The Executioner

Gretchen is an animal lover. Even though we owned a couple of dogs, and a couple of cockatiels, and a parakeet, and an aquarium full of fish, she felt a great void in her life. It was a void that could only be filled by the addition of chickens, like live ones living in the back yard. 

If you ever want to try your hand and suburban chicken ranching it is an easy thing to do. Just build a hutch, or better yet get your spouse to build one, then go to  mypetchicken.com. There you can point and peck your way to the purchase of poultry paradise. She did this. She selected the birds she wanted and when the chicks hatched they were sent out the next day via express mail. They were only 99 cents each. ( + shipping and handling. No warranty expressed or implied. Void where prohibited.)  

 

The post office called and said:
"You have a package that peeping."

It was clear from the start that one of the hatchlings had a problem, it couldn’t hold its head up. That meant it couldn't feed or otherwise go about its chicken business. I called it floppy neck syndrome. Gretchen asked we what we should do. I said, “Hell it was only a buck. Just throw it in the trash and get yourself another one.” 

Oops. Based on her apoplectic response I quickly gathered that I answered incorrectly.

She told me that since this living creature was under our care we had a moral obligation to it and it's health and well being. Furthermore, we needed to be mindful and respectful of its dignity.  This lecture went on for longer than I thought the situation warranted. I'm just glad she couldn’t figure out how to work the PowerPoint. 

Needless to say she did NOT take my advice.

She went online and did some research. She found out a small percentage of chicks started their lives with this condition and it was developmentally linked. That meant if she could maintain nutrition long enough, there was a chance that it would grow out of it. So she embarked upon a feeding program. She would feed this chicken every three hours. She would get up in the middle of the night to feed the chicken. If she had to go somewhere during the day she would take the chicken with her. Sure enough, in just 8 weeks there was no change in the chicken, but Gretchen was exhausted. Again she came to me and said “What should we do?” 

This time I replied “whatever YOU think is best.”

She gave it some thought and came up with a novel solution. We owned a rectangular Tupperware container, like the one used for brownies. She figured if she sealed the chick inside with a container of vinegar and baking soda it would purge the environment of oxygen. When that happened, the pullet would slip into a catatonic catnap of permanent proportions. First she made a little bed out of Kleenex, but only after she searched the house to find kind that had lotion in them, because they were softer. Then she put the chick on the bed with the vinegar mix beside it and closed the lid.

You could rinse it out.

About an hour later she wondered how everything was going so she peeked inside. This let in a gust of fresh air and the chicken took a deep breath as if to say “Whew! Thanks man, it was really getting stuffy in here!” I said “Gretchen! You can’t do that! You’ve got a good idea but you have to give it a chance to work.” So she reset the contraption. She put the bird back on its bed and closed the lid again, making sure to include a brand new homeopathic death cocktail. Then we went to bed.

The next morning she gently peeled back the lid to the Tupperware and that chicken sat bolt upright. It looked perfectly healthy. It held its head up high. It was a miracle! It was also short lived, because by lunchtime its head was flopping over again. When I got home from work I knew the decision had been made because at the far side of the yard a site was prepared. There was a newly dug a hole with hatchet next to it. 

I took the chicken, gently and respectfully, and placed on the ground next to hole. I struck it once with the hatchet, but been very rainy, and the ground was muddy, so all that did was push its head down into the dirt while its body flopped around. So I gave it another chop. And then another. About this time Gretchen yelled across the yard: “That seems like a lot of whacks over there!” By this time I was windmilling like Pete Townsend in concert. 

Pete with his ax.

When I was finished I went over and offered Gretchen my condolences and told her that the yard had been returned to its original, all-natural state. She said, “What in the world was going on over there??” I told her that the ground was really soft and so the euthanasia wasn’t as straight forward as we would have liked. She was irritated when she asked, “Did you see the rock that I put there? What did you think that was for??”

I said, “Yeah, I noticed that. I figured it was a headstone. So I just propped it up, you know, at the end of the grave there.” Then she snidely said, “No. That was OB-VI-OUS-LY a chopping block.” This irritated me. First, the way she drew out the word “obviously”, it was like she was pronouncing each syllable as a separate word. The meaning was: you are so incredibly stupid. 

What the hell was she talking about anyway? She is the one that said we had a moral obligation to this stupid McNugget. She is the one that said need to always be considerate of its innate dignity. She had all kinds of hippy-wack-a-doodle ideas so it made perfect sense to me that she would want her defective 99-cent chicken to have a goddam headstone! 

Besides, you would never use a rock as a decapitory aid, it would ruin the blade of the ax. I thought if I explained this to her she would immediately see the soundness of my thinking. I could see her saying "I was wrong about that. You are right, of course." Then I would bask in the glow of her contrition.

It didn't work out that way.

I said, "No. That was not a chopping block, because chopping blocks are made of wood. Headstones are made of rock." 

And the defense rested.

She wasn’t fazed. With arms folded across her chest and looking  bored almost to the point of sleep, she monotoned: “really.”

Now her attitude was starting to piss me off. I said, “YES. REALLLY!”

Then she let out a big breath and said really sarcastically: “soooo……did you learn that when you were in EXECUTIONER School?”

My Yearbook Photo

“YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU ARE A COMPLETE IDIOT!!!”

“YOU ARE!!!”

About three seconds later we simultaneously said, “OK. Let’s go get a beer.” As we sat on the screen porch she said over and over “so you thought it was a headstone” and then she’d chuckle. I said, “Look Gretchen, headSTONES are made of rock. 'Stone' is even included in the word. And when your kids played with blocks were they made of rocks? No, they were made of wood because BLOCKS ARE MADE OF WOOD.”

Blocks, made of wood, RIGHT???

I don’t know. Maybe sometimes I am too literal.