The air was very fresh this weekend, this weekend that is a virtual glut of significance to people like me. Yesterday was St. Martin’s Day…and though I am not Catholic, I grew up a bit in Catholic Bavaria. Where we visited palaces alight with spectacular paper lanterns illuminated by candles inside. Also, the next day, November 11th, was always the old Armistice Day (now Veterans’ Day) in America. In Catholic parts of Germany, it was the first day of Fasching—that season of festival and party before Lent. Not for the potent beer-fueled Bavarians a mere weak few weeks of festival, no…it begins in November with solemn statuary of heros and saints draped with balloons and festooned with ribbons. And of old, this is the weekend of slaughter on farms—any livestock not worth feeding through the long dark winter ahead met its doom at this time.
And for me, the New Moon coincided with this weekend. The new moon is when I check my bead counters against the death counts, and if I have even hundreds more, I string more beads. Yesterday, being so driven with the intensity of carrying the strands in and making certain of the count, I mentally blanked on the whole Armistice Day and St. Martin’s significant synchronicities, but wondered why the counting, beading, and replacing strands on the monument so completely totaled me. One of two first public openings of the Walk of the Fallen was upon this day in 2003—and one of the guests told me she “saw” rank upon rank of military men standing as if in a giant skyward amphitheater—as if witnessing our rites of honor and grief. That story, from a stranger raised the hair on my neck then, but made me wonder if she had forgotten her medication, too. I don’t much “see”….though the place is uncanny enough even with my metaphysical blindness.
I woke this morning, the task of the beads done, and the weeping afterwards done, but with more tasks ahead. It is Veterans’ Day….and in tune with St. Martin’s Day, today is the appointed death day for the excess ducks—the four drakes destined for Yule tables. I down half a cup of coffee and go out to be Lady Death to the big fluffy, handsome gray-headed buff drakes. My son waits with the freshly grinding wheeled axe, my one-time vegetarian husband reluctantly standing by to help. The plan was that I would catch the ducks, since they are most docile and catchable for me; my son would kill them and the two men would together clean and dress them. The look on my poor Minotaur husband’s face tells me that is not going to work. I get the first duck, petting the so-silken throat as I carry it forth to doom; apologizing not in guilt, but real compassion. We all die, we are all meat for some other being—the ducks feed us; we humans someday quite possibly will fall victim to single-celled raptors who won’t make our doom nearly so rapid.
My ducks have led a good life since Memorial Day when they came here as wee ducklings. They roam free all day, with plentiful food and wild forage. All summer they had a large pondful of water to play in, and the sprinklers to boot. They didn’t grow fat on feed in a cage barely larger than their own bodies; they have not been terrorized by over crowding or artificial light. We have known from the start that we would keep a couple Rouen drakes and all the egg laying females; but the excess six buff drakes we got were table-bound. We met a fair amount of resistance to the idea in casual conversation—how COULD we kill them? We had raised them from babies, just how could we?
But that is just it, you see. I wonder at the shoppers who go to the meat counter clear-conscienced. Those benighted creatures did grow up in horrific conditions, often sick and medicated to keep them eating, when the unnatural diet itself was eroding their insides. Poultry raised for market lead misery filled lives…..bills chopped half off so they don’t peck their packed like sardines neighbors to death through the wire, for instance. My ducks had glorious if short lives. The great horned owl of the area got a couple of them before we got an adequate shelter completed, but even those deaths were fast and yes, utterly and absolutely natural.
The deaths this morning were not so ‘natural’ as the owl’s predation, but they were fast and merciful. My muscled son struck the first with such ferocious dispatch that the very large block of wood split clean with the blow, along with the ducks neck. Any meat eater who never kills his own, at least once, cannot possibly feel the intensely intimate connection with the world as it is before the cellophaned market meat racks that modern man counts upon. It is a good reminder, a healthy reminder, that for us to live as we will, something else dies—every day, virtually every day. A profound sense of gratefulness comes to those who shed the blood themselves. There is no enjoyment in the killing, simply a sense of place, so to speak. Today was the turn of the four drakes…some day, it will be my turn. The yard cat came to watch the results of our “hunt” and seemed impressed with our prowess. The offal was taken down front to feed the wintering ravens and crows; the ducks were plucked and cleaned and washed and bagged for freezing. It took a long while; I am about 40 years out of practice at cleaning ducks—my father hunted and I was his aide. The remaining two drakes and five females are browsing the yard, untroubled now. So, there, that for tradition, St. Martin.
The new moon has had her fill of my tears for the fallen, those whose names I read and pour libations upon the stone for each time the list grows. The tradition of fall slaughter seemed strangely appropriate this morning, perhaps something so painful to the non-experienced, non-farm wife let out my inner pain and fury? Tonight cups will be raised, and poems about red poppies read aloud. And then, non-Catholic or not, a fasching-like indulgence of wine might tuck us all into our winter’s beds .
