I
am in Corporate Hell.
Not to be confused with Hell’s
Corporate Headquarters, although I imagine the two would be quite similar.
I’m working in a conference room
with eight other women. No, we’re not
having a meeting; we have all been displaced from our cubicles during
renovations and must work literally side-by-side for two weeks. My Work Wife and I have been informed that at
least two people in this room are dogging our footsteps, keeping spreadsheets
on our movements: what time we arrive,
what time we leave, how long our lunch breaks last, how often we use the
restroom/get coffee/etc.
They don’t talk; not to us, not to
each other. It’s just clack-clack-clack
on their keyboards, and occasionally one will try to sneak a peak at our
monitors to see if we’re working. If one
of our work phones rings, necks snap in our direction and they eyeball us like
we just devoured a batch of aborted fetuses and splatter-shat them out in the
middle of the room.
Slouched
down in my chair—done with my work for the day—I’m thinking about something I’m
certain no one else is. I am wondering . . . how many knives should I take with me this weekend?
This place smells of blood, bleach, and death.
A
little bit like shit, too, but not as much as it did before. It smells . . . familiar. It smells like where I want to be.
Of
course the meat case still doesn’t work.
Of course Evan is slicing away on the bone saw. My face lights up; of course Travis is quietly
whittling meat off of bones. Of course
Rob is standing around supervising. He
immediately embraces me.
I’m
back in Ste. Gen with Eli for opening weekend of rifle season for deer. As usual I come bearing all sorts of
treats: jerky, two racks of Burt’s
smoked ribs, smoked beef tenderloin with our horsey sauce, and homemade pumpkin
muffins (because I’m domestic as fuck).
There’s also smoked pork loin that Rob made already in the fridge.
But
. . . something’s missing. Something
crucial.
Where’s
Sawyer?
Dropped
off the face of the earth apparently. A
few months after my first visit, he left the shop. A while later, his girlfriend found out that
he had been a little . . . unscrupulous. And that’s when—unbeknownst to me—I got roped into the situation.
In
the heat of argument, accusations got thrown around . . . and my name might have come up. Something along the lines of, “Oh, I bet it
was that chick from the shop, wasn’t it?”
I’m
a homewrecker!
And
I didn’t even do anything!
Although
. . . it makes me wonder what he told her about me to make her think I was the
“other woman” (or one of several from what I gather).
Eli
asks me why I’m so concerned about it.
“Oh
what are you a jealous ex-husband?” I
mock.
“What
is with the ex-wife thing, anyways?”
I
explain, “When I got back from my last trip down here, everyone wanted to know
what it was like. And I thought about it
and I thought about it . . . and I told them that it was like being married to
you. We spent every single minute
together, we slept in separate beds, there was no sex, and there was constant
nagging. Therefore: marriage.”
He
laughs.
I
continue, “We also cooked together, had dinner with your mom, went for a
romantic moonlit walk in the woods. . . .”
“You thought that was romantic? How was that romantic?”
“Well, if it had been any two other people, it would have been
romantic.” Any two other people.
They’re not quite ready for us to be
here; they weren’t expecting us until much later. So we drink coffee and eat muffins until Rob
says it’s time to clock in. Meanwhile,
Sawyer’s replacement arrives—a chubby guy with a young face who doesn’t say
much.
Eli asks where my work boots are.
“I figured we’d just change into
galoshes when we need to. Look, I wore
my meat shoes!” I proudly show off my
suede Pumas that I wear to the shop every weekend.
“Wha—meat shoes?”
I nod my head.
“When you two girls are done
flirting, make sure you write down both of your time so I can get you some cash
before you leave tomorrow,” Rob orders.
While Eli writes up a time card, I
lean closer to Rob and mutter out of the side of my mouth, “Um . . . I wasn’t
expecting to get paid.”
“Of course I’m going to pay you.”
Okay, boss. Let’s get to work then.
Both coolers have been cleared out
of the pig and cow bodies that usually dangle within, in order to have enough
room for all the deer they anticipate for rifle season. Plus, it makes clean-up easier when you’re
only running one type of meat.
We
start out butchering a couple “share deer” that are already in the cooler. Some hunters donate their kill to a program
called Share the Harvest—if they happen to kill more than they can use, or if
they only want their deer as a trophy.
The
hanging tenders—the tenderloin, running down the inside of the ribcage on
either side of the lower spine and into the pelvis—are typically removed by the
hunters right away, so we don’t have to deal with them.
Evan
separates the legs and the ribs using the bone saw. Eli shows me how to get the backstraps—comparable
to just plain loin on a pig—off the outside of the ribcage (one on either side
of the backbone, again). You run your
knife all the way down the center of the vertebrae, then start pulling and
cutting the meat downwards and away from the ribs. You end up with a long, thick, tube-looking
piece of meat that most people cut into medallions for cooking.
Everything
else we try to get as much meat off of as possible; a large portion will go to
the grind for sausage and snack stix, but the bigger chunks will be used for
jerky, made in-house.
There
is a lot of unusable meat—the disadvantage of killing something with a gun is
that it causes bruising on the muscles and internal bleeding. Internal bleeding is deep crimson and
gelatinous, and therefore difficult to deal with. You can’t simply slice your knife through it,
and it sticks to everything. It feels
like you should just be able to brush it off with your hand because it’s all
jiggly-wiggly, but it snaps back into place like a rubber band. So you have to cut into the meat underneath
it to remove it, and now you’re losing edible meat.
While
I’m struggling to de-bone a foreleg, Eli walks away, comes back and tucks a
towel into my apron.
“What—do I not have enough
towels?” I turn and show him the towel hanging
from the other side of my apron.
“Oh; I didn’t see that one.”
“That’s right, this ain’t amateur
hour! I got this shit ready to go.”
As he walks away I call out, “Thank you husband!” He rolls his eyes and shakes his head.
After
two share deer, the fresh kills start coming in, all in various states of
severance. They don’t have to be field dressed, but the shop
charges an extra $25 if they want us to do the eviscerating, as a sort of
incentive for hunters to do it themselves.
Hence the joke I keep hearing all day:
“What, ya don’t believe in field dressin’ yer deer?”
One
kill arrives completely intact. I am
working with my back to Eli when I hear the heavy hollow wet splat on the concrete floor, signaling
that Eli has disemboweled the corpse.
Dang. I hope I get to do the next
one.
Since
most of them come in gutted, the only “organ” we have to remove is the
esophagus, which is a simple matter. The
esophagus is a tough white ribbed tube running through the neck. Look up at the ceiling and run your hand
along your throat; that’s what you’re feeling.
Once the deer is skinned and hung upside down by its tendons, you reach
through the body cavity down to where the neck starts, slide your knife in
between the esophagus and the neck meat and cut all the way around it, then
come round to the stump where the head used to be and do the same thing, and
pull it right out. When it’s difficult
to get to—like, one guy split his deer’s ribs way off center and so they
weren’t open wide enough—you can simply make a vertical slice though the neck
meat and rip it out that way.
Rob
has gone . . . gallivanting again;
meanwhile the others clean the processing room.
The new guy goes home after that, he doesn’t stick around for the big
cutting. That leaves just Eli and me on
the kill floor for now, all suited up in our galoshes, rubber aprons, and latex
gloves. I watch him do a buck once, just
to reacquaint myself with the process.
“What’re
you waiting for? You know what to
do.”
And
so we set to work.
Just
like with cows, skinning begins below the ankles of the hind legs: drag your knife all the way around one, and
the hide seems to pop away and expose a little bit of the white tendons
beneath. Then you turn your knife
blade-up, parallel with the leg but perpendicular to the hide, and make a slit
up the inside of the leg (harder than it sounds, but the initial cut is the
toughest part). Peel the fur back to
expose the little wispy white membranes, then cut and peel, cut and peel, until
the entire leg is exposed.
The
tricky part is the tendon back there—the Achilles—because it splits the leg. So imagine—you know where your Achilles is—so
imagine that, but only two inches in
diameter at the thickest. You have to
skin all around it, and through the little gap between the tendon and the leg
itself. Not to mention the “ankle” bone
right at the base of it, where the skin is pulled tighter than anywhere else on
the body. That little ankle bone also
catches a lot of scent on the males,
so I’m glad to be wearing gloves.
Eli
has the hand saw out for removing the hooves . . . my old nemesis. Even though I’m only sawing though a few
inches, I’m struggling, but I persist. I
will defeat this enemy with sheer brute force!
Once
the back legs are skinned and the hooves removed, up she goes. Or, well, he. Nobody shoots for doe opening weekend, they
all vie for the trophies first, so all we see are bucks.
You
can hook through one or both tendons; deer are light enough that they can go up
by only one leg. Sometimes it’s actually
harder to get them up by both: you get
one on the bar, the other slides off; get that one situated, the first one
slides off; and so on and so forth.
I
just finish that song and dance when Eli says, “Oh you don’t have to use the
double hook, you only need one.”
Apparently
he did not witness the epic struggle and my gracious triumph. “Do you know what I just went through to get
this damn thing up here?! It’s on the
double hook; it’s staying on the damn
hook!”
Ahem. Anyways
. . . now the buck is flipped upside down and you continue skinning down the
back and midsection, the hide falling down around its shoulders like a gooey
meat cape.
Eli
cuts the tail away from the body and I remark, “I’ll let you handle that, since
I know how much you love playin’ around with buttholes.”
He
does not respond.
Now
is also when you skin the forelegs and remove those hooves. Skin all the way up to the split in the chest
cavity. If the genitals are still on—some
processing facilities require evidence of sex—they come off and get tossed in a
pile with the hooves over near the Gut Room.
Once the hide is skinned all the way down the neck, make several cuts
around the throat meat until the spine is exposed, then grab the buck by the
horns and cut its head off.
If he still has a head. Some hunters take those with them, to be mounted. Others only want the antlers. The first time I watch Eli take the rack off
of one, I’m a little appalled. Using the
hand saw, you make two diagonal cuts from the outside of the antlers into the
skull, like you’re cutting a wedge of pie out of the top of the deer’s head. So the antlers come out with a tapering piece
of skull and brain still attached. The
heads look so small without their adornments—malformed, disfigured—tossed into
a pile with many other heads, each one indistinguishable from the next in
death. You’d never know who had the
biggest antlers, who got the most mates, or who won the most battles.
I’m
not sure how I feel about the trophy hunters.
I believe in respecting something that gives its life to feed
someone. And I guess . . . it’s not like
they’re just taking the antlers and leaving the meat to rot out in a field;
they are ensuring that the whole animal is used. I know it’s not the same as, say, taking a
rhino’s horn and leaving it for dead; deer are far more populous and their
antlers far less valuable. The value
comes from the hunter’s pride in his own skill at taking down such a huge
rack. But I can’t help seeing just
another phallic symbol.
When
I comment about the antlers that night at dinner, Eli’s mom makes the point
that those males, while living, love to show off their antlers. They are trophies to them, too. So if, in death, those antlers end up
displayed in a den or family room somewhere, that buck is still being
honored. Still . . . it sucks that the
reward for being the biggest and burliest is a bullet to the ribs.
Next you remove the esophagus, which
we already covered. Finally, you rinse
off all the dirt, leaves, hair, and whatever other particulates cling to the
carcass. “Looks like he took a bath in
leaves!” is Evan’s favorite thing to say regarding the really dirty ones. Last you tie the hind legs together with
twine so they’re not flopping around all willy-nilly.
By
now Evan and Travis are done cleaning and we’re all on the kill floor as the corpses
continue to pile in. We have two skin-for-mounts
arrive one after the other, which get pushed to the front of the queue. Skin-for-mount means the hunter wants the
entire hide and head for stuffing. I
leave those for Eli and Evan, since they have to be perfectly skinned for
presentation, and any time I might accidentally cut through the hide, it would
have to be stitched closed by the taxidermist and wouldn’t end up looking too
pretty.
Since
there are so many carcasses, and only four of us, Eli delegates jobs for each
of us. My assignment is to start the
skinning on each and remove all the hind hooves, which means I’m about to get
real familiar with nemesis.
It also means lots of bending
over. And lots of straightening up when
my back starts to hurt. All the up and
down is causing my shirt to slide up in the back, but I’m too busy—and too
bloody—to bother with it. Rob has
returned and is talking to Eli; I’m concentrating on skinning so I miss the
first part of their conversation, but I tune into it as soon as I realize
they’re talking about me.
“Yeah I saw it,” Eli says.
“She’s showing it off to me.”
“What?” I ask.
“Your tramp stamp,” Rob states
matter-of-factly.
I snap, “It’s not a tramp stamp if
it covers your whole back.” Okay so it’s
more like half my back; I just wanted
to shut them up. It’s still a pretty big
tattoo. And both of my shoulders are
covered, so . . . probably more than fifty percent of my back is inked.
Rob concedes, “Well that’s true; and
most of them go out rather than up. And
start lower too—closer to the butt crack.”
The next time I use the bathroom, I
make certain to pull my long johns all the way up and tuck my undershirt in.
Man,
I am starving. It’s about one
o’clock. Rob asks us if we’d like to
take our lunch break; Eli says we’re fine for now.
Damnit.
But Rob returned from his
gallivanting with a case of beer, so we start drinking instead.
The hunters who pull up don’t mind
when they spot Busch cans on the kill floor, or when I release a loud burp in
front of them. Empties rattle around
their truck beds . . . and cabs . . . and hands. . . .
Beer, bucks, and blood . . . what
could be better?
Evan is working on an untouched
skin-for-mount and I stop and watch him for a minute. He’s taking off the back hooves, but I have
the saw. He cuts all the way around the
joint once, sticks his knife in and severs all the cartilage. Then he quickly twists, the joint snaps, and
the hoof comes off.
Dang,
I forgot I could do that!
I
try it myself with the buck I’m working on.
I bend the ankle back and forth several times to make sure I know where
the joint is. The trick is to make sure
all the cartilage is out of the way before you try twisting it. It works beautifully the first time I try,
and I can’t help the “Raaaaaaaah!” that escapes my lips at my success. I just feel so . . . stalwart. I don’t bother with the saw anymore.
Travis
takes his lunch break, and Eli goes to load the ribs I brought into the
smoker. When another truck backs in to
drop off a kill, Evan unloads it and writes down the hunter’s particulars, then
heads back into the shop. I am
momentarily alone with all the carcasses.
Except
I’m not.
I
hear women’s voices outside. I’m
guessing they’re related to the hunter who just pulled away. . . .
“Look,
see? All the skin is off of him.”
And
that’s when I hear the child’s cries.
Really?
I
guess I can’t blame them for trying to show their kids where food comes
from. The unfortunate part comes when the
kid figures out who shot Bambi’s mom.
And now all this little kid sees is me, curved knife in hand, standing amidst
piles of warm furry carcasses, and two bloody skinless bodies in a death’s
embrace dangling on a hook behind me.
The
child screams, despite the mother’s soothing affirmations.
I
simply shake my head and keep working.
Certainly not a first for me.
When
Eli gets back I tell him, “You missed it!
Made a baby cry.”
“Something
tells me you probably take great joy in that.”
“No
Elijah, despite the fact that I don’t want kids of my own, I do in fact like children.”
Eventually
there is a lull and we are allowed to eat lunch. It is unseasonably warm today, which doesn’t
make for good hunting; deer prefer to move around more in cold weather. Rob was expecting upwards of thirty deer that
first day, before the weather turned. Still,
eighteen deer in one day is nothing to scoff at. And I suppose it kept the pace more at my
level and I was able to keep up with the guys.
It is exhausting work, and we’re at it for about ten hours that first
day. I slip into a deep, dreamless sleep
that night.
* * *
The
next morning a vicious storm whips through the trees and leaves swirl overhead;
clouds furiously tumble past, the sky a roiling grey sea above.
Eli
and I shelter under the eaves of the butcher shop.
I
cup my right hand under the water streaming over the side of the building; use
it to rinse off the inside of my left wrist, where I accidentally gave myself a
little love tap with a knife earlier. Good thing it wasn’t near any important
veins.
“Looks
like we won’t be seeing much action today,” I comment.
He
scoffs in agreement, “Not exactly ideal hunting weather.”
“It
was a fun weekend though; thanks for letting me come down again.”
“Thanks
for coming; I enjoy your company, even if I don’t always act like it.”
I
smirk, “You’re not so bad yourself sometimes.”
“Brazen
hussy.”
“Insufferable dick bag,” I counter.
Before retiring for the night prior,
we spent some time outside enjoying the warm windy weather. Eli’s parents have a trampoline in their
backyard, so we went and laid on it to watch the trees sway in the breeze.
He
sighs, “What a strange year. . . . How was your year?”
I only have to think about it for a
moment before I answer, “Better than last year.” Anything beats six months of depression. Eli tells me about his 2012; he got hit by a
car while bicycling cross country. Okay so
his 2012 was way worse than mine was.
But I don’t tell him about the bad part of my 2012, that was before I
met him. Instead I tell him about all
the places I traveled this year—in addition to Mexico and lots of camping
trips, I also went to Marco Island, Florida, with my family, and visited my
little brother in Hagerstown, Maryland.
That’s what I did. But what did I learn? What did I become?
I did a two-day float trip this
year, on one of the more difficult rivers in Missouri (which I didn’t know at
the time). Water was pretty high, so
there was only one really choppy spot, near the end. I was alone in a kayak—seventh wheel, as
always—and none of the other canoes were anywhere near me. I realized a bit too late what I was paddling
into and tried to maneuver left, right, left . . . then I decided just to
straighten myself out, face the waves head-on, and let the river do as it
pleased. I had my camera in my lap, and
my towel and shirt weren’t strapped down, so if the river wanted to have its
way with me, I would be losing a few things.
I bounced up and down, but didn’t tip over. The river saw me through to the calm waters
where a couple friends were waiting, cheering for me. River’s got its own ways, to paraphrase Bear
Claw Chris Lapp. Sometimes you just
gotta let go, and let it take you.
Sometimes it’ll smash you against a rock. And sometimes it’ll get you where you need to
be. River’s sort of like life in that way.
I
learned that some people impact your life like a bullet to the ribs. Some people leave soft spots—bruises,
internal bleeding—and others leave hard spots—scar tissue.
I also learned that no matter where
I go or what I do, I’m not just The Butcher’s Apprentice. I’m an apprentice of life.
That’s what I learned this
year.
But
you know what? The year’s not over yet.
We
lay on the trampoline, talking and laughing, listening to the wind whipping
through the leaves, until raindrops hit our foreheads and lips.
From
our vantage point beneath the shop’s overhang, we spot an empty trash can blowing
away; Eli runs out to retrieve it.
“How
fast do you think that wind’s blowing?” he asks.
“I
dunno . . . eighty.”
“Eighty?” he laughs. “Miles an hour?”
“Sure,
why not?” Shit, I don’t know what wind looks like.
“I
bet it knocks a ton of pecans out of
those trees,” he gestures towards the field across the road.
The
tempest blows through quickly and before we know it the sun is shining again, though
the gale persists. We carry bags across
the way and fill them with the downed nuts.
Eli cracks one in his hand, holds it out to me.
“For
me? Thank you!”
Wow;
I’ve never had a pecan straight off the tree before. Puts the store-bought stuff to shame. It’s so much . . . meatier; but also drier—grittier.
The
boss pulls in while we’re still collecting, chuckles “That’s illegal!” at us as
he drives past. Well we were going to share with him, but I
guess now we won’t. We cross back over
to the shop.
The
boss gets out of his truck; someone else gets out of the passenger side. One of his kids—a son, probably around seven
or eight years old (I’m terrible at guessing ages).
Rob introduces him. “Bradley you remember Eli; this is his
girlfriend.”
The word is barely out of his mouth
before I say bluntly, “I’m not his girlfriend.”
Rob leans down and elbows Bradley
conspiratorially, “See? She doesn’t like him either.”
We all head inside, Bradley quiet,
giving us a wide berth.
Rob notices and tells him, “You
don’t have to be scared of Eli.” He
points at me. “That one there’s the one
to be afraid of.”
I shrug. He’s right.
The boss isn’t staying long, he’s
only dropping off more beer for us. I
don’t feel like drinking; I don’t feel like I’ve earned it—we only had the one
deer that was waiting for us when we first got here. He was still warm, but much more flippy and
floppy than the ones we did yesterday.
Eli explained that rigor mortis sets in early on, but then sort of wears
off. This deer had been dead since
yesterday, which is why he wasn’t very stiff.
With the weather being what it is, we don’t have much to do.
The shop’s not normally open on Sundays; these hours are specifically
set aside for processing deer. Evan
comes in after church lets out, and spends the day inside watching YouTube
videos on his phone.
Now that the storm has passed, it’s
actually turned out to be a really nice day, so I grab a beer and sit out front
and enjoy the sunlight and fresh air while Eli works on his truck. I make friends with a fuzzy caterpillar and
help him across the parking lot to safety.
Since Eli no longer lives here,
(he’s a full-time city boy now) he must take full advantage of our time in Ste.
Gen. Which is why he’s requested all the
fresh eggs he can from a local friend.
She shows up carrying a bag stuffed with several cartons for him, says
her hellos to everyone, but stops when she sees my unfamiliar visage.
I introduce myself.
“Sorry,” Eli says.
“So rude!” she scolds him. “Were you planning on introducing her? As your . . . friend? . . . Girlfriend?”
I cut in, “Colleague.”
“I don’t claim her,” he declares.
I laugh. I like that one.
Wrapping his arm around me, he remarks,
“Yeah can’t you tell how close we
are?”
He knows what’s coming; I’m pretty
impressed that he willingly set himself up for this one. I ball up my right fist and make a quick jab
at his side. He wasn’t as prepared for
it as I thought; I feel his muscles sharply contract as he releases me.
He should know better by now.
Along with his eggs, Eli must make a
short trip into town to see the local candlemaker about a gift for his roommate
Kensie’s birthday. She’s also a friend
of mine, so I grab his phone and text her to ask when I can supply her birthday
spankings. I then take to annoying Eli
with the question, “Did she respond yet?
Did she respond yet?”
“No!
Jeez, leave me alone!”
“See, this is why we’re divorced.”
“We were never really married in the
first place so we can’t be divorced!
Every time you talk I just want to——You’re so difficult, and that’s going to haunt you for the rest of your
life!”
I know I’m difficult. I also know that everything Eli says is
sarcasm, but every once in a while he hits the nail on the head—he just masks
it with smartassery. But I would never admit
that to him, so instead I respond in kind:
“Psssh, no one listens when women talk!”
He sighs, “Kensie did respond.” He turns, looking intent on grabbing
something off the shelf behind me.
“She did? What did she—”
WHAM.
This ass-smack is brought to you by
the letters eFFFFFF yoUUUUUU.
“That’s from Kensie.”
I gasp. “Awww, I’m not even mad! I could totally feel her hand channeling
through your hand. . . . She hits a lot harder than you do, though.”
Towards closing time, a few trucks
pull up. Figures . . . nothing all day,
and now we have work. But instead of deer, these folks bring in
three coolers. Everything’s already
broken down! Eli introduces the one girl
in this group of camo-clad hunters. She
used to work here, for four years. And we have the same name. She butchered everything at a post-hunt
hootenanny last night; now they want the meat processed into grind, sausage,
jerky, and the tenderloins smoked, so all we have to do is take down their
orders and put the meat in the cooler.
Eli tells her about the St. Louis
shop where I work.
“Oh, what do you do there?”
I snort, “Cook and wash dishes.”
She scrunches up her face in
confusion. “Don’t they know you can do this?”
“They know, but they don’t get whole
animals up there; there’s no opportunity for me to do this there.”
Then she says something I’ve heard over
and over since starting this here little adventure: “I would’ve loved to have kept working here,
but they couldn’t afford to keep me on full time.”
In
other words . . . you can’t make a living out of it.
When
we leave, Rob hands us our earnings and says, “See you next weekend.”
Huh? I didn’t know we were supposed to come down
again; I have tickets to the Ambush home opener and my nephew’s third birthday
party next weekend, I can’t skip out on those.
Eli
responds, “I didn’t request off for next weekend; I can’t shirk my other
responsibilities.” To come down here and
get paid less, is what he means. But the reason he moved to the city in the
first place is because summer is the slow time for butchering and they had to
let him go.
So
is this the extent of what my experience can be? Stuffing sausage every weekend pro bono, the
occasional Pig Day with Foster, and a few weekends a year of actual butchery?
If
this is it . . . is it enough?
I glance down at the wad of cash in
my hand.
I got paid. I actually got paid. To
butcher.
And I have an open invitation to
come back any time—with or without Eli.
So I think . . . for now at least .
. . it just might be enough.
(Twenty-one
deer when it was all said and done.)
You're a professional Now!!!!
ReplyDeleteHaha; almost like a *real* butcher!
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