I Woke Up Screaming

When I was little my mother was a stay at home mom, but that did not mean that she did not do her part to supplement the farm’s income. I have told you in other stories that she baked for the grocery store in town and of course, to private individuals. She also sold cream to people that wanted it. She sold that for a dollar a pint. She made a lot of money for that in those days. Mother also had laying hens and sold them as well. Laying hens were hens that were good for soup etc. when they got too old to lay eggs and hatch them out.
Mom’s big money making time was in the late spring. She would raise tiny chicks. The chicks would come to our house in great big boxes. These little guys needed a lot of attention especially somewhere warm to grow. If mother didn’t put heat lamps on them, they would huddle together and smother each other. They needed special watering bottles, vitamins, feeders etc.
Mother decided that she was going to go into the chicken business full speed ahead. She ordered four hundred chickens the spring that I remember in particular. If you have never raised chickens you have no clue what that entails as far as hard work. My own grandmother did not attend my mom and dad’s wedding because her hens were hatching their eggs and had to be there to save the chicks. That was in August and to this day I don’t understand why grandma decided to let eggs hatch out that time of year, but be that as it may, she didn’t go to the wedding.
Well the chickens arrived, they grew and by the end of June or at least by the fourth of July, they weighed three and a half pounds which my mother said was the perfect size for fresh fryers. I still have the scale on which she weighed each and every one to make sure they were big enough to butcher.
My dad had a stump some distance from the chicken house on which stood proudly two nails that held the neck of the chicken that was doomed for the frying pan. After he had chopped their heads off, he threw them out on the ground away from the chicken house to bleed out. They flopped and flopped all over the place. When the chickens were dead then it was up to mom to “dress” them. She first “scalded” them. Extremely hot water was put in buckets, she doused them up and down until the feathers easily came out with a test pull. Then she got down to business and plucked all the feathers off the chicken. The chicken then went into the sink into cold water. When the chicken was completely cool, then it was time to “dress” the chicken. She had extremely sharp knives to do this with. She was an artist in “dressing” chickens. To this day I cannot master this art, but I have one or two a year that I cut up, not four hundred.
Many people that ordered chickens did not want them cut up, but wanted them whole for baking.
Mother used freezer paper and freezer tape to wrap them up with. Each chicken had a person’s name on them. Then they were flash frozen in mother’s huge chest freezer. On Friday or Saturday nights we would deliver these chickens to Mother’s customers. This entire process made Mother exactly one dollar per chicken.
Mother had sold chickens to people before, but not on such a big scale. It seemed to me all I saw was blood and “guts” which is what dad called the entrails of the chickens.
One night I woke up screaming. Both Mom and Dad came running to my room. They, of course, wanted to know what the problem was. I told them that I had dreamed that I was a chicken and that they had chopped my head off. Mom cuddled me and told me it was going to be ok. She never dressed chickens for other people again. She told my dad that it was just too much for a little girl to have to deal with.