Hapa Girl: A Memoir

20. The Cannibals

When I was sixteen, my father left the Texas job and took a new position in Chicago, working as a consultant for a historically African American educational foundation. He helped them raise funds, recruit members, organize conferences and workshops, network and expand. The new job didn’t pay as well as the old one, but he’d grown weary of Texas. Sometimes working in Chicago made him a happier person, and sometimes it only reminded him of all the reasons he hated our town in South Dakota. When he came home, he yelled constantly at my brother and me, but mostly at my brother, because he was growing up and becoming someone my father didn’t recognize anymore. My father was anxious all the time. My mother opened a business in town, a photography studio. She thought it would help us to belong. She would make her own connections to the community, she would find a way for us to survive . I worked in her studio after school and on weekends. I worked on our farm in the mornings before school, before I went to work in the studio, forty hours a week, sixty during school vacations. I didn’t realize then that my mother thought if I worked in the family businesses , she could keep me safe from local predators. All I knew was that she, too, was anxious all the time. 20 The Cannibals On our farm, the chickens were aging. They were no longer laying regularly, the roosters fought savagely, and we couldn’t afford to keep feeding them. Early one morning my brother and I rounded them up from their pen and put them in the bed of his pickup truck, which we covered with a green tarpaulin so they couldn’t escape. He drove them to the chicken-processing plant—the abattoir—in South Sioux City, Nebraska, and the next day my mother and I picked up their plucked and plastic-wrapped bodies. We now had meat to last through the winter. Unfortunately, I’d made the mistake of naming the chickens after my favorite writers. It had seemed amusing when they were alive, but now I could recognize them in our freezer. The plump one was Ray Bradbury, the one with the skinny thighs, Isaac Asimov. Louisa May Alcott had the uneven, lumpy back, and Emily Dickinson, oh dear, I’d recognize that neck anywhere. There was nothing else to eat, but after Ray Bradbury came out of the broiler, well browned and basted in his own juices, I couldn’t bear to eat him. He tasted like sand in my mouth. My brother said I was a wimp, that I’d never be a real farmer. That year my brother was intent upon becoming just that. He was going to make the farm practical. He was going to contribute, he said, to help our finances. Since there were still no prospects of selling the house, we all knew by this point that we needed all the help we could get. We’d built up a regular customer base for our hens’ eggs over the past couple of years, but now my brother decided a few dozen layers were too impractical for real farming. He decided to order a scientifically bred super-chicken that was guaranteed to lay an egg every twenty-four hours. I remember the picture in the chicken catalog of a rather scrawny white bird with oddly long legs. It was a new kind of American White Leghorn,“definitely not your grandfather’s chicken,” the description read, and the bird had a Dewey decimal number after its name to prove it. Because my brother wanted to go into egg production big time, he ordered an initial shipment of seventy-five chicks. The Cannibals • 147 The chicks were cute and harmless looking, all yellow fuzz and soft peeps, and remarkably uniform. They didn’t vary in size much, they grew at the same rate, they pooped at the same rate. Maybe we’d simply gotten better at raising chicks, but it seemed as though they didn’t have any of the frailties our old chickens had had. They didn’t eat the wood chips on the floor and get their anuses plugged with splinters and die of constipation. They didn’t catch cold and die of pneumonia if they fell asleep too far from the heat lamps. They didn...