La Bouchère
Palais stood behind her father, who wielded a large knife with ease and used it to gesture with as he instructed her on how to properly be a butcher.
“It is important to find the way the cow wants to be cut,” he said, the knife one second pointing at the ceiling, the next dangling near her chest, and the next wiggling precariously close to her father's eye. “The meat will speak to you. Think, Palais, think. It comes from the fields. It eats grass all day, and it shits out round pies that heat in the sun and can be burned for fuel. It smells of animal. It gets soil stuck between its hooves. The cow, it sits in the hot sun, or lies in the shade, flies buzz, bite, it flicks them with its tail. Remember the meat for what it was, and listen as it whispers to you how it must be cut. There are many ways to cut a cow, but a true butcher will know just by the whisper of the meat.” He patted her shoulder with the hand that wasn't holding the knife. “You will see, my daughter, that it is also like being a woodcutter. The woodcutter must know the tree, must listen to what the tree is telling him, and must find the grain of the wood on which he may cut. The same is true in finding the grain of the meat. Try to cut meat the wrong way, and it collapses into mush under the pressure of your blade. Work with the meat's will, and not against it.”
Palais knew that this was insanity. Her father was convinced he was the greatest boucher in all of France. But simply from long-distance dating Paulo, a butcher's son in Cannes, she knew that there were better bouchers in better boucheries all over France.
Still, she tried her hardest to listen to him.
“Watch me, Palais, and see how it is done.”
She watched his wrist move in twisting, up-and-down, roundabout motions, and could almost feel the blade piercing the tender meat as if it was her own. There was the sound of the meat's resistance against the knife, like no sound at all, and the sharp cut-cut-cut, the sound of the knife on the wooden table. She thought it did sound like chopping wood, though she had never heard anyone chop wood before. She liked the way her father's knife was able to slide through tendrils of muscle and strings of fat so easily. She wondered if this was the way wild animals feel when they bite into their prey and their teeth sink through living tissue like it is soft cheese.
“Now, it is your turn.”
Palais had been cutting meat her entire life. No one, especially not her father, had ever asked her if she had wanted to become a butcher. She might have wanted to become a maid, or a florist, or even a writer, but no one had ever asked her what she wanted to be. She hoped, one day, to write a novel about being a boucher, but she would rather be anything than a boucher.
Now, with her father watching, she poised her wrist with her own large knife carefully over the fresh chunk of meat, and began the cut. She went slowly, remembering to watch carefully for the flaws in the muscle, to work with the way the rivers of tiny veins flowed.
As she was cutting the meat, Palais remembered when she had once brought a friend home from school, Yvette, to play with her in the back of the boucherie while they waited for her father to close the shop. Yvette always smelled like flowers because her mother was a fleuriste, and she carried dried flowers with perfume in the pockets of her clothes to make her smell even more of flowers. Palais had liked Yvette because Yvette had straight black hair and big eyes and smelled like flowers, and Palais imagined that she might be a doe in disguise as a young girl. At the boucherie, there was blood all over Palais' father, there was blood in buckets here after it had been drained from the animals, and there was red and purple and blue everywhere, the shop like a huge bruise crawling from underneath the skin to the surface. Yvette stepped into the back of the boucherie, where all the raw meets hung in the freezer waiting to be cut or cured, and her face turned very pale. Yvette then fainted, and did not talk to Palais again after that.
When Palais was a bébé, her father used to set her down on top of a coil of sausages. Palais would stare at him with her pale blue eyes and watch the red blood trickle down the blade of the knife and form puddles on the wooden table.
She knew meat, its sunset colors, its smell like iron and sweat, its touch soft and resistant, its sound like sucking up water, its taste like blood and roasted hazelnuts. Meat had surrounded her since birth, meat on its iron hooks in the dim lighting of the freezer, body masses cold and dead, hanging all in rows, bumping against a form and hearing the slight jingle of the metal chain, the sigh of the freezer door opening. She knew meat, in all its states, and as she cut-cut-cut the piece in front of her, twisting her blade carefully, she realized that she could hear the meat. It was whispering to her, in soft little sounds, of its life that had passed, of all the places it had not been, of the French countryside in which it had been raised with other cows. The whispered ghosts of the cow told of the calves who were all taken away, the females to be raised for milk, the males put in tiny boxes for weeks so that when they emerged, starving and tender-muscled, their legs wobbled and they could not walk and the men leading them to slaughter had to shock and beat them to get them up the ramp. How the cow had eaten grass every day, had more calves, had them taken away, and been milked by machines, again and again in the cycle that stopped when the cow could no longer birth calves safely, and did not give as much milk, and was carted away to be slaughtered, clip-clop hooves, deep and uneasy lowing, up the ramp, chains around the legs, hoisted in the air to be conveyed into electric water, barely stunned, then blade along the throat, and blood, blood, blood collected to be sold, and meat still alive watching the life spurt out of it in gushes of thick red juice.
When Palais was finished cutting the meat, she turned to her father.
“You are not the best boucher in France,” she said. “The meat tells me what it has suffered, but I will never be great.”
Her father nodded his head solemnly. “That is the curse of the boucher, my daughter.”
Palais stood in front of the cuts of meat she had made, knife slick with blood, and thought that maybe being a boucher really was like being a woodcutter. She looked down and heard the blood on her knife still humming with stories, still vibrant with the life it had once given, and knew that a boucher was the only thing she could be.
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