Killing Sophie

The ideas and metaphors which controlled and inspired our lives on the Franklin commune combined a wish to end the Vietnam War, help draft evaders get into Canada, learn to be self sufficient, raise healthy children, and save the whales, the bees, and the planet.  We said of ourselves that we were trying to live post revolutionary lives during pre-revolutionary times.  We combined a hippie Waldenesque desire to live a wholesome lifestyle, to return to the land, and to be pre-carbon fuel consumption self-sufficient farmers, maybe even Indians, with a desire to directly confront the oppressive American corporate and military power structure.  Ideals of egalitarianism, revolution, and self-sufficiency were central to us and actually informed our lives and the choices we made in many ways.

We did manage to raise one-third of our food, including a vast vegetable garden, chickens, pigs, dairy cows, beef cows, and gallons of delicious and sacred maple syrup.  We also produced most of the feed necessary to keep our animals alive, although the profit margin was slim.  A popular mocking self-image we had was that we kept a team of horses so we could take out and spread manure on the fields, so we could harrow and seed the fields, so we could harvest the hay and grain we grew to feed the horses, so we could take out the manure to spread on the fields we needed to harrow and harvest to feed the horses to spread the manure.  We were their servants as much as they were ours.  As I said, the profit margin was thin.

Periodically we slaughtered and ate one of our large animals.  Inevitably these animals had been pets with names as well as dumb beasts.  The kids had cuddled and loved them.  Some we had raised from birth.  All had contributed to our sustenance with their milk, eggs, good humor, and now flesh.  We admired, respected, and needed our animals, their tolerance, strength, and beauty.

In advance of the decision to slaughter one of the large animals, which until then we had only imagined we would eat, our group of very diverse and mostly very hard working people would sit in meeting for hours we couldn’t afford and didn’t enjoy, trying to make an intelligent collective decision consistent with our diverse images and ideologies about the killing. 

As to the slaughter of big mammals it was agreed that only one person at a time would be responsible for the actual slaughter, that he or she would select the method by which they would dispatch the animal, that children would be allowed (not compelled or discouraged) to watch, and that we would then collectively butcher, skin, smoke, freeze, cure, or whatever it was we were going to do with often hundreds of pounds of meat.

When we killed our first large boar, a fellow named Arnold, we selected Charlie, the man who loved Arnold most, the man who had spent the most time feeding Arnold, cleaning his pen, moving him around, chasing him, catching him, helping Arnold breed the sow that produced our next litter of Arnolds, as slaughterer.  Charlie used a knife to cut Arnold’s throat because local folklore emphasized the importance of bleeding a boar to death to insure good tasting flesh.  I can hear Arnold screaming in pain, terror, and betrayal to this day. We also castrated Arnold immediately upon his death out of respect for more local folklore about the impact of testicles upon the taste of boar meat. Nobody I recall particularly ate the organs of Arnold, though there was much talk of doing so and of wasting nothing. We did make organ stew, maybe some folks tasted it, but it wasn’t heartily eaten and ultimately we fed it to the dogs. The flesh that we did cure, smoke and freeze, however, was mighty tasty. I’m not sure how long it lasted. We were twenty souls and Arnold had been but one. When we dined on Arnold we often said out loud “Thank you, Arnold,” making a macabre joke out of the obvious truth that the creature we had known as Arnold was being transformed into the creatures we were.

We next slaughtered Woolly, a Scotch Highland steer.  We loved Woolly, a magnificent creature: longhaired like his keepers and long horned as well.  Standing in the field in summer Woolly was Ferdinand the bull. Covered with snow in the winter he was Perseverance and Grace. Frisky. Friendly. Our guy Wooly: never mean, but always unconsciously dangerous, sort of like we were.  We tried hard to preserve Woolly’s hide after we took his life to sustain our own and I worked diligently at salting and saving his hairy thick skin in an effort to honor Woolly and turn him into vests or moccasins, or some such utilitarian romantic image, but in the end Woolly’s hide was just a hard and unmalleably stiff piece of cow folded over a fence rail, with flies buzzing around it, never attaining the level of leather or flexible afterlife we imagined.

I was selected (I selected myself?) to make the next kill, this time of Sophie, the first animal we’d brought onto the farm besides our dogs and cats and one very old horse “gifted” us by our neighbors. Sophie was a smallish, quiet, sad looking, tired Jersey cow who had grown quite old.  Nice gentle creature Sophie was: docile, breedable, easy to move around, easy to milk, and willing to have dozens of strangers and kids squeeze her teats. Black and tan and brown Sophie. She had served us well, providing milk, butter, yogurt, and cheese, as we pulled and poked her twice daily, taught the children to milk her, helped her become inseminated, and watched the delivery of her new calves. But Sophie was now old and we were hungry.

By this time in the commune’s existence, whenever we intended to slaughter a large animal word would get out, some of the local farming folk would hear of the event, and some would inevitably come by to ogle and offer instruction in long lost arts. Slaughtering days were never ordinary days on the commune. We needed to delegate much time and energy to organizing and carrying out the many tasks associated with the slaughter, to covering the other tasks that still needed to be done, to explaining what was happening to the kids, to dealing with the kids while we actually killed, butchered and preserved hundreds of pounds of meat in an edible fashion.

I wanted Sophie’s death to be as quick and pain free as possible. I had chosen to kill her by shooting her through the forehead with a twenty-two-caliber rifle: a small gauge weapon, which would make a very small hole, with not a lot of noise or blood, and hopefully dispatch her instantly. I personally led Sophie out of the barn by her halter to the lawn between the north side of our house and the maple sugaring shack. I talked to her, explaining why this had to be, jokingly offering her a blindfold. She had no idea what was about to come next. Trust me on that one.

A triangular hoist had been erected on the lawn to raise Sophie up after death so we could gut and clean and skin her most easily. I brought her up from the barn in solemn processional fashion. I felt as if I was standing beside myself watching the man with the gun and the cow called Sophie walk her last walk. About thirty people were standing around as I dropped Sophie’s halter, moved a few feet back from her, and sighted her forehead through the rifle barrel. 

“Good bye, Sophie,” I said, as I was about to pull the trigger, but at just that moment Sophie bent down to munch some grass, changing the position of her head and the angle at which I wanted the bullet to enter her brain. So I lowered the rifle, walked over to Sophie, lifted her head up by the halter, let go of the halter, walked back three paces, and lined her forehead up again in my sights as she again lowered her head. She was after all still a cow standing in green grass and I was merely her kindly executioner. I walked patiently over and lifted her head again. I stepped back. She lowered her head. I lifted her head. She lowered her head. I lifted. She lowered. I let her go. She bent down to eat grass.  She was still a cow.

A local farmer in his late twenties walked over to be helpful with the killing. He grabbed Sophie by the halter and lifted her head up as I lined her up in my sights. He said to Sophie with tight throated humor loud enough for everyone to hear, “Come on you Christ killing Jew, stand up now, it’s your turn.”

I held Sophie in my sights. The barrel of my gun was pointed at the exact center of her forehead. The local humorist stood next to her, holding her halter with his right arm extended. I looked at him, bigoted and innocent. I looked at Sophie, equally innocent. I saw them both clearly. I considered my options. I suppressed my anger and reactivity as I have so often done in the face of mindless anti-Semitism and, not moving the rifle barrel, squeezed the trigger, transforming in an instant all of the energy that was Sophie, and all of the energy in the world.

All four of Sophie’s legs lifted from the earth at the same time.  There was literally a six to nine inch space between the ground she had been standing on alive and the air she was suspended in, legs folded at the instant of her death, a momentary holy ascension by a very old cow, before she crumbled to the earth. I remember thinking Sophie wasn’t really dead, that we could put her back together if we wanted. I believed that as we cut through her sternum. I believed that as we spilled her guts into a wheelbarrow to take to the compost heap. I believed that until I sawed her hooves off and pulled her skin off. Naked, she was meat.

We ate Sophie’s organs, her heart and liver. I don’t recall a lot of pleasure in doing so. All of Sophie’s meat in fact was gamy and tough, though far far better and longer lasting than the many frogs we killed one day that summer at the local pond and tried to eat but couldn’t, throwing dozens of dead frog bodies without legs into a bucket and dumping them into the compost heap, where they were picked at by crows and returned to the earth that mothers us all.