Cleaving (10 page)

But he's also a guy in whose company it is very comfortable just to be quiet. Which is what we're doing now, until suddenly
Juan chuckles.

"What is it?" I ask, smiling in expectation of a funny anecdote.

And he starts telling me a story. It takes me a few seconds to catch up with what he's saying. Juan speaks completely fluent
English, but it's accented enough, and he is soft-spoken enough, that occasionally I miss a word or two. Anyway, he's talking
about walking a long way in the cold, and at first I think he's talking about walking to work.

(What I was thinking of was: I once overheard Josh asking Juan if he had a winter coat. "I'm
getting
you a coat. It fucking
kills
me thinking of you walking to work in this weather without a real coat." This from a man who had, not ten minutes earlier,
cacklingly locked one of his employees into the cooler for fun.)

So then Juan says something about stopping in the middle of the night for a couple of hours' sleep, and I'm slowly beginning
to understand what it is he's telling me and I am obscurely embarrassed, as if he's sharing something with me more intimate
than our relationship bears up to.

"I woke up, and I was so, so cold, I thought I was going to die. I couldn't feel my hands. Lying there, freezing, and I look
up at the sky, and there are so many stars. It was beautiful. Now whenever I'm really cold, I think about that." He laughs
again.

"Where was this?" I ask, not exactly sure how to respond to this disclosure, however casually bestowed.

"Arizona, I think."

"The desert," I say moronically, "gets cold at night."

"Yeah."

I have been secretly feeling kind of sorry for myself ever since the spurting sausage. Pitying myself for my flailing marriage,
for my lost lover, for getting older and maybe never having sex again. And then Juan tells me his story about crossing the
border in the middle of the night, an experience so arduous and uncertain and frightening that rich tourists pay money, this
is true, to get a Disneyfied version of the experience. And he tells it with a giggle. It's just what he has to do whenever
he wants to visit his mother.

And I think, I really ought to get over myself.

J
UAN'S
M
OTHER'S
B
LOOD
S
AUSAGE

4 quarts unsalted pig's blood, as fresh as possible

4 cups finely diced pork fat

About 4 tablespoons kosher salt

About 3 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper

1 quart chopped onion

11/2 cups finely chopped jalapeno, seeds removed

2 cups shredded mint

A quart container of pork "middles" (from your butcher--ordered along with the blood and fat)

Kitchen twine, trimmed up into three-inch lengths

Special equipment: a manual sausage-stuffing funnel, basically a metal cup with a nozzle at the bottom, either handheld or
on a stand of some kind

If the blood is not basically straight out of the animal, it will have congealed; reliquefy it with a blender, food processor,
or immersion mixer. Then simply stir in the fat and all the remaining ingredients. It will be very, very liquid, and you'll
wonder how you'll ever make anything solid from it. There is reason to wonder.

Untangle a length of casing, maybe three feet or so of it, and bunch it up on the nozzle with the aforementioned up-and-down
motion. Tie the end into a knot and reinforce by knotting a length of twine just above it.

Over a bin or large baking pan, begin spooning the blood mixture into the cup of the stuffer, while with the other hand urging
the casing off the nozzle as it fills. When the chunks of fat get stuck in the mouth of the funnel, push them through with
the handle of a wooden spoon or something similar. This is all easier to accomplish if you have more than one pair of hands.
Sausage making, like the activity it often resembles, is more fun with two people.

Stop filling when you still have about four inches of casing left. While one person holds the empty bit up and pinches it
closed, the other person will twist the length of sausage into links. About four or five inches from the bottom end, make
a double twist, then reinforce it with a tie. Continue like this until you've divided up the whole length. At the top of the
last link, make a knot with the end of the casing. The sausages will feel to the touch like, well, pig intestines filled with
blood.

Drop the length of sausages into simmering water and poach it for about ten minutes. This is tricky; keep the water at a very
gentle simmer. After about five minutes, begin testing for doneness. Gently lift a link out of the water with tongs. First
touch the surface; the sausage should have solidified. Then poke the sausage with a toothpick or skewer; the sausage is done
when a puncture in the center of the link oozes clear juice rather than blood. Lift the sausage from the water and let cool
to room temperature.

In an ideal world, this recipe would yield about two dozen four-inch links of sausage. However, all boiled sausages are delicate,
especially blood sausage, due to the liquid filling. You will lose many lengths to burst casings--which make a disturbing mess
in the simmering water--and more to undercooking (you can fry up the undercooked links and use them as you might chorizo).
But the ones that do turn out are lovely--spicy and rich, with the mint providing an unexpectedly refreshing note. You'll find
that you can live with the few links you have and not mourn too much over your mistakes.

"I
F YOU CAN
dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." I don't quote Vince Vaughn movies, as a general rule, but this line pops into my head
as I start in on my fourth beef round of the day. I've been working at the shop for a couple of months now, and I'm stronger
than I was, but beef rounds still get me winded. After practicing on these buggers, going back to petite pig hindquarters
will be a snap.

Beef rounds are enormous things, and more obvious than some of the other primal cuts. There is no question that this is a
hundred-pound ass-end of cow. They are obvious in other ways as well. They have lots of interlocking parts, but the pieces
all have a pleasing distinctness about them. The muscles have simple shapes, like those games for very small children, with
the plastic blocks in different shapes that are meant to be fitted into different indentations: top round, a circle; bottom
round, a trapezoid; eye round, a cylinder; knuckle, a cone. Breaking down a beef round is splendidly clear-cut work, but,
given the sheer weight of the thing, it's also
hard
work.

The wrist of my left hand, my cutting hand, is now visibly thicker than my right, with muscle and also with chronic swelling.
My left thumb has started to occasionally catch, just as my granny's used to do.

(She would pop it loose by rapping it sharply against a tabletop; when I winced, she'd cackle merrily. She might have been
a manic-depressive alcoholic, but as all the women in my family know from personal experience, that doesn't mean she didn't
have a sense of humor. Or that she wasn't tough: her version of coffee was several tablespoons of Folger's crystals dumped
into a saucepan of boiling water, cooked down five minutes, then poured straight out into her one stained coffee cup. Oh,
and though she smoked for fifty years and for the last fifteen years of her life basically lived on canned peaches, Pepperidge
Farm cookies, Taylor sherry, and Neapolitan ice cream, she never had any serious health problems, except for the odd stomachache,
and wound up dying at the age of ninety, mostly out of sheer cussedness.)

Sometimes, after a day of hard cutting, the ache in my wrist keeps me from sleeping. My hands and arms are adorned with nicks
and scrapes, mostly from the featherbones that bristle along the cut edges of the spines on sides of pork, thin shards that
can scrape like hell. I find all these marks, like the ones D used to bestow, perversely satisfying, a coded diary of my experience.
Josh and I have begun talking tattoos. His arms are heavily inked already, and he's looking to accompany me when I decide
what to get to commemorate my Butchering Endeavor.

It's a Wednesday afternoon, slow, so Jesse has joined me for a bit of knife practice. He normally works the counter, and so
doesn't get a lot of table time. He and I, junior butchers, toil away on the rounds while Aaron and Tom go after the chuck
shoulders. Chuck shoulder is the most challenging primal to break down. Aaron and Josh and Tom will get into three-way tiffs
over the best technique for doing it. For now I pretty much stay away; I certainly can't yet navigate a shoulder without assistance.
So I stick with rounds. The Jackson 5 is playing on Josh's iPod. (Josh's musical collection is something of a hoot--opera,
sugary pop, Eminem, world music. My favorite, I think, is the album of themes from classic seventies porn movies. Actually
really great, hummable tunes, with much amusing wakka chikka. And the sight of a bunch of butchers cutting meat to the theme
of
Debbie Does Dallas
is not to be missed.)

I start by breaking off the shank. With a mighty pull I grab hold of the narrow end of the round--what would be the handle
of the drumstick if this were a chicken--and swing it around until it's jutting out over the table edge. Checking first to
make sure that no one is near the knife's path, I cut through the thick rope of tendon where it emerges from the muscle and
stretches, exposed, to meet the bony knob of the shank's lower end, with one sawing slice away from me. The blade always springs
up a bit once it's through. Then I follow the seam of the shank muscle up to where I estimate the joint to be. To find it,
I press down against the meat and fat with my thumb and grab the bone by the end to wiggle it back and forth. My fourth round
of the day, and finally, this time, when I stab my blade tip in, I hit the crack of the joint on the first try. "Gotcha!"
I mutter as I dig in, working through the sinews until I'm able to break open the joint. The shank comes away in my hand and
a lazy drip of clear, silky synovial fluid falls from the end to the ground. I toss the shank to the far end of the table.
The inside of the joint's cup is bright white, wet with the lubricating fluid, and impossibly smooth. I can never resist running
my fingers, ever so briefly, inside that bowl of cartilage.

"So tell me again where this place is? I've ridden my bike around there."

Jesse is asking about the apartment I've just rented, about twenty minutes away from Kingston. Eric doesn't like that I've
done this, of course, but the drive up from the city and back at the end of each day I spend at the shop is exhausting and
burns unseemly amounts of gasoline, and besides--who am I kidding?--I look forward to the nights of solitude, to the escape
from our fights that aren't fights, our silences full of reproaches. It's a plain, pretty, often chilly set of rooms on the
second story of a slightly shabby Victorian. When Eric and I were separated, I never told him that I was, much of the time,
happy, just having that tiny apartment to myself, to be able to sleep until ten or stay up until four, to cook my own dinners
for myself, to read in a room no one else resided in. Though this place is twice as large as my Yorkville sublet, and in an
upstate so-called town--really just a post office, a volunteer fire department, and a curve in the road--it reminds me of that
first room of my own, of the small pleasures of living alone.

"It's in Rifton." Now, the name is a bit of a problem, just a tad too ironic, as if I need more reminders of all the gaping
crevasses opening up in my life. "South of here, off 213. Close to New Paltz, past Rosendale."

"Okay.... Yeah, there's great biking out that way. You have a bike?"

"Nah."

It seems like everyone in the shop is a serious biker, even Josh, who I can't imagine on a bicycle. (He even sells a biking
shirt in the shop on which the cuts of meat are marked out, so that you can see where my brisket is, where my flatiron steak.
I wear it sometimes while butchering, and Aaron says I look like a superhero, by which he means, though he doesn't say, that
the top is brightly colored, very tight, and has a zipper that, when pulled halfway down, as I wear it, exposes a certain
amount of cleavage.) Tom and Jesse, particularly, are always relating their latest cycling adventures. I have been trying
to avoid getting sucked into an outing. That sounds nasty but isn't meant that way. I just feel so daunted.

I've taken up a meat hook and I'm working at pulling out the aitchbone. "Aitchbone," I've now figured out, by the way, is
derived from the Middle English "nache," meaning "buttock." But it's still a hip bone, so I stand by my initial theory. Anyway,
same process as with the pork rounds, just bigger and thus harder. I get the hook up through the eye of the bone.

"You could borrow one of mine sometime."

A small grunt as I begin to pull down on it with my right hand, scraping up under it with the knife in my left. "Thanks, that's
nice of you. But I don't really ride."