‘Pioneers who pee don’t make the newspapers,’ joked Grandfather. But if with a child’s peevishness I liked the truth better, which was that Grandfather had been urinating in the sewage ditch, not working in the yard, when he saw the hyena, that was because it made a difference. Anyone could understand that it was easier to throw down a pail of fodder or a bundle of hay than to stop peeing in midstream.
After the incident, I would sometimes go to the cowshed in the afternoon hours when Grandfather was napping in the cabin or under a tree in the orchard. Zeitser would be leaning wearily against a wall, perusing an old newspaper that Shlomo Levin had left lying in the yard; the cows would be drowsing in the cowshed; and even the exhausted flies would be resting on dusty piles of sacks in the corner or curled up in the fodder sweetly asleep on a piece of carob. Going behind the manure pile to pee, I would suddenly force myself to stop with a round, violent squeeze, grab a pitchfork, and run back with it to the yard. After many such practice sessions, I could do it without spilling a drop.
Grandfather returned from the clinic groaning from the painful injections. The first thing he did was summon Manya, our delinquent watchdog, and give her a dressing down. Hurt and disgraced, she slunk away, taking her food bowl with her, and was never seen again. Liberson, who was the village treasurer at the time and often went to Tel Aviv, claimed to have seen her there hanging around the boardwalk cafés and toadying up to the English. ‘She was so embarrassed that she pretended not to know me,’ he guffawed.
I pulled up an armchair for Grandfather to sit in. I was, so they say, a strong child even then. No one thought me particularly bright, but I was considered ‘sturdy, responsible, and good-natured’. Grandfather sat down and told me a story of which all I remember today are the words I didn’t understand – bacillus, anthrax, hydrophobia – and a vague something about a Ukrainian peasant boy who was bitten by a rabid wolf and brought to Paris to have his life saved.
‘Yes, indeed, my child,’ said Grandfather. ‘Like Burbank, Louis Pasteur was the farmer’s friend.’
Riva Margulis and Tonya Rilov came to visit, their faces furrowed with worry. When Grandfather looked at them in astonishment, because the two of them were never seen together, they explained that the Committee had recommended that Comrade Mirkin be given chicken soup as a restorative, and that they were volunteering to make it. Grandfather thanked them but said it wasn’t necessary. He told me to bring the hatchet and the hook, and we went to catch a chicken ourselves.
At the far end of the cowshed we found Pinness measuring the teeth and skull of the charred hyena and jotting down the results in a notebook. Serene but excited, he hurried over to us when he saw us.
‘I’m sure it’s him,’ he said. ‘I’m absolutely certain.’
He began to cut the hyena’s head off, inserting his knife deftly between the spines of the vertebrae and severing the large neck and shoulder tendons with practised strokes. A week later the animal’s white, shiny skull was on display in the glass cabinet of the nature room. As was his custom, Piness did not remove the flesh with chemicals but simply buried the carcass with the eggs of the greenbottle fly. Within a few days the newly hatched maggots had picked the hyena’s bones clean.
As soon as the anxious hens roving around by the hayloft saw Grandfather and me approach with the short hatchet and the long hook, they knew what we had come for. While Grandfather sharpened the hatchet, first honing it on a grindstone that spun around in a basin of water with a flurry of sparks and spray, then filing it down with a sickle, they ran around the yard beating their wings and screeching to one another. Grandfather, who was traditionally the family chicken killer though not much of a meat eater himself, brandished the hook, which was no more than a rusty reinforcing rod a yard and a half long and twisted at one end, swept our speckled hen Shoshanna off her feet with it, bent down with a grunt of pain because his stomach still hurt from the injections, and grabbed her by the throat.
The cows shut their horrified eyes. With a movement so lightning fast that it made me want to study it in slow motion to see how it was done, Grandfather laid Shoshanna’s neck on the concrete partition of a feed stall and brought the sharpened hatchet down on her throat. Contorted beak opened wide, her combed head dropped on his black rubber boots as he flung her startled body over his shoulder in a parabola so perfect that he did not even bother to glance at the familiar curve.
The beheaded chicken, a flying fountain of blood, fell, writhed, and rose to its feet for its death dance. Grandfather moved away. He disapproved of the hypnotic way I stared at the hen doing her last little jitterbug. ‘That’s something you must have got from your mother,’ he said.