The pain of culling
Nothing is sacred
Professional storytelling is an art. Stories of a rural America that mainstream media won’t acknowledge are a necessity. Please consider joining the growing community of Postcards from the Heartland supporters with an upgraded subscription. In today’s world, our stories may be all we have left of things not for sale to the highest bidder.
I won’t tell you it didn’t hurt.
The panicked heartbeat fluttered under my fingers as I held down a healthy rooster that has roamed this land, defended his girls and greeted the morning with gusto his entire life.
I won’t say it’s not disquieting, grasping tightly a body bleeding out ‘til it quiets, a body we just chased as it generated its best chaos of wings and claws to escape us. How hard they fight for their simple, short lives. It’s a fight that commands respect.
Teo* and I share an unspoken sadness as one of us quickly cuts his throat while the other sooths and thanks the rooster. Before he can blink, a white film comes over his black beady eyes. His boney head and sharp beak that seconds ago was screeching at us drops silently on the ground, liberated now from its soft and strangely light body.
Five is four too many, as roosters go. It’s not good for the hens either, Teo says. He loves chickens so much he trains some of his to sing on command. He names them things like Naranjita, (little orange) Abuela, (grandmother) and Xi Jinping (yes, that one). When he runs out of names, the rest are called Frijoles (beans).
Teo lives and farms alone. Iowa winters are longer for him.
These were handsome Icelandic roosters, a landrace that can sport flashy reds and greens, or white-gold shawls over iridescent dark purple shoulders or speckled copper backs. They had awesome plumes. They were sturdy birds. They were not unkind, like some roosters, except to each other.
I won’t tell you the sky started to cry.
I’ll just say that when a late-December rain began to peck at our shoulders, we ducked under cover to finish the job.
Our hands were bloody and scorched as we pulled each one from a bucket of hot water. We quickly plucked the feathers from tail to pin, pulled yellow skin off their feet like gloves off long arthritic fingers and threw the corpses in the cooler.
The water must be boiling hot for the feathers to release. So, at times we just sat there watching the rain, waiting for water to boil.
Then it was gutting time. Teo’s been doing this since he was a kid. He pulled out his bull-nose butcher knife the size of a small machete. The chipped and blackened blade looked like he’d used it as machete too, maybe even since childhood. The wooden handle was worn to his grip. Only the most beloved tools look that way.
Teo made precision surgical incisions around the rectum. Then he reached in to detach and scrape the insides off the body cavity, grabbing as much of the guts as he could.
He gently pulled out the soft pink heart, liver, lungs and intestines. The intestines are the tricky part, but he made it look easy. The thick strands look like long noodles but are stuffed with manure that, if allowed to touch the rest of the bird, risks infecting the meat.
I won’t tell you I butchered my first bird well. That was why I needed Teo, not YouTube, to teach me. The roosters are now in the deep freeze.
Slaughtering beautiful birds seemed an apt way to end 2024, a year of more extreme living and dying than most:
Paul and I visited our daughter in Portland, sharing laughs and stories as she introduced us to food truck parks and waterfalls.
We came home to our beloved Aussie Border Collie dying from a mysterious infection.
A month later her ailing father, my first husband, died much sooner than expected.
Our mother-daughter relationship has been off-roading ever since, hitting 32 years of boulders and old farm iron hiding in the tall grass.
Paul, at 81, spent months in physical therapy for his shoulder replacement.
We launched Draco Hill Nature Farm with free events that drew from 5 to 35 people with about as much predictability as Iowa weather.
I volunteered full-time for a local candidate, excited we’d make healthy change in our community.
The campaign ended up holding me hostage on days I had to harvest chestnuts, so the deer got to them first.
Covid struck our home just as the Asian pears were coming in. I had to give away what I could manage to pick.
In a basement bar in downtown West Branch, we learned we lost the local campaign while staring stunned at the screens at a country erupting in equal parts joy and panic.
Friends died throughout the year and survivors regretted surviving, at times. We are old enough to expect it. And so we hugged the living, thanked them for staying with us a while longer and quietly hoped we’d all survive another year.
I can’t say I’ll miss this year of loud crowing and new aspirations, drought sandwiched by unseasonal rains, thrashing and flailing just to be heard, heartbeats and gratitude, good humor in strange places, flying feathers, slashing claws or the deep and silent darkness we must endure when Death demands its due.
And I won’t say I won’t miss those roosters.
*Note to Readers: Due to today’s political climate I will no longer use real names of any immigrant I know whether they are “legal” or “illegal” because of the ungrounded hostility they may face from my actions.
Teo’s Chicken Wisdom
Oval shaped fertilized eggs will be roosters. Round ones will be hens.
White patches on a rooster’s wattle indicates that he breeds well.
Never have too many roosters for your hens. It wears them out.
You can tell the age of a rooster by the size of his spur.
Chickens will eat tortillas ‘til the cows come home.
On Weather
If you know the original artist, please share in the comments but this was too good to pass up.
Beautifully written. Thank you for sharing Teo and his wisdom and the birds/beans and what it means to butcher a rooster well.
Thank you for this 🙏🏼❤️