Eight years. Renny was gone for half that time, but all the same, it’s been eight years since the two of them tied the knot, and they’re still carrying on like newlyweds. Castor feels a two-pronged pang. He was jealous at the wedding too, sick with it. It didn’t help matters that Renny had chosen one of the linemen to stand up with him.
Best man
. Castor was well oiled before he even set out for the church. Once there, he lurched down the aisle, opening his jacket to
show the guests his bottle, explaining just exactly how the visions came on. Renny and the lineman took hold of him by the arms and half-carried him to the empty back pew.
Elsa gave him a poison glare upon entering, then shone smiles left and right all the way up the aisle. The second she and Renny were done signing the register, she came for Castor like a broody goose. “If you care about your brother—” she said to him through her teeth.
“Well, sure I care—”
“Shut up and listen. If you really care about his happiness, if you want him to be able to hold his head up in this town, you’ll walk out of here and never come back.”
“Aw, now—”
“The town drunk,” she hissed. “The village idiot.” He lowered his eyes, and that was when she came in for the kill. “Look, it’s Uncle Castor,” she sang in a little-girl voice.
“Run!”
Suddenly Castor doesn’t feel much like sticking around to watch Renny and Elsa emerge. Besides, it’s high time he got his hands around a bottle. He can feel the ghost of a tremor coming on.
A
ugust stood awestruck before St. Peter’s Catholic Seminary, flanked by the two suitcases that were all he’d brought with him from home. It was the largest building he’d ever had cause to enter. Its landscaped grounds swept gracefully down to the Thames—only the Canadian cousin, but to August it was the finest river in the world.
“Entering seminary is a life and death decision.” So began the Rector’s speech of welcome.
“Life
because you are choosing to give your life to the Church and to Christ our Lord.” He paused dramatically.
“Death
because you will pass a sentence of death on the life that came before.”
August smiled. He’d taken the bus to the London depot and a taxi from there, but that wasn’t how the escape played itself out in his mind. He could picture himself standing in the street out front of his mother’s house. He’d been waiting so long he could scarcely believe it when the time finally came. The bird was the colour of smoke, the size of a winged horse. It circled before landing, blocking then revealing the sun. August didn’t question, he simply threw
a long leg over its back, dug his fingers into its silky ruff and held on. The dove lifted him away just as Fairview began to sink, collapsing in on itself like a dying star.
He tuned back in for the speech’s denouement.
“—from the Latin,
seminarium,”
the Rector said gravely, “meaning ‘seed plot’, the ground where one plants, say, a crop of corn.” Here the Rector removed his thick glasses with tremendous delicacy, as though he were revealing an occult truth by exposing his squinty eyes. “As in any cornfield,” he continued, “there are those who grow sweet and healthy in their husks, safe in their silk, golden in the sight of God.” He smiled thinly. “And there are those the crow picks clean.”
The hog’s a giant. It took just about everything Thomas had to scald it, dragging it up and down in the steaming vat, first by its hind legs, then by a massive hook through its lower jaw. It was a hairy bugger, and scurfy too. He was at it forever with the bell scrapers, and still the beast had to be scrubbed and singed all over twice before the final shave.
Its jowlless head sits on a plate now, the tongue and eyes carved out, along with the waxy core of its enormous ears. Thomas has already opened the carcass to find little blood trapped in the chest—the sign of a professional kill.
Most slaughterhouses stuck their hogs hanging after yanking them off their feet with a length of chain, but Thomas Senior was from the country—he’d grown up sticking hogs on their backs, so on their backs was the way it was done.
For months after Thomas botched his first sticking, the old man checked up on him when he was killing hogs. Even when everything looked perfect, Thomas Senior would squat down and stick his fingers in the wound, exploring the shape of it, feeling for the cut-macaroni ends of arteries and veins, counting how many Thomas had got. When he was satisfied, he stood and walked off without a word. When he wasn’t, he stuck his own knife in, then Thomas’s fingers, to show him how it ought to feel.
Thomas cuts down between the hams and splits the aitchbone with a saw. Then loosens the penis and lets it hang, to be pulled out later with the guts.
He’d always dreamt of escaping, but it wasn’t until his mother passed on that the dream began to walk with him through his waking days. He was twenty-seven when Sarah Rose died. It was merciful—a blood clot breaking loose somewhere and shunting steadily toward her brain. The morning was peaceful, his father not yet returned from the night before. Thomas was hunkered over the paper to the soft scrape of her whisking eggs behind. She didn’t make a sound—at least not with her mouth, just her small body crumpling, the same thud as a two-month calf. It was all over before he could pick her up, not so much as a twitch or a moan.
The day after the funeral he was boning beef. “No sense mooning,” Thomas Senior had grunted at the graveside. “You and me back to the grind bright and early.” And so they were, Thomas donning his mother’s apron to cook the old man his breakfast, a panful of hissing bacon and the last of her home-baked bread.
When the others knocked off for the day, Thomas stuck around, the narrow blade frantic in his hand. The old man looked in, said, “Lock up, willya,” and was gone.
The moment he heard the door slam, Thomas reached in under his rubber apron for the newspaper he’d smuggled in, stuffed down his shirt front, bleeding ink over his belly and chest. He spread it on a dry corner of the table and began piling up bones, folding up three sheets per parcel, setting the grey lumps aside.
Thomas was a whiz with the boning knife—he controlled it like a claw—but today he’d been sloppy, left so much meat on the bones that he’d felt the others exchanging looks. Let them. Not one of them had a feeling bone in his body, except maybe MacLeod, and he’d been out on the killing floor dropping steers. Thomas had never told MacLeod about feeding the dogs, but he had a feeling the quiet half-breed would understand.
The others hated the stockyard pack. Some of them even laid out rat-poisoned livers and hung around to watch the skinny mongrels wolf them down. At least once a week he rolled bundle after bundle down the dark side alley, watching the toothy shadows tear into each one, so grateful they swallowed the bloodied newspaper too. Many had died from eating what they were given, but that did nothing to cut the hunger of those that were left.
He was folding up the final sheet when a black box ad caught his eye.
Butcher shop for sale. Fully equipped. Sole butcher to town. Apply Town Hall, Mercy, Manitoba
. His heart kicked hard. He traced the ad with his knife tip and lifted it from the page, folded it up small and drove it deep into the front pocket of his pants.
He could hear the dogs scrapping outside. Gathering up the bone parcels in his arms, he hurried to the back door, a crazy grin splitting his face. “I’m coming,” he called out, laughing. “Daddy’s coming.”
Thomas felt like a country bumpkin on the streetcar. He’d lived in St. Boniface all his life but had only crossed the river to downtown Winnipeg a handful of times, and those with his mother, to the looming Hudson’s Bay and back. He asked the driver to let him off close to the library, an institution he knew nothing about, save the words an elementary school teacher had planted in his brain.
A library is a kind of heaven. You can learn anything you want there for free
.
He wandered the stacks, trailing his hand down spine after spine. Famous painters, tuberculosis, birds of Canada, the Baptist Church. His head swam. Half an hour before closing he did the unthinkable—approached the aged librarian at her desk.
She nodded wordlessly, swivelled in her chair and yanked out a long, skinny drawer. Her knobby fingers flew through the cards, alighted, pulled up three and scratched particulars on a small green pad.
Thomas panicked. “I can’t,” he stammered. “I don’t know—”
She sighed and nodded again, then leapt up like a woman half her age and led him at a run through the shelves. One of the books was perfect—small enough to smuggle home, with detailed blueprints for retail cuts, both fancy and run-of-the-mill. Thomas burned the midnight oil for a week, slipping the book under his mattress and catching an hour’s
sleep before rising to work. He carried the dotted diagrams in his mind, laid them out over carcasses to better understand. The old man caught him idle, intent on a quarter of beef, and cuffed him upside the head.
A month had passed since Thomas spotted the ad. He’d located Mercy on a map, counted and recounted what money he’d managed to save. It was a surprising amount, really, given his piddly pay. And then there was his mother’s rainy-day fund, one of the many secrets they’d shared, a flat English toffee tin flaked pink and gold, kept under the nest of her prize layer in the ramshackle coop.
He couldn’t bear to write and see if the butcher shop had already sold. The way he looked at it, that shop was his only hope.
Rose’s Slaughterhouse bred two kinds of men—dead-eyed shufflers and nutcases, the kind who lopped off fingers in their brutal haste. Thomas Senior liked to keep a good mix. The shufflers showed up on time, while the snaky ones kept up the pace. Thomas could feel both types inside him, loitering like bums, waiting for his will to break. So far, though, he was still an exception. Him and MacLeod, the smooth-skinned Metis from The Pas—the only one Thomas talked to, even though it was rare to get an answer back. MacLeod was unmatched as a cutter. Carcasses divided themselves eagerly for him, like loose women removing their clothes.
It was just the two of them at the greasy lunch table, the others hooting and hollering outside. Thomas Senior had two fat male rats in a cage, and was taking bets on which would claw the other down. No longer able to keep it to himself, Thomas fished in his breast pocket for the ad. MacLeod
gave it a good long look, like he was trying to figure how much it was worth. “You got money?” he said finally.
“Some. Enough, I guess. Maybe.”
MacLeod sipped his strong, foul-smelling Thermos tea. “So go.”
“Yeah,” Thomas sighed, tucking the square of newsprint away. “He’d skin me.”
MacLeod nodded. “Do a piss-poor job of it, too.”
Thomas laughed. It was true, the old man never could get a clean cut—raggedy hides and splintered bone were a sure sign of his work. Every beast he handled gave meat that was fear-toughened and bruised.
MacLeod’s metal cup struck the table. “Tonight,” he said firmly.
“Tonight?”
“You go out in the shipment tonight.”
It was a truckload of pork sides headed for Ontario. Thomas could bail out partway to the provincial border and find his way somehow from there.
Find his way somehow
. It was an exhilarating phrase.
It was crazy, he knew, but it just might work. Also, MacLeod reminded him, it was free, and he’d need every cent he had when he got there. Besides, Thomas was no artist, but even he could see a kind of beautiful symmetry to the plan.
They picked a crate with a good-sized knothole for air. MacLeod piled the pork sides in around him, then nodded and nailed the top down without a word.
Thomas figured the truck’s speed at about forty-five and counted off miles with a box of matches and a pocket watch.
He made his break when the driver pulled in for coffee and pie. MacLeod had used finishing nails—a couple of cramped kicks and the lid gave way. Thomas pushed aside three fatty slabs and sat up like a vampire, banging his head on the metal roof.
Jesus. He broke a clammy sweat. What if they’d stacked him at the bottom of the pile?
Shoving the meat aside, he climbed out awkwardly, lit a match to get his bearings, then hammered the lid back on loosely with his fist. He kept his eyes closed to clamber backwards down the stack, preferring his own dark to that of the rig. The door opened mercifully from the inside. He hoisted it up just high enough to roll out onto the gravel lot.
Road signs told him east from west, one promising not far to the turnoff he needed. It didn’t take long to leave the truck-stop lights behind. It was still spring, still cold. Every now and then there came the howl of an engine, headlights tearing a white strip through the night. Thomas stopped to catch his breath. The earth was spinning. He could feel it—the planet and him on it—spinning through space.
It takes three full weeks of sick mornings for Mathilda to stop kidding herself. The truth hits as she’s scrambling eggs for Thomas’s breakfast, gagging in their putrid steam.
Later that same day she catches a glimpse of Father Day through the shop window, scurrying past on the far side of the street. Her stomach kicks at the sight of him. She excuses
herself from the chicken livers she’s weighing and runs upstairs. After splashing frantically at the sink, she looks up to meet herself, wild-eyed and dripping, in the mirror. He’s thinner, no doubt about it, rings of blue misery beneath his eyes. It could be as simple as guilt. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s love.
Come Saturday, she reclaims her position at the tail of the line. There’s a faint tarnish on the brass handle of the confessional door, a tarnish that wouldn’t have been there in Aunt Vera’s time, or during her own brief reign. She kneels down, feeling instinctively for the frame. The moulding won’t come free. Beneath it, she imagines not two screws but eight, every one of them tightened down. She skips the preliminaries.