The Other Way Around (20 page)

“It's nice right here. Come on up.”

She drops her bag of apples and scrambles up beside me. She leans back in a little crook right next to me and lays her legs across my lap. She drums her fingers quietly on her leg. Her fingernails are gnawed down to nothing. “You're right,” she says, surveying the surroundings. “It is pretty nice up here.” She tips her head back so it rests against the tree. “Andrew, what are you going to do when this is all over?”

“Eat apple crisp,” I say, even though I'm pretty sure that's not what she means.

“Seriously.”

“Seriously? I don't know. Go back to school, I guess. Go back to my old life.” It's the second time I've said it in an hour, and it's starting to sound more and more like a plan.
But not yet
, I want to tell her,
not yet
. I wonder if G thinks I'm wimping out by running back to my suburban lifestyle instead of heading off like Gene into uncharted waters. I know I'll be different somehow, and hopefully everything else will be different too.

G sighs. “I think you should be writing some of this down.”

“Some of what down?”

“This! You know, this moment and this tree and this farm and everything. And what you think about it. Because once you get back into your life, you're going to wonder what it all meant.”

“Did Ms. Tuttle send you?”

“Who?”

“Never mind,” I say. I know she's right, but I'm not going to give her the satisfaction of being my Yoda. I swing down from the tree and pick up my bag of apples. “What about you, G, are you writing this all down?”

“This?” she says. “This
is
my life. Nothing confusing about that.” It's meant to be a joke, but I hear a tiny bit of sadness in her voice. She must hear it too, because she screams out “Geronimoooo,” jumps out of the tree, and tackles me in the grass.

That night during dinner I get up from the table and go the bathroom. Next to the composting toilet is a warped mirror framed by chunks of broken pottery. I stare at myself in the mirror, and I'm honestly a little surprised by what I see. My eyes seem brighter, and there are a few more freckles on my nose. My hair has grown out a little bit. It's almost as shaggy as
Jesse's. I touch the back of my head where I always pat down an annoying cowlick, but it's all grown in. Jesse's green-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt is the same one I've been wearing for days. It's become like my St. Mary's uniform. I think about what Lindsay said and wonder what she sees that sets me apart from the Freegans and if that's a good or a bad thing.

The next morning G wakes me up by shaking my tent on her way to pee. “Wake up, sleepyhead. It's time to earn our keep.” I cross paths with a frazzled-looking Tim staggering out of the woods. There's a long red scratch across his left cheek.

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“Freakin' nature,” he says. “I found a great crap spot and then, right as I'm squeezing one out, something snaps behind me. I jumped up so fast I practically took a dump in my pants, and I got this,” he gestures at the scratch on his face. “I hate camping,” he says in a low voice. “I'm sleeping in the van tonight.” I laugh and walk past him to find a place to conduct my own bit of morning business. Afterwards I put on the cleaner of my two filthy T-shirts and walk over to the farmhouse, where Skye has laid out some homemade bread and jam.

Lindsay is perched on a wooden stool, licking the jam off her bread. It's a little bit sexy, but mostly kind of gross. Jesse and Jeremiah appear deep in conversation over a seed catalog. Emily, G, and Tim wander in after a while and help themselves to some bread. After everyone has eaten, Jeremiah outlines the plan for the day. Skye is going to work on getting their restaurant orders
ready to deliver in Fort Smith. They mostly supply places in Hot Springs, but there are a few places in Fort Smith that order greens and root vegetables from them. Jeremiah is going to kill chickens.

“Normally, I'd wait another month or so. But it's a lot of work for just the three of us, and since you guys are here, I thought I'd take advantage of the extra hands,” he explains. “We'll have a fried chicken feast tonight, and we'll put away the rest for winter.” He turns and looks at Jesse. “I imagine you would rather see what Skye's doing today, since it's more of the business end. The rest of you can pick whatever you have the stomach for.”

“I'll kill chickens,” Tim volunteers. “I've had enough plants and trees for one day,” he whispers.

“Me too,” I say, because it seems like the more interesting of the two options.

“I would rather work in the gardens,” Emily says primly. G and Lyle don't seem to have a preference, so Jeremiah sends Lyle off with Skye, and G comes with us. Jeremiah heads off to the barn to gather a few things and says he'll meet us up by the chicken trailer in a few minutes. When we arrive at the chicken trailer, Emily is there. Her head is bowed toward the ground and her arms are slightly extended with her palms up.

“Did you change your mind?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “But I wanted to say good-bye to them and thank them for their life and spirit.”

“Oh,” I say. I'm hoping she finishes before Jeremiah gets there. After another minute she drops her hands and raises her head.

“I think they're ready to go now,” she says with a completely straight face. She walks over and squeezes my hand
before heading back down the hill to catch up with Skye and the others. I watch her go; her too-big jeans are held up around her skinny hips with a paisley-patterned men's tie. I've been practicing a conversation in my head for several days now—a conversation in which I try to make it clear, without sounding too pathetic and desperate, how much I want to kiss her again.

Jeremiah backs his old pickup into the pasture, and we help him unload the supplies piled in the flatbed. We set up a couple of folding tables and roll out an enormous wooden stump with two nails protruding from the top. The stains and bits of feather left on the stump leave no question about what it's for.

Jeremiah gets a fire going and organizes the equipment as he explains the process to us. “Catching the birds can actually be the tricky part,” he says. “But once you have one, you need to tie up its legs and swing it around a few times over your head. That will make it sleepy. Then one of you needs to hang on to the legs and one of you needs to swing the axe.” He stops and looks critically at us and then down at our footwear. “On second thought, I brought a sledgehammer too. I think I'd rather have you guys swing that. That way one person can just rest the axe on the chicken's neck and the other person brings down the sledgehammer on top of the axe. It would hurt a lot if you missed and hit yourself with a hammer but it probably wouldn't mean as much bloodshed.”

“I call feet,” G says.

“I want to swing the hammer,” Tim says.

“I guess that leaves me holding the axe.”

“Classic,” says G, and she smirks at me.

Jeremiah nods. “Okay, whatever you want. Once it stops moving—and it will move around a bit—you need to bring
it over here to the water.” He points at an enormous stainless steel pot of water that is beginning to bubble over a large propane stove. “We dunk the birds for a minute or so to loosen the feathers and then we string them up over here to let the blood drain and pluck them. Once they're bare you can bring them over to me at that other table, and I'll gut and quarter them. They're pretty much ready to go in the freezer or the frying pan after that.”

I look over inside the plastic fence surrounding the chicken trailer. The birds are busy pecking at the ground and at each other. A few curious ones have come over to inspect our setup. It's hard to imagine them as the pale pink pieces of meat stuffed neatly on Styrofoam trays that I've seen in my refrigerator.

Jeremiah is right about catching the birds. Part of it is my own timidity. I've been eating all kinds of meat my whole life, but I still don't really want to pick the ones to die, so I sort of halfheartedly chase them around in circles. Tim gets the first bird and lets out a cowboy-style “Yahoo!” as he swings it over his head.

I look away when Tim brings the sledgehammer down on top of the axe, but the smell of fresh blood fills the air immediately—a warm, metallic smell like rain hitting a summer pavement. By the fifth bird my sneakers and the bottoms of my jeans are spattered with chicken blood, bile, and tiny feathers. The pile of heads next to the stump grows, and my stomach turns over a little less each time one hits the ground. We do five at a time and then pluck them before moving on to the next group. Some of the feathers are hard to get out and if the bird gets cold sometimes we have to dunk it twice. When the feathers come out, they leave a small pucker in the skin that
contracts and closes up. With the feathers are gone, the birds look more and more like meat. It's a lot of reality, and for the first hour I'm pretty queasy about the whole thing. But when I think about eating fried chicken that night, the feeling goes away. I watch sidelong as Jeremiah instructs Tim on how to gut the birds; first slitting them up the middle without puncturing any of the noxious organs and then pulling out the entrails whole. After that they're quartered. I'm interested, but not so interested that I want to be invited to participate.

Sometime in the early afternoon Skye comes up with sandwiches and a huge pitcher of iced tea, which I gulp down greedily. I didn't think that after seeing so much blood I would have the stomach to eat, but I devour the food in front of me. “Come on down when you're done,” Skye tells us. “I'll get the big tub going for all your clothes.” We kill, de-feather, and gut the last bird by midafternoon, but it takes a couple more hours to get everything cleaned up.

“Strip,” Skye orders me when I find her tending the fire beneath a huge metal washtub outside the farmhouse. I'm so excited about the prospect of clean clothes that I shamelessly shed everything but my boxers and toss it into the bubbling tub. “Emily said you didn't have a lot of extra stuff, so I left you a towel and a few things of Jeremiah's outside the shower. Why don't you go wash up before we start cooking supper?”

I knock lightly on the wood next to the faded green paisley curtain that stands in for a bathroom door. “Drew?” Emily calls. “Is that you? You can come in.” Emily's face is flushed and pink from the shower, and she's wearing only a blue towel that's lost most of its pile. She's rubbing some sort of beige cream into her face. “Isn't this stuff amazing?” Emily gushes. “Skye makes
it. It's like an exfoliating cream or something. She told me to try it after my shower.” I sit down on the closed toilet next to her and give a big sniff. It smells a bit like oranges and a bit like almonds. She puts one foot up on my knee and continues rubbing the lotion into her calf. “Man I forgot how tiring working on a farm is. My back is killing me. Maybe you can give me one of those killer massages later.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. I'm staring at the foot on my knee, trying really hard not to look up at the gap where the towel doesn't quite come together. Emily is preoccupied with her lotion, and if she notices my interest in her towel, she doesn't say anything. She moves on to the other leg and keeps talking. “Skye and Jeremiah are really amazing people. It's too bad about Lindsay though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she totally rejects everything they've worked so hard to create here.”

“Well, isn't that kind of normal? I mean just because her parents are kinda cool and hippies doesn't mean she's going to want to be like them any more than you and I want to be like our parents.”

Emily sighs. “And she's a total skank.”

“Whoa, really? You think so?”

“You should watch out, Drew. You should have heard the way she was talking about you today out in the fields. It was like she'd never seen a guy before.”

“Maybe she's just never seen such a fine specimen,” I joke, but Emily ignores me.

“And I was all, like, I'm trying to pick kale here and just be in the moment and she's just going on and on about you and
asking me about you. It got really annoying.” I wait for details without saying anything. But Emily just shakes her head and goes back to her lotion. When she's done, she puts the ceramic lid back on the container, sighs again, and sits down squarely on my lap. I adjust my head a little so her wet mop of dreads isn't right in my face. But Emily takes my arms and wraps them around her, pulling me in close again. “I used to love this,” she says.

“What?” I say quietly.

“Being wrapped up in a towel and held.” So I hold her and we don't say anything else for five or maybe ten minutes. It's only closeness; there's nothing really sexual about it. “I'm getting cold,” she finally says and turns to plant a small, chaste kiss on my lips. “I think that's the stuff Skye left for you.” Pointing to a pile of clothes and a towel in the corner, she leaves me sitting on the toilet with a cold damp space where her warm body just was.

When Skye brings the chicken out on a big silver sheet pan, brown and glistening from the hot oil, all my memories of blood and soggy feathers fly out the window. I was nervous about the rest of the Freegans, but they all assured me that they were willing to eat meat if they knew where it came from, who raised it and killed it. Everyone except for Emily. “I'll try,” she had said primly. “I'm just not sure my body still produces the enzymes to digest meat.” G snorted and rolled her eyes.

Emily puts the smallest drumstick on her plate and gnaws at it gingerly. Everyone else dives in with gusto. Watching vegetarians eat meat is truly something to behold. Jesse, Tim, and G are stuffing it in as fast as they can, barely bothering to wipe the smears of chicken grease from around their mouths.