y o u c a n ’ t r u n away o n h a r v e s t d ay 233 feathers, making necessary observations such as “Gag, look where his head came off,” and “Wonder which one of these tube thingies was his windpipe.” Most kids need only about ninety seconds to get from eeew gross to solid science A few weeks later Abby would give an awardwinning, fully illustrated 4-H presentation entitled “You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day.” Laura and Becky and I answered the kids’ questions, and also talked about Mom things while working on back and wing feathers (Our husbands were on to the next beheading.) Laura and I compared notes on our teenage daughters—relatively new drivers on the narrow country roads between their jobs, friends, and home—and the worries that come with that territory I was painfully conscious of Becky’s quiet, her ache for a teenage son who never even got to acquire a driver’s license The accident that killed Larry could not have been avoided through any amount of worry We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second I wondered how we would get through this afternoon, how she would get through months and years of living with impossible loss I wondered if I’d been tactless, inviting these dear friends to an afternoon of ending lives And then felt stupid for that thought People who are grieving walk with death, every waking moment When the rest of us dread that we’ll somehow remind them of death’s existence, we are missing their reality Harvesting turkeys—which this family would soon on their own farm—was just another kind of work A rendezvous with death, for them, was waking up each morning without their brother and son / By early afternoon six roosters had lost their heads, feathers, and viscera, and were chilling on ice We had six turkeys to go, the hardest piece of our work simply because the animals are larger and heavier Some of these birds were close to twenty pounds They would take center stage on our holiday table and those of some of our friends At least one would be charcuterie—in the garden I had sage, rosemary, garlic, onions, everything we needed for turkey sausage And the first two roosters we’d harvested would be going on the rotisserie later that afternoon 234 a n i m a l , v e g e ta b l e , m i r ac l e We allowed ourselves a break before the challenge of hoisting, plucking, and dressing the turkeys While Lily and her friends constructed feather crowns and ran for the poultry house to check in with the living, the adults cracked open beers and stretched out in lawn chairs in the September sun Our conversation turned quickly to the national preoccupation of that autumn: Katrina, the hurricane that had just hit southern Louisiana and Mississippi We were horrified by the news that was beginning to filter out of that flooded darkness, the children stranded on rooftops, the bereaved and bewildered families slogging through streets waist-deep in water, breaking plate glass windows to get bottles of water People drowning and dying of thirst at the same time It was already clear this would be an epic disaster New Orleans and countless other towns across southern Louisiana and Mississippi were being evacuated and left for dead The news cameras had focused solely on urban losses, sending images of flooded streets, people on rooftops, broken storefronts, and the desperate crises of people in the city with no resources for relocating or evacuating I had not seen one photograph from the countryside—a wrecked golf course was the closest thing to it I wondered about the farmers whose year of work still lay in the fields, just weeks or days away from harvest, when the flood took it all I still can’t say whether the rural victims of Katrina found their support systems more resilient, or if their hardships simply went unreported The disaster reached into the rest of the country with unexpected tentacles Our town and schools were already taking in people who had lost everything The office where I’d just sent my passport for renewal was now underwater Gasoline had passed $3 a gallon, here and elsewhere, leaving our nation in sticker shock U.S citizens were making outlandish declarations about staying home Climate scientists were saying, “If you warm up the globe, you eventually pay for it.” Economists were eyeing our budget deficits and predicting collapse, mayhem, infrastructure breakdown In so many ways, disaster makes us take stock For me it had inspired powerful cravings about living within our means I wasn’t thinking so much of my household budget or the national one but the big budget, the one that involves consuming approximately the same things we produce Taking a symbolic cue from my presumed-soggy passport, I sud- y o u c a n ’ t r u n away o n h a r v e s t d ay 235 denly felt like sticking very close to home, with a hand on my family’s production, even when it wasn’t all that easy or fun—like today Analysts of current events were mostly looking to blame administrators Fair enough, but there were also, it seemed, obvious vulnerabilities here—whole populations depending on everyday, long-distance lifelines, supplies of food and water and fuel and everything else that are acutely centralized That’s what we consider normal life Now nature had written a hugely abnormal question across the bottom of our map I wondered what our answers might be / Our mood stayed solemn until Eli introduced the comedy show of poultry parts He applied his artistry and grossout-proof ingenuity to raw materials retrieved from the gut bucket While the rest of us merely labored, Eli acted, directed, and produced He invented the turkey-foot backscratcher, the inflated turkey-crop balloon Children—even when they have endured the unthinkable—have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up We got a little slap-happy egging on the two turkey heads that moved their mouths to Eli’s words, starring in a mock TV talk show As I gutted the last bird of the day, I began thinking twice about what props I was tossing into the gut bucket I was not sure I wanted to see what an eight-year-old boy could with twelve feet of intestine The good news was that we were nearly done I encouraged the rest of the adults to go ahead and wash up, I had things in hand They changed out of the T-shirts that made them look like Braveheart extras The girls persuaded Eli to retire the talking heads and submit to a hosing-down Our conversation finally relaxed fully into personal news, the trivial gripes and celebrations for which friends count on one another: what was impossible these days at work How the children were faring with various teachers and 4-H projects How I felt about having been put on the list That question referred to a book that had been released that summer, alerting our nation to the dangers of one hundred people who are Destroying America It was popular for nearly a week and a half, so I’d received a heads-up about my being the seventy-fourth most dangerous 236 a n i m a l , v e g e ta b l e , m i r ac l e person in America It gave a certain pizzazz to my days, I thought, as I went about canning tomatoes, doing laundry, meeting the school bus, and here and there writing a novel or essay or whatever, knowing full well that kind of thing only leads to trouble My thrilling new status had no impact on my household position: I still had to wait till the comics were read to get the Sudoku puzzle, and the dog ignored me as usual Some of my heroes had turned up much higher on the list Jimmy Carter was number “When you’re seventy-four, you try harder,” I now informed my friends, as I reached high up into the turkey’s chest cavity from the, um, lower end I was trying to wedge my fingers between the lungs and ribs to pull out the whole package of viscera in one clean motion It takes practice, dexterity, and a real flair for menace to disembowel a deceased turkey “Bond James Bond,” a person might say by way of introduction, in many situations of this type My friends watched me, openly expressing doubts as to my actual dangerousness They didn’t think I even deserved to be number 74 “Hey,” I said, pretty sure I now had the gizzard in hand, “don’t distract me I’m on the job here Destroying America is not the walk in the park you clearly think it is.” Someone had sent me a copy of this book, presumably to protect me from myself A couple of people now went into the house to fetch it so they could stage dramatic readings from the back jacket These friends I’ve known for years uncovered the secrets they’d never known about me, President Carter, and our ilk: “These,” the book warned, “are the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at ‘ordinary’ Americans .” All eyes turned fearfully to me My “Kentucky NCAA Champions” shirt was by now so bloodstained, you would think I had worn it to a North Carolina game Also, I had feathers sticking to my hair I was crouched in something of an inharmonious yoga pose with both my arms up a turkey’s hind end, more than elbow deep With a sudden sucking sound the viscera let go and I staggered back, trailing intestines My compatriots laughed very hard With me, not at me, I’m sure And that was the end of a day’s work I hosed down the butcher shop and changed into more civilized attire (happy to see my wedding ring was y o u c a n ’ t r u n away o n h a r v e s t d ay 237 still on) while everybody else set the big picnic table on our patio with plates and glasses and all the food in the fridge we’d prepared ahead The meat on the rotisserie smelled really good, helping to move our party’s mindset toward the end stages of the “cooking from scratch” proposition Steven brushed the chicken skin with our house-specialty sweet-and-sour sauce and we uncorked the wine At dusk we finally sat down to feast on cold bean salad, sliced tomatoes with basil, blue potato salad, and meat that had met this day’s dawn by crowing We felt tired to our bones but anointed by life in a durable, companionable way, for at least the present moment We the living take every step in tandem with death, naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven, whether we can see that or not We bear it by the grace of friendship, good meals, and if we need them, talking turkey heads ... house-specialty sweet-and-sour sauce and we uncorked the wine At dusk we finally sat down to feast on cold bean salad, sliced tomatoes with basil, blue potato salad, and meat that had met this day’s dawn... renewal was now underwater Gasoline had passed $3 a gallon, here and elsewhere, leaving our nation in sticker shock U.S citizens were making outlandish declarations about staying home Climate... of the adults to go ahead and wash up, I had things in hand They changed out of the T-shirts that made them look like Braveheart extras The girls persuaded Eli to retire the talking heads and submit