Hans shoves in the pick and hauls the animal out onto the grass with one movement. The circle of curious onlookers, who have
gathered close to catch sight of the shooting, hop back.
So this is where the phrase
bleeding like a stuck pig
comes from. The creature's legs work furiously as blood jets from its throat. The force of its jerking spins it around in
circles like a spasmodic break-dancer. All in eerie silence. There's no terrified squealing, what we're watching is not conscious
suffering, it's just the innate need of any living being to hang on to life. Like watching a patient who, though brain-dead,
nevertheless fights hungrily for breath when taken off the respirator. As it struggles, the hog smears itself in its own blood,
which continues to flow out torrentially and sinks into the deep grass, absorbed by the ground like water.
It takes maybe a minute for the animal to come to stillness, though it seems much longer. Hans loops a rope around the animal's
rear legs, cinches it tight. He points to two students in the crowd, gestures at the rope. "Take it over there."
Two boys grab hold of the rope and drag the dead hog over to a spot where an old porcelain bathtub has been sunk into the
ground. (Men outnumber women in this group by probably three to one.)
Two ropes are laid out across the tub on either end of it. When the students give the body a shove, it drops heavily, in the
way of dead things, into the tub, on top of the ropes, so they're now looped under it, one at the shoulder, the other near
the rear legs. As the rest of us gather around, a couple more volunteers start scooping bucketfuls of boiling water from a
vat about the size of a smallish hot tub sitting atop a big woodstove and pouring the water out into the bathtub until the
hog is half-submerged. At Hans's direction, four guys take hold of the ropes' ends on either side of the tub and pull them
back and forth, tug-of-war style, so that the body is turned over and over. By the time the water has stopped steaming, the
pig's coarse hair has started coming loose, floating, and the ropes have worn away two long, bald areas, the skin beneath
poached white and soft. It takes four people to pull the body back out of the tub and onto a piece of worn plywood.
When Hans asks for more volunteers, half a dozen people step eagerly forward, but I am not one of them. I tell myself it's
because I should let the tuition-paying students, those who are here legitimately, get the experience, but the truth is that
somewhere deep inside I don't want to be a party to this slaughter, that I feel somehow less culpable as an observer than
as a participant. Nonsense, of course.
Volunteers kneel on the ground all around the hog, with cup-shaped rubber scrapers in hand. As they rub off all the hair,
great soggy clumps shedding into growing piles shifting about in the breeze, the body shudders, fat rippling under its skin
like an overweight jogger, legs sawing back and forth as if it's still alive and struggling to get away. But once all the
hair is off, the work of five minutes, as the hog lies there, pale and bloated, it is already more meat than animal.
The body is carried to a nearby shed with a little covered, concrete-floored patio. A chain threaded through a pulley attached
to a wooden beam overhead is looped around the hog's rear legs, and two broad-backed boys tug on the other end to lift it
up off the ground until it's hanging free.
The next part is where slaughter meets butchery, where everything starts looking very familiar to me. After making a couple
of hissing passes across the honing steel with his knife, an unshowy thing not much larger than what I use in the shop, Hans
without flourish slices the hog open from stem to stern. Then he reaches inside, scoops out its pallid entrails, and pours
them into a large bucket. The liver is cut out, the heart that so recently worked efficiently enough to pump all the creature's
blood from its neck in a matter of seconds, the stomach, the lungs together with the windpipe, all the way up through the
animal's throat, ending in the blue tongue cut loose from the floor of the mouth with a swipe. He cuts the head smoothly off
and sets it to one side. What remains, the emptied body, the edges of its sliced belly hanging open like a set of curtains,
is more or less exactly what I see at Fleisher's.
The CIA does teach butchery, but not extensively. Most students get about seven classes in meat processing, only some of which
include hands-on practice, so what is now, after three months, completely familiar to me holds great fascination for them.
After the hog has been halved with a quick pass of a butcher's saw, they take turns leaning in to get a look at the sides,
pointing out the spareribs, contemplating where the Boston butt comes from. (The shoulder, I could have told them but don't;
it's the same muscle as what's called a "chuck roast" in beef.) I back away to let them get close. It's over for me. The hog
has gone from contentedly grunting farm animal to nothing I haven't seen before, in under ten minutes.
Hans is already loading up his rifle again.
I make myself watch the "processing" of one more animal. When Hans enters the second hog's pen, it won't stand up, just lies
resolutely, chin between hooves, looking up at him. It doesn't seem panicked, but it looks so much like Robert the Dog when
I come home to find he's been in the garbage can that I can't help thinking it must have figured out that something bad is
afoot.
Part of me thinks I should stay longer, stick it out--they have half a dozen more animals to go through--but instead I head
back down the track toward my car, which is parked at the side of the road. I've seen my slaughter; two were enough for me.
I head back to the shop, a half-hour drive through the beautiful morning, and get to the shop before it opens. As I walk through
the door, Josh says, "Back from the killing fields. You scarred for life? It's rough, right?"
I fake a look of trauma. "Pretty intense."
But the truth isn't so simple. I think mostly I'm disturbed because I'm not so disturbed at all. I just saw this creature
killed and gutted, and I'm more or less fine with it.
As I'm tying on my apron, Aaron comes up to me with an unidentifiable something on the end of a fork.
"Try this."
"What is it?"
"Just eat it."
"Is it something disgusting?"
"No." He cocks an eyebrow. "But I wouldn't tell you if it was."
I open my mouth and close my eyes, obedient, as he pops the something in. I chew.
"Not half-bad. What is it?"
Aaron grins. "It's heart."
"Heart?"
"Grilled beef heart. You like it?"
"I do. Sorry, you're going to have to try harder to wig me out."
Aaron makes a
who, me?
face. "I'm not trying to wig you out. I'm trying to educate you. Educate!"
"Uh-huh."
"Hey, Julie?" Jessica is dressed up more than usual, in fitted jeans tucked into leather boots and a nice black top with a
draping cowl neck. Her hair is not in its usual frizzy updo, but down and smoothly styled. I think she's wearing makeup. She
doesn't look particularly happy, though.
"What's the occasion?"
"I'm going out to one of the restaurants we supply in a couple of hours. Josh... can't make it. Or won't. So do you want to
come? It's a great place, and I'm betting there'll be free dinner in it for you."
"Absolutely!" I swallow my gobbet of heart.
The drive from Kingston to the restaurant will take about an hour and a half. It would be a little less if Josh the speed
demon were driving in his itty-bitty Mini, but tonight it's just going to be Jessica and me in their big red van. I unfold
the mirror on the sun visor and take a peek. "Good God, I'm a mess."
"Eh, you look fine."
"Um, thanks, but I really, really don't." I've got no clothes with me at the shop but the jeans and Fleisher's T-shirt I'm
wearing. My hair is mussed and pressed sweatily against my skull, my face is bare of makeup and flushed with my day's exertions.
I stink. I run my fingers through my hair a few times, but soon give up and settle back into my seat as Jessica pulls into
the traffic circle that spits us out at the New York Thruway toll plaza.
"So I've heard a lot about this place, but I'm like the last person alive not to have been. Even Eric went, with his ex-girlfriend."
"Ex-girlfriend? But I thought you two have been together since basically birth?"
"Yeah.... Um."
Jessica glances over at me.
"Ahh."
I grimace sheepishly. I've been so good up to now. But I suppose some of everything that's so constantly roiling inside was
bound to slip out sometime. I'm relieved, to tell the truth. Suppressing the urge to blather is exhausting. "Yeah. It's been
an interesting few years."
Once the floodgates of female conversation open up, shutting them down again is not really an option. Before we've driven
half an hour, I've explained both Eric's indiscretions and my own, bemoaned the loss of my lover, and admitted to my preference
for a bit of the rough and tumble.
"Wow. If Josh slept with someone... I don't think I could take it. I can barely stand him sometimes as it is."
"Yeah, what's going on with you two lately? I mean, if I can ask? Jesse said there was something of a blowup yesterday." Josh
and Jessica make no efforts to disguise their disagreements from colleagues. They've been known to rail at each other, right
by the cutting table, yelling and snorting with ire, then march off in opposite directions, muttering in disgust, while the
rest of us are left standing around in the clearing dust. Afterward, when the tension recedes, Josh refers to it as "Mom and
Dad fighting in front of the kids."
Jessica rolls her eyes. "Oy. I'm telling you, husbands and wives working together.... I try to get him to concentrate on something
he doesn't want to deal with, and he just flies off the handle. Made this big damned fuss about being too swamped to come
out with us tonight, as if I'm inconveniencing him." It's nearly dark now, high clouds fading to purple. Jessica flicks the
turn indicator for the Tarrytown exit.
"Well, I am amazed that you two can fight like that. Eric and I practically
never
actually fight. Even during the worst of it--"
"Is that good?"
"I don't know. It's
easier
. Though there was this one time when he sleepwalked in the middle of the night and when I woke up the next morning he'd taken
all the knives out of my knife block and lined them neatly up on the kitchen counter--"
Jessica cuts a glance over at me. "Okay, that's psychotic."
"Oh, I think he was just feeling guilty because he'd broken one of my knives, stabbing it into a cutting board--"
"Which he did why?"
"Oh, he was angry. I bring it out in him, I guess. I sometimes think I ruined him. He was just a gentle soul when I found
him."
"You do realize that's crazy, right?"
"I guess."
We're pulling up onto a gravel drive leading to the back door of a rambling stone building. It looks like the restaurant's
staff entrance. "Well, every marriage is its own special hell, sometimes, right?" We get out, slamming the van's doors shut.
The air smells faintly of animal dung. I'm conscious all over again of my hat hair and my meat-spattered shoes and T-shirt.
And she just walks right in the door. It's the sort of thing I would never do--barge right into a bustling place full of people
busy doing important jobs to find the person I want. I am more of a linger-at-the-doorway-looking-cowed girl. But I follow
her through the narrow, terra-cotta tiled halls to an open doorway.
"Hey, Dan. You got a minute?"
The chef is a thin man, with full lips, a high forehead, and a long nose. Large, dark eyes. He gives Jessica a slow smile.
"Absolutely." He holds out a hand with long fingers, meeting her eyes in that way that particular people do, then turns to
me.
"This is Julie. She's an apprentice at the shop."
"It's a pleasure." He shakes my hand as well, and meets my eyes too. "Pull up a chair, why don't you both?"
We do. Introductions over, Dan turns all his attention to Jessica. I simply sit, trying to look both attentive and small,
as the two of them talk slaughterhouses and budgets and FDA approvals. The conversation lasts for maybe twenty minutes; I
entertain myself sometimes by watching the hordes of restaurant workers in their chef's checks bustling to and from the bright
kitchen outside the office, and sometimes by watching Dan talk to Jessica. I know his style, recognize it all too intimately--the
eye contact, unwavering then broken, the fingers playing along the edges of objects on his desk, the low chuckle that's just
amused enough. I am a sucker for such performances, but it seems to have no effect on Jessica. She laughs her honking laugh
only when Dan says something to merit it, she merrily twinkles or playfully smack-talks without a trace of self-consciousness
or strategy. I'm envious of her.
"I need to get back into the fray out here. But thanks for coming. You're staying for something to eat, right?"
"That'd be great, thanks."
"All right. We'll throw a little something together for you."
Jessica rolls her eyes as the hostess walks us out of the kitchen into the dining room, where I stand out like a bedraggled
Amazon in the honeyed light.
"What?"
"Him 'throwing a little something together.' You'll see."
And so I do. For the next two and a half hours, Jessica and I eat our way through untold courses of wonderful, precious food--teeny
tiny bulbs of fennel on sticks, pork chops so little they kind of freak us out (was this pig yet out of the womb?), paper-thin
slices of apple. Two hours later, I will honestly not be able to remember all of what I've eaten. I'm a champion eater, but
this has even me feeling defeated. But there is a moment that makes the marathon worthwhile. The pig bonbon.
It's tiny, a perfectly shaped one-inch square. It is announced to us as pig heart, but it doesn't look like the heart Aaron
popped into my mouth earlier today, like a slice of dark meat. No, it seems to have a creamy texture, like a pate. The square
is sandwiched between two impossibly thin, crisp wafers of dark chocolate. Jessica and I are dubious. We pick up the squares
and pop them into our mouths at the same time.