Just a Part of Growing Up, You Say

My father used a hatchet to chop off the heads of chickens. Why I watched I don't know. I couldn't have been older than five or six.

No doubt there was blood, but I don't remember it. Just now I wonder if Daddy washed the hatchet blade after each kill or if the blood of all the chickens he killed mingled on the blade. Oh well. What I do remember is being sad and sorry about the chicken. I have never liked the idea of death, and seeing it close up made it more real than I expected. I don't know what I expected. I was a child, remember.

Of course, I later ate the chicken with the rest of the family. That's why Daddy killed them, so Mama could cook them for our dinner. I wonder if I put it all together then.

I do not know what I was thinking as I watched that hatchet come down and hit the neck of the chicken. That was a hard thing. The hardest part, though, was seeing what happened after Daddy chopped off the head. I am sure I thought that would be the end of it--you chop off a chicken's head, and it's dead. No. It's not dead yet, or it doesn't know it's dead. It runs around the yard until--until what? Until it can't run any more, I guess.

Such a scene, such an event was shocking, perhaps even traumatic for a little girl. I don't know how many such executions (harsh word, I know) I saw. Maybe only one. And, again, I do not know why I was watching. Where was my mother?

We also had rabbits. I don't think I ever saw how Daddy killed them, but I know he did because I remember seeing their skins stretched across those wire frames. And I remember eating the rabbit Mama cooked.

Don't get the wrong idea about my dad. I can say with full confidence that these killing chores were just that--chores. He was not a blood-thirsty man. Far from it. He was a provider, and that's why we had chickens and rabbits, because they fed us. Someone had to do the killing. It was Daddy's job. I suppose I understood that all those sixty-some year ago. I suppose.

(I know we also had goats, but we didn't drink goat's milk and we didn't eat goat's meat, so I'm not sure of their purpose, except to eat down the grass and weeds in the vacant lot. But that was before we moved to Santa Monica, which is where we had the chickens, at least the ones I remember.)

The chickens. The killing of them has stayed in my memory all these many years. I can still see that headless chicken running wildly around the yard, soon to be followed by another. And I wonder if a small girl witnessing such a thing didn't file away what she saw and keep it as just one more reason to be afraid of things.