by RICK DANLEY // October 14, 2016
It had been a crisp blue autumn morning when, around 11:30 a.m., a single rain cloud stalled over Gilbert Covey’s farm.
“Starting to sprinkle a little bit,” said Covey, who stood amid a cluster of small outbuildings south of the family farmhouse. Heavy drops pelted the cement slab where Covey stood; 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 and all at once the sun reappeared and poured through the branches. The dappled light cast strange elongated shapes onto Covey’s blue shirt, and as the branches moved in the breeze, the shapes swayed like coral and gave the appearance, briefly, that the farmer and the bird were underwater.
Gilbert 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, “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.”
In the decades before the metal funnel came along, Covey managed his chicken slaughter the old-fashioned way: He strung the birds upside down from a clothesline and took a knife to them one after another, allowing the heads to fall to the ground whereupon his dogs would scoop them up in their mouths. (Covey still lets his dogs, Princess and Bella, feast on the detached heads. “Dogs don’t care,” explained Covey.)
“You know, it used to be real tough for me to do that, with the chickens,” said Covey, who is a deeply friendly man with a tender demeanor. “Especially when I raised them myself, you know, from the time they’re a day old. But, now, it don’t bother me anymore.”
AFTER A FEW minutes, Charles’s neck-hole was sufficiently drained. Sam removed the bird from the metal funnel and dunked him in a nearby tub of scalding water, which loosened the feathers. From there, he dropped the sopping chicken in a large cylindrical contraption that looked not unlike a cotton candy maker but is in fact an electric “plucker,” the barrel of which is porcupined with dozens of rubber prongs. Sam flipped a switch and the plucker lurched to life, spinning the headless chicken in an accelerated tumble-dry while Charles’s feathers were sifted out through a slot at the bottom of the machine.
Until this year, Covey had always plucked his chickens by hand.
After about 10 seconds, the machine stopped. Covey reached in and hauled the bird out by one of its giant, rubbery, cartoonish-looking claws. “See?” he said, pointing to Charles, who without his feathers looked as pink and naked as a baby.
“Hey, but have you ever seen one cleaned?” asked Covey.
DIANA COVEY, standing at a utility sink in another of the outbuildings, ran her knife expertly around the plucked chicken, removing its claws and tail and clearing out its entrails.
“I most definitely married into this life,” joked Diana, who pulled a tightly wound package of guts from an opening in the pimpled carcass and dropped it with a splash into a pail with all the rest. “I came from Fort Scott, see, and we didn’t do this in town.”
She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with the back of her wrist. “People ask me where I live and I tell them, ‘In the boonies.’” Diana went back to cutting but then stopped abruptly. “Oh, no — look,” she said, targeting her husband with a look of mock-accusation.
“Oh, I kno-oow,” wailed Covey, in his high-pitched drawl. “See, she’s always telling me not to feed them the night before. Because — see that? That’s the craw, where the grain goes,” he said, pointing to the bird and to a swollen, membranous sac poking out of its torso, which Diana gripped resentfully. “But I tell her, ‘I can’t do that to my babies! Can’t leave them hungry.’ Even though I know I’m going to kill them the next day.”
After finishing the chicken Diana packed it neatly into a plastic bag and tied the top and handed it to Sam, who carried it over to the freezer and placed it next to the others.
The Coveys will go on to kill and clean nearly 100 chickens over the course of three days. “I’ll be glad to be done,” said Covey, who, on Monday, still had 70 or so left to go. “I took care of them myself, you see. I’d come out and water and feed them every morning, and feed and water them every night, and then I’d bed them down. I’d clean the floors once a week. I’m 68, you see, and ready to slow down a little bit.”
GILBERT AND DIANA have been married nearly 40 years. They have a grown son, Andrew, and daughter, Sarah, both of whom still live on the farm. Sam, who Covey routinely calls “a great help,” is Sarah’s boyfriend. The Coveys don’t sell the meat they raise. Including grandkids, there are 10 mouths on the farm to feed. Along with canned produce and fresh vegetables from the garden, they are, at this point, very nearly “self-sustaining,” as Diana describes it.
“I’ve really enjoyed my life,” said Covey. “I’ve had a good family and that’s worth everything. I believe, I really do, that the good Lord is on my side. This is where I want to be.”
To meet Gilbert Covey on his home turf, you have to drive a million miles into the heart of rural Allen County, up dusty hills and across narrow, low-water bridges, a land of fence lines and painterly skies and large, solitary hawks that drop from the tops of telephone poles into the assumption of a weightless flight.
A soybean field runs up to the Coveys’ backdoor and, on the other side, the farm looks out on a wide, quilted valley. “It must be a beautiful place to live,” I suggest.
“It is. It is,” Covey says, pulling uneasily on the brim of his hat. “I mean, it’s pretty nice, and of course we like it up here. But, listen, right now, we’ve really got to kill these chickens.”
This article first appeared in The Iola Register on October 14, 2016.
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