Alice Munros Best

to understand how she could be an enemy. How could anybody hate Rose so much, at the very moment when she was ready to come forward with her good will, her smiling confession of exhaustion, her air of diffident faith in civilized overtures?
    Oh, Patrick could. Patrick could.

THE TURKEY SEASON
To Joe Radford
    WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN I got a job at the Turkey Barn for the Christmas season. I was still too young to get a job working in a store or as a part-time waitress; I was also too nervous.
    I was a turkey gutter. The other people who worked at the Turkey Barn were Lily and Marjorie and Gladys, who were also gutters; Irene and Henry, who were pluckers; Herb Abbott, the foreman, who superintended the whole operation and filled in wherever he was needed. Morgan Elliott was the owner and boss. He and his son, Morgy, did the killing.
    Morgy I knew from school. I thought him stupid and despicable and was uneasy about having to consider him in a new and possibly superior guise, as the boss’s son. But his father treated him so roughly, yelling and swearing at him, that he seemed no more than the lowest of the workers. The other person related to the boss was Gladys. She was his sister, and in her case there did seem to be some privilege of position. She worked slowly and went home if she was not feeling well, and was not friendly to Lily and Marjorie, although she was, a little, to me. She had come back to live with Morgan and his family after working for many years in Toronto, in a bank. This was not the sort of job she was used to. Lily and Marjorie, talking about her when she wasn’t there, said she had had a nervous breakdown. They said Morgan made her work in the Turkey Barn to pay for her keep. They also said, with no worry about the contradiction, that she had taken the job because she was after a man, and that the man was Herb Abbott.
    All I could see when I closed my eyes, the first few nights after working there, was turkeys. I saw them hanging upside down, plucked and stiffened, pale and cold, with the heads and necks limp, the eyes and nostrils clotted with dark blood; the remaining bits of feathers – thosedark and bloody too – seemed to form a crown. I saw them not with aversion but with a sense of endless work to be done.
    Herb Abbott showed me what to do. You put the turkey down on the table and cut its head off with a cleaver. Then you took the loose skin around the neck and stripped it back to reveal the crop, nestled in the cleft between the gullet and the windpipe.
    “Feel the gravel,” said Herb encouragingly. He made me close my fingers around the crop. Then he showed me how to work my hand down behind it to cut it out, and the gullet and windpipe as well. He used shears to cut the vertebrae.
    “Scrunch, scrunch,” he said soothingly. “Now, put your hand in.”
    I did. It was deathly cold in there, in the turkey’s dark insides.
    “Watch out for bone splinters.”
    Working cautiously in the dark, I had to pull the connecting tissues loose.
    “Ups-a-daisy.” Herb turned the bird over and flexed each leg. “Knees up, Mother Brown. Now.” He took a heavy knife and placed it directly on the knee knuckle joints and cut off the shank.
    “Have a look at the worms.”
    Pearly-white strings, pulled out of the shank, were creeping about on their own.
    “That’s just the tendons shrinking. Now comes the nice part!”
    He slit the bird at its bottom end, letting out a rotten smell.
    “Are you educated?”
    I did not know what to say.
    “What’s that smell?”
    “Hydrogen sulfide.”
    “Educated,” said Herb, sighing. “All right. Work your fingers around and get the guts loose. Easy. Easy. Keep your fingers together. Keep the palm inwards. Feel the ribs with the back of your hand. Feel the guts fit into your palm. Feel that? Keep going. Break the strings – as many as you can. Keep going. Feel a hard lump? That’s the gizzard. Feel a soft lump? That’s the heart. Okay? Okay. Get your fingers around the gizzard. Easy. Start pulling this way. That’s right. That’s right. Start to pull her out.”
    It was not easy at all. I wasn’t even sure what I had was the gizzard. My hand was full of cold pulp.
    “Pull,” he said, and I brought out a glistening, liverish mass.
    “Got it. There’s the lights. You know what they are? Lungs. There’s the heart. There’s the gizzard. There’s the gall. Now, you don’t ever want to break that gall inside or it will taste the entire turkey.”