I don’t say a word.
Mom says, “But what’ll we do with all this stew?”
* * *
WHEN SLAUGHTERING TIME comes around again, Mom decides it’s time we learn about the “cycle of life” so that we can understand our food comes from somewhere besides the grocery store. Paul sits us down in the backyard early on a Saturday morning and tells us, “This isn’t a game, so I need you guys to take it seriously. I can teach you but only if you respect it. Don’t go fartin’ around with the knife or the lye or the club.”
He gets the black metal rod down from the loft in the barn where he keeps his rifle and ties a string around a branch from the tree in front of the shed. “This is where we hang the rabbits, to drain the blood.” He takes a scooper from a bucket of white powder and shakes it down the trunk of the big tree next to the toolshed. “This is lye. Don’t touch this stuff. It’s there to make sure none of the blood or guts turn to rot on the tree.”
We go into the barn where the litters of three-month-old bunnies are waiting in their cages. They aren’t quite as big as the breeders, the mama bunnies and papa bunnies we’ve named Peter and Princess, the huge brown floppy-eared bunny we’ve named Fred who sits around his cage all day. But they aren’t small either. We’ve been careful not to name the young ones since Mom says you can’t be friends with your food.
Paul opens a cage and picks up one of the adolescent gray bunnies by the loose skin around its neck. It kicks and flails. He’s careful to keep the sharp claws away from his face, holding it out with a stiff arm as we follow him outside.
He kneels down and pins the rabbit to the gravel with his left hand, picking up the black iron club with his right. “The important thing is to hit him hard on his head. You want to knock him out so he doesn’t suffer. Not two hits. Not three. One hard smack across the back of the skull.” He lifts the pipe and brings it down hard. There’s a crushing sound as metal hits bone. Bunny eyes shoot back in their sockets, bunny legs kick straight out. Paul holds it up and carries it to the tree while it squirms. “He’s knocked out. That’s just nerves leaving the body.”
I can’t help but think of Phil in the driveway and the bad men from Synanon.
We grab another from the barn. He holds it down by its neck on the gravel path and says, “Remember you’ve got to hit him hard. That’s the humane thing to do. Hitting him softly only means he suffers more.” He hands me the iron rod. “Go ahead.”
I feel the weight of it. The club is heavier than I expected it to be, not quite as heavy as a baseball bat, but smaller, denser, so that as I take practice swings, the end falls much faster than I expect and I have trouble with my aim. I squeeze tight and hit the bunny on the head. It kicks and squirms. “No!” Paul yells in my ear. “You got to hit it hard. Now you just hurt him. Swing again!”
There’s a trickle of blood coming from the rabbit’s nose as it struggles under his hand. “Now! Hit him! Hard!” I swing the club again, feeling it ricochet back when it hits the skull. The bunny lets out an awful wheezing sound as its left eye bugs out and falls halfway from its socket. It’s still kicking and trembling, a small bright red pool forms under its head. Little spots of blood dot the gravel. “Goddamn it! Give me the goddamn club!” He takes it from my hand and smashes it over the rabbit’s skull with a loud crack that seems to echo off the barn and the house, down the alley and up into the sky. The bunny falls limp.
“That’s why you gotta hit ’em hard.”
“I tried. I was just afraid to hurt it.”
“You’ve got to kill it on the first hit. That’s the whole point.”
He ties the rabbit’s foot to the string on the tree as it flops and twitches against the trunk. He walks over to the table he’s set up and picks up the big hunting knife, carrying it low, blade down, below his waist. He grabs the ears and cuts off the head, sawing through the neck. Thick dark red blood flows out in streams over the powdery white lye.
He throws the head in a bucket. “You have to let all the blood get out before you do anything else.” We wait in silence while the blood drains.
Paul breaks each of the rabbit’s legs “to make it easier to remove the skin.” He makes an incision just below the point where the string has been tied around the rabbit foot. He cuts and pulls, cuts and pulls, removing the fur in one big piece, slicing away stubborn bits of creamy white skin. When the pelt is halfway down, he puts down the knife and gives it a hard pull, removing it all at once. What’s left is a small rabbit carcass dangling from a tree. At this point it looks more like the meat we see on our plates every night than the bunnies that hop around in their cages.
By the time we get to the tenth rabbit, I get the hang of it. How to hold it down by the neck, even saying “shhhh” to calm it before bringing that club down as hard as I can with all my strength and determination to not make him suffer, to crack the life out of it on the back of its skull in one swing.
We cut off the heads, remove the skin and empty the guts, careful to cut out the little green gall sac that hangs inside the rib cage. “That’s the nasty stuff,” Paul says. “Got to be careful not to puncture the sac. Could ruin the meat.”
When we’re done, we put the carcasses into small bags and take them down to the freezer in the basement. “How about some cocoa?” Paul says. “But not that sugar-free shit your mom buys. I got the good stuff.” He gets a chair and climbs up to reach the cabinet above the sink, moving aside the purple cold medicine and a box of gauze. “My stash,” he says with a wink. We have cocoa and he gives us each a five-dollar bill. “Good job today. Now you guys know how to slaughter. It’s basically the same with all animals. In theory you could field dress a moose.”
I drink my cocoa and try not to think about the bunnies, about the queasiness in my stomach, how I didn’t want to hurt them, how doing so meant that I had to imagine it as a game and not the thunderclap of life as it ends and I watch their little bunny souls fly up into the sky.
CHAPTER 10
SUUUUUUN
There is a crackle of static from the plastic yellow phone when my brother hands it to me in the living room. We have a ritual when Dad calls from Los Angeles. The ritual is we fight over who gets to talk to him first and Tony wins. I don’t mind. He’s nice to me when he’s talking to Dad and Mom lets us stay up past bedtime since she’s always telling us children need a father figure even if it’s a drug addict ex-con who left her for a tramp.
Dad says he’s looking forward to seeing us in L.A. in the summer and that we can go to the beach and he’ll take us to Disneyland and how does that sound? It sounds like another world to me and I’m not sure if he’s even serious and if he were to say, “Just joking. Ha-ha,” I would say, “Good one, Dad.”
“I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”
“Me? Who?”
“Hold on.”
I hear the shuffle of movement through the tinny speaker and then a familiar voice that seems to speak in song. “Hello? Is this the Mouseketeer, Mr. Mikel himself, writer of stories, drawer of pictures? Is this really and truly the one and only Suuuuuun?”