Twelve by Twelve by Micahel Powers Read Free Book Online Page B

as if I walk with her in the mornings.” These were next to her dear elder cousin’s mums, “splendid in the fall” and her “John Jamison apple tree from my dear friend John, who was proud to have been named outstanding Black farmer in the county one year. Wonderful hours in his kitchen listening to his stories.”
    There was beautyberry, which grows along roadsides all over the South, but “this one is from the Murdock home place in Ronark, Alabama. The house my great-grandfather built for my great-grandmother when they married.” A fig tree from an activist friend in Chapel Hill. Fragrant flowers near the 12 × 12 door: Osmanthus, aka fragrant tea olive, “sweet scent of my childhood. It perfumes theair on summer nights, as do four o’clocks from my sister’s garden, nicotiana (flowering tobacco from Analisa), datura, or devil’s trumpet, so fragrant at night.” Plus American hazelnuts and rugosa rose (for rose hips) and native wildflowers from other relatives — Solomon’s seal and Solomon’s plume; dogtooth violet, skullcap, and amsonia — making the whole swirl of life around the 12 × 12 a glorious blueprint of nature, love, and memory.
    Her map brought to mind Thoreau’s observation that it’s perfectly fine to build castles in the sky — just be sure you put foundations under them. Jackie’s air castle — a sensual, productive relationship with a few acres; being mindful and fully present; living on a low-carbon diet — bloomed in full color before my eyes. Her castle took transpiring, photosynthesizing form on the earth’s surface. She put foundations under her dreams: some seeds, some science, some art. Each day I’d walk out at sunrise into a gently transformed world. New shapes, smells, and shades of color, the hang of a tiny fruit, the wrinkle of a leaf, the ambitious shoot of a straight stalk. Glory be.
    Along with the mysterious smell, another wafted over to the 12 × 12: the smell of a working farm. One day Kyle saw me from across the pond and ran over to remind me about the dangling issue of the white broiler. He pointed it out again, in the swarm of fowl, and I told him I’d take that one plus another.
    “Okay,” Kyle said. “Would you like to take them with you?”
    “Like this?” I said, a frown growing on my face. “But they’re alive.”
    He looked up at me through blue eyes, a little puzzled. I tried to clarify: “They need to be slaughtered.”
    “Yes,” Kyle said, innocently. “You’re going to slaughter them.”
    I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. A moving wall of chickens, turkeys, and ducks was all around us. Kyle was now joined by two of his brothers; the three blond boys stared at me withan earnest, expectant intensity. I was fully acquainted with the relevant theory: if you eat it, you should be able to kill it. Someone else shouldn’t do your dirty work. And if I couldn’t kill a chicken, perhaps the only honest response was to become a vegetarian.
    Kyle filled the silence: “My dad can show you. It takes one hour.”
    “How about we talk about it later?”
    “I’ll ask my dad. He shoots them in the head.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Yes, that’s how he slaughters ‘em.”
    “Sometimes,” six-year-old Greg jumped in, “the head gets shot off the body, and one time it was hanging by just a little skin.” The three brothers giggled, and the four-year-old launched into another head-shooting anecdote, the bloodiest so far. More hysterical laughing.
    Kyle then assumed an authoritative pose again, shushing his brothers and pronouncing: “There’s two ways to kill a chicken.”
    “I thought you cut its throat,” I said.
    “That’s the other way. But it’s harder. I recommend blowing its brains out.”
    Feeling a bit stunned by this turn of events, I told the boys I needed to think about it. As I hustled back to the 12 × 12, I bumped into my furniture-maker neighbor, the forty-something José, from Mexico. He handed me a plastic bag of