Being a farm kid is not for sissies and cowards. The dark side of the chicken experience is slaughtering, plucking, cleaning, and preparing chickens for the pot. I watched as Mother transformed into a slobbering beast as she towered over the caged chickens, snagging her victim by the leg with a twisted coat-hanger, ringing its neck and releasing it for its last run. We crowded by, horribly thrilled by what we knew was coming. It was scarier than ”The Night of the Living Dead”, as the chicken, flapping its wings, running with its head hanging crazily to one side, chased us in ever larger circles until it finally greeted Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates. It looked horribly cruel, but done properly, a quick snap of the wrist breaks the chicken’s neck instantly, giving a quick death. Of course, this is my assessment, not the unfortunate chicken. The chickens always looked extremely disturbed.
Afterward, my mother grabbed the dead chicken, plunged it into a pot of boiling water, plucked the feathers, slit its pimply white belly, removed its entrails, cut off its feet and head, and prepared it for dinner. I was repulsed when Mother found unlaid eggs in the egg cavity and used them in cooking. That just didn’t seem right. I was happy to eat the chicken, but future eggs….disgusting. It kind of seemed like genocide, or chickenocide, to coin a new term.
Mother looked out one day and saw one of her chickens eating corn, oblivious to the fact that her gizzard was hanging out, bobbing up and down merrily as she pecked corn with all her lady friends. Apparently she had suffered injury from a varmint of some kind. Clearly, she wouldn’t survive with this injury, so Mother and I set about catching her. At least she could be salvaged for the table. Well, she could still run just fine. We chased her all over the yard with no luck.
Finally, Mother decided to put her out of her misery by shooting her. She missed. She fired again and shot the hen’s foot off. I knew I could do better. I shot her beak off, then hit her in the tail. By this time, we both felt horrible and had to get her out of her misery. Her injuries had slowed the poor beakless, tailless, gizzard-bobbing, one-leg hopping chicken down enough so we could catch her and wring her neck.
All chickens didn’t end life as happily. The LaFay girls, Cheryl, Terry, and Cammie raised chickens to show at the fair for 4-H, with a plan to fill their freezer with the rest. Late one Thursday evening while their widowed mother was at work, they realized tomorrow was the day for the big barbecue chicken competition. Mama wouldn’t be in until way too late to be helping with slaughtering and dressing the chickens. After all the time and effort they had put in on their project, they had no choice but to press forward without Mama’s help. They’d helped Mama with the dirty business of putting up chickens lots of times. They’d just have to do manage on their own.
Cheryl, the eldest, drew the short straw, winning the honor of wringing the chicken’s neck. She’d seen Mama do it lots of times, but didn’t quite understand the theory of breaking the neck with a quick snap. She held the chicken by the neck, swung it around a few times in a wide arc, giving it a fine ride, and released it to flee drunkenly with a sore neck. The girls chased and recaptured the chicken a couple of times, giving it another ride or two before the tortured chicken managed to fly up in a tree, saving its life.
Acknowledging her sister’s failure, Terry stepped up to do her duty. She pulled her chicken from the pen, taking it straight to the chopping block, just like she’d seen Mama do so many times. Maybe she should have watched a little closer. Instead of holding the chicken by the head and chopping just below with the hatchet, Terry held it by the feet. The panicked chicken raised its head, flopped around on the block, and lost a few feathers. On the next attempt, Cammie tried to help by holding the chicken’s head, but wisely jumped when Terry chopped, leaving the poor chicken a close shave on its neck.
By now, all three girls were squalling. Cheryl tied a string on the poor chicken’s neck, Cammie held its feet and they stretched the chicken across the block. By now, Terry was crying so hard so really she couldn’t see. She took aim, and chopped Henny Penny in half, ending her suffering. Guilt-stricken, they buried the chicken. Defeated, they finally called their Aunt Millie, who came over and helped them kill and dress their chickens for the competition, which they won. All’s well that ends well.
Nutsrok 
I wasn’t a city girl, but I was suburbanized. Everything about your stories here kind of horrified me – and Lord, forgive me for laughing.
You sure do know how to tell a story! :)
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In my family, we compete.
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I laughed all the way through that post.
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That was a terrible day to be a chicken!
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Thanks for liking my work. I am so new to how all this works. I’ve had a WordPress page for nearly 10 years and just paid my dues and not figured out how to use it to my advantage!
ive been a storyteller wanna be writer avid bookworm all my life but now I’m in my 70’s I reckon it’s time to get the whip out and get cracking. One is never too old to learn..it’s just that there’s a lot of sawdust up there for everything to muddle through!!
So any help or useful information you want to throw my way I’m ready to catch it. I’ve written & illustrated homemade books for my grandkids when they were little ones, fifteen years ago.
But now I want to leave them with a fistful of My Life”s Guts &. Garter stories for them to read to their children. I can’t say I’m into getting anything published. I worked in retail selling books, hiding in the back corner reading them instead of doing my work! I’ve met lots of famous authors and publishing houses who did worse things to ones’ written material then your Mother ever did too those chickens!
Thanks!
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You already have the skills. You are articulate. This comment really caught my interest. Don’t worry about whether your post is interesting or fits in a niche. I have never published a single post that nobody liked. Tomorrow I am going to write a post about taking my 96 year old mother to the doctor. That sounds tedious, doesn’t it? Check back tomorrow, please. Oh, another hint, post on a regular basis, for example, once a weekly, three times a week, whatever works for you. Follow and comment on other writers. Good luck!
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Thanks for the heads up. Too easy.Writing something..anything comes naturally to me, and I’ve written a daily ‘rant’ on my Facebook account about ‘the day’s doings’ for 2 years. Every day for 2 years.. So I guess it’s time to start believing in myself and just write..right..and not live under the smog-filled cloud bestowed on me when I was born that “I’m NOT GOOD ENOUGH’. THAT IS A USELESS HUMAN BEING!:
Sorry for shouting…thanks for believing in me.
regards
Marilyn
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You are articulate and interesting. If you can talk you can write. Here’s a prompt. Write about breaking somebody’s belonging. I know you’ve done that. Everyone has. Did you hide it? ‘Fess up? Lie?
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Well yoour story takes me back to my childhood.. I grew up amongst the chickens and cows, pigs and whatever quick footed animal lived on our patch of dirt!
i used to think we were mighty poor because we didn’t own a vehicle to use on the farm or to use as transport away from the farm. We had Clydesdale draught horses to hitch to farm machinery and a horse that my father rode to gather the livestock.
Our Mum was ‘ the chicken killer’ I think my father was a bit of a wimp but then again he had served many years in the war and had probably seen enough killing and dying broken bodies without having to inflict pain and suffering to anything breathing on the farm!
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Maybe he was like me. When I saw how experrtly Mother snapped those chicken’s necks I was a little daresome to get smart with her.
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Country life certainly makes a person strong. I admire it.
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I surely don’t want to work that hard anymore. Heck, Ii didn’t want to then.
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I hear ya. Though one thing that I wonder is, if kids today had to work at a young age, what would our world look like. Perhaps a little less self-entitled? I admire folks like you who did work hard on the farms growing up. I feel, and I could be wrong, but I feel that you were instilled with a much harder work ethic. I admire you and I admire your story.
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Thank you. Everyone needs to learn to work.
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I agree.
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This had me laughing so much it looked like I was crying, it also made me think of mum who would at times say to one of us that we were running around like a headless chook, I remember my sister asking how did mum know how a headless chook ran around and mum replied because she had seen her fair share of headless chickens in her childhood.
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It’s like a horror movie! And to think your own sweet mother knows how to wring necks! Makes a kid think twice before sassing!
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Ugh, I don’t think I could have killed the chicken. I’m a wuss when it comes to that sort of thing. Congratulations to the winners though
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Country life can be demanding. It certainly made me look at my mother in a different light. That tiny, gentle woman could do a chicken in in seconds.
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