Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

She was disappointed for us that we would have to wait until spring to witness Agnes the cow giving birth to a calf; there was no more thrilling and beautiful experience in life than watching the first moment of it take place. “Crap,” said Father. “There are a helluva lot more beautiful and thrilling moments to watch that I can think of—almost any moment you could name, as a matter of fact, except the moment of death, which might possibly give it a run for its money.”

“Now, Leland,” said Mother, “have you ever seen an actual birth? You know damn well you haven’t, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maggie, darling,” said Father, “guess what? For once you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I don’t know what I’m talking about, and what’s more, I don’t want to know what I’m talking about, nor will I go on talking about it if it’s what I think it is. I have deliberately spent my whole life, all forty-odd years of it, avoiding contact with pain, and that includes the sight of it, and when Agnes the cow gives birth to her damn calf I want more than anything to be as far away as possible. Hear that, children? I have no one to count on except you. Notify me wherever I am, day or night, the instant Agnes or any other animal around here goes into labor, so that I can take the next plane to California.”

That did it. Although she knew he was only half serious, Mother disapproved of what she called his fastidious attitude and worried that its influence on us would be stronger than hers. A few days earlier, our dog, Stewart, had been run over in a dreadful accident right in front of the house. Stewart was a young pointer given us by Jimmy Stewart to replace Mr. Duchin. He’d rushed to the edge of the driveway to bark at a motorcycle roaring past on Long Meadow Hill Road, a seldom-traveled byway, and the driver had swerved deliberately onto the gravel to run him down. Bridget, Bill, and I were squatting in the middle of the driveway; it was midday, the best time of day to hunt for tiny pieces of glinting mica mixed in with the gravel. The motorcycle hit Stewart so hard it knocked him twenty feet out onto the road, where he lay whimpering, totally disemboweled, with two legs severed. Steaming lumps of blackish-red blood, almost indistinguishable from the shiny hot tar itself, lay all around him. We screamed for Mother and he died in her arms a few minutes later while the three of us stood on the side of the road sobbing.

This incident had a disturbing effect on us and Mother verbalized her concern. While she didn’t want us going through life totally desensitized to violence, neither did she want us to be delicate hothouse flowers; it was important to instill in us an overall sense of balance and continuity. As to the matter of what to protect us from and how, she was ambivalent. There was, on her part, a hunger for simplicity, a great romantic notion of living a simple life, as opposed to what other people thought of as romantic, which was living in Hollywood. She felt it was imperative to shield us from the consequences of her career as an actress, because to her they represented life at its most dangerous—that is unreal, illusory. It was equally imperative to expose us to the simple facts of nature, because they didn’t just represent life, they actually were life; they had substance, whether or not that substance was pleasant. To dramatize what she meant, and at the same time counteract in us what she suspected were the unhealthy beginnings of squeamishness, she came up with an unusual idea.

“The most honest-to-God revolting idea you’ve ever had, Maggie,” we could hear Father protesting from the next room where he, Mother, and Emily were in a huddle.

“Children!” announced Mother breezily. “I have an idea for an experiment. Although your father pretends he doesn’t approve at all, he’s willing to give it a try.…” The idea sounded intriguing. We would all go together down to the chicken coop, and watch Mother take a lesson from Andrew Tomashek in how to chop off a chicken’s head. Andrew performed this chore every Saturday morning in order to provide us with chicken for Sunday dinner, and once we saw how simple and perfunctory it was, just a chore like any other—and if even Mother could do it—it would prove to us that there was nothing so terrible about the sight of blood, or death, for that matter, when it was a question of necessity.

So we all trooped down the dirt path to the chicken coop. We had about three hundred chickens, so the coop was sizable; there were nesting houses and a shade tree in the middle, and under the tree a broad flat stump, bloodstained and scarred with old hatchet marks. It was a warm morning; while Mother was explaining to us the highlights of what we were about to see, such as the chicken flapping around the enclosure for a minute or two after its head had been chopped off, and how not to worry because even though it was really dead, its nervous system, interestingly enough, continued to twitch involuntarily for a little while just like a worm’s or a snake’s, Father shuddered and began to perspire. I stared at the pasture beyond the coop, intent on the long grass shining as a light wind moved through it and wondering if it wouldn’t be more fun to go farther on down the dirt path to the swimming pool, which would be lovely and cold, freezing, since it was fed by natural springs (water so pure we could drink it right out of the ground, and so icy it made our foreheads ache), which also fed the brook running through the pasture just below.

“Maggie,” I heard