Dear Irene:
“All I have to offer is my memory and those most connected to an Azorean past come, of necessity, from my childhood…
[…]Everything in the piece is accurate, including the names. I lived in San Lorenzo the Freitases lived, technically, in Ashland. Both towns were unincorporated so their boundaries were pretty loose. San Lorenzo today is a fairly large town, Ashland, I believe, no longer exists except possibly as a part of San Leandro […]”
Julian Silva
(email, January 6, 2009)
Like most of our neighbors throughout the thirties we raised chickens in backyard pens. They guaranteed us a daily supply of eggs and the traditional Sunday dinner, a stuffed, roasted chicken large enough to feed a family of five, and later, after the birth of my sister, six. Every Saturday my older brother and I were assigned the unpleasant task of slaughtering and preparing the next day’s main course.
Chickens are a particularly unlovely animal, at least the ones we raised were, and I never felt the least bit sentimental about them. They were dirty, ugly and mean-spirited, always pecking at one another, so that the last one in the chain of command went around with a featherless neck, mercilessly pecked by the entire brood and left to feed on the meager dregs of the scraps we fed them. But this sad brutalized and underfed creature had a kind of revenge every Saturday, for she was never the one chosen for our Sunday dinner, and though her life may have been a constant torment, it was invariably long.
Because I did not like the creatures does not mean I enjoyed killing them. This Saturday afternoon ritual was, in fact, the most onerous of all my childhood tasks. My older brother, who was ten, two years older than I, was the one who actually swung the ax. And he did enjoy his role, as I, trying not to see any more than was absolutely necessary, held the chicken by the legs with its neck laid on the chopping block. My squeamishness merely added zest to my brother’s swing of the ax, as I then let the decapitated thing go, watching, transfixed by the grotesque flapping of its outstretched wings over the dry clods of the apricot orchard, blood spurting from its neck, for what seemed to me an interminable length of time. Even more disgusting than this ghoulish display of the body’s residual life after death was the head itself, lying beside the block, its one visible eyelid closing ever so slowly over its startled gaze.
In France, I knew, such things were done to people, once even to a queen; and though I was a great admirer of Norma Shearer and an incurable addict of the Sunday afternoon movie, I stayed home the Sunday she played Marie Antoinette, because I already knew the ending and could not bear even to imagine her lovely head being chopped off.
Once the execution was over we had then to pluck the chicken, a process that produced for me the most defining odor of my childhood, my madeleine, if you will, that peculiar and unmistakable stench emanating from the feathers of a recently slaughtered fowl dipped into boiling water. It is a peculiarly cloying odor, repellant and unmistakably unique and one that I would recognize anywhere at anytime, and once recognized, I would once again be feathered with all the insecurities and fears of a peculiarly fearful childhood.
The second most memorable odor (and odors are important because our sense of smell is the most primitive of our senses, and thus, in a way, the truest measure of our being) is the smell of a red-hot iron horseshoe being pressed onto one of my maternal grandfather’s horses’ hooves, an act which seemed not to disturb the horse at all, but invariably made me want to vomit. The only other animals my grandfather tolerated, for he disdained pets, were the feral cats that kept the rat population of his barns in check. Each morning they were given a bowl of stale bread soaked in milk, just enough to keep them alive but not so complacent that they would willingly pass up any rodents lurking in the shadows. Feral cats are apt to breed almost as prolifically as rabbits, and the population was kept under control, by one of the farmhands gathering all the excess kittens into a gunnysack and drowning them with a stunning lack of emotion from everyone but me. For the kittens were the only cats I was ever able to get close enough to touch and I found them irresistibly appealing.
Our own mice and rats were kept under control by a series of traps, large and small, set throughout our shed and basement, since it was considered too dangerous to have a cat with young children around. For Cats scratched and infants were particularly vulnerable to their sharp claws. No one in San Lorenzo in the thirties ever considered that a tame cat might possibly become a pet. If you wanted a pet, you got a dog. And that was what we got when my father one day brought home a Boston bulldog. Why anyone would choose a pet so ugly as a bulldog, I could not understand. I would much have preferred a cocker spaniel, or a golden retriever, but a pug is what we got. Why was never explained.
The rather unimaginatively named Pug did not last long. Not only was he ugly, but ill-tempered and bellicose, particularly where chickens were concerned. We soon trained him not to kill our chickens. But our nearest neighbor’s chickens were not so lucky.
Joe Freitas was one of my grandfather’s foremen and as part of his salary was allowed to live in the dilapidated old house behind ours in which my grandfather himself had been born. Joe was a tiny man, five-foot two at the most, and built like a jockey, wiry and tough without an ounce of spare flesh on him. His wife Mary, who came from Hawaii and obviously had Polynesian as well as Portuguese blood in her, was a good head taller than her husband, robust and not particularly good-tempered. They had two children, Ernie a boy my brother’s age and Lydia a girl my age, but because the driveway to their house opened onto Ashland Avenue, they went to Ashland Grammar School, rather than the San Lorenzo school my brothers and I attended. It was from their mother I learned the few Portuguese phrases I knew: “Vai p’ra casa,” foremost among them.
She was beholden to my Grandfather Smith (of the Pico Smiths, for, despite his name, both of his parents had been born on that tiny island) for her husband’s inadequate salary, she was even beholden to him for the rickety old house they lived in, with indoor plumbing but nothing resembling central heating, not even a fireplace, but she was damned if she was going to be beholden to any of the Smith princelings for anything, and though few women in San Lorenzo were strong enough to resist my efforts to charm them, Mary Freitas was certainly one of them. She refused to be seduced by my best efforts and was always shooing me on my way.
The Freitases also raised chickens, which they let run free in the day time, which proved a temptation Pug was unable to resist, and after he killed the third Freitas chicken, Pug, my father decided, had to go, and he disappeared as mysteriously and as suddenly as he had appeared with no great sadness on the part of any of us.
My Grandfather Silva raised rabbits for my grandmother’s famous recipe of marinated rabbit stew. It was my favorite of all her dishes – at least until I discovered what had to be done before the rabbit reached my plate. Unlike chickens, rabbits, with their startled ears, like exclamation points, their furry coats and pink eyes, were things of beauty, yet my grandfather, otherwise the gentlest of men, would take one out of its hutch, holding it by the ears, and within thirty seconds turn this lovely breathing creature into a piece of raw meat, with a swift chop of the side of his hand to the back of the rabbit’s neck, followed by an even swifter slit with a sharp knife, like pulling down a zipper, and the fur coat was peeled off as easily as a winter mitten. I was both fascinated and repelled and invariably squealed, to my grandfather’s initial delight. What made this staunch, unsentimental brutality even more inexplicable to me was that my grandfather knew what it was like to love an animal, for he had a Chesapeake Bay retriever he was devoted to. Like his master, Skipper was large and gentle and I rode him like a pony when I was very young.
After my third squeal, every bit as horror-stricken as the first, my grandfather ceased to be amused and decided I needed a lesson in the facts of animal life. So he took me, aged eight, to what was to be my most memorable and shocking view of death until his own death a year later: the annual slaughter of the Mouras’s hog.
cont…
NOTE: “Coming to Terms with the Facts of Animal Life” was published on this blog Comunidades on January 7, 2009. This month of February, Comunidades celebrates its third anniversary, and to commemorate this date we will be reviewing some original versions of texts published here in the last three years.