The Day a Turkey Ate My Vegan Husband
There’s this old timey village in our town, where you can rent an antique car, take a carriage ride, or tour a soy mill and see how soy was…milled, back in the day. The staff speaks in Old English dialect and wears long dresses and bonnets, suspenders and broad hats. Around Halloween, they have a head-less horseman riding around scaring the bajeezus out of kids and they sell pumpkin donuts and spiked apple cider. In the winter, there are carolers, actual chestnuts actually roasting, and spiked eggnog. It’s a lovely place to wander around shnockered in all seasons. Summertime is fun because the staff hand-tills vegetables and tends to livestock.
This summer, my husband and I took our two kids to this village for a visit. It was a beautiful day, with a breeze wafting the smell of horse shit across the tiny plains. We said hello to the sheep and spotted a few early pumpkins poking their heads out of the sincere little patch.
We are vegan, and land just this side of patchouli stink on the hippie spectrum, and my husband longs to one day be a self-sustaining family. He observes with great interest how the village grows their heirloom vegetables without the use of modern conveniences like Trader Joe’s. I skeptically nod along with his theories on green beans and wonder about things like off-grid tampons and deodorant.
Walking between the glass blowing barn and the pottery barn (not THE Pottery Barn, just a barn full of pots), I noticed a large black and white spotted turkey in the yard of one of the old houses. It was enormous, with really unique plumage. He was busy hunting for bugs or corn on the ground, but when my kids and I warbled at him, he looked up, making beady eye contact with us. “Oh, hello!” he seemed to say. Or, probably, “Good morrow to ye fine folk!”
My son asked about the red appendage hanging off the turkey’s face. I thought it was a ‘gizzard,’ but my wanna-be farmer husband informed me that, no, it’s actually called a ‘snood.” I thought he was making up words again, but the internets agreed with him. It seems that the thin red thing dangling off the tip of his beak is the ‘snood,’ and the scrotum-looking tissue pile bouncing under the beak against the neck is the ‘wattle.’ Of interest, according to modernfarmer.com, apparently snoods come in various lengths, and “for reasons that remain unclear, snood length appears to be an indicator of robust genes in turkeys.”
This turkey was stacked, which probably explained why he approached us with such confidence.
A gate allowed us inside the yard, and once there, our turkey friend came right up to us. I’ve successfully raised some panicky, skittish children, just like myself, so they cowered behind my legs. It’s possible that my saying, “We should run, right? Shouldn’t we run?” may have influenced their flight tendency.
My husband, always cool as an organic cucumber, stood quietly while the bird got close. He even put out his fool hand as if to pet it. “They’re nice, see, kids? See? No need to be afraid. If the turkey was feeling threatened, his snood would be standing up. He’s totally chill. Look at how he- OW!”
That’s when the turkey took a huge bite out of my vegan husband’s thigh meat.
The turkey and my husband squared off as the kids and I bolted up the stone stairs into the kitchen of the old house, surprising a room full of sweaty tourists and several employees baking pies from scratch in an old timey oven. It was at least 1,000 degrees in there and smelled of cinnamon and learning. My plan to try to blend in, like there wasn’t a man-turkey battle happening right outside, was destroyed by my son, who blurted, “My dad got bit by a turkey!”
When the room turned to look at us in silent slow-motion, we could hear my husband’s voice outside. “Back off, you stupid bird!”
One of the bonnet-ed women dropped her rolling pin and ran out the door.
“Sir, please do NOT kick our turkey!”
“He won’t let me pass!”
“Sir, he is an endangered turkey species! SIR!!”
To which the man that I love, this non-meat eating, tea-drinking, pacifist, said, about the artisanal, craft turkey, “I’m just moving him with my leg.”
The kids and I tried to pretend everything was normal in the house. We just wanted to learn about how to make an apple pie with hand-churned butter, OK? Finally, my husband sheepishly joined us in the kitchen, and we were all able to sneak out the backdoor. Only when we were back safely on the main street did we look back into the yard. There was no sign of the birdpetrator. We wondered if he had been taken to poultry prison.
We enjoyed the rest of our day at the village. As we made our way toward the exit that evening, a kindly staff lady in a rocking chair waved to us and asked us if we’d had a nice day, to which my snitch of a son said, “Yeah, except my dad got bit by a turkey.”
She stopped rocking and stood up with surprising speed for an elderly lady in a hoopskirt, “You’re the one who got bit by the turkey? Security has been looking everywhere for you! Just a minute. Stay right there…”
We didn’t.
It was pretty clear by the tone of her voice and the urgent way she was patting herself down for a walkie-talkie that the village po-po were not considering us the victims in this turkey encounter. We skipped away, like everything was normal, this is fine, we’re fine, we’ll just be heading out now. Is that rain? We should go.
It’s a good thing we’ll be in costume the next time we come for the Halloween festival. We’re definitely on an endangered farm animal most-wanted list now.
At least they didn’t cook and eat the turkey in retribution. Thigh for a thigh, or whatnot. I mean, that tom was a dick, but we didn’t want him dead. We’re animal lovers, after all. Well, ‘love’ may be a strong word in this case, but you get the idea.
