Took a red-eye from San Diego at eight Wednesday night and dozed on the plane, waking up to shots of the near-full moon shocking patches of desert and desert-cities across the country to Cleveland. On the ground there was snow. It was still dark. My father sounded tired on the phone. He drove me home and cut a melon and made coffee. My mother came downstairs sleepy and hugged me. They showed me the work they'd done on the basement. I made some toast. My grandfather rang the doorbell and told us all about how icy the roads were to the South. I made him coffee and toast. We laughed that God had mixed up Easter and Christmas this year. I drove my grandfather back to Alliance and we stopped at the house for boots and jackets and then my grandfather got behind the wheel and we drove to the animal farm. He reversed into the driveway, using the mirrors because it's hard for him to twist his neck all the way around. I opened the barn door without knocking. The goats were stoic and the sheep bleating. Everybody was cold but the frost was gone. It was about eight o'clock. There was a black potbelly with long whiskers and a patch of hair on its head that came to say hello, nuzzling our shins. The two brothers who ran the farm were working silently in the back. One of them was milking a goat into a plastic milkjug. The milk was the color of eggnog. Two kittens, safe under a stool, watched. He finished and set the jug on the sill and the kittens waited for him to turn his back and then attacked the jug, licking its rim and handle furiously. The two men wouldn't have said a word if we hadn't first. The bigger one locked the goat back in its pen and together they walked around to the sheep. My grandfather said a joke, something about the weather, and I think they laughed, but their backs were turned. All the animals were ruffling and hitting into the sideboards. There were rabbits the size of dogs and turkeys with gemstone gobblers covering their whole snouts and rear-ends that looked as if they'd been used for shotgun practice. The turkeys stood like warriors, eyeing me. The brothers mumbled to themselves, and then one of them pointed at a sheep and my grandfather said that it was too small. The man pointed to another one and said it was about sixty pounds and my grandfather said that's a-alright. One of the brothers snuck the lamb from behind as it tried to hide in the corner and its brothers and cousins and sisters and mothers all bleated and bolted scurrying every way. He hefted it onto his hip like you would carry a toddler and his brother opened the door for him. They went into the next pen and, without much difficulty, put the lamb entirely into a canvas bag. They hung the bag from a scale fixed into the ceiling and weighted it. Fifty-eight, he said. That's a-alright. They thumped it onto the ground and pulled the bag down around it. One of the brothers put a knee into the lamb's side and tied its legs together with green twine. It shook against him. He lifted it up and took it out of the pen and put it on the ground. A man came into the door with his hands covered in blood. I recognized him. He was Romanian. He said buna dimaniata, buna, buna, laughing and smiling at me and he asked my grandfather for a hand out back. The pig was rubbing against my leg. I asked one of the brothers if they were gonna butcher the pig. He said they weren't. I asked him why it didn't have a pen. He didn't answer right away. He was looking at an old calendar. It was faded and blank and hung high enough on the wall that he had to strain to write on it. It was their ledgerbook. Each day was a transaction. He scribbled fifty-eight and one point seven and a hundred in the box for Tuesday, October nine, I don't know what year. He turned to me and said that somebody in Salem wanted to make a pet out of it, but they were within city limits and a neighbor reported them. I asked if they were keeping it as a pet now, and he said, no, he'll sell it to somebody. He said he could sell any animal. He could find somebody to sell it to. I pet a huge black sheep on the stone top of its head and it bleat at me, very deeply. I asked another question and then he finally started talking. He told me that the lamb we got was a Doric Cross, and that that one there is an Icelandic Border Lester and some of 'em got horns and some of 'em don't. He said that he tries every breed that is natural but only some is really liked. He said that people that buy to eat is less picky than the women who buy for the wool. He said that he has some women that love one kind of sheep and another that loves the other kind. Some that loves black and some that don't. He can get about the same money selling for wool or meat. He told me that he tried eating sheep some time and it wasn't as good as lamb, but not too bad. And that they butcher the older sheep for feed. He told me how good his rabbits were. And that he and his brother were going to eat a turkey this weekend. He said he only liked cow milk but goats wasn't too different. He still had to bottlefeed a few kids. My grandfather came back in the barn and two men followed him. He washed his hands in a cold bucket and wiped them unscrupulously on a paper feed bag. I went out to see the lamb they had hanging skinless behind the barn. My grandfather is the best at butchering, they told me. My grandfather said that next year I'd help them, that I came all the way from California to butcher. He told me to put the lamb in the truck and I picked it up and held it under its legs against my body. Nobody had to say goodbye. I said thanks and so did my grandfather, but the animals were too loud for us to be heard or for anyone to pay mind. My grandfather brushed the hay off the lamb's side before I slid it into the truck. He drove home and the dogs were waiting in the driveway, knowing what we had for them. He parked the car next to the house and asked if I needed a wheelbarrow and I said that I didn't. The lamb was silent. It didn't even look at me. It wasn't hard to carry, but it started slipping on the way to the barn. I tried to heft it back up but it started kicking. I set it on the snow behind the barn and kicked at the dogs to keep them away. The lamb tried to stand and almost succeeded. Still, it didn't bleat. My grandfather pulled open the full barn door. He had a knife in his hand. He walked over and knelt on the lamb and straightened its neck and said, see here, right below the jaw, and he stuck the knife in and sawed it cleanly out through the front of the throat. The lamb didn't make a sound. My grandfather held it on the ground for a moment, wiped the knife's blood off on the fleece of its head, and then stood up and went into the barn. I watched the lamb as its head slowly straightened. Its breath melting out. Peace coming to its eyes. Come and see my tractor, my grandfather said and I went through the barn and into the shed and admired his new tractor. I went back out to see the lamb and my grandfather followed me and said to grab a leg and we pulled it in and set it on the dirt floor of the barn. We each took a hind leg and started to skin. I stopped to sharpen my knife better and then peeled the skin up past the knee and to the groin. There was a rope hanging from two pulleys that each of us took an end of and tied between the forebone and the tendon. I lifted the lamb by the hind and my grandfather pulled the rope and fastened it over a post that supported the haystack. Parts of the post had never been stripped of bark. The lamb hung now about four feet in the air, slowly dripping blood against the dirt floor. He cut around the anus and then we started on each side pulling and cutting the skin away from the fascia, pulling it down its body, as if we were taking off its clothing, very methodically. He showed me how to open it in the middle. Stick the knife below the anus and pull hard. And then he showed me how to be careful when spilling the guts. Put two fingers into the body cavity and then the knife between the fingers, working down, careful not to pierce the intestines, which spilled out, hot and raw and noisome, and to be very careful around the gallbladder, which was filled with a translucent green liquid that resembled something kept in a vile. The guts are tender, but they can stand pulling. I knicked the large intestine and a peppered-green sludge oozed out. It smelled explosively. I had to yank to finally undo the guts. I threw them to the dogs in the snow. The poison gallbladder we removed separately. We saved the lungs, kidney, liver and heart for soup. Blood spatted onto my face when I pulled out the heart. We sawed off its legs and then head. Then finally sawed clean down its middle, starting at the coccyx and straight down the spine. The spinal cord spilled out and I looked at a piece, trying to figure it. It looked like a fatty string of cartilage, nothing special. I threw it to the dogs. I went around the corner of the barn to the water barrel but it was frozen over. I went back in the barn and got a hammer and went outside and broke the ice and filled two buckets. Together we washed the halves of the lamb and washed the knives and the woodsaw and then washed our hands in the freezing water. An hour later, in the house kitchen, we cut off all four legs, and then sawed the ribs into sections. I showered and then my grandmother and I went to buy napkins and paper plates for Easter at the church. We stopped by the fabric store to buy a new zipper for my coat. Everywhere we went she knew somebody. We went to Sam's Club, where they sell tires and gazebos and offer samples of breaded fish and granola and salsa and sell books and bras and ten pound bags of Italian meatballs and computers and ipods and shoes and toolsets and hottubs and giant trampolines. We bought the meatballs and a few pineapples and I was yawning at the wheel and my grandma made me pull over so she could drive. She told me stories of Romania. She told me how much she liked sugar, and that she would eat sugar and bread and water and wanted nothing else. Her mother hid the sugar and she found it. Her mother locked the sugar in a cabinet and hid the key under the carpet and she found the key and gave the neighbor children a feast of sugar. Her mother locked the sugar and wore the key on her apron and my grandmother stared at the cabinet and after a few days figured out that she could take out a drawer above the locked drawer and slide her hand around and take the sugar. It was very difficult for her to take only enough so that her mother wouldn't notice. Eventually she took too much. Her mother promised her that if she told the truth as to how she'd raided the sugar she could have a ration every week. My grandmother confessed and from then on ate her entire sugar ration on the day it was given. We went to church early to iron the altar dressings and set up tables and chairs. The Twelve Gospels service started at seven and most of it was in Romanian. For every gospel reading the congregation kneeled. I could make out enough Romanian to know what was being read, but I was falling into dream, and hard, like Peter and James and John in the garden, I tried breathing very deeply to increase the oxygen in my head and wake up but my head was desperate for dream and Jesus was off praying by himself. We all spent more than an hour on our knees that night. After three hours the priest gave a sermon and we went into the hall and had a feast of beans, eggplant, zacusca, bread, nutbread, whiskey, and wine. I was beyond sleep. When we finally got home my grandfather went to sleep and my grandmother and I moved some furniture into the garage and talked for awhile and I washed and got laughing into bed, waiting for sleep and its grace. My grandmother, the most productive insomniac I've ever known, came into my room to talk a bit more. She told me a story of a little boy in Romania who, when he was very young, started to take fruit from his neighbor's tree. The mother caught him one day with an apple in his pocket and she chastened him, but let him keep it. He soon started taking eggs from another neighbor's coop. And even a little chick one day, that he killed and his mother found in the garden. She disposed of the evidence, and said nothing. When the boy grew up he started climbing the village fences and then even breaking into houses. One day an old man caught him robbing his house and he killed the old man and ran away, but was later caught, and tried, and sentenced to die. Before the execution the guards asked him if he had any last wishes, and he said that he wanted to see his mother. It wasn't allowed, but the man insisted, and then begged, and screamed, and finally the warden permitted his mother to come for just a few minutes. When she saw her son she pitied him, as before, and forgave him, as always, and bent down to kiss him, and when she came close the son lifted up and snapped at her face and bit off a piece of her nose. He told her, with blood dripping from both of their faces, that it was her fault that he was being put to death, that she should have punished him for stealing apples as a boy. He told her that he wanted everybody to see her mistake, to be able to laugh at her mistake, to see it on her face for the rest of her life. I must have fallen asleep around the end of the story because I remembered it the next morning, Good Friday morning, as if I had experienced it, as if it wasn't a story, the blood in my mouth.
About the author:
John Washington currently lives and writes in San Diego.
© 2009 Word Riot
