It had been a crisp blue autumn morning when, around 11:30 a.m., a single rain cloud stalled over the farm of Gilbert Covey. Covey stood amid a cluster of small outbuildings. “Starting to sprinkle a little bit,” he said. Drops slowly began to pelt the cement slab where Covey stood; thwick…thwick, one here, one there, mixing with the many spots of fresh blood that already dotted the concrete.
Covey opened the door onto one of the nearby sheds. Inside, the floor was covered with straw. The elderly farmer entered. Dozens of white chickens with red combs scrambled in every direction. Covey, bending at the waist, shuffled undecidedly behind first one scurrying bird, then another.
“All right,” he said. “Who’s next?”
Sam, a young man who helps Covey on the farm, stood just outside the doorway. “Find Charles,” he called.
“Who?” said Covey.
“Charles.”
“Charles?”
Covey scooped up the first bird he could grab — whispering, “It’s OK, it’s OK” — before quickly exiting the shed and jerking the door shut behind him.
Covey hugged the bird to his chest and the two men walked around behind the outbuilding, where, beneath a canopy of trees, a single wooden post, about six feet tall, stood upright in the dirt. A large metal funnel was affixed to the beam at about head-height and below it was a white plastic bucket, its interior smeared with a bright layer of blood.
The rain stopped just as suddenly as it had begun and the sun came out and poured through the branches. The light cast strange elongated shapes onto Covey’s blue shirt, and as the branches moved in the wind, the shapes swayed, like coral, and gave the appearance, briefly, that he and the bird were underwater.
Covey lifted the dingy-white chicken over his head. The bird, which had squawked and fluttered desperately just a few minutes prior, now — even as it was turned upside down — emitted only a few muted clucks and then fell silent. Covey pressed the bird’s large tufted body headfirst into the silver funnel.
“I have to reach up there and grab their heads, because they can’t go down very far,” explained Covey, his hand crawling up through the narrow end of the chute.
Having found the bird’s head, he pulled until its slender neck was exposed. Covey lifted his knife, then paused, shooting me a quizzical look. “Most people don’t like to see stuff like this,” he said. “You OK?”
I mumbled something unmanly, but it was enough to satisfy Covey. He leaned forward, pressed the knife against the bird’s throat and, with a swift and violent swipe, he beheaded Charles.
“That’s all there is to it,” said Covey. “Just real fast. So they’re not in too much pain.”
The men rounded the outbuilding, joking and talking, and I followed, on sea legs, a few steps behind.
In back of us, the bird’s headless body continued to jerk in its receptacle.
“Sorry,” I said, pointing to the large yellow claws still visibly writhing above the lip of the metal cone, “but, like, how long will that, that, you know?”
“Well, we’ll leave it in there about five or six minutes,” said Covey, “to make sure we get the blood out.”
