Birdhouses

In the winter we ate goats. Father taught us how to skin, and I made us all hats. We were taught to fear and respect the animals. Their pain and their suffering. In the winter, the blood was the worst. It ran into the ice and frost like a grisly snow cone. When the fair came to town and I bought a cherry snow cone, all I could taste was that blood.

And I liked it.

So in the winter, we ate goats and it tasted like sawdust. Like the sawdust that used to gather under my father’s workbench when he fashioned logs into birdhouses. And I hated those birdhouses. I hated them because he was always working on them. Hated them because I never saw him not making one. The next winter, we ate more goat. More sawdust and more birdhouses.

Birdhouses in the winter.

In the winter, even in the spring, there were no birds. And a pile of tiny empty houses gathering the corner of my father’s barn. Houses that he had labored on for hours on end. Houses no one would ever live in. And a son with no father.

When I told my sister that I wished father would spend less time with the birdhouses, she slapped me and called me a bastard.


One winter, I had not yet made our annual hats. Laziness, I guess. My father said, “Go on, son. Make us them hats. Take pride in your craft.” And I went to my father’s workshop and I saw the pile of empty, useless little houses. I took the sharpest hatchet I could find and went back to the kitchen. Father asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, but I barely heard him. I hanged them upside-down in the barn, gutted like the sawdust goats we ate in winter.

I ripped the skin from their backs and I made them hats.