The Chopping Block

The Chopping Block

Aunt Lois and Uncle Maury Morgan farmed eighty acres near Ripon, Wisconsin. From the age of ten, I left my hometown to stay at their place for a week or two each year during the summer vacation. It was an idyllic setting.

The farm was an old one. There, Maury tended a small herd of dairy cattle, several pigs, a clutch of Rhode Island Red chickens, Uncle Janes' two retired draft horses, and a fluctuating staff of dogs and cats. The farm buildings were getting on in years and were devoid of paint. The machine shed was collapsing and the two-holer still functioned beside the granary.

One of the fall farm activities was the butchering of chickens. I was shocked to see this level of violence in an otherwise pastoral setting. Next to the west door of the barn sat a log about eighteen inches in diameter and two feet tall. When it was time to butcher chickens, Maury produced a hatchet and the roundup began. No bird was excused this fate.

As a city girl, I had never seen the likes of it. Maury took a captured clucker and held it by the legs so that its neck lay on the flat top of the stump. With the other hand, he raised the hatchet and swiftly brought it down across the chicken's neck. At that point, head and chicken parted company.

The chicken often didn't seem to notice that "command and control" was no longer wired to the motor. It ran around in a headless state for a brief time before acquiescing to the inevitable. I had new appreciation for the adage "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" after witnessing this process.

After the beheadings, Maury hung the lifeless bodies upside down over the gutter in the milking barn. When the blood had drained out of the corpses, he took each off its hook and briefly dunked it in scalding hot water. This maneuver loosened the feathers and I began to pluck. What a mess that was! Wet feathers stuck to everything: hands, clothing, hair, and even got in my mouth.

When they were all bald, he gutted each, and we turned the whole project over to Aunt Lois who cleaned the carcasses. She neatly wrapped the former egg layers in heavy paper and placed them in the freezer for future chicken dinners or soup.

It wasn't long before there was a clutch of new, fawn-colored chicks under the brooder lights to begin the saga anew. Oddly, the witness of this practice did nothing to diminish my appetite for poultry. In fact, we often celebrated the completion of this chore with a most delicious roast chicken dinner and all the trimmings.