The Innocence of Roast Chicken by Richards Jo-Anne

Author:Richards, Jo-Anne [Jo-Anne, Richards,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781770104365
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1966 … Eight days to Christmas

Rivulets of watermelon juice raced around the mound of my belly and collided. Already stippled with water from my wet hair, my naked stomach ran with small streams, pinkish in the recessed light of morning.

It was early. Early enough to catch the phantom cleaners at work with their silent dusters. Early enough for just the glowing expectation of sun, setting each leaf of the wild fig darkly against the sky. The chickens clamoured and crowed and the generator rubbed and grated against the still-warming air.

Carelessly dried from our early swim my father dripped, dabbing his nose on the towel slung around his neck. He was squatting flat-footed, I echoing his position, on the lawn in front of the stoep. Through the window I could hear Ouma’s radio tuned to the Afrikaans station.

Dad sliced through the reddened flesh of the melon with the precision of a flourished scimitar. His blade split the circle in two and he handed, in silence, another piece into my reaching hand. The sticky sliding of a pip made its way slowly down my chest.

We were joined at last by the boys, wet and shaggy as dogs, shaking themselves and showering us with droplets. In their chattering presence, they proclaimed the ordinariness of day, and scattered the last spirit-wisps of ephemeral early morning.

Soon we’d be called in for porridge, hot and honeyed, on the starched cloth. We’d drink creamy-yellow milk and eat soft, sizzling eggs. I could smell the hungry waft of bacon through the open door.

‘Hell, Dad, you should have seen it, Dad. It was unbelievable. Those chickens just fought it like anything, Dad. Wow, it was incredible. They fought it into the ground.’

Michael paused to slurp at his watermelon. Dad’s unperturbed knife strokes and absent smile compelled him to continue.

‘They even pecked its eyes, Dad. You should’ve seen the blood. Hey, Kati? There was stacks of blood. You tell him.’

I was watching with revulsion the thin pinkish stream of juice wandering and dribbling from my thigh. I placed the half-eaten slice back on the sloshing tray which held the melon.

‘Had enough, Kati?’ My father was looking at me, ignoring the background beat of Michael’s ‘Dad? Dad? Da-ad?’

‘I’m just cold now, Daddy. I want to go get dressed.’

I wanted to remove my heavy eyes from his view. Hiding the guilt in their downcast depths, I could feel it swimming upward, ready to leap into the open before them all.

That was the worst of it, the guilt. The horror of that thin stream of blood had not been so much in the fact of a chicken’s death, which, of course, I told myself in mental flagellation, I knew to be the everyday forerunner of gravied wings and drumsticks. But I’d never been aware of it before, never considered the connection between clucking hok and carving knife. And at least that death would be dispassionate – a detached and impersonal execution.

The horror of this death was in the greed and gratification of

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