Cleaving Read online

  The air smells like flowers. With a little extra push of will I open the car door and get out. Inside the front screen door, the shop is dim and has a whiff of something not exactly clean, though not unpleasant either, the same class of aromas to which horse barns belong. There’s something unsavory, yet covertly exciting, about the place; it’s like sneaking into an abandoned hunting lodge. A glass-fronted freezer against one wall to the left holds an untidy pile of hand-labeled bins and packages. The wide planks of the wood floor are worn, dark, stained, and strewn with a light sprinkling of sawdust. The meat counter seems to be an improvised affair; the coolers look old, perhaps secondhand, and rather than the high piles of fresh beef and lamb on neat trays adorned with parsley sprigs I’m accustomed to seeing at Ottomanelli’s, there’s a haphazard scattering of meat, some of it looking a little gray and tired. The end of a busy week. There’s a blond woman in her late thirties smiling at me directly behind the counter, and an old man, stooped, in the farther reaches of the space behind her, winding trussing string around thick, stiff fingers. One of the brothers from the sign, of course. You can always tell a butcher. He looks up at me and nods, not unfriendly but weary. “Can we help ya?”

  So once more I give my spiel about wanting to learn butchery, of being willing to do anything to get behind that counter every day and watch him do his thing, that I’ve driven all the way from New York to ask him for this favor. The brother smiles sadly. But once again I get a shake of the head. “We don’t have enough work to go around as it is. Nobody wants butchers anymore. When we retire, we’ll have to shutter this place.” He says it kindly enough, and it’s not my place to argue with him. Maybe he thinks I’m a dilettante, and maybe I am. Maybe this irrational passion is going to pop like a soap bubble, evanesce. Maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow, decide I’m really into, I don’t know, dog racing.

  But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that my passions don’t tend to run out. Would that they did.

  It occurs to me as I duck back into my car that all the butchers I’ve been speaking to remind me of my granny. She lived to be ninety, never really had anything wrong with her, physically anyway, and presented herself as a cheery, tough old broad. It took me the longest time to realize that the same woman who used to make me the world’s best fried chicken, who I shared a bed with as a kid, who I’d wake up in the morning with my giggling, toothless “Yet’s yaff!” (that’s “Let’s Laugh!” in toddler), lived every day of her life harboring a blackness in her, a profound dissatisfaction with the confines she’d placed herself in when she was still just a beautiful young woman of limited prospects in Brazoria, Texas, that had settled into a sort of dry rot of the imagination. So what must it be like to see your entire profession—not just your job, or your business, but the entire profession, what you have always done for a living—crumpling up and blowing away? I don’t know, but I know that Granny fought a feeling of pointlessness her whole life, that it curdled her sense of humor (she was never not funny, but she got to be funny in a darker, sour way) and led to the inordinate consumption of Taylor sherry. I know it because I see her in my mother, and I feel her in me, more and more. It leads me to drink too—though not sherry, yet—and to other things, to things that are bad for me, harmful urges succumbed to. My fear of butchers is nothing in the face of my fear of this curse that seems to run through the veins of the women in my family. Maybe that’s what the voice I hear is telling me; it’s trying desperately to help me outrace an inevitable future. One thing I’ve learned about my voice is that it prefers indulging dangerous cravings to the prospect of tamping down those cravings into bitter resignation. I make a U-turn in the gravel lot and head for home.

  A few miles before I hit the interstate, I come over a hill and my BlackBerry goes all atwitter in the cup holder. I pick it up eagerly, though with a pang as well. I’m surprised in the moment that I’m almost disappointed the thing is working again.

  Two messages, two men.

  The first: How’s the meat?

  The second: Mhm.

  Does everyone talk like this, in these codes? I decipher both perfectly. One pulls at me with a thousand strands of anxiety and obligation and love and solicitude and guilt; the other with a single knowing yank, the secret guttural syllable that brings me to heel.

  To both my answer is the same: I’m on my way.

  2

  Boned Out

  AND THEN, a month later, I find it.

  Another clue has led to another long drive, all the way north to Kingston, New York, nestled in the Catskills. I head up early in the morning in my Outback. (Yes, I’ve become the sort of thirty-three-year-old woman who drives a silver Outback, bought new. Somehow, funky, colorfully dilapidated wrecks became one of those categories, along with funky, colorfully grotty shithole apartments, that I outgrew without noticing.) I am nervous and not too hopeful as I park, feed a meter, walk through the glass door of the shop on Wall Street. But I know the second I step in: this is it.

  Fleisher’s is more than a butcher shop, really. It’s almost a market, with fragrant soaps made of beef tallow on the shelves, local vegetables in baskets in the middle of the floor, T-shirts for sale pinned to the walls: 100% GRASS-FED, LOCALLY GROWN. It’s a place equally quixotic and inevitable. It might be a neighborhood butcher shop, or it might be a political movement masquerading as a neighborhood butcher shop; either way, it’s not quite the shop of my fantasies. It’s something else, a place I’d not quite imagined.

  I introduce myself to the guy behind the counter, a big man with a seventies porn mustache, small, smirking blue eyes behind wire spectacles, and a long rusty braid running down his back from under a black Kangol cap. He’s surprisingly young, not much older than I am. Maybe that’s what finally gives me the push I need. “My name is Julie, and I—” At the last moment I abandon all my carefully rehearsed phrasings. “Honestly? I just want to learn how to turn a cow into a steak.”

  Raised eyebrows. And then: “Cool.”

  The butcher’s name is Joshua. He invites me back to watch him cut up a pig. And then he feeds me the best pork chop I’ve ever tasted.

  “ALL RIGHT, chica, you’re going to bone these bad boys out.” As he passes on his way to the front office, Josh tosses two bewilderingly large pieces of pig onto the cutting table, adding to the collection already there. Back legs, with the hooves still on—do pigs have hooves, is that what you call them?—and the skin, laced with dark veins and pocked with pores and the occasional wiry hair. They’re shaped rather like giant pork drumsticks, which is exactly what they are. “Watch Tom,” he calls over his shoulder as he strides away. “He’ll show you what to do.”

  It’s my first day as a butcher’s apprentice. I woke up at six this morning. I’ll grant you that’s not hideously early by your average working stiff’s standards, but sometimes it’s a struggle just to get out of bed in the morning at all. I swear I sometimes think if I didn’t have a dog to walk and cats to feed, I just never would. Eric has been having the same problem. He barely stirred when I slipped out from under the covers and into the shower. By seven I was on the road, and now, at five minutes after nine, I am tying on a white apron, which I grabbed from an old plastic laundry bin, and taking a knife from the magnetic strip on the wall.

  Josh passes again. He keeps barreling up and down the length of the shop from counter to office to cooler to kitchen to back stair: arranging the case, grabbing invoices, pulling out primals to be cut down, checking on how the sausages are coming, going out back for a smoke break. A bear of a guy, with a big voice to match and a cheerfully profane word for everyone, he’s like an animal in a well-designed, spacious zoo, relatively comfortable but still prone to restless pacing. I briefly try to picture this guy submitting to a suit and tie, a maze of cubicles; the image is laugh-out-loud funny.

  “You got your lid?” he says without pausing in his circuit, tapping the brim of his own cap.

  “Oh, right! I do actually!” I t
rot back to the table and chairs in the back of the shop, behind the front cooler, where I’ve dumped my stuff. I’m pretty proud that I remembered, on my first day, to bring a hat, and a good one, too—a brown leather New Zealand bush hat that fits me like I was born to it. I wear it at a slight tilt over one eye, jauntily. I have lost and found this precious object enough times to bring to mind the phrase “God looks after fools and drunks.” I have had many dreams in which this hat has featured prominently. So the idea of wearing it all day, every day, to keep my hair in place while I’m learning to cut up large animals—the air of sexy, tomboyish bravado this hat will help me exude—is privately exciting. I yank it onto my head and almost dash back to the table, where Tom, a tall man with a slight stoop, a black mustache, and a goofy grin, is already pulling a second leg toward the edge of the table. Tom is a master butcher, has been doing this all his life, just as his father taught him. When Josh decided to open a shop a few years ago, he knew no more about butchering than what he had gleaned from some visits to his grandfather’s kosher butcher shop in Brooklyn as a child, so he hired Tom not just to help cut meat, but to teach him and his employees. Of which I suppose I’m now one, sort of.

  “Start by taking off the trotter, here.” Holding the hoof in his left hand and the knife in his right, he runs his blade around and straight through the first joint, taking off the foot with one smooth spiraling motion. He tosses the foot to the table. “Go ahead, you do it. Piece of cake.”

  I pull a leg toward me, feel around to make sure I know where the joint is, and make a circular cut around, through the tough skin and flesh, but I’ve misjudged, for I hit only bone. “Shit,” I mutter.

  Tom grins over at me. “Wiggle it. Ya gotta wiggle it.”

  And when I move the foot back and forth I see what he means. When I work the foot I get a better sense of where the axis of the joint is, and after some digging around I hit cartilage and shove the tip of my blade through, between the bones. A bit more sawing and I have the foot off. It ain’t pretty, but it’s done. “Okay.”

  “Now off with the hock. You can do that with the band saw, if you’re a hack.”

  “Oh, I’m a hack. I aspire to hackhood.”

  “Nah. This is how the real guys do it.” He simply slides the blade through the skin, across what would be the base of the buttock, to mark his cut, then switches the grip on his boning knife so that he is fisting it with his pinky at the base of the hilt and with the sharp of the blade facing toward him. With his elbow bent at a right angle he pulls it through the meat, blade all the way to the table—a scarred wood surface, maple I think, four feet by six, on wheeled, metal legs—until, again unerringly, he hits the joint. Some blade tipwork gets him through that, and he finishes by smoothly raking through the flesh on the other side. Ham hock thrown to the side.

  “They call this here a pistol grip.” I nod, though I don’t really understand how it pertains to firearms; it looks more like the clutch of a frenzied serial killer in a horror flick. Then he makes a quick gesture, pulling the knife blade first, fast, toward his groin. “They also call it the widowmaker,” he says with a cackle. “Gotta be careful. You putting force behind that, it comes free and flies straight into you.”

  “Maybe you should show me the band saw.”

  “Eh, wimp. Go on, do it. You can learn the shortcut after you get the real way down. Band saw’ll kill ya, anyway.”

  “Oh, all right…” So I apply myself to the job, getting used to the new grip. I actually prefer it; it feels so much stronger. Which, I realize, is exactly the danger. I’m able to put a lot more power behind the blade this way, pulling it toward me with my biceps. I can see what Tom means; if I pulled a bit too enthusiastically, things could get ugly. I scoot my body off to one side a little just to be safe, then slice through. Again I hit bone, again I have to dig messily around in the meat until I find the joint, wedge my knife tip down into the small, curved space between the bones, a cup and ball, as tightly knitted together with white bands of sinew as a devoted husband and wife. (I wince away that maudlin metaphor as quickly as I can.) My knife makes uncomfortable squeaky noises as it works in, hitting cartilage and bone. I get through it, though. The edge is ragged, the skin abraded, but the hock is off. “Okay,” I breathe. “Now what?”

  Tom is already on his third round, lapping me with practically every step I complete. I suspect he’s showing off a little. “Peel away the skin. You want to leave the fat on, though.” He demonstrates, loosening up the tough, slightly translucent skin at one edge and then, holding the flap between thumb and forefinger to keep it taut, pushing the blade away from him in a long sweeping motion just under it so that it lifts off easily, revealing a thick layer of fat, as white and sticky as a spread of Marshmallow Fluff. He pulls the skin off that entire ham—it is now recognizable as such—in one great piece, almost completely clean of any white fat residue. The woman-suit-making freak from The Silence of the Lambs would have been impressed. I certainly am.

  Needless to say, I don’t manage with nearly such finesse. I quickly find that there is something particularly satisfying about this job, though, something about how, when you get the pressure right, along with the angle of the blade, the knife skims across the underside of the skin with an easy scraping noise like ice skates. There is a trick to it, and when you’re doing it right, you know it. I whisper under my breath, in nearly unseemly pleasure, “Thaaaaat’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

  But I don’t always do it right. I sink into the bed of fat or pierce the skin, and wind up getting it all off only in several ragged pieces. No woman-suit for me.

  Next I take off the top round, a cap of flesh on what I guess was once the pig’s tush. Tom shows me how to find the seam. “Seams are the key. You can follow a seam, you can break down anything.”

  So. Between any two neighboring muscles, be they housed in a pig, a steer, or, one presumes, me, it turns out that there is a thin layer of connective tissue: clear, threadlike, easily cut. It looks rather like what would happen if you rubber-cemented two pieces of pink construction paper together, then pulled them apart again before the rubber cement dried. I don’t know what this stuff would be called by a biologist or a doctor, but in the meat fabrication biz it is called a “seam.” Seams seem (seams seem, heh) magical to me; they are what give butchery its best chance at grace. If you know what you’re doing, you can peel two muscles clean apart, smooth and untorn, with the tip of a five-inch knife, or even just with your fingers. I go along painstakingly, but as I pull up on the cap of meat with my right hand, all those clear connecting threads show the seam’s path. As timidly as I jab at them, still they fall away before me.

  “Don’t gotta be so delicate with. It’s pork! You can’t screw it up!” Tom cackles again. He’s got a nasal voice, always amused, his words accented into a slight New Yawkese. He looks and sounds like a Muppets character. “Chop, chop!”

  But I’m rather mesmerized by the slow, easy peel. Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apart. It’s actually rather moving, though I know better than to try to explain why aloud. It’s sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.

  And off comes the top round. This will later be sliced into cutlets for the case, to be fried into schnitzel or rolled up into stuffed involtini. But for now it’ll be bagged and put into the front cooler until the case needs to be refilled.

  “And that’s it. The rest goes into the grind. Just sausage.”

  A white plastic bin on the cutting table is piled high with pig meat, roughly sliced into big strips. Juan has come over to stuff the meat into big clear plastic Cryovac bags. He’s a short, barrel-chested guy I guess to be a little younger than I am. I’m instantly attracted to his smile, though I’ve not yet gotten to talk much with him, just a hello after Josh introduced him this morning as “the only guy with any br
ains in the whole place. That’s including me.”

  “I like your hat,” he says to me now.

  “Thanks!” I find myself blushing with pleasure. It is a good hat.

  Tom has by now broken down almost all of the pile; he’s leaving one more round for me to practice on, while he moves on to shoulders. He speaks quickly. “Pull out the aitchbone, that round one there.”

  “H bone? H as in hip?” For the bowl of bone protruding from the fat end of the round, with its hole in the middle, clearly has to be some part of the pelvis bone. It looks like something that—if picked clean of flesh and left out on the desert floor for a month or two—Georgia O’Keeffe would paint, as the bright New Mexico sky gleamed through its smooth white curve.

  “Nah. Aitch. A-I-T-C-H.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Tom shrugs his loose cartoonish shoulders. “Dunno. Homework for you, eh?”

  So I pull it out as Tom shows me, with the help of a meat hook. With the big knob end of the drumstick facing me, I scoop out the divot of flesh from the middle of the hole, then come behind the bone to scrape meat free from the top edge. Then I can work the tip of the meat hook over that edge, then back and through the central hole. The hook is a C-shaped curve of steel about the size of my curled thumb and forefinger, with a viciously sharp point on one end and an orange plastic grip on the other. I hold it as if it were a bicycle handle, the base of the hook emerging from between my index and middle fingers. With it I can get a sure grasp on the bone, and a means to turn gravity to my advantage.