to the side of the chicken’s head and blocked her vision while I slipped my free hand under the bird and extracted the egg. I felt like a mesmerizer. She (the chicken, not Mrs. Brown) never saw it coming and she never complained after it was over.
“Well done!” said Mrs. Brown. “You are a professional already.”
We collected about a dozen eggs into Mrs. Brown’s apron and then she transferred them to a small cardboard box with a wire handle. “You carry this, honey.” And she handed the basket to me. I used both hands on the wire handle, not because it was too heavy, but because I knew the load was fragile. This basket needed very careful handling. I headed toward the doorway and Mrs. Brown made what seemed like one move and collected two hens by their ankles in one hand. She carried them upside down out of the chicken coop behind me. The chickens chattered some, but didn’t seem remarkably upset.
“These are for dinner today,” she announced. Vaguely I knew that meant they would be killed, cleaned and plucked. But I had not witnessed any of these processes before. “Do you know what that means?” she asked.
“Yes,” and it wasn’t precisely a lie.
“Do you want to help?”
“Yes,” and I was pretty sure that wasn’t a lie either.
You stand right here and keep the chickens from escaping.” And Mrs. Brown positioned me in a place where it would be impossible to not see exactly what was happening.
She was a pro. Mrs. Brown swung both chickens up on the chopping block with her left hand. She knew just how to apply a little downward pressure on the backs of their legs to make them crane their necks outward and in two quick snicks, the heads of the chickens fell to the ground and their bodies fell down next to them.
That’s when the Halloween movie began.
The two disembodied chicken heads continued to look at me through those terrible eyelids. The beaks moved open and closed like the head was clucking or worse, trying to speak to me in some kind of spirit chicken talk. The dreadful chicken tongues moved as though the birds were choking on something and trying to vomit up something stuck in their throats. Years later I saw a man choking on a broken chicken bone and he had that same motion in his mouth parts. The lower part of the mouth dropped down like it was trying to melt back into the throat while the tongue gaped out unnaturally and flexed as though it could expel something causing great pain.
And that’s when the bodies jumped up. Quite literally, I learned that day the expression “running around like a chicken with its’ head cut off.” These two bodies rose up from the dead and began sprinting. Not just stumbling around, but sprinting. Each of them displayed two spurting threads of chicken blood shooting short parabolas into the air through their chicken arteries. At first the headless bodies staggered and bumped into each other and the ancient chopping block that had been witness and partner in countless crimes, all committed in the same nonchalant way. I watched with my mouth open, aghast. This couldn’t be true. It was at least as terrifying as any dream that had sent me to my mother’s safe haven at night. And then, the bodies bracketed me. One on either side. Ghoulish spurts of arterial blood arcing toward my trembling body. I was in the moment. I panicked and began running away from the dead chickens. I ran away from one and nearly bumped into the other. I wheeled to escape and stepped on one of the still silently squawking chicken heads. I dropped the box of eggs. My hands went to my chest like tiny Tyrannosaurus Rex arms and flapped impotently. I danced on my toes. The birds still staggered toward me. And without knowing it consciously, my urine flowed–flowed right down the insides of both legs, through my tennis shoes and into the rich, loamy earth which had been fertilized for years by the sacrificial blood of countless chickens, sprinting around to spread their fountains of enriching blood on Mrs. Brown’s yard.
Mrs. Brown, looking at me like she was concerned, nonetheless was smiling. She reached down and collected the now slumping body of one chicken and made a stab at the other. It ducked behind my jittering knees and she grabbed again, this time coming up with the flapping white body and tried to hold it behind her while she smoothed my hair and tried to hug my face to the side of her thigh. I felt her comfort. And then I saw the chicken blood on her fingers and recoiled. I stepped on the other chicken head and turned hard to escape it. That’s when I ran into the chopping block. I was defeated and I sank to the ground.
The chicken bodies were now lifeless and dropped behind Mrs. Brown on the ground. She wiped the chicken blood on her ubiquitous apron and reached to pick me up.
I was crying inconsolably now, wailing really, in an irrational objection to a world that could offer such a horror to an innocent child of mid-century. And she began to pet my head and neck, much like she handled the unsuspecting chickens in the chicken coop. My wailing began to subside into little whimpers as she began to carry me down the hill to my house. About half-way, despite the fact that I was clearly still in shock, the tears had stopped, the breathing was nearly normal. She put me on the ground and held my hand as we slowly walked home.
Down the hill were adult conversations and gentle laughter, a little hair tussling. There was some one-handed hugging against the outside of my mother’s thigh. My father laughed but didn’t seem to talk about the dead birds or the blood or the horrific specter of reanimated chickens. Instead he recalled a story about when he and Ron Brown had ridden bicycles down the railroad tracks some fifteen years before. Shortly Mrs. Brown returned to her house and the chickens and Sunday dinner. My mother turned to breakfast. My father walked into the back yard and sat on an old tree stump staring down the train tracks. I stripped off my wet pants, redressed and went to the living room to play with my baby sisters. I didn’t want to leave my house ever again if I could avoid it.
