Everyone enjoyed Saturday-night dinners with Winifred. The conversation was more animated. Elsa perked up and her complexion looked healthier, which made Mary relax. Once, we played cards afterwards and Winifred even had a beer with me, but it became obvious that Elsa didn’t have the capacity to play hearts anymore, so the game ended and the TV was switched on before she could become too flustered.
I was always the third wheel at these dinner parties, trying to find my way into conversations that debated the merits of different furnace brands or analyzed the year’s weather predictions from the Farmers’ Almanac. All my references to literature or pop culture fell flat, despite Mary’s or my attempts to explain the context. They didn’t intentionally ostracize me, but I was outside all the same. Tonight, though, I couldn’t even try to engage. My attention was torn between the chicken in the center of the table and Mary’s profile as she refereed the conversation.
“That doesn’t look very good.” Winifred leaned over my plate and poked at my veggie burger.
“Try it if you want.” I got up and grabbed a Coke from the fridge.
“They’re actually pretty tasty,” Mary put in. “Especially grilled and with some cheese and tomato on top. They make great lunches.”
“No, thanks, Winifred replied. “I only eat food I recognize.”
Then she and Elsa launched a discussion of the quality of various TV dinners. I took a long drink.
After dinner Mary and I tackled the cleanup. She washed the dishes and tossed comments into the older ladies’ discussion via the pass-through window between the kitchen and living room, just like everything was normal. Her hands were scalded red from the hot water. I couldn’t stop staring at them. She laughed at something, then caught my expression and sobered as she handed me a plate to dry.
As soon as the kitchen was in order I excused myself and went upstairs. I’d been spending more and more time in the spare room, which was obvious from the piles of books and stacks of student papers covering the tops of the dusty storage boxes. The heat from the oven had drifted up, stifling the air in the tiny space. Opening a window that screamed against its sash, I began picking up books at random. Lifting one, I traced the gilt in the cover, then grabbed another and checked a date I already knew. I flipped to arbitrary pages and read a few lines, then turned to the next book and the next. I couldn’t settle into any of them, couldn’t make myself forget what happened today.
The worst part was that it had been my idea in the first place.
Show me what to do with the chickens and I’ll take some shifts with them. Give you a breather, I’d offered the other day. It was a desperate move on my part. I could think of a thousand things I’d rather do to reclaim my marriage besides clean up chicken shit, but all my efforts with Elsa were failing. Whether it came from pride or shame, she allowed only Mary to help her with most tasks, and whenever I asked her how she felt the answer was the same. “Fine, fine.” So chicken shit it was. Although she raised her eyebrows when I made the suggestion, Mary agreed.
Since school started I’d been sleeping in on Saturday mornings, but even after grading papers late into the night I staggered out of bed at 5:30 today and trudged along behind her through the yard, which wasn’t even touched by the gray before dawn.
She showed me how to collect, wash, and store the eggs, how to clean up the excrement, and how to replace the straw as needed. We fed them while they lurched around and pecked at our boots, following us with their blank, beady stares. She lectured about how to look for disease and sickness and then she picked up one of the hens and carried it to the back of the main barn and killed it.
I didn’t even realize what was happening until Mary had the knife in her hands.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Her voice was matter-of-fact. The blade flashed pink from the sunrise and the bird struggled to free itself from her grip.
“Is it sick? What’s wrong with it?”
The bird’s eyes were rolling frantically now and I couldn’t seem to focus on anything else.
“Nothing’s wrong with it. Winifred’s coming over for dinner tonight.”
And with that she severed the bird’s head from its body and blood spewed onto the ground. The body flopped and rolled, as if unaware of its own death and frantically trying to recover the piece it had lost. I stumbled backward until I ran into the barn wall. If there’d been anything in my stomach, I would have heaved it right over that fountain of blood. Mary went to a nearby hose and washed off the knife like she’d been slicing a birthday cake, angling it to one side and then the other until I could see her face in the blade.
The bird bounced over to me and I ran away from it, which made Mary roll her eyes.
“It’s just a chicken, Peter. You don’t run away from them in the grocery store.”
“They don’t run at me in the grocery store!” I yelled.
“I’ll probably roast it with some potatoes, but I’ll throw on something separate for you.”
I didn’t answer. She stood on one side of the headless chicken and I stood on the other without any idea how to respond to her polite offer to make me a vegetarian meal.
The thing was, most of my friends would have been impressed. Chick’s got brass balls, I could hear them saying. Even when she’d outmaneuvered them with her easy logic on whatever issue being debated at the bar—raising minimum wage or the literary effect of Harry Potter on the millennials—she always bought them a beer and made them laugh in the end. If I told them about what happened today, they would’ve raised her status to legendary.