Chicken with stripes
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Anyone can read what you share. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Cold days are better for killing animals. Warmer months demand time in the wheat fields.
Plus, heat and sun quickly turn meat rancid. On my family’s farm in rural Kansas, we did our butchering in the fall and winter, when the work drew no flies. On gray afternoons, I would get home from school — after an hourlong bus ride on muddy roads — to see a large, pink carcass hanging near the cinder block farmhouse where I lived with my grandparents. Grandpa would have already shot a bullet through the heifer’s brain, drained her blood, cut off her feet with a handsaw and begun to peel away her skin. Then, having hooked two of her legs with a steel spreader connected to the long arm of our tractor, he would have used hydraulic controls to lift the heavy creature — who, not two hours prior, grazed in the pasture and huddled against the north wind with her family — and sliced her underbelly from anus to neck.
We would spend the evening in the butchering shed — a small barn next to the house with a garage door, a bloodstained concrete floor and a rosebush growing up its south wall. Grandma stood at the grinder making hamburger. My job was to weigh the meat on a metal scale, wrap it in white butcher paper and label it with a marker. This was an average day for me, growing up. During those formative years, witnessing death did not desensitize me to the plight of our fellow animals. Rather, life on the farm in general strengthened my reverence for the more-than-human world, which so plainly dictated our lives. While we opened and closed the gates that trapped farm animals, we were often at their mercy.
On winter mornings when we would have preferred a warm bed, we crouched in the snow and pulled a breech calf into the world before sunrise. We were aware each day, when we entered the pasture to check the water in the stock tank, that even the smallest of the Charolais cattle could beat us in a fight. On Sundays at the little Catholic church down the dirt road from our house, we stared up at Jesus’ bleeding, hanging body and listened to the sermons about man’s dominion over the earth. But in our bones we knew it was the other way around. Our humility was not just the result of doing hard, undervalued work. It was also the result of being undervalued people.
Even as a child, I understood that families like mine, poor rural farmers, were low in the pecking order. Television shows and movies portrayed us as buffoons and hicks, always the butt of the joke. We didn’t need those cues to know that society held us in low esteem, though. All we had to do was look at our bank accounts. We worked the land and killed animals so that others would eat, so that we would afford propane for the winter, and so that the rich, rigged industry we supplied grain to would become a little richer.
The profound humility instilled in me by my upbringing left no room in my worldview for exceptionalism of any sort. It also left me troubled by the ways that most humans calculate the value of things — animals, plants, land, water, resources, even other people — according to hierarchies that suit their own interests. More than once, while wrapping meat, I sliced my finger on the sharp edge of the butcher paper. There was nothing special about my blood. It was red just like the pigs’ and the cows’. It was clear to me that there was nothing special about me or my family, either, doing that most essential work of feeding others. Nothing special but also nothing lesser.
