Author: Russell Banks
Category: Literature
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Early on in the work at the lab and later at the sanctuary, before it had become my obsession and, in a way, my salvation, I wondered where the word chimpanzee had come from. It was a peculiar word, I thought. Whenever I said it aloud, I heard a combination of sounds that were slightly comical to me. Their name was a little bit ridiculous and thus ridiculing. Once, shortly after I started the sanctuary, I looked the word up in Woodrow’s battered old Webster’s Collegiate, because I hated calling them that, chimpanzees and chimps. Their name seemed to make subtle fun of them, to diminish and demean them, and was not at all a word like human or even like the names we give to other mammals putatively lower on the evolutionary ladder than chimps, like dogs and lions and horses.
It’s a bantu word from the Congo, meaning “mock-man”—a name derived, not from the creature’s own nature, but from its relation to us, to humans, as if its essential nature were a lesser version or a negation of ours. It’s the only species named in such a purposefully distancing way. It’s the not-human. The not-us. The un-man.
Maybe its scientific name would be better, I thought, more democratic somehow, since chimpanzees and humans belong to the same genus, Anthropopithicus. But, no, the zoologists had long ago named the creature Anthropopithicus troglodyte, and every mother’s child knows what a troglodyte is.
Nonetheless, I looked that word up, too, hoping, I suppose, that it would turn out actually to mean something like “a highly intelligent and sociable animal found in sharply decreasing numbers in the jungles of West Africa.” But a troglodyte is “one of various races or tribes of men (chiefly ancient or prehistoric) inhabiting caves or dens.”
It was circular and kept coming back to us—to not-us.
I KNEW THAT the truck had come to a stop beside the sea, for I smelled salt in the air, even from beneath the heavy tarp, and heard the waves breaking on the reef and sandbars beyond. I pushed my way out and inhaled the cool, fresh air of dawn. I grabbed my backpack, rolled off the bed of the truck, and swung down to the gravel roadway. The sky was milky in the east. Half hidden in the mists a few kilometers south, beyond the all-but-abandoned Freeport, was the humped back of Cape Mesurado, and sprawled across the cape like a rumpled, drunken sleeper was the city, Monrovia.
Mamoud leaned from the cab and said, “This where you tol’ me to put you, missy. Still got a ways to get to town, y’ know.”
I said no, this was fine, which puzzled him. He slowly rolled a cigarette and lighted it and studied me for a moment. “Don’ make no sense, missy,” he said. He studied me some more, as if for the first time considering my use to him and not his to me, and said, “Gimme some dash, missy.”
“I paid you already. We’re even.”
He shook his head no and licked his thin lips, took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Gimme dash,” he repeated, and when he reached for the handle to open the door and come out of the truck, I bolted—scrambling from the road down the crumbly landfill through the thorn bushes into the dark, gloomy gully below. I shoved my way through the brush down there for half a hundred yards or so, stumbling over garbage and old tires and broken bottles, sea wrack and road tossings, and then stopped, scratched on the face and bare arms by the puckerbushes, and waited there, crouched close to the wet ground, breathing hard, listening. Finally, I heard the door of the truck slam shut, and heard the truck chunk into gear and slowly move on down the road.
A light, cooling breeze drifted through the underbrush from the sea to land. I stood up and heard the waves lap the shore on the farther side of the gully and break on the reef a quarter mile out and smelled the stink of dead fish and wet sand. Then suddenly the yellow African sun was in the glowing sky, and dawn had been here and gone almost without my seeing it. There are no gray shades this close to the equator, no evening’s gloam or dawn’s early light. There’s night, and then there’s day, and night again. The wind shifted slightly, and I smelled wet, charred wood and rotting citrus and fresh human feces. I was alone.
No, I wasn’t alone. A dark brown young man, shirtless, scrawny, and wearing only a pair of pale blue nylon running shorts, stared at me from a few feet away. He backed off, eyes wide open, as if frightened of me—but why, I wondered, frightened of what? It should have been the other way around. But I was not afraid of him; he was exactly whom I should have expected to see there. It must have been my long, white hair, straight and undone—surely peculiar to him—my pale skin, the inexplicable presence of such a strange creature in what was probably his gully, his personal territory. All of that, I supposed. But there was something more than my oddity reflected off his wide-eyed gaze—it was as if he thought I was a jumby, a ghost.
He waggled a finger at me, no-no-no, turned, and scrambled back up the side of the gully to the road, and then away, in the same direction the truck had gone, towards the city.
A madman, I thought. He’ll never return now to this place, which had been his field, his little garden, where, like an insect, a dung beetle, he had learned to scavenge his daily food and safely hide himself at night. I had contaminated his place, put a ghost into it. I slung my pack onto my back and made my careful way along the garbage- and trash-strewn incline out of the gully and over the low ridge to the narrow beach below, away from the road, where I turned toward the city, the harbor, the mouth of the river, and the island in the river where, ten years earlier, I had abandoned my dreamers.
AT THE FARM in Keene Valley and throughout the village, I was thought to have gone out to Liberia as a Peace Corps volunteer and somewhere along the way had married an African man and had borne him three brown children. I had framed photographs of them in the house. “That’s me with my husband, Woodrow. And those are my sons when they were little boys, Dillon and the twins, Paul and William.” And then the photographs of my parents: “That’s my father. Yes, the Doctor Musgrave. And my mother. Both dead.” And no one else.
I volunteered as little as possible. In a partial and carefully reticent way, which people understood once they heard what I had to say, I let on that in the late 1980s, when Liberia erupted in civil war, my husband and sons had been caught up in the violence. “It’s one of those wars that never seem to end.”
I related this in a way that did not invite further questions, told my story in a low, flattened voice that deflected both inquiry and suspicion that I might be lying or had something to hide. “It was a terrible time… People were being brutally murdered… There was chaos everywhere… There still is.” And so on. It’s easy to construct a believable false story from a miscellany of partial truths.
People felt sorry for me and admired my reticence. In my neighbors’ and workers’ minds, even Anthea’s, Africa generally and the Republic of Liberia in particular were places from which any sane American woman would flee anyhow, whatever the cost. Everything I had told them, everything they heard in the post office, at church, at the Noonmark Diner, convinced my fellow citizens that I had suffered enough already. It was as if I had endured and miraculously survived a terrible disease, and no one wished to cause me unnecessary additional pain by asking for details.
THE DAY IN LATE AUGUST when I decided to return to Liberia arrived and passed in a normal enough manner. Frieda and Nan drove the pickup out to the northside orchard and were filling it with late McIntosh apples, and Cat was in the greenhouse seeding the last crop of lettuce for the season. The dogs slumbered in a circle of sunshine on the grass in front of the house. It was warm, in the high fifties by noon, and sunny—a golden day. The leaves of the maple trees, oaks, and birches in the cool spots along the river had begun turning, tinting the air with pale shades of reflected red and yellow and orange light. Occasionally the first Vs of Canada geese crossed the cloudless sky from north to south, their harsh calls and cries rousing the dogs, who looked at the sky and considered for a few seconds the idea of giving chase, if only to keep up appearances, then gave it up, yawned, and went back to sleep.
Soon there was something far more interesting for them. With the dogs�
�� help, Anthea and I herded the chickens together so we could pack them four to a crate. Though the dogs, Baylor and Winnie, easily kept the hens clustered in one corner of the large, fenced-in pen, the birds were hysterical—there’s no other word for it—making the job absurdly difficult and therefore slightly humiliating. Finally, however, we managed to crate enough to fill our standing orders, four dozen of them, all plump broilers, Rhode Island reds, and lugged the crated chickens to the shed that we call the butcher shop, an old tool shop with a cement floor, a double laundry sink, a hose, and a floor drain.
We waited till after lunch before beginning the nasty work of killing the chickens, which we do the old-fashioned way, with a machete and a wooden chopping block. The chopping usually falls to me, as if it were my responsibility, or perhaps my privilege, though I’m sure Anthea would do it if I asked her. I don’t really mind; Lord knows, I’ve seen worse. But it wouldn’t be nearly as unpleasant if, when you decapitated the chickens, they didn’t bleed the way they do—profusely and in spurts that last longer than you think they should—and their headless bodies didn’t scramble wildly around the shed as if in crazed search of eyes and mouths and tiny brains. It’s strange, I don’t really like poultry or birds generally. They don’t quite register with me as animals. They seem more like complicated plants or higher-order insects, and that’s more or less how I treat them, providing them from the moment they hatch with the same carefully calculated food, water, space, and shelter as I do the vegetables. Until it comes time to kill them, when they seem suddenly to possess all the familiar mammalian emotions—fear and sadness and love of life. Consequently, whenever I have to decapitate thirty or forty or fifty of the squawking, wild-eyed creatures in a row, it’s a stressful, wrenching time for me.
Yet I wouldn’t for a minute think of fobbing the job off onto Anthea or anyone else. It feels somehow just and necessary that I do it myself, that I let Anthea lay the puffed-up, panting body of the chicken against the block, that I slap my left hand around the creature’s small head as if covering a child’s coin purse, stretch out the neck, and with my right hand lift the machete over head and bring it swiftly down, as if driving a nail with a hammer, cutting cleanly through the neck with one stroke. I drop the head into the bucket beside the block, and Anthea tosses the body aside, to let it pump out as much of its blood as it can before the heart stops, and its body staggers in smaller and smaller circles, and finally flops over onto the concrete floor, quivers, shudders, and is dead. The dogs, who know what is happening now, are locked outside the butcher shop, barking wildly, almost joyfully, to be let in.
Forty-eight times I do this. Then we fill the double sinks with water that’s hot enough nearly to scald our gloved hands and gather up the still-warm bodies and dip them, and working in a kind of mindless fury, we yank the feathers out by the handful, tossing them in the air, hurrying, pulling feathers with both hands, before the skin of the hens cools and the feathers set and can’t be pulled out without tearing the flesh. We cover ourselves, each other, the entire room with feathers—making a bloody, gruesome mess of everything inside those four walls. We stack the naked, headless bodies of the chickens on a counter top, one on top of the other, until we have them arranged in a neat pile, a pink, squared mound of flesh, and all that’s left now is the removal of the innards, evisceration, which we do together, standing at the counter side by side with our slender knives, enlarging the anus, reaching into the body cavity and pulling out the organs, separating the liver, gizzard, heart, and kidneys, which we stuff into small plastic bags, and when we have washed the body in cold water, we shove the bag of organs back inside the cavity. Our long, white aprons and knitted wool caps and our faces, hands, and rubber boots are splashed with blood. Feathers and guts are stuck to us everywhere, as if we have been tarred and feathered by an angry mob. We are breathing hard. We have been at this for hours and are nearly done.
We wrap each body in plastic and again in paper, and now it is simply meat, food, protein and fat, ready to be delivered to the little Keene Valley Supermarket or picked up later today by our special-order customers—forty-eight organically fed, free-range chickens, a luxury item here in the Northcountry, hundreds of miles from any gourmet restaurant or store, sold at a price that’s competitive with mass-produced, chemically fed, chain-store chickens. I pity those poor sick creatures that, unlike our more fortunate hens, are dosed with antibiotics and spend their entire lives packed in tiny boxes under bright lights in food factories somewhere in Maryland or Arkansas, birds from start to finish raised, fed, watered, killed, plucked, and packaged entirely by shiny machines, never touched by human hands. Our creatures, we believe, have been provided with lives worth living, and they repay us with their healthy, clean bodies.
This, I have convinced myself, is our little battle won. It’s me and Anthea and the girls against Tyson’s and Frank Perdue and the industrialization of the food chain, and for us it justifies the carnage and the stress and high feelings that the bimonthly killing arouses in us. There’s still something of the ideologue inside me, I guess. All these years later. It explains why we find ourselves at the end of the day standing there, bloody and feathered and smelling of gore and guts; it tells us why we are near tears, panting, our chests heaving and our legs weak; and why we look at each other like suddenly estranged lovers. We’re doing it, by God, for a reason. It’s political.
“I never get used to this,” Anthea said and lighted a cigarette and with a shaking hand passed it to me and lighted another for herself.
I smoked and said nothing. There was still work to do, the cleanup. The dogs, sensing the fun was over, had drifted off, so I swung open the door of the butcher shop and let fresh air and late-afternoon sunlight into the room to dispel the smell of wet rust and motor oil, the odor of spilled blood and opened bodies—the stink of fresh death.
But there was something else, it was the residue of my dream of Africa, a stream of vague, almost erotic feelings that had been released in my sleep and then got left behind when I awoke and the dream dissipated and I could no longer call the generative images and story back to mind—a range of forgotten emotions that the killing of the hens today had summoned and now had suddenly brought forward and that unexpectedly and against my will had taken on the hard focus of a specific desire. I said to Anthea, “If I had to be gone a while, do you think you could run the farm? Could you handle it okay?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. Sure, I could. For how long?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a few weeks, maybe longer. Maybe less. Depends on what I find out there.”
“Where?”
“Liberia. Africa.”
Anthea stared at me in disbelief. “Geez, Hannah, you sure? I mean, Africa. How old are they now, your sons? I mean, if they’re…” She stopped herself mid-sentence. “What’re their names? You told me once, but I forget.”
Their names, yes. “Dillon and William and Paul.” When I left Liberia the names of my sons were Fly, Worse-than-Death, and Demonology. I didn’t tell that to Anthea. I added the numbers, the years since I had left Africa, and said, “Twenty-four for William, the twins are twenty-three,” and finished her sentence for her, “… if they’re still alive.” But I did not tell her that when I left our home in Monrovia they were fourteen and thirteen. Little boys. She could work out the numbers if she wanted to, but I knew that she wouldn’t, because she’s a kind woman and loves me.
“All right. Go ahead, and don’t you fret the farm, honey. Me and the girls can keep the place running like clockwork. Stay out there in Africa as long as you need to.”
“Let’s get cleaned up,” I said. “You pack the chickens in the cooler, and I’ll hose this place down. Then let’s take a swim. You up for it?”
“Too damned cold! You got to to belong to one of them whatchacallits, polar bear clubs, to swim this time of year,” she said, and peeled off her bloody apron and cap.
BUT IT WASN’T too cold after all. Nan and Frieda drove in from the o
rchard, and a little later Cat joined us on the porch, where by then we were drinking beer and yacking in our usual way—I think Frieda was trying to convince Nan to join her on a climb in the Ecuadorean Andes in November, while Anthea and I teased the two, saying there was no way they could handle altitude with their kind of drug use. I sent Cat for the towels, and when she returned, we tossed our empty beer cans in the trash, and the five of us walked arm in arm across the lawn and cut through the field in front of the house, making our way gaily down to the river.
I felt strangely liberated that afternoon, almost like singing, not faking my comradery, as I normally did on these occasions. Up ahead the dogs bounded through the tall grass, scaring up small flocks of slow-moving, chilled grasshoppers, snapping the insects out of the air as they ran.
On the near bank the grove of tall, spreading, fifty-year-old oak trees cast its long shadow out to midstream. Beyond the shadow, all the way to the far bank, the river was in sunlight, glittering and warm. We stripped off our clothes and entered the cool, shaded water, Frieda and Nan first, plunging ahead, showing off their tanned, athletic bodies and their reckless abandon, followed by Anthea, who shoved her way into the water and hollered as she got waist deep, swearing at the cold and at us for talking her into doing a thing this dumb, and behind her came Cat, slender and childlike, holding her arms over her small, tight breasts, until she was up to her chin, when she finally let go of her fragile protection and swam like the others for the sun-warmed water on the farther side.