Did you ever dress a chicken?

Did you ever dress a chicken? Feb 2010

I had never dressed a chicken, and having grown up in the City of Bridgeport and not on a farm somewhere in Connecticut, I had no idea what dressing a chicken meant. Nothing against farms, I have thoroughly enjoyed living on Ted Jones Poultry Farm in Guilford for much of the past year, but lacked any farming sense.
So when Ted Jones, the old, cranky Yankee farmer asked me if I ever dressed a chicken, I told him no.
“Well, I have a bunch of birds in the coups and I need a hand dressing them on Friday morning,” he said. “Thanksgiving is less than two weeks out and I need to get these birds to Bridgeport so people can buy some large, fresh chickens for their meals.”
“I’ll be glad to help,” I said. “If it’s something you think you can teach me to do, I’ll be there.”
“Fine,” Ted said. “Meet me at 7 Friday morning; I’ll have everything set up.”
Ted was not very social and not much of a talker - instead he would grunt, or even bark, responses to questions we would have.
On the few times he did initiate conversation, it would be awkward – and sometimes creepy.
“So, you guys went grocery shopping today… five bags,” he would say.
I didn’t know we had five bags of groceries! But, wherever he was when we got home – at the coups, near the pond, feeding the cows or in his kitchen drinking coffee - he was watching and counting.
I was a student at Southern Connecticut State University studying journalism. My wife Kelly was supporting me as a graphic designer, working in New Haven, while our son Rory, a second-grader, was going to school and loving life on the farm.
Rory loved seeing the animals and watching them from the kitchen window while he ate dinner or colored at the table. He would also name them. His favorite was a small brown cow that was on the farm until recently that he named Rusty. Even Ted started calling him Rusty. For the few months Rusty and a half-dozen other cows – who were larger in size but not as playful as Rusty – were on the farm, they would provide Rory with his nighttime entertainment. Rory would run and tell us how Rusty slipped between the other cows to get some water from the pond or how Rusty would run to where the food was, which gave him a few minutes of uninterrupted dinner until the other cows moseyed on over and nudged Rusty aside.
The chickens would get names as well as they strolled between the chicken coupes. Once, while watching a couple of chickens – Mark and Henry were their names – and munching on a dinner of chicken, broccoli and white rice, Rory stopped abruptly, pointed to his plate and asked, “Hey, did this chicken used to be alive?”
I explained the ins-and-outs of the food chain to Rory, and he seemed not to be too upset with the whole raising-chickens-to-eat process.
One Sunday afternoon, while cooking burgers and hot dogs on the grill, we asked Ted if he would like to join us for lunch. He agreed, but, odd guy that he is, went into his house first to bring out some of his own beef patties (like we didn’t just offer to feed him!).
I cooked up his burgers, and as I was putting them on buns, Ted tells Kelly that she has to have one of his burgers.
“It’s the tenderest, tastiest burger you will ever have in your life,” he boasted.
“It’s delicious, Ted,” Kelly said.
“You know who that is?” he asked as Kelly and I looked at each other in horror.
“No, Ted, we don’t need to know…” I tried to say before being cut off by Ted’s answer…
“It’s Rusty,” he said.
Rory, who was munching on a hot dog, looked up.
“Rusty?” he asked.
Kelly and I were stunned. Ted laughed.
“Mom, did you eat Rusty?” Rory asked.
Stunned silence.
“No your Mom is not eating Rusty,” Ted said.
“Where is Rusty?” Rory asked Ted.
“I had to send him to another farm,” Ted said. “He needed more room to run around. But you know animals are raised on farms so people can eat them. This isn’t some petting zoo here.”
“Oh,” Rory said, looking suspiciously – and a little sad - at his mom before fixing his stare on the burger.
Maybe he willed the burger not to leave the plate, because Kelly didn’t touch it again.
We generally thought Ted was totally heartless – probably from a life of living and working on the farm without a wife or any children to help him appreciate things more. But then, the day before we were to dress the chickens, he told Kelly that while 120 chickens would be dressed and brought to Bridgeport to be sold, the 40-or-so remaining birds would be donated to the senior center in Durham. That made me excited about the dressing of the birds – even though I still had no idea what that was – because we would be helping out some elderly folks who deserved a hot Thanksgiving meal. We thought maybe there was a heart inside Ted after all. It just wasn’t that noticeable.
So, that Friday morning at seven sharp – I walked down to the coupes where I saw Ted backing up his truck. On the back of the old pick-up truck was a mound of crates.
“Alright city boy, you ready to start working for a living?” Ted asked.
“I’m ready,” I said, over the cluttered sound of chickens clucking.
Ted explained that I needed to go into the coupe, grab chickens and put them in the crates.
“Once you get five or six birds into a crate, I’ll close it and stack it,” Ted said. “But we don’t have all day for this.”
“It sounds easy enough,” I said, as I started grabbing chickens and putting them in the crates.
I wondered if this was all there was to dressing chickens – catch them and get them ready for the ride to Bridgeport. I even started having some fun, running after the chickens in a circle – like Stallone did in the first Rocky movie as he tried to catch the chickens. “Yo, Mickey, these chickens are kind of fast running around here,” I said doing my best – but not very good - Rocky Balboa impersonation.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ted barked.
He was not a movie fan. Said he probably hadn’t been to the movies in 25 years and he had no idea who Rocky was.
“We’re going to stop at about 100,” Ted said. “One more crate.”
We made sure the20-or-so crates were secure before we pulled away form the coupe. I was thinking we were preparing them for the 30-mile ride to Bridgeport. But as the truck slowly crawled up the eighth-mile dirt road to the back of Ted’s house, I saw the smoke – or what turned out to be steam – coming up from two large pots elevated over an open fire in Ted’s driveway. There were also three cones; they looked like three traffic cones, upside down near the pots of boiling water. On the other side of the pots was some machine with what looked like big blunt spikes on a rotary.
Man, what have you gotten yourself into? I asked myself.
We parked near this set-up and Ted jumped out of the truck.
“Now pay attention,” he said. “This needs to done right or we ruin the birds.”
He pulled a bird out of the crate; put it head first into the cone so the head would stick out of the bottom; took a knife and cut the bird’s throat.
“You do this to three birds at a time – use the three cones here,” Ted said. “By the time you get the third bird in here. The first one will have bled out enough to take it to the pot.”
I stood uncomfortable watching this – no longer feeling the chill in the air or noticing the spectacle of the sun rising over the farm. Ted took the now-dead bird to the pot by its feet; dunked it briefly into the almost-boiling water – “This will loosen its feathers,” he said – and then to the machine, where a pedal on the ground started the wheel turning.
“You take the bird right from the water to the wheel and this will knock its feathers off,” Ted explained. “Now this is a fast process. If the bird is in the water too long it is no good and if it is on the wheel too long it is no good – the bird will be bruised. You understand?”
“Uhm… sure Ted,” I said, not realizing how happy I had been all these years just eating food and not realizing were it came from.
“Alright then,” Ted continued. “You then bring the bird to me at this table and I’ll put the finishing touches on it; clean it up so someone will want to buy it. Now grab a crate and let’s get started.”
It was such an easy process, I thought. I could do this without giving it much thought.
I looked over at our house, which was across the dirt road and probably 75-feet away. I was hoping that Kelly could not see what I was doing and I prayed we’d be finished before Rory got home from school.
I grabbed the first bird from the crate: “You have no idea what’s coming, do you?” I asked myself – or maybe I was asking the bird. Either way, we had no clue.
The constant cackling and clucking seemed to echo on the property, which was surrounded by tall trees.
I put the bird into the cone, head first and leaned down and pulled his head through. I grabbed the knife, and while I still had a hold on the head, ran my knife across the bird’s throat – its warm blood pouring onto my hand – sticky like red paint. I grabbed the second bird and did the same and then the third, each time adjusting myself so the blood wouldn’t hit me so much.
I went back to the first bird, pulled it out of the cone, dipped it in the hot water and then ran it over the spikes on the turning wheel. I brought it to Ted.
“Not bad,” he said. “Since you are a city kid I thought you would mess the first one up.”
I nodded and walked back to the birds, grabbing the second and third one – which soon turned into the 20th and 21st ones – and then the 34th and 35th ones. With each group of three, the clucking became that much quieter.
At one point I realized that, as I carried one over to Ted, they looked like the rubber joke chickens you can buy. I wasn’t really in a laughing mood – I never had blood running onto my hands before - and I’m pretty sure the chickens wouldn’t get a kick out of it either.
“These are going to make some great dinners for people,” Ted said at one point. “Look at these; these are some good looking birds.”
I must admit, they were good looking birds.
But I still didn’t think I would be eating chicken for awhile.
Later, Ted told me that he gets a kick out of dropping the birds off at the senior center in Durham, sometimes with a few baskets of potatoes and vegetables from his garden.
“They get to have quite the feast for Thanksgiving with that,” he said.
“It must be great to see how appreciative everyone is about it,” I said.
“No, I just drop it off and go,” Ted said. “I don’t need to stick around. That’s not why I’m doing this. Now get me some more birds.”
We finished the birds – which ended the constant clucking - and I helped Ted load them onto the truck in sacks that he kept chilled in a refrigerator in his garage. He was off to Bridgeport and I was heading home to get ready for a class.
“I will do the rest for the seniors tomorrow,” Ted said before leaving. “But it’s a small load and I probably won’t need any help – not that you are usually around on Saturday mornings anyway. You usually head out on Saturday mornings.”
“I usually have a class,” I said. “But if you need me, I’ll be here.”
It wasn’t hard work. I knew it was necessary work.
But I still hated the feel of blood pouring onto my hands. I was hoping he wouldn’t need me.
At the house, I ran in and went straight to the shower, and scrubbed my hands more than a few times while in there. Once done, I stood at the bathroom sink washing my hands again. I was sure they smelled, although I washed them thoroughly in the shower. I would wash my hands, smell them, not smell anything, wash them again anyway and repeat…
“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” Kelly recited as she watched me from the doorway.
“Thanks for the Macbeth break, but my hands were covered in blood,” I said.
“No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red,” Kelly continued, finishing the Shakespeare quote with a chuckle. “This is the perfect time for Macbeth.”
All day while in class I would smell my hands, making sure they did not smell of blood. I didn’t smell anything unusual, but I still remained convinced that the small was there.
Ted did not need me the next day, which was fine. And after a couple of days I stopped smelling my hands.
It was a little while longer, though, before I ate another chicken.