Can I pay you in chickens?

The flock master, the poultry pistol, the chicken farmer I guess technically you’d call him, one Malte Jörgensson, desperately needed a few workers to help him on the farm for a day or two. It was beautiful summertime in Österlen, but all that beauty didn’t make it an ounce less true that Malte needed laborers real bad to handle a few urgent matters: build new coops and fence lines, transfer compost, move chickens around, and so forth. He had a Pole who worked and lived on the farm. His name was Robert, but the way Malte said it, on account of his Scanian drawl, sounded like this: Robot. Robert had arrived to the farm five years ago to work for six months. He was such a good worker and got along so well with Malte that he just stayed on in perpetuity.

Robert went back to his village in Poland for a few weeks every summer to visit his sick mother, friends, and so on. His absence was particularly crippling for the farm’s operations that summer: Malte’s wife, Gunnel, had broken her leg and couldn’t contribute, so one could say the farm, insofar as a farm can be attributed personhood, was actually crippled. In her rigid cast, Gunnel was confined to the house, its insides decorated sparsely, but with perfectly functional furniture and comfy sofas. She moved around on the ground floor on a wheelchair. The family cat, Dilbert, the fearless rat assassin, kept her good company, offering her gifts of mangled rat bodies, and the occasional headless bird. Malte was a peach. He cooked for Gunnel, brought her coffee and snacks, helped her around, and so on. Gunnel missed Robert’s tender touch on her skin, breasts, neck, and nether parts. She too called him Robot on account of her dialect.

Did Malte know that Robert and Gunnel were having an affair? He sure did, but it didn’t bother him, as he’d drained all his sexual juices many years ago, while Gunnel hadn’t. They agreed to satisfy Gunnel’s loin-centered needs through the introduction of a third party, under one condition: both wife and husband had to approve. After a few disapprovals (all seasonal workers, to keep it private and quiet, since gossip flows like a mighty waterfall in this area), Robert emerged victorious with the tacit understanding that no words would be uttered about the whole thing, ever. They didn’t worry too much about Robert running his mouth, because he only spoke Polish and had no desire to learn Swedish save for the odd word or expression having to do with the farm, chickens, and (reserved for Gunnel) sex.

*

The solution to Malte’s woes that summer wasn’t easily forthcoming, even though he only needed people for a day. He first thought of hiring another seasonal laborer. But Rolling Hills Chicken Inc. and Järrestad King Turkey, the big guns in the area, had already nabbed all the workers, who came from countries like Poland, Estonia, and Serbia. These big poultry kahunas had over twenty thousand birds each, a vast infrastructure, and bottomless resources. Malte had less than a thousand, of which around half were meat bird and half egg birds. His resources, needless to add, were limited.

The big companies had their foreigners cooped up in miserable shacks and worked them like robots, seven days a week, so poaching a few of these wretched men even for a day was out of the question. Malte had read a big article about the exploitation in Ystads Allehanda recently, clucking his tongue, sucking his teeth, shaking his head in disapproval.

There were a lot of other horror stories coming from Rolling Hills Chicken Inc. and Järrestad King Turkey. In one news segment on SVT that Malte watched many years ago, an undercover reporter who had taken jobs in both companies, showed his secret recordings of featherless and injured birds running around, of hens eating hens.

They were so powerful these companies, nothing was ever done about any of this.

Malte had a little slaughterhouse with a large sheet metal table, an industrial-grade plucking machine, and tile floor with a powerful drain for all the chicken blood and liquefied guts. Sometimes the chickens were still alive when they got plucked. They made these awful sounds from the pain as they spun round and round in the plucker, the dull metallic sound of its drum looping, like a clothes dryer, if clothes dryers were torture chambers. It could take minutes for a chicken to die in that thing. Malte hummed to himself to drown out the screeching. But that, he told himself, was entirely different from the big evil companies. That was purely by accident.

As a selling point to his customers, Malte insisted that his chickens (exclusively of the Hubbard Redbro and Rowan Gold races) were pasture-raised, slow-raised, and treated like royalty, which translated to this: his chickens produced the best eggs, the meat had the best taste, and the whole process was animal-friendly and humane.

From time to time, Malte would strut around his farm aimlessly, darting from one place to the next in search of nothing in particular, in search of the search.

*

Malte liked to tell people this well-worn joke about a farmer from Österlen who encounters a Stockholmer vacationing on an adjacent farm. One day the farmer wakes up to the sound of gun shots. He discovers that the guy from Stockholm has shot down a goose. The farmer tells the Stockholmer: “The bird fell on my field, it’s mine.” The Stockholmer says: “nah-uh, it fell on this side, it’s mine, besides I shot it.” The farmer replies: “Well now, we have ourselves an impasse. Look here. I have a fair solution. Each of us gets to kick the other in the nuts. The one that kicks the other the farthest gets the goose. Or are you chicken, like the rest of the Stockholm pussies?” The Stockholmer, though nonplussed at the proposal, wants to show that Stockholm men can hold their own among these hicks. “Fine,” he says. “Great, I’ll go first,” says the farmer, and kicks the Stockholmer so hard in the nuts that he flies back three meters, at which distance he tumbles down on his ass, holding his scrotum in agony. “My turn,” the Stockholmer squeaks out as he rises up from the rich soil, black as the night, crumbly as feta cheese, his nice pants caked in it. The farmer interrupts, “nah, you keep the goose, after all it fell on your field,” and walks away, whistling to himself.

*

Malte thought in chickens. He dreamed in chickens.

*

Malte thought that perhaps the Bosnians in town could answer his labor question. There were a lot of them. Too many, really. Didn’t do shit. Collected welfare. And so on. That was just true, like 2+2=4 was true. He was chummy with one of them: the Lumberjack. The Lumberjack would trade his creatively imported Zaranoff vodka for Malte’s chickens. Every now and then the Lumberjack would do the odd job on the farm. They’d also drink together, often with Robert, occasionally with Gunnel, though she didn’t like to get drunk. The Lumberjack spoke some Swedish. Robert knew a few words. And Malte spoke a version barely comprehensible outside the confines of Österlen. Yet they communicated.

Malte rang up the Lumberjack and told him to bring two or three other Bosnians to do some work on the farm. Cheap Bosnians, he emphasized, because chickens could do this work.

Sure, said the Lumberjack. He brought his teenage son and his two teenage friends. The teenagers hadn’t done any farm work, or any work for that matter, but they itched to get a hold of some cash to buy nice clothes, a perfume, a video game, and such. None of their daddies, the Lumberjack included, had what you’d call a regular job, which meant a perennial dearth of cash and status for the teenagers.

*

Malte reckoned the Lumberjack took the country road from town, driving on gently undulating hills, between rapeseed fields in full bloom. Being the only road from town to Malte’s farm, he was right. As the Lumberjack approached the farm in his old, brown, and creaky Volvo station wagon, the three teenagers, squeezed together in the backseat, started joking about whether the chicken farmer fucked his chickens. Haha. The Lumberjack told them to shut the fuck up and act as professionals. This is business. He scolded his son, who had a puny mustache blond like his father’s, extra hard, like XXL hard. Dick, his son whispered to his friends, who giggled. Malte, hands in the pockets of his dirty poop-colored Caterpillar overalls, was standing and waiting for them under a willow tree as the Lumberjack rolled into the yard and parked in front of the farmhouse, a typical Scanian cross-timber house with whitewashed lime-rendered walls, bulging and dipping like the gentle waves of the Baltic Sea not far from it. He waved to the Lumberjack, who waved back.

The introductions made were mostly grunts sprinkled with words, as were the instructions Malte gave the foreigners. He could tell that the acrid smell of the farm threw the urbanite teenagers off. Fucking townspeople.

*

The Bosnians worked for ten hours, minus a thirty-minute break for lunch, and a ten-minute break for coffee and biscuits. Chickens ran around everywhere, clucking, crowing, flapping their wings, their white feathers smudged with black feta dirt.

Came the time to pay up. The teenagers had been told they’d receive three hundred Krona each. Malte lowered his head before them, and said: “Times are tough. Can I pay you all in chickens?” The Lumberjack nodded. The teenagers’ jaws dropped in unison.

One of the teenagers, the poorest, got upset. Then he got a little more upset. Then he got a lot upset. Then he instinctively kicked Malte in the nuts with his foot. Kicked him so hard the poultry pistol flew back. “Fuck your chickens, you hick! Give me my money!” the teenager said.

Lying there on the ground, cupping his battered nuts with his hands, Malte intently looked up at the teenager who’d assaulted him (the teenager’s body held back by the Lumberjack’s left hand and his face smacked by his right). The teenager saw something strange and utterly baffling. In Malte’s eyes the teenager saw the intense stupidity of a chicken’s stare.