Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (36 page)

Grampa drove Grandma and me to their friends’ farm at dawn. (Somehow, sitting in the center of the seat between Herb and Bittie didn’t stir up the same excitement as sitting next to Boone.) Sara still snoozed in her bed. No one had made a move to rouse her, and I decided
not
listening to her whine all day would be a plus.

Paint peeled off the window fra
mes of the two-story house. A scrawny cat darted into an overgrown yew bush randomly placed along the side of the porch, off-center and unpruned.

We walked
through a wet, mostly weeds yard to a leaning, faded red chicken coop set on cinder blocks. Nervous hens pecked at the dirt within a pen defined by a rusting wire fence. A rooster, apparently free to roam, stalked across the lawn. It watched our movements with teensy yellow eyes. The volume and frequency of its loud clucks escalated when we approached the flock.

A robust woman in heavy rubber boots came out of the stone farmhouse
, followed by an equally rotund man, definitely older than me, but young enough to perhaps be her son. They shooed the rooster away, further agitating the scattering hens.

“Hello
, Bittie,” the woman called. “Still want a dozen?”

“Whatever you can spare,” Grandma said. She
introduced me. The man, Chuck, eyed me like the rooster eyed the hens.

“Chuck will give
you a hand with the killing. I got water boiling on the back porch,” said Martha, Chuck’s mother. Grandma limped along behind her toward the porch roughly enclosed with white metal siding and aluminum windows. Grampa stayed with Chuck, so I did, too.

I
didn’t know what to think when Chuck dropped a squawking chicken head first into a metal cone mounted on the rear exterior wall of the coop. The cone trapped the bird with its head hanging out the hole at the bottom. He slit the poor thing’s neck—I thought I would puke—and let the blood run into a bucket waiting on the ground below. When the chicken stopped struggling and the blood slowed to thick drops, he lifted it out by the feet. “Take it to Mum,” he grunted.

Heavier than I expected,
especially holding the bird at arm’s length to avoid the dripping blood, the weight dragged at my shoulder socket. I saw the head in my peripheral vision, swinging piñata-like at the end of its partially severed neck. Martha threw the whole mess into a pot of boiling water. She held the feet to swish the carcass around a few times then dropped it into another pot filled with ice water that quickly turned Jolly Rancher red.

Grandma waited by the ice water in a chair with a plastic tub between her feet, her hands encased in heavy rubber gloves. She dunked the bird a few times then yanked it back out and started pulling the feathers out in clumps, carefully
stripping everything, including the head and feet. She set it aside on a heavy wooden table that displayed an assortment of knives and devices of torture. Looking up at my uselessness, she said, “Maybe you should pluck while I clean.”

I nodded,
unwilling to handle guts bigger than what came out of squirrels. Grampa arrived with two more dead birds, and the assembly line—or rather, the disassembly line—began to function. I kept my head down after seeing Grandma finished severing the first head. I concentrated on smelly wet feathers and tried to ignore the sounds of joints and cartilage being slashed. The stench of saturated chicken, blood, and the innards Grandma spilled out of the warm bodies made me swallow hard more than once.

Eyes down and keep plucking
, I told myself.

When Grampa and Chuck finished the killing part, they took over butchering while Martha, Grandma and
I plucked. They collected what I recognized as cleaned chicken parts in a gray plastic tub. Another tub held feet, heads and internal organs mixed with unidentified pink and yellow and whitish globs. I hoped the dissection lab refuse pile stayed here.

“Many hands make quick work,” Grandma said as we finished.

Unfortunately, Chuck included the yucky tub in one of his trips to Grampa’s truck. He slid the raw parts into the bed while Grampa removed a box of Grandma’s canned goods.

“
They’re for you,” Grampa said, indicating Chuck should take it. “We appreciate you and your mother sharing some of your food to get our family ready for winter.”

Martha
and Grandma talked on the porch. She fussed when she saw the jars. “Now, Bittie, you already paid me for those birds. Here, now, you take some eggs, too.” She scuttled into the house and returned with a brightly printed foam carton. “Here’s a dozen and a half, nice ’n’ fresh. Violet, you carry them so your grandpa can help her to the truck.”

As Grampa drove home,
I opened the carton to inspect the orange-brown eggs lined up in cups where stark white discount mart eggs had once been cradled.
EXP June 30
was inked into the lid. Sometime last summer, a shopper who didn’t mind if her French toast wasn’t free range, Omega-3, organic vegetarian fed, had placed eighteen plain white eggs in her cart, paid for them, and drove home, never guessing, a few months later, the refrigerated case would be empty and warm, leaving her bereft of her favorite hot breakfast. Now we traded home-canned applesauce for eggs laid by chickens I’d just helped butcher.

Our circle of life closed tighter, a lasso pulling in around the world in a diminishing halo.

 

Grandma
pulled two old smock aprons from a kitchen drawer to wear in her chilly kitchen. The flowery scent of fabric softener waged a brief, losing battle with the odor of dead poultry as I tied the strings at my waist. She put the blend of random, partially unidentified parts in a stockpot filled with seasoned boiling water while I spread the parts I recognized on trays to roast in the gas over. Empty jars from the basement were rinsed with water from a five-gallon camping dispenser and lined up like soldiers as the house filled with the steamy odor of cooked poultry.

I whispered a prayer of gratitude when Grandpa
dumped the boiled laboratory pieces into a black trash bag. He wore long oven mitts to pour the broth through a cloth-lined strainer. Golden liquid swirled in a stainless steel bowl. Bubbles of transparent yellow fat glistened on top. I removed it with a spoon.

We tucked the
partially roasted pieces in jars. Grandma showed me how far to fill the jars with the broth, and how to wipe the rims with a towel soaked in vinegar. I placed shiny new flat caps on top and screwed down reusable rings, finger-tight. We loaded jars into the pressure canner where she’d already added a few quarts of water. With the lid on, she lit the gas burner beneath it and set her timer for fifteen minutes.

We kept filling jars. When the timer went off, she called me to the stove. “You want a good flow of steam, then set your timer for another ten minutes, then you’re ready to build the pressure.” After
the second timer, she put what she called the regulator in the lid of the cooker. “Now we have to keep adjusting the heat to keep it at eleven pounds of pressure for an hour and a quarter.”

I monitored the stove
since Grandma still had a bum foot. After the arduous prep, most of canning consisted of waiting. We had to let the pressure decrease before I could retrieve the hot jars with a special pair of tongs to gingerly place them on the towel-covered counter. While we waited, I loaded a cooler with perishables from her refrigerator and she talked. She told me about butchering pigs as a girl—“Always the day after Thanksgiving.”—and fermenting homemade sauerkraut in ceramic crocks. “My, that was a strong smell.”

Grandma had me correct the water level in the canner before we loaded it again. The third and last batch
of jars I managed by myself, with her watching to make sure I didn’t make a mistake that would “blow us to kingdom come,” in her words. Memory of the tomato incident provided strong motivation. I’d do almost anything to avoid chicken flesh and bones blasted across the pink cloud ceiling.

Condensation
coated the kitchen windows. The unexpected pops of sealing lids punctuated our industrious sounds as the flat tops sucked down to concave by the cooling air trapped in the vacuum of the jars.

I bent to study chicken pieces
buoyed in their golden liquid. This morning, those drumsticks walked in a dirt pen. The thought should have grossed me out, yet, instead, filled me with a sense of accomplishment. I had no idea what canned chicken would taste like, but knew I preferred it to no chicken at all, which seemed to be the alternative.

Grandma limped up beside me. “It’s more efficient to can the meat off the bone, but deboning chicken is probably my least favorite job, and I have plenty of jars.”
The thought of my always-industrious grandmother avoiding any kind of household labor astonished me. She placed her arm around my shoulders in a gesture of sisterhood. “You do red meat the same way. All the processing times are in the instruction book for the pressure cooker. Do you think we should bring it up to your house, in case somebody gets a deer?”

“I don’t know,” I said at first. Then I decided to be decisive. “You have the gas stove down here. We should probably plan on doing the canning in your kitchen for now.”

She nodded and smiled, pleased.

“You look tired, Grandma. I’ll clean up while I watch this last batch.”

“I wouldn’t mind putting my feet up for a minute or two,” she admitted. She joined Grampa, who’d made himself scarce once the heavier work was done. They talked quietly for a moment. Soon, the sound of snoring emanated from the living room.
 

 

I proudly carried one warm jar of canned chicken home, after waking the nappers. We left the rest behind to cool.

Sara and Danny were on the couch watching a video on the portable DVD player. “Ewww,” Sara said when I showed her the drumsticks floating in their yellow bath.

“Don’t worry,” I retorted. “You don’t have to eat squirrel
or
chicken this winter when there’s nothing else.”

She wrinkled her nose.
“What stinks?”

“
Probably me. And thanks for all your help.”

“Whatever.”

I followed Grandma and Grampa into the kitchen. Boone and my parents were at the table. All three gave me odd looks I credited to my bottle of bobbing chicken legs.

“Well
, look at that,” Dad said, taking the jar and turning it in the fading afternoon light. “Brings back memories, doesn’t it, Mother?”

Grandma smiled. “She worked hard today. Wore both of us out. Tomorrow she and Grampa will
bring the rest of the jars up to store in your pantry.” She tried to hide a yawn. “I’m gonna put my feet up for a few more minutes.” Grandpa followed her back down the hall, and they closed the door to their tiny bedroom.

Dad
set the jar on the table. He and Mom looked at Boone, then at the chicken, then at each other. Everywhere but me. Boone glanced at me for a second then reached out to run his finger along the ring cap of the jar.

“I guess I’ll go change. I need to
rinse my jeans in the spring?” I said, hoping the question in my voice would shake loose some info.

Mom leaned
around the edge of the table to look at me. “Yuck. Is that blood at the bottom?”

“Yep,” I said, sounding more nonchalant about it than I felt. “The butchering part was pretty gross, but I did okay.”