The Lost Landscape. Joyce Carol Oates

she would claim she’d never seen a chicken slaughtered. Never seen a single one of the Rhode Island Reds seized by the legs, struggling fiercely, more fiercely than any human being might struggle, thrown down onto the chopping block to be decapitated with a single swift blow of the bloodstained ax, wielded by a muscled arm.

      It was the Grandmother’s arm, usually. For the Grandmother was the chicken-slaughterer.

      Which the girl had not seen. The girl had not seen.

      The girl did recall a time when Grandfather was not so big-bellied and confident as he’d been. When the Grandfather began to cough frequently. And to cough up blood. The Grandfather no longer teased the little girl, or caused her to run from him crying as she’d run from Mr. Rooster. The little girl stared in horror as the Grandfather coughed, coughed, coughed doubled over in pain, scarcely able to breathe. The Grandfather would scrape phlegm up from his throat, with great effort, and spit the quivering greenish liquid into a rag. And the little girl would want to hide her face, this was so terrible to see.

      It was explained that the Grandfather was sick with something in his lungs. Steel-filings it was said, from the foundry in Tonawanda. The Grandfather had hated his factory-job in Tonawanda but the Grandfather had had to work there, to support the farm. For the farm would not support itself, and the people who lived on it.

      The Grandfather had liked to say in his laughing-bitter way that he and the other workers should be running the foundry and not the goddamn owners. Until the terrible coughing spells overcame him the Grandfather would say how the workers of the world would one day rise against the goddamn owners but that was not to happen, it would be revealed, in the Grandfather’s lifetime.

      SELLING EGGS, SITTING OUT by the roadside. Sitting, dreaming, waiting for a vehicle to slow to a stop. Customers.

       How much? One dozen?

       Oh that’s too much. I can get them cheaper just up the road.

      Always there were eggs for sale. And, at the end of the summer pears in bushel baskets. Sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes. Apples, cherries. Pumpkins.

      With a faint sensation of anxiety the little girl would recall sitting at the roadside at the front of the house behind a narrow bench. When sometimes the Mother had to go inside for a short while and the little girl was left alone at the roadside.

      Hoping that no one would stop. Hoping not to see a vehicle slow down and park on the shoulder of the highway.

      Some of the anxiety was over chickens, that made their blind-seeming way down the driveway, to the highway. Chickens oblivious of vehicles speeding by on the road, only a few yards from where they scratched and pecked in the dirt.

      Anxiously the little girl watched to see that no chickens drifted out onto the road. The little girl knew, though she wasn’t altogether certain how she knew, for she’d never seen, that from time to time chickens had been killed on the road.

      Sudden squawking and shrieking, and a flapping of wings. At first you rush to see what it is, and then you do not want to see what it is.

      One of the constant fears of the little girl’s life was that Happy Chicken might be hit on the highway for the little girl could not watch me all of the time.

      Each morning running outside breathless and eager to call to me—Happy! Happy Chicken!

      And I came running, out of the coop, or out of the barn, or out of a patch of grass beside the back door, hurrying on my scrawny chicken-legs to be stroked and petted.

      “Happy Chicken! I love you.”

      THE LAUGHTER WAS KINDLY, and yet cruel.

      Of course you ate chicken when you were a little girl, Joyce! You ate everything we ate.

      No. She didn’t think so.

      You’d have had to eat whatever was served. Whatever everybody else was eating. You wouldn’t have been allowed to not-eat anything on the table.

      No! This was not true.

      You hated fatty meat, and you hated things like gizzards, and we laughed at how you tried to hide these—beneath the rim of your plate!—as if, when the plate was removed from the table, the fatty little pieces of meat you’d left would not be discovered. But you certainly ate chicken white meat. Of course you did.

      No. That was—that was not true . . .

      Children ate what they were given in those days. Children ate, or went hungry. Your father would have spanked the daylights out of you if you’d tried to refuse chicken, or anything that your mother or grandmother prepared.

      But no. She did not believe this.

      It’s true—she does remember her Hungarian grandmother preparing noodles in the kitchen. Wide swaths of soft-floury ghost-white dough on the circular kitchen table that was covered in oilcloth, and over the oilcloth strips of waxed paper. She recalls the Grandmother, a heavyset woman with gray hair plaited and fastened tight against her head, always in an apron, and the white apron always soiled, wielding a long sharp-glittering knife, rapidly cutting dough into thin strips of noodle. And the Grandmother’s legs encased in thick flesh-colored cotton stockings even in hot weather. The surprise was, sometimes you could see a pleading girl’s face inside the soft flaccid Grandmother-stern face. And the little girl remembers something white-skinned, headless in a large pan simmering on the stove, the surface of the liquid bubbling with dollops of yellowish fat.

       You loved your grandmother’s chicken noodle soup! You don’t remember?

      She hides her eyes. She hides her face. She is sickened, that terrible smell of wet feathers, plucked-white chicken-flesh.

      Protesting, I had nothing to do with that.

      Trying to recall in a sudden panic—what had happened to her pet chicken, she’d loved so?

      Our memories are what remain on a wall that has been washed down. Old billboards advertising Mail Pouch Tobacco, in shreds. The faintest letters remaining that even as you stare at them, fade. The Hungarian Grandfather who’d been so gruff, so loud, so confident and had so loved his little granddaughter he’d been unable to keep his calloused fingers out of her curls had died at the age of fifty-three, his lungs riddled with steel filings from the foundry in Tonawanda. The Hungarian Grandmother lived for many years afterward and never learned to speak English, still less to read English. The Grandmother died in a nursing home in Lockport to which the granddaughter was never once taken, nor was the granddaughter told the name of the nursing home or its specific location.

      Why was this? The Mother had wished to hide the little girl’s eyes. Even when she was no longer a little girl, yet the Mother wished to shield her from upset and worry.

      What happened to me? What happened to Happy Chicken?

      Oh, the little girl did not know!

      The little girl did not know. Just that one terrible day—Happy Chicken was not there.

      She mouths the words aloud: “Happy Chicken.”

      There is something about the very word happy that is unnerving. Happy happy happy happy.

      A terrible word. A terrifying word. Hap-py.

      Waking in the night, tangled in bedsheets, shivering in such fright you’d think she was about to misstep and fall into an abyss.

       Happy. Hap-py. We were so hap-py . . .

      In the cold terror of the night she counts her dead. Like a rosary counting her dead. The Grandfather who died first and after whom the door was opened, that Death might come through to seize them all. The Grandmother who died somewhere far away, though close by. The Mother who died of a stroke when she was in her mid-eighties, overnight. The Father who died over several years, also in his mid-eighties, in the new, twenty-first century shrinking, baffled and yet alert, in yearning