Sunita

I want to give her a good death. She has come close to a bad death, earlier in my stewardship of her life, and to save her from it, I have chosen her today for slaughter. 

She was my favorite kid, when she was born—you know how sometimes there’s just something about an animal, some little spark that sets it apart from other animals for you?—and I always spoke about her as if I knew her, as if there was something to know. Oh, Sunny-girl, hang in there, I’d say, when it was hot and she was sprawled panting in the barnyard, dozing in her not particularly expressive way, looking exactly like all the other goats. What I’m saying is, I don’t know if the reason I loved her had anything to do with her, or only to do with me, projecting something onto an animal.

I prepare to kill her with a small handful of grain, and then think better of it. It’s not ideal: the bits of corn come spewing back up out of the esophagus, and the melodrama of a last supper prolongs the moment, and for what? I cannot succumb to eulogy. The best thing to do is handle her as if nothing is going to happen. So I walk her from the barnyard into the backyard where my husband and I harvest our small livestock. He and I put her on her side with the same maneuver we use to trim hooves: one of us lifts slightly and the other sweeps her legs out from under, and we lower her as gently as we can. She is annoyed, as usual. She sighs, flicks her ear. It’s okay, Sunita. Pretty girl.

I can feel my heart skipping, a too-long pause and then a massive double-thud, which is not necessarily related to anxiety. I have been experiencing this irregular heartbeat for months, sometimes so steadily that I faint, my heartbeats clocking in at the equivalent of thirty beats per minute. Doctors can find no cause, but I suspect that it has something to do with a tick-borne disease I contracted in Missouri. This is possibly conspiracy thinking. If the irregularity becomes constant enough, they will send an electrical impulse to my S-node, like hitting a reset button. Until then, I sometimes have to sit down suddenly to prepare to lose consciousness. I try to keep part of my mind alert to my heart’s rhythm: it is like trying to stay awake after hitting snooze.

My husband holds Sunita’s head firmly. I position the captive bolt stunner at the back of her skull, between her horns. I hold it with both hands, and fire. Instant nothing. I shudder and a tear falls, and I am embarrassed, so I say aloud, “I don’t know why this one is so hard for me.” Which is true, and not true. Still moving quickly, I press my finger to Sunita’s eyeball, to check and double check that she does not flinch and does not blink, that she has no feeling. At least, this is what we believe: that when you touch an eyeball and the body produces no reaction whatsoever, there is a disconnection of nerves, and therefore no feeling. Therefore is the part I do not know. I cut her neck, and my husband pumps her back leg like riding a bicycle. The flow of blood gushes with each stride. The heart is a pump that doesn’t stop until it runs dry.

We slit her ankles to work the gambrel through and hoist her up to begin skinning. Once, I began butchering a rabbit and found six half-formed kits in its abdomen. I was butchering it because it was a breeder and it was not, breeding after breeding, getting pregnant. And here it was, pregnant, and because I had been a bad record keeper, I killed it anyway. I held that string of quivering fetuses like a slimy necklace in the sun, and cried, so angry at myself, and also a little unsure if my crying was warranted, caught in a snag of my philosophical and political stance about whether a thing was already its potential future self, and I finished cleaning the rabbit. This memory still surfaces sometimes, when I am about to open up a female animal.

I peel Sunita, ankles down, and cut with great care around her anus. Two years ago, Sunita nearly died giving birth to too many large kids, and this is why I wanted to give Sunita a good death today, to prevent her from dying a bad one. Even though we keep our buck separate from the girls, goats get through fences. (Or over, or around, or sometimes I swear to god they teleport. You get back from work one afternoon and stomp your stupid hat into the stupid dirt, because there they are, in the same paddock.) I peel Sunita and this is the second-most intimate with her body that I have been.

* * *

The first-most-intimate: Two years ago, my hand as small as I could make it and breaching Sunita’s birth canal, I eased kid number three out in a gentle slip-slide, so warm and near-life that I worked a few too many minutes at resuscitating it. I pressed its little chest, I cleared its nostrils and mouth of mucus, I clamped my mouth over its face and attempted to give it a jumpstart of breath. You sustain a blank determination in these moments, neither succumbing fully to hope nor to defeat. It is not impassioned: you move robotically, pumping a still-warm and gooey carcass with breath. The attempted intervention’s pointlessness eventually becomes evident, and you simply set the thing aside.

Like the two that preceded it, kid three was a whopper. As it cooled in the hay, entirely formed and carried to term, I watched its alternate life spool out before my eyes. The juddering tail at first gulp of milk, the telltale butt wag hours later when it had become proficient at latching on, the first little wobbling side-hop of frolic it might land or collapse from, precursor to evening after evening of gamboling, to a lifelong spontaneity of movement at dusk, to drowsy cud chewing and waiting out storms in huddles and each morning’s grazing. 

This happens sometimes with livestock stewardship: even though we breed for dams that throw twins (two udders for two mouths), they sometimes have triplets or quads or even more; even though we do our best to breed for easy birth, they sometimes bear babies too big for their bodies who get trapped in the birth canal, or entangled with their siblings. They have to take the diver position to come out easy. Sometimes they simply don’t. I had tried to interpret the signs of Sunita’s bad labor—I wanted so desperately to just ask her what she needed—watching her for signs of pain and her water’s break, but I made the wrong call. If I had intervened earlier in this particular case, I could have assisted the painful and precarious, but live birth of Sunita’s kids, before the fetuses suffocated in utero, their water bags broken. Helping is a sometimes fatal risk—infection, premature inducement, vaginal tears—but in this case, I had waited too long to help.

The first time I soaped my arm to assist a goat near death with a stuck kid, I breached the vaginal canal with my folded-small hand and blindly disentangled the kids caught dead inside, pushing one back and pulling one forward, to fit them through. It tangled my own stomach, to do so. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I said. The dam had been dragging herself along the fence all night when we found her. The first kid came out so soft that it was already going sponge, coming apart in the middle, held together only by its skin.

With an arm dish-soaped up past the elbow, I put Sunita’s third kid in the bucket with its cold, gelatinous siblings. The whimpers of pain that had accompanied each of Sunita’s exhalations finally ceased. She only breathed, stretching her head occasionally toward her own tail, moaning the gentle mmm’s that would be the fundamental imprint of mother to her kids. This call and response is a mothering instinct that people breed for; breeding for a trait means that those animals without the trait are culled. Culling means they are not allowed to reproduce, which means they are killed and made meat. Sunita had mothering instincts. It was my own stewardship in question. 

Murmuring and receiving no reply, Sunita looked forward and panted again. Her udders strained against the hay, swollen and hot. Milk for three and then some.

* * *

I take the skin from Sunita’s legs down. Once I have cut around the parallelogram of her hind end and tied the bung hole, I will ease the tip of the knife between the soft fur of her abdomen and the softer organs behind, cupping my other hand on the backside of her skin to create a pocket of clearance, knuckles pushing her organs away. I will run the cut to the sternum. I will work my stiff hand against fascia, encountering very occasionally a twitch of muscle, echo of moments-ago feeling.

On YouTube, I watch a man take a rabbit from alive to cleaned in fifteen seconds. Cleaned is a word, in this context, meaning meat. The transformation happens so quickly that on my third and fourth viewing, I can see the cleaned rabbit sitting inside the live one on his lap, like it is one of those Anne Geddes babies in a costume. And that’s exactly how the man skins the rabbit, like pulling off an oversized jumpsuit.

The carcass quivers. Nerves scream messages to nowhere. I have read that in humans, consciousness might remain for a few seconds after decapitation. I have read this because my middle school experience was pockmarked by forwarded viral videos of distant decapitations. I have read this because the world is excruciating, and because something in me feels the obligation to know. I have read about cartels torturing their victims by pulling their tongues out through their noses, and about public immolations in which a mob puts a car tire over somebody’s body and douses them in gas and sets them alight, about ethnic cleansing and child soldiers and genocide. I have read it because these things are removed from me and my life. I have read it because I kill animals, but I’m afraid of the violence that I’m doing without knowing it, just by living here, by being white and middle class and American, by using gadgets that run on minerals mined by children in the Congo and oil from Venezuela or the Middle East monopolized through American-facilitated coups that incite large-scale destabilization and violence and migrations that my own country responds to by caging children.

When I stun an animal, and cut it, and pump its blood out, and decide that it is really dead, I give it some time. A few minutes before I begin skinning, to fully leave its body, just in case.

* * *

I tell a friend I am going to try to write this essay. She tells me that she remembers reading Georges Bataille, French philosopher, on slaughter. The decline of civilization began, he said, when we separated the killing of our animals from our lives. The friend and I agree that this makes a lot of sense. Our births, deaths, and killing have all been removed as much as possible from our homes. Modernity has facilitated for so many Westerners the belief that our lives are simultaneously safe and that they are not predicated on harm—that we can even exist separately from harm—that we have not simply outsourced de-facto enslavement for the production of our tremendous economy of disposable consumer goods, that we can purchase food whose fuel and chemical inputs don’t result in vast ecological devastation, killing fields, large-scale extinction. Modernity allows us to believe that consumer activism and individual choices can keep us clean. Clean is a word, in this context, meaning guiltless, good, and pure. We have language about it, labels and packaging, compromises of syntax lobbied to death: free range, sustainably raised, responsibly sourced.

I try to find this tract about slaughter from Georges Bataille. I am, maybe, a bad researcher, and what I find instead is copious speculation about the spectacle of violence: its potential power, our inherent desire or need for it, the human magnetism toward spectacular death that differentiates our species. Bataille tried to convince several friends to torture him to death in public. ‘Friends’ might be a mischaracterization. I’m grappling with care, and slaughter, and stewardship, and whatever distinguishes humans from other animals, if anything. Bataille wanted to illustrate what he believed to be a supreme truth, that annihilation and love were two sides of the same grotesque coin, that absolute truth was a violent contradiction.

Is compassionate killing possible? Am I at work on the same question that Bataille was asking, repulsive to me as it seems? 

* * *

In the barn, after I have pulled three dead kids for whom Sunita’s udders bulge like water balloons stretched to their tissue’s limit, I wait for her to pass the afterbirth.

But she doesn’t. Some ten minutes later, she still hasn’t. I am anxious. If she were up walking around, I wouldn’t even be keeping track of time. My husband, too, is waiting for her to pass the afterbirth, so that she can eat of it what she wants, and then he can bury the remaining goop with the contents of the bucket, now cool and gelatinously stiff and buzzing with a couple flies. Should I go in? What do I expect to find? I don’t know what afterbirth ought to feel like.

And then Sunita’s nose wrinkles; her lip comes up. She’s in pain. Or, she’s pushing.

Is it possible that she has one more? Surely not. With twelve to fifteen pounds of baby goat in that bucket, surely not. Having waited too long to intervene before, and knowing that I will put her on a round of antibiotics regardless, I decide I have to at least feel for something. She has endured so much stretching already today, and is swollen and tender, and I wince. I make my hand small, smaller. I apologize. I go slowly. 

And my fingers find the smooth-slick, firm-soft contours of a little face, and two tiny hooves. I groan. I have not more than blinked back the threat of a tear, but discovery of the fourth kid opens a little space for agony to rip through. I hold my position. Expletives ensue. I collect myself. I apologize to her and clench my jaw. Get it over with. 

Gently, gently, I tuck my middle finger between the two hooves and soft-clamp my fingers around them, and begin to pull. I do not want to pull this one into pieces. Sunita groans, but weakly. It is not the panicky shout of half an hour ago. I do not want to hurt her. 

I pull the tiny feet: they breach the world, soft as flower petals. So warm. The sack is still intact. Sunita is too exhausted to push, but I don’t rush it. I give her a few breaths before I pull the head through, and once the hard part is over, the kid rushes out in a quick slap of liquid. It’s possible, I tell myself, and so begin to clear the kid’s mouth and nose of mucus, hurrying toward the resuscitation process that has resulted three times already in nothing. 

The weakest little heartbeat, and a twitch in the back legs, and I shriek. Maybe shriek isn’t the right word. A little corkscrew pop of pressure. I holler for a new towel, to rub this baby down vigorously and fan the flame of its tentative life.

Sunita moans, but doesn’t get up. The kid takes a breath, and then another, and then is breathing, and its body begins shivering to life. I move it to Sunita’s face, so she can lick up the sack. This is the first one she’s had the chance to nuzzle; I haven’t given her the dead ones.

Sunita makes the ‘mother’ moans, and the baby reciprocates, albeit weakly, with its tiny voice. Finally, I am crying. You better fucking live, baby. 

She does. We call her Lucky, and then Lucy. I milk Sunita daily—onto the ground with the antibiotic milk, to relieve her of the pressure, to try and prevent a mastitis that she will get anyway, shriveling a hard knot into one of her bags that will keep me from breeding her again because I don’t want her to die of it—and I love them both, Sunita and Lucy, so full of something like triumph, so gloriously rising each morning to a day of pasture grazing, scrawling with their meanderings the word idyllic on the hillside.

I try to stifle that narrative I’m making. There are other doe-kid pairs and groups out there, too. I don’t know how a goat remembers; I don’t know whether a goat might have a sense of how many dead kids she bore. Because she does have one kid, and her experience of labor has been followed by bonding with and feeding that offspring, I don’t know whether or how this goat might grieve. Sunita certainly shows no particular signs of having a special relationship with me, other than that she is accustomed to a daily exchange of grain for the discomfort of being milked. Interested in me for possible treats, and wary of me for possible handling, and comfortable with neck scratches as long as I make no sudden movements: this has always been her cautious approach. The goat does not have a special survival narrative. The goat has now: weather, hunger, insect annoyances, satiation, milk-drop, cues about movement from the herd.

* * *

Melodrama, maybe: I spend reverent time with Sunita’s organs. Skinned and headless and open down the middle, the carcass hangs like a laundry sack. I take each item out.

I inspect her lungs, searching maybe for corroboration of ill health. I hold the pink slabs like the wings of a splayed bird in my hands, running my thumbs over their surface. The organ is a kind of solid foam, a wiggly, aerated rubber. If you compress the tissue between your finger and thumb you can feel the air pockets collapsing, you can feel it deflate like a molecular sponge. On YouTube, I have watched videos of people who cook with all parts of the goat for their village. The lungs are still attached to the stiff ribbed tube of the trachea before the men cut them apart, and the men blow into the trachea to inflate the lungs like balloons. I don’t know whether this is some process of quality control, or for fun, or for the imagined YouTube voyeur. They are so comfortable with the organs, so at ease with the butcher, and they know how to cook every last part.

I cut a cross section. What would I find? Signs of lungworm, maybe, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. She seems pretty healthy. I feel the breath come into my chest, an automatic process, my own lungs inflating without any effort. The miniscule exchange is happening in there, the individual oxygen molecules passing somehow from the air to my blood, from the immense world of not-me to the tiny miraculous community of organisms that I am.

There is no outside. This is the wisdom of Zen Buddhism and mycology and geological time and Indigenous traditions the world over: there is no outside. The tiny cracks in the skin of my hands are red-grimed with Sunita’s blood. 

I reach in, last, for Sunita’s heart. It hugs the front of her chest cavity, still warm. It fits perfectly into my cupped hand. I have listened through his chest at my husband’s heart some nights and thanked whatever there is to thank in the world for the continuation of that electrical, muscular orchestra, its proteins chained and dancing. I have eaten the hearts of at least chickens, goats, cows, and rabbits; possibly pigs, I don’t remember. I take a moment to remember to pay attention to my own heart beat, its resistance to clockwork, its oddball lurch. I pull Sunita’s heart away, scooping it out, and its heat escapes.

I don’t know what happens to us when we die. My feeling—and I can hardly call it a belief, because it has nothing like argument or tenets or even parameters—my feeling is that we are one massive, maybe limitless consciousness, of which everything is a part. A swirling soup of energized awakening. Me, my friends, the goats, a snake caught in a coil of barbed wire, a cedar sapling burned up in a hill fire, every stupid mosquito. When we die, however much or little we are, we just sort of go back into the soup.

Eventually, the hanging carcass that was once Sunita—a goat I believed I had an affinity for, and who had an affinity for me—becomes clean. Soft tissues removed, it is just the meat and bones. Tomorrow, after hanging overnight, it will become cuts and ground meat, and what’s left, all the trim and bones, I will push in the wheelbarrow out into the cornfield behind the house, a quarter mile into the ravine in the middle of the section, and make my offering to the coyotes.