Young eyes on old trade: a farm's need to slaughter
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NORTHAMPTON
The summer our son Silas was 2, he spent the majority of his waking hours wearing an old, shimmery-gray shirt that once belonged to Oona. He called the shirt his "other blue dress," and while he wore it he would become a cascade of characters, ranging from a mischievous girl named Betsy, to Eeyore the donkey, to a cow named Diva ("I'm Diva the cow and I'm parading down Main Street!"), to Big Horsey, who was also one of his stuffed animals.
One afternoon that summer we sat on the couch reading the Grimm Brothers' story "The Donkey." At the moment when the donkey removes his skin and reveals himself as a handsome prince, Silas stood up very excited, laughing, saying, "It's my donkeyskin," and proceeded to remove and put on his other blue dress several times. The story confirmed what he already knew: The dress was a magical implement that gave him access to an entire world of transformations between male and female, friendly and fierce, and, most significantly, human and animal.
To say that Silas loves animals is roughly equivalent to saying that rain makes the ground wet. He lives animals. He wakes and sleeps in a dense underbrush of images, ideas, scenes, facts and myths about animals, all of which conspire to create the most bull-headed, hog-wild, cocksure boy this side of Pleasant Street. Silas watches animals, dreams about them, becomes them, and, of course, he eats them.
The summer of the other blue dress, we had a goat named Maybe (he was born weak, so we said, "Maybe he'll make it and maybe he won't.") Silas watched Maybe get born. He played with Maybe in the barn until the goat was bigger and stronger than the boy was. Toward the end of summer, I decided to start getting Silas ready. Walking into the barn one morning, I said, "Silas, do you know we're going to eat Maybe?"
Silas' response was not what I'd expected. He did not object or ask why or even look confused. Rather, he cracked up. Holding onto the doorknob, his body hanging limp, he laughed uncontrollably. And let me be clear: This was not because he found the idea preposterous or silly. He was laughing because he got it, completely. He was looking at this healthy, rambunctious, milk-fed, pasture-raised goat-kid, and he found the idea of eating him delightful.
Silas is 4 now. He's borne witness to the lives and deaths of maybe a dozen goats, a hundred-or-so chickens. He's expressed sadness at seeing some of the animals leave, while others he's eagerly ushered out the door. A few weeks ago we read Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Zlateh the Goat," in which a boy and goat become caught in a blizzard. The boy is walking the goat to the town butcher, but to save himself and the goat from certain death, he stops and burrows his way through the snow into a haystack, where he and Zlateh remain for three days. The goat eats the hay, and the boy drinks the goat's milk straight from her udder. When the blizzard is done, they go home, and the goat is welcomed back into the household.
About the same time as we read the story, we crossed the road to visit this year's batch of lambs and kids, who'll be sent off to the slaughterhouse at the end of October. Silas hadn't been over there in a few weeks. The lambs, called Coyote and Musk-ox by Silas (or Grumpy #1 & Grumpy #2 by our crew) would now let him close enough to touch their wool. And the goat kids, too, had gone through transformations.
They now smelled musky and rich. Lightning had sprouted a new tuft of curly hair right at the crown of his head, and both he and Max had little beards forming. The strength of their legs was impressive. The kids had become teenagers, and when Silas said repeatedly, "Ooh, Lightning is a BUCK," he was speaking with the same sort of awe another child might reserve for a basketball-playing, Puma-wearing, earbud-sporting, obnoxious and beautiful 16-year-old boy.
"Those goats are going to be delicious," I said.
"Yeah," said Silas. "Lightning is going to be delicious."
Silas wanted to stay out with the kids (even after Maya, the doe, butted him flat in the chest and knocked him over), but I said no. We still had more chores to do.
I wonder at times whether I'm making light of death and suffering, or not taking the time to instill in Silas a properly reverential attitude toward these creatures whose lives we're responsible for.
My attempts at doing this, however, have generally been pretty lame. Far more convincing, I think, is just to stand with him at each part of the process, to answer his questions, to point out at slaughter time the vividness of the blood, or the strange logic of gravel in a gizzard. And then we read stories, which get at the mystery and the complexity far more directly than any admonishments I could offer about life or respect or responsibility.
Today, as we rode our bike home from the Y, I pointed to an oak tree with its first flush of red. After that, Silas announced each one we passed. "There's one changing!" he yelled, and, "Hey, another one!" For the first part of the ride he was a jaguar, but after a while it turned out that he was Artax the horse. "We're chasing changes," I said, and I thought of the Irish legend of Taliesin, who tries to escape from the witch Ceridwen by transforming himself into a hare. When she becomes a greyhound and gives chase, he transforms into a fish, and she becomes an otter, he a bird, she a hawk, until finally he turns into a grain of corn, which she - a hen - eats and becomes pregnant.
We spend our days in the flux of these changes. We chase the corn-seeds with our tractors until they become ripe, juicy ears. We eat the flesh of animals who are also our neighbors, our dependents, our friends. Baby Wiley munches a thread of chicken (Wiley doesn't know much about much, but he sure knows he likes chicken), while his older brother arcs through the room at a speed I would not have thought possible a year ago. He is running so fast, he explains, because he is both gazelle and cheetah at the same time. He doesn't wear many dresses these days, but the transformations keep on keeping on.
The season's nearly over. We've mowed the flowers, the melons, some of the tomatoes. In a few weeks, we'll hang a kill-cone on a tree beside the house and slaughter the turkeys. The Tom turkey, whose name is Lafcadio, with the black-whiskered snood over his beak that contracts and distends, with the caruncles along his neck that engorge a deep red, with the pale grey scalp that turns a bright blue, with his splayed legs and dinosaur-gait and melodic bark, is - in a word - appalling.
But the whole thing is appalling, right? This eating and growing and slaughtering. This living. I could also say it's beautiful, but appalling will have to do.
Ben James, who runs Town Farm in Northampton with his wife, Oona Coy, is writing a column about the enterprise. To learn more about the farm, visit them at the Tuesday Market in downtown Northampton or check out nohotownfarm.com.
