Not many outside of the farming trade, those who do not raise animals, understand that—nowadays—chickens for meat are killed with an instrument that breaks the bird’s skull and kills it instantly. Though wringing the chicken’s neck is more tactile, and brings the person closer to the reality of the food, it is an unreliable method and brings a mixed return in the effectiveness and swiftness of the birds’ deaths—and is therefore no longer the choice method. The tool is stainless steel, like an oversized brutalist syringe. The killing instrument is a spring- loaded rod with a spike on the end, which whoever is delivering the killing blow must pull back and release.
The reality is that, in the modern day, we are often far removed from our barbarism. The meanest girls the farmer knew, in her adolescence, were never at all direct with their cruelty. They simply turned away when the hopeless targeted girl crossed their eyeline, went quiet when she entered a room. The killing blow—even against the smallest animals—is spoken about only in references for the other witnesses, those in the know.
For example, after grabbing the bird by the wing, taking it out of the coop, and bringing it to the shed where the spring-loaded-chicken-killer lived with the rest of the tools, and the lawn mower, the farmer told her husband now that Goldie, one of the favorites of her children, was waiting for him in the freezer. The girls were playing games on the family computer upstairs, and her son probably would want to hide his hurt over Goldie’s demise—there was really no need to speak in this code. She was not clucking around and pecking at ice pebbles in the freezer, and her girls (if they’d heard) would know that.
The farmer, as a child, had been one of those blindly-led children made to raise a show pig. Everyone loved the county fair, then, with those gargantuan plastic jugs of sugary lemonade. Her father made it clear—the pig was being raised to be sold, and once Pinky, the pig, was old enough, there was a blue ribbon waiting to be awarded. When she was a child, the computer was not yet a household object and she had nothing to draw her attention away from the pig, whom she’d begun to term her friend. She fed Pinky, and walked her on a lead, wiped the mud off her all the time. At the county fair, when they led Pinky onto that trailer and took her away to die, the farmer was wearing dark riding jeans, starched stiff, a Wrangler shirt for little girls with pink opalescent snap buttons. Pigtails, and a hat.
Her husband, also, was a similar protege of his father. Many little boys are. Though they grew up in the same town, his family was not the farming type; he, instead, darted around his father’s auto body shop like a shadow of an older brother, of which he had three. Though, by then, he enjoyed the reaping/sowing cycle of having animals, and some crops, he was still the most at home picking at the engine of the John Deere. Early into their bout of parenthood, she sensed that he must have a similar story, one along the lines of her time with the pig.
After a series of false-starts in bed or over drinks, she heard the entirety of the story: his father, since his oldest brother had been a child, had been working passively on a classic car, a Ford, he said. And one of the summers when his two older brothers were both in high school, they were driving it all the time, every day when their father was at work, and her child-husband was—that mid-August—already annoyed with Carmy, the littlest brother. With the older boys in the front seat, her husband alone in the backseat did not speak up, and allowed them to leave without Carmy. Conspiring already, he thought that they’d teach their little brother a good lesson, that several hours alone at home would surely teach him not to wind them up. Anyway, her husband told her that night over dinner, they didn’t make it far, because Carmy ran into the driveway—his arms outstretched in front of him trying to say, wait for me—as they were already leaving, and they backed the Torino right into him. By the time their parents were getting home from work, the older boys were still trying unsuccessfully to pull the child-sized dent out of the fender, and Carmy was upstairs with ice packs wrapped to his head and ankle.
It is a wonder he lived, said the farmer, really, many children die that way. Her husband continued, nodding, and the farmer flexed her hands on the table: after our parents figured it out, I watched the medics put Carmy in the ambulance, and I thought I would never see him again. He said, that’s why it’s like your thing with the pig. Because when we were looking at Carmy, worried about him in the hospital, my father sold the Torino and none of us ever spoke of it again.