as I could get at my friendly old spawning ground, Mother’s on Main Street. The earth and sun have somehow revolved around each other so many times that, again, it’s already getting dark by five o’clock and I am not one gibbous closer to a life plan. I live in the cold basement apartment of my dad’s house.
That fall, I was often outside in my canvas jacket sitting on the log pile at dusk smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, feeling shrouded in gloom. I watched the garden decay, and a frost settle, and thought about death and the inherent beauty of the cycle of life. How untragic it would be, I thought, if I just killed the mailman or maybe myself, and returned to the earth. I was reading Dostoyevsky—who arranges the timing of these things?—and identified too strongly with Raskolnikov’s desire to have all feelings, all sensations, and to kill a human being. I had it confused at the time with some literary context but I think, in hindsight, I was just brittle with subcutaneous rage, and bone tired. I had been hustling for a long time. Eternal sleep had strong appeal. I’ve all but begged to kill this chicken.
There was no need for me to be killing chickens. This wasn’t 1930 or anything. And we weren’t out on the Nebraska plains. We were in what had been my grandparents’ house, up on the hill overlooking Lambertville, on the Jersey side of the Delaware, where my dad had been living since he’d sold the ruins. The house looked over a cemetery and had a deep woods behind it. It’s true that my dad didn’t have TV—the “tivvies” as he calls them—a telephone or a microwave—but these were aesthetic choices. There were people on either side of us—normal New Jersey neighbors—who knew of things like ice-in-the-door-of-the-fridge, MTV, and instant ramen noodles. He kept chickens as part of his gestalt.
There was one chicken in the coop being badly henpecked. My dad said we should kill the chicken and spare it the slow torture by its pen mates. I said I’d like to kill it. I said I wanted to kill it. I said it was important to confront the death of the animal you had the privilege of eating. I said it was cowardly to buy cellophane-wrapped packages of boneless, skinless breasts at the grocery store—desensitized, sanitized, devoid of any semblance of its live form.
This was what two years at Hampshire College had done to me.
My father, wishing I would comb my hair more often and pass quickly through this particular phase, said, “You can kill the thing when I get home from work.”
He claimed to have grown up with chickens and said he had killed many in his boyhood, so I let him coach me through it.
From a remote spot on the back kitchen steps, he told me how to decisively gather the chicken out of the pen. Adding my own bit, I spoke to it philosophically about the cycle of life. I held it firmly and calmly with what I hoped was a soothing authority. Then he told me to take it by the legs and hold it upside down. The chicken protested from deep inside its throat, close to the heart, a violent, vehement, full-bodied cluck. The crowing was almost an afterthought. To get it to stop, my dad told me to start swinging it in full arm circles. I windmilled that bird around and around the way I had spun lettuce as a kid in the front yard, sending droplets of water out onto the gravel and pachysandra from the old-fashioned wire basket spinner my mom used.
He said this would disorient the bird—make it so dizzy that it couldn’t move—and that’s when I should lay it down on the block and chop its head off, with one succinct whack. If you’re as practiced as my father claims to have been, your ten-year-old brother windmills the birds while you are chopping off their heads, and no sooner have you tossed one chicken into the grass to run around headless, than your brother is handing you another dazed chicken to whack, and like a machine you just spin and whack, spin and whack, until you’ve got twenty birds ready for the icebox for the next five winter months of Sunday suppers.
In my own way, not like a machine at all, I laid it down on a tree stump and while it was listless and trying to recover, I clutched the hatchet