you can’t run away on harvest day 229aroma fills the house. When a friend began raising beef cattle entirely on
pasture (rather than sending them to a CAFO as six-month-olds, as most
cattle farmers do), we were born again to the idea of hamburger. We can
go visit his animals if we need to be reassured of the merciful cowness of
their lives.
As meat farmers ourselves we are learning as we go, raising heritage
breeds: the thrifty antiques that know how to stand in the sunshine, gaze
upon a meadow, and munch. (Even mate without help!) We’re grateful
these old breeds weren’t consigned to extinction during the past century,
though it nearly did happen. Were it not for these animals that can thrive
outdoors, and the healthy farms that maintain them, I would have stuck
with tofu- burgers indefinitely. That wasn’t a bad life, but we’re also enjoy-
ing this one.
/Believing in the righteousness of a piece of work, alas, is not what gets
it done. On harvest day we pulled on our stained shoes, sharpened our
knives, lit a fire under the big kettle, and set ourselves to the whole show:
mud, blood, and lots of little feathers. There are some things about a
chicken harvest that are irrepressibly funny, and one of them is the feath-
ers: in your hair, on the backs of your hands, dangling behind your left
shoe the way toilet paper does in slapstick movies. Feathery little white
tags end up stuck all over the chopping block and the butchering table
like Post- it notes from the chicken hereafter. Sometimes we get through
the awful parts on the strength of black comedy, joking about the feathers
or our barn’s death row and the “dead roosters walking.”
But today was not one of those times. Some friends had come over to
help us, including a family that had recently lost their teenage son in a
drowning accident. Their surviving younger children, Abby and Eli, were
among Lily’s closest friends. The kids were understandably solemn and
the adults measured all our words under the immense weight of grief as
we set to work. Lily and Abby went to get the fi rst rooster from the barn
while I laid out the knives and spread plastic sheets over our butchering
table on the back patio. The guys stoked a fire under our fi fty- gallon ket-
tle, an antique brass instrument Steven and I scored at a farm auction.