Guts in Buckets

“I’m a killer!” Cathy Stronjy’s voice shrieks through the phone. It’s two days before Thanksgiving: turkey execution day.

My mom’s on the phone with our neighbor and friend, coordinating our plans to help her slaughter the main feature of our Thanksgiving meal. “I don’t want you sweet beautiful people getting all bloody,” she protested to my mom’s insistence that we come to help.

“But you’re a sweet beautiful person too!” my mom said. No, Cathy’s a killer. 

Two hours later we walked onto the scene: a wooden table covered with a bloody scrap of gray plastic set up just outside the turkey coop. There were a lot of buckets - snow-covered white feathers sticking up out of one, scaly turkey legs in another, and two still-warm, pink birds submerged in water in another.

“You girls have good boots?” Cathy yelled as I walked up. She had the hose on full blast, dunking one of the turkeys in and out of the bucket, sloshing water and blood all over the snowy ground.

“I was hoping to get this a little cleaner for you guys,” Cathy said as she bent the stub of the neck towards her. I heard snaps and pops. Cathy looked up, “Don’t mess with me.”

We had missed the execution hour, but were just in time for de-feathering and pulling out the guts. I tried to be helpful, but ended up mostly watching (and cringing) with fascination. My mom and I pulled out stray feather needles while Cathy slit open the beast’s neck area to get at the innards. She stuck her hand in – no glove – and came out with the gizzard first. She plopped the liver, a deep smooth red, in a pot singing “Pateeeè!”  The heart was set aside to be boiled with lots of garlic and the rest – lungs, intestine, kidneys – spilled onto the turkey legs in the bucket.

“Now this is probably one of the weirdest things you’ll ever see,” Cathy said, picking up the gizzard and a knife. She carefully cut through the ‘seam’ in the blue-tinged organ, about the size of a grapefruit. She pulled apart the two halves, revealing a balloon like sac, plump with… I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know what. “Is that poop?!” Cathy shook her head and punctured the sack. The splats resounding in the bucket changed to a tinkling as small stones poured out among masticated green roughage. The gizzard grinds the stones against the food the bird has ingested, aiding in digestion.

Apparently, if you do it well, the gizzard pouch pulls out very neatly in its own little wrapper. “My sisters and I used to sit around having gizzard peeling contests,” Cathy laughed, “Now is that hillbilly or is that hillbilly?”

After the turkeys cooled down in the snow on her porch we brought them in for a last once over. We peeled of the thin layer of skin membrane and pulled out a few more feather tips. Cathy stuck her hands underneath the skin up the back to stretch it out for us. “Now you can just slip the herbs and butter right in there!”

These were the third and fourth turkeys Cathy had butchered that day. “I just decided to be glad about doing this,” she said. She raised the turkeys for meat and they had a good happy life eating weeds out of her garden. She’s glad to be able to provide her family and friends with a good bird on Thanksgiving, and there’s just no reason to be sad about it.