Killing a Turkey at Belle’s
Belle said I could have a turkey for Christmas if I killed it.
My children are in a field picking dried red chilies off frozen vines,
crushing them with their small fingers.
In the greenhouse we fill two sacks with the fresh basil
still growing up from the earth floor,
water what is left of the kale.
Soon it will all freeze.
Belle said it was easy to kill a turkey.
She would do one first and show me.
We walk to another field, closer to the river
and dig potatoes that will be cut up,
healed over for planting in the spring—
several pounds budding from each small seed piece,
a hand producing more fingers than it needs.
A muster of turkeys come racing up from the bosque
as if they were a litter of puppies and run toward the children,
that crimson skin on their necks bobbing like tongues.
The children run away from the turkeys,
who start to run away from them,
and then back again toward each other,
until my girl gets dizzy and slices her wrist on the barbed wire fence
she falls against to stop herself from falling.
I return without the children to kill the turkey.
Belle watches me get out of my car as she finishes
scrubbing her kitchen window.
She was raised in a family of 10 children,
wants none of her own. The turkeys
are foraging in the dirt for kitchen scraps tossed
under the killing cones, which hang like lanterns on a rope
suspended between two ancient cottonwoods.
Belle comes out of the house with black mitts on her hands
carrying an iron caldron of scalding water in front of her.
She puts the water down by the trees,
grabs a turkey by its neck
flips it over so she’s holding only its feet,
pushes its head through a cone, gives a tug at the neck,
then with one sweep of a machete,
its head falls to the ground.
Blood rushes out, a dam released,
pours copiously over the cold dirt, while steam
floats out from the head on the ground,
rises from the pool of blood.
Belle and I watch as the turkey’s still beating heart
pumps all the fluid out of its body.
She takes the limp bird down, dunks it
in the hot water to soften it for plucking.
I can’t do it.
The neckless bird is the shape of a swaddled
newborn baby. Belle says I should take the one she killed.
She will kill another one for herself.
She wraps it in newspaper,
puts it in a strong grocery bag with handles,
sets it in the back of my car.
We grab some blankets from the house,
walk through the yellow fields, down to the Rio Grande,
and sit on the bank throwing pebbles to her dog,
who curves his front paws into scythes
as he digs and digs in the shallow icy river,
below the freezing mud, reaping colored stones
from the barren water.