A chicken with its head cut off

                  

My brother Jerry and sister-in-law Nancy just left after a short visit. As we always do, we spent lots of time swapping family stories.

Unlike most brothers, whose childhood memories overlap, Jerry’s and mine don’t. He is older by sixteen and a half years and left for college before I was two; I don’t even remember him living under the same roof. He has stories I haven’t heard. I always have some that are news to him, including this one, which happened when I was 16 or 17.

Whenever it was our mother’s turn to host her bridge club – two or three tables of ladies who dressed to the max for the occasion – she went all out to impress, cleaning the house top to bottom, polishing the silver and agonizing over the menu.

For this particular get-together of her club, mom decided she wanted to serve chicken salad. Sounds easy enough. You go to the store, buy a chicken, cook it, chop the meat and mix in the celery, mayo or whatever else you want to put into it, right?

Not for our farm-raised mother. She insisted the best chicken salad was made with meat from an old hen. She said it tasted better.  

She called a farmer she knew from church who raised chickens. He said he had an old hen he would gladly sell her. She dispatched me -- I had just received my driver’s license -- out into the country to get it.

The day was oppressively hot and humid. When I arrived, the farmer’s wife, an elderly lady I had seen a hundred times dressed in her Sunday best, greeted me wearing bib overalls with no shirt underneath. Living in the middle of nowhere, she was apparently accustomed to dressing that way on hot summer days. It was, at once, fascinating and revolting. It took all the willpower I possessed to avert my eyes.

She took me to the chicken coop where she caught the hen, which fluttered about, trying to escape. She thrust it by the legs upside down into a wooden crate with slats. I placed the crate in the car’s trunk and drove home.

When the old hen and I arrived, mom said she was going to show me how to kill a chicken and told me to fetch a broomstick. At this point in my story, Jerry, who remembered the era before rural Missouri grocery stores like our father’s sold dressed chickens, laughed and said he knew exactly what I was about to describe because, as a youngster, he had watched mom kill dozens of chickens that way.

I carried the crated hen around the side of the house. Mom ordered me to hold with one hand the chicken’s head just above the ground and to hold its back legs with the other.  She placed the broomstick over the hen’s neck, pushed the broomstick and hen to the ground, then stood on the stick, straddling the hen. She grabbed it by the tail … pulled up on its body … and, whoosh, the chicken was decapitated.

Freed from its head, the chicken started running, blood spurting every which way from the gaping hole in its neck, turning the grass red. It ran around in circles a couple of times then headed straight into the street ... and into the path of an oncoming truck which flattened it.

The bridge club ladies were served ham salad.