Yes. But this isn’t chickens.
They sat on the fence and watched it all. For most of it Dick Sherman used a knife with a steel handle, which was easier to clean up afterward, and there wasn’t the problem of a wooden handle’s breaking. It was a sharp knife and he began by stabbing it into the horse’s stomach and working it sawlike along his length, sawing up through the tough hide and brownish hair and pulling with his other hand to open the cut wider. When the knife grew slippery with blood he wiped it and his red hands on the hair over the ribs. Then the yard-long incision had been made and Dick Sherman and their father began to peel back the hide, their father pulling the upper flap of skin and hair backward while Sherman shaved at it underneath, freeing the hide from the ribs and stomach lining, exposing a thin layer of yellow fat and the fine sheaf of red muscle. Dick Sherman was kneeling at the horse’s stomach with the knife and their father was crouched over his back. Both men had begun to sweat. Their shirts showed darker along the back and their faces shone. But they paused only briefly, routinely, to wipe their forearms across their shining foreheads, then fell to work again over the prone horse, whose one visible eye, as far as the boys could determine from the fence, had not changed at all but was still wide open, still staring indifferently into the blank featureless sky above the barn as if he didn’t know or didn’t care what was being done to him, or as if he had decided at last not to look anywhere else ever again. But Dick Sherman wasn’t finished yet.
He drove the knife into the groin inside the top back leg to cut through that big muscle so he could sever the tendon in the joint. Afterward, with their father’s help, the leg could be pulled back away, leaving the gut exposed and accessible. It took a while, stabbing and probing, to find the tendon and then to free the joint, but he found it finally.
Try it, Sherman said. See can you pull his leg back, Tom.
Their father took Elko at the back cannon and pulled hard, wrenching it, carrying the long fine-boned leg back and up so that it stood up now into the air almost perpendicular to his body, awful-looking, horrible. Sitting on the fence, watching it, the boys began to understand that Elko was dead.
The rich muscle at his groin where Dick Sherman had opened him lay thick and heavy and raw, exposed to view like steak. The hide had torn some when their father pulled and was bleeding along the tear. But now the gut could be opened. Sherman cut into the stomach lining. Then the yellow bags and the blue knots of stuff spilled out onto the dirt and the wispy manure. There was mucousy blood and fluid, yellow-and amber-colored. The transparent membranes shone silver in the sun.
Sherman said, Have you got a tree trimmer handy, Tom? I could use one.
In the barn, Guthrie said. He stood up stiffly and walked along the side of the barn into the dark center bay and returned with the two-handled double-clawed tool he used to cut tree branches and the spirea bushes around the house. He handed it to Dick Sherman.
Sherman laid his knife down. Pull the hide back again, will you? he said.