Given his own buried anxieties, Harrison had not been thrilled, on arrival the previous fall, to be informed of certain perceived deficits in his own intellectual preparation, and assigned remedial—remedial!—work to address those deficits. Yes, he, Harrison Oppenheimer, the smart one, was to be detained for never having studied—wait for it—the King James Bible and the Confessions of Augustine, two texts most assuredly not on the syllabus of any class at the Walden School. （He wasn’t alone in this disgrace, thankfully; that fall, he met twice weekly with a few of his fellow remedials—Tony, Chaim, and one of the Justins—to discuss these texts in depth with Professor Alcock.） Meanwhile, he studied Euclid’s Elements and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with the others, and his old muddle with philosophy began to dissipate almost immediately. （This was what teaching could be, he marveled!） It wasn’t even difficult, and there was nothing wrong with his brain. Addressing another Walden-induced deficit, Harrison began to do some Latin and even a little Greek with Mr. Perrulli, a former priest who’d been teaching classics at Roarke since Loring’s time, and he read deeply in epistemology with Tony （who despite his dairy-farm upbringing already possessed a profound understanding of the material） and joined a few of the others in the Constitution seminar. Harrison even found himself engaged by Mr. Boudreaux’s auto mechanics class, taught as something of a rite of passage at Roarke, and actually learned how to repair an engine.
But when it came to the famous Roarke chores, the physical labor that was as central to the school’s mystique as its cerebral prerequisites, Harrison was far less enthusiastic. And who could blame him? No one was especially happy to rise at dawn and greet the day with their toil. （Even Tony, whose life had been spent tending to cows, was known to be short-tempered as he dressed first thing to go out to the herd.） A few of the men had managed to find good fits: Gordon, for example, who came from a restaurant family in Washington State, and who liked to cook, had taken charge of the kitchen soon after their arrival （a great relief to the second-years and the faculty, as the last Roarke student with any culinary aptitude had graduated a year earlier）。 He had breakfast and coffee ready by the time the others came in from the barns and the fields, and while the food he prepared was an adjustment for Harrison, hunger helped anything go down. Harrison was hungry at Roarke in a way he had never been in Brooklyn. After a while, he was even happy to see certain menu items come up on the rotation—vegetarian chili, baked trout, pasta with autumn vegetables. Anything but chicken, basically. He was pretty sure he would never eat chicken again.
Harrison had not been at Roarke for a month before he was summoned to the coop, cloudy with feathers and slimy with shit, and unceremoniously handed the unsupervised care of the school flocks. The second-year student who did the handing looked utterly delighted.
“But … but…” Harrison was already sputtering, and not only from the reek of his immediate surroundings. Gordon in the kitchen: that made sense. Tony in the cow barn: that also made sense. But a Brooklyn boy—a Brooklyn Heights boy—in charge of this?
The second-year looked as if he knew precisely what Harrison wanted to say about this situation. Perhaps he had attempted some similar objection a year ago at about this time, and yet these birds had still gotten fed and watered and relieved of their eggs and, yes, butchered and readied for the kitchen, from that day to this. Putting Harrison in charge of these … creatures … was a test, like rebuilding a car engine or achieving some familiarity with the King James Bible or sharing a bunkhouse with twenty-seven other men, or finally, finally, gaining liberation from his siblings. If help was needed, he was told, an answer could likely be found on the shelf of animal husbandry books in the library, every one of them older than Roarke itself. Also, would he please bring in eight broilers for dinner?
Yes, killed.
Yes, plucked.
Yes, gutted.
Chickens were beings of little brain. Precious little brain, it turned out, and while this was neither a good thing nor a bad thing when you had to feed them or chase after them or break up their disputes （they could be horrendous bullies, like something out of a John Hughes movie） or insert your hand beneath them to collect their morning eggs, it was an indisputably good thing when you were tasked with terminating their lives. In the end, and after many abortive attempts, Harrison did indeed consult Modern Poultry Farming for the best （most efficient? most kind? most likely not to make him barf?） means of shuffling eight unlucky fowl from off this mortal coil. And he managed to get the job done.