Killing It

by Camas Davis

  LEVI = GENUINE ARTICLE, I’d written in my notebook.

  Chatting with Levi over dinner that night, I began to understand what Robert had meant. Levi took everything several steps further than most people. He insisted on killing his own animals whenever possible, and he typically dealt with all the details of butchering them himself. While Levi didn’t own his own farm, he’d grown close with the farmers he bought pork, lamb, goat, and beef from, visiting their farms on a regular basis. In his urban backyard, Levi also raised his own bees for honey, chickens for eggs, and rabbits and chickens for meat. He hunted for elk and deer each fall. He fished. On a regular basis, he canned his own duck and rabbit rillettes, rendered his own lard, made his own soap. He processed his own pickles and preserves from the produce he grew in his garden. Levi was, for all intents and purposes, what many food-conscious people in Portland strove to be but were not entirely sure how to become: a self-possessed, self-taught, culinary obsessive-compulsive–cum–urban homesteader with a stomach for killing his own dinner. He funded all of this through his day job as a critical care nurse at a local hospital. He’d even refinanced his house so that he could study cooking in France with Robert.

  Over a dessert of Robert’s delicate crêpes suzette, Levi told me that every year for his birthday, he found a farmer to buy a pig from, killed the pig himself, and then roasted the pig for fifty of his closest friends. He also usually killed a second pig and butchered it himself so that he could make his own hams and bacon.

  “I’ll probably want to write a story about you someday,” I’d told him. Two months back from France, I was doing just that.

  While I waited for Levi to return, I roamed the farm and took notes. The ground was dry, save for the muddy pasture where Linda’s pigs wallowed. I leaned on a wooden fence that separated all the pink pigs from me and watched one particularly large pig—almost as large as that seven-hundred-pound sow in the French abattoir—root around in the mud with what looked as close to glee as I could possibly imagine. I considered getting on my hands and knees to join her.

  And I considered joining her because rolling around in pig shit and Oregon mud sounded a lot more appealing than taking down notes while Levi attended to the real-world business of killing a pig. But I needed to write this story. I needed the money now. And I needed the money now because I’d been homeless, sleeping on friends’ couches, and living out of my car, for two months, and though I’d finally saved up enough unemployment checks and scraped together enough writing gigs to be able to afford first and last month’s rent on the tiny little detached garage studio I’d just moved into, I wasn’t sure I could cover next month’s rent.

  Five days. That was how long I’d lasted back at Will’s house after I returned from France. And then I’d left him in the middle of the night on the hottest day of summer, after waking him up from a deep sleep to tell him I couldn’t do it anymore. I am tentative about love and I am in love. I am afraid of being alone and I want to be alone. This is what I’d wanted to tell Will when I woke him. Also, I don’t know exactly who I am anymore, but it’s not who I was when I left for France. But it didn’t come out right. It was too complicated. I’m done would have to do the trick. Sever all communication between the heart and brain. It would be cleaner that way. Less pain, less suffering.

  But nothing about that night was clean or painless. I ended our screaming fight by hastily packing a bag with a can of Jehanne’s duck rillettes, a bottle of honeysuckle eau-de-vie, a toothbrush, and some underwear and slamming the front door, leaving Will, in his boxers, hunched over a creaky wooden chair in the middle of the living room to survey the aftermath of the hellish tornado that had just swept through his house.

  “I want you to be happy,” he’d said before I left for France. “Just don’t come back from France and leave me.”

  “I’d never do that,” I’d said. “I’d be a terrible person if I did that.”

  * * *

  —

  A LOCAL CHEF, Guy Weigold, arrived. We’d met only once before, at one of Levi’s pig roasts. He was the owner of the Farm Cafe, a now shuttered, mostly vegetarian restaurant in Portland, and when he’d found out I was a food writer for the local city magazine, he’d joked, “Don’t tell anyone I’m here. My customers probably wouldn’t like it.”

  Three of Robert Reynolds’s students, Porter, Tagg, and Nick, came around the corner of the barn. They were in their early twenties, dressed in that purposefully disheveled, hipster aesthetic—horn-rimmed glasses, tight jeans, plaid surf shirts, hoodies, Danner boots, Converse high-tops. They were earnest, respectful, curious guys who’d come on their own time, at Robert’s urging, to witness Levi’s pig kill.

  A big white pickup pulled up just as Levi returned in a pair of Linda’s dungarees, and a diminutive, dark-skinned man opened the driver-side door.

  “Chief Dave,” Linda exclaimed. “Hello!”

  “Hello,” Chief Dave said, not smiling. He looked around at all of us warily. “You got a lot of people here,” he said to Linda.

  Dave Strickland—his customers called him Chief Dave, although I never found out why—owned what Linda called a “state-inspected mobile slaughterhouse” and spent his days traveling from farm to farm to do what most people have little to no interest in doing: shooting four-legged farm animals in the head, bleeding them, then skinning and eviscerating them so that they could be turned into meat for the dinner table. Linda told me that smaller farmers like her, who weren’t interested in running their own slaughter operation, preferred to hire an outfit like Chief Dave’s to come to the farm to do the slaughter, as opposed to having to drive their animals to a large, unfamiliar, USDA-inspected slaughterhouse, which was often more than a hundred miles away for many farmers she knew. Linda also felt that on-farm slaughter was more humane, and more sustainable for her business, even if it legally limited her options for selling her animals. Due to various regulations I didn’t yet fully understand, she was allowed to sell animals killed on the farm only in whole, half, or quarter form, directly to consumers who wished to use the meat for personal consumption. She was not allowed to sell to retail outlets like restaurants and butcher shops that, in turn, would be selling the meat for profit. To do that, she was required to take her animals to one of the USDA facilities. If you couldn’t cooperatively own your own small slaughterhouse like the Chapolards did, this seemed like as good a workaround as any for a farmer like Linda. But it also meant she needed to find consumers who wanted to buy a whole, half, or quarter pig, who were as willing to take on the trotters and pig ears as they were the pork chops and bacon.

  “Why spend a lot of money on gas and stress your animals out when you could have a guy with a gun show up?” she said. “The animals don’t even know what hit them. They’re happy one minute, dead the next.”

  Linda had hired Chief Dave to come and kill a pig for one of her other customers that day, so while Levi still planned on killing his own pig, he’d decided to pay Dave to show him how he handled the post-kill processing.

  Chief Dave climbed out of his battered pickup, reached back into the truck’s cab to grab a shotgun, and then turned to survey the barnyard. Having an audience was probably not customary for Chief Dave. Most people hired him to kill their animals so that they wouldn’t have to witness any of it. We were all clearly city kids, tourists on his outdoor kill floor.

  Levi approached Dave and shook his hand.

  “Thanks for coming,” Levi said. “So I’ve been killing a pig every year for about four years. The first year I tried to kill a pig, it was horrible. My friend Robert told me that in France they just hang a live pig up by its back feet and it falls asleep and they stab it in the neck. Robert is a good storyteller, for sure, but, as it turns out, live pigs don’t actually fall asleep if you try and hang them by their feet.”

  We all chuckled, but underneath, I sensed a collective nervousness about what we were about to witne
ss. Would it be much smoother than that?

  After a couple more years of trial and error, Levi had perfected his method. “The whole thing is peaceful now, at least for the pig,” he said. We followed Levi into the barn, where his pig had been settling in for several hours now, sniffing the walls of her hay-lined stall. Levi knelt down and massaged her cheeks.

  “It’s hard for us to watch. But now I feed them a half rack of beer, I make sure they are good and relaxed, I shoot them in the head, I bleed them out, and it’s a happy ending.” As he said this, Levi poured a bottle of Blue Moon Winter Abbey Ale into the mouth of the pig he was about to kill. It seemed as pleasant a way to go as I could imagine.

  According to meat scientists I have talked to since, the jury’s still out on feeding an animal alcohol before slaughter, but ensuring that an animal is rested and relaxed leading up to and during slaughter is in fact an important determining factor in the quality of the meat we eat. If, for instance, a pig is immediately slaughtered after stressful transport, the meat of that pig may be pale, soft, and watery—the result of fast rigor onset, which produces high lactic acid in the muscle postmortem, before the carcass can be chilled. The industry label for this kind of pork is PSE, or pale, soft, and exudative. Allow the pig to rest between transport and slaughter, handle the animal gently during slaughter, and chill the carcass rapidly postmortem, and PSE pork is much less likely. The opposite end of the spectrum is DFD or dark, firm, and dry meat, often due to extended activity or struggle or an inappropriate period of fasting prior to slaughter, which results in a depletion of glycogen storage in the muscle, leading to the muscle’s inability to produce sufficient amounts of lactic acid postmortem. This meat may be too dry and is prone to spoil quicker. DFD is more common in beef, but can sometimes be found in pork.

  “He sure loves his pigs,” Linda said, nodding toward Levi, who had begun talking to his presumably tipsy two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Blue Butt, the common breed name for Linda’s Yorkshire-Hampshire mix.

  “Of course I do,” Levi said.

  * * *

  —

  WHISPERING SWEET NOTHINGS into a pig’s ear was all good and fine, but killing a pig meant killing a pig, so Levi made a plan with Chief Dave.

  “So I’m going to do the honors,” Levi said, pulling a pistol out of his pocket. “But I want to see how you skin it and gut it.”

  “Fine by me,” Dave said.

  We grew silent. Levi let the pig smell the gun, so that this new, shiny object in her line of sight didn’t scare her, and then he slowly moved the pistol up toward her head. A few seconds later, he shot her right between the ears. She immediately fell over sideways and began to convulse just like the seven-hundred-pound sow in the French abattoir had after she’d been stunned with electricity. Levi and Guy held the pig’s body down so that she didn’t thrash into the walls of the barn.

  “When you shoot a pig in the head,” Levi told us calmly, “its nervous system sends out multiple signals all at once, which makes the pig’s body convulse. It looks terrible, but if I did it right, she can’t feel anything right now.” After she’d stopped moving completely, Levi and Guy lifted the pig’s back legs up off the ground so that when Chief Dave stuck a knife into the carotid arteries, the blood ran toward the ground. No one was there to catch it.

  The sound of blood is more shocking than the sight of it. I could hear it spilling out onto the sweet alfalfa beneath the pig’s body. In Pig Earth, Berger describes a cow being slaughtered. “Life is liquid,” he writes after seeing its throat cut. “The Chinese were wrong to believe that the essential was breath.”

  Levi and Guy set the pig back down on the hay-covered ground. Levi turned to me. I could see the pulse in his neck tracking time. “Every year I do this, it’s a little horrific. The day it isn’t, I don’t think I should eat pigs anymore. Write that down in your little notebook, Ms. Reporter Lady.”

  In a mere five minutes, Chief Dave hung the pig by its back legs, skinned it, and then sliced down its belly and eviscerated it, letting the pig’s innards slide out into a large bucket.

  Levi explained to Chief Dave that normally he and his friends plunged the pig into a vat of scalding hot water for a minute and then shaved the hair off with knives so that they could save the skin, too.

  Chief Dave shook his head. “Seems like a whole lot of work for nothing.”

  “But the skin is delicious,” Levi said. Levi, like me, had been to France, had learned to use the skin to thicken his soups and stews.

  “Make sure to get the leaf fat,” Linda said to Levi.

  “What’s leaf fat?” one of Robert’s students, Nick, asked.

  Leaf fat, Levi explained, lines the abdominal cavity and the kidneys, and is prized because of its high lipid count and creamy consistency. It also burns at a lower temperature than fatback, which is where traditional lard comes from, he told us, and so, in its rendered form, leaf fat is perfect for pastries and pie dough.

  “It’s what people used before Crisco,” Levi said.

  The Chief gave Levi a suspicious look. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m gonna make pies all year long, daddio,” Levi said.

  “You’re keeping the head, too?” Dave asked.

  “Is that uncommon, Dave?”

  “For white people, yeah.”

  “I’m not your average white guy,” Levi said, and pointed to the bucket of guts. “I’ll take that heart and liver, too.”

  Chief Dave went over to the bucket of guts on the ground, cut the heart away from the rest of the organs, and handed it to Levi. Levi offered it to me.

  I tucked my pen behind my ear, shoved my notebook in my back pocket, and stood there with the pig’s heart in my hands.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Two days later, after Levi had hung the pig in a friend’s restaurant walk-in and the carcass had gone through rigor mortis, our same group—Guy, Tagg, Porter, Nick, and I—gathered around a stainless-steel worktable at the studio where Robert taught his students.

  Levi had a busy few days ahead of him. His to-do list for the weekend read something like this: (1) butcher pig; (2) rabbit rillettes; (3) duck confit; (4) kill roosters; (5) render fat; (6) make sausage; (7) salt pancetta and guanciale; (8) start posole; (9) cut soap; (10) order beef from Larry; (11) feed bees.

  He began walking the students through what they would do with the pig liver and head.

  “We’ll make pâté today out of the liver. I’ll make guanciale out of the jowls. Jowl bacon, in other words. And I’ll crack open this head, take the brains out, and put the entire thing in a stockpot and make posole,” Levi said.

  Levi washed the liver under cold water and then gathered the students around him. He cleaned the liver using the same knowledge he relied on every day as a nurse, offering words like portal, lipase, vena cava, and common bile duct to explain what he was doing.

  “This isn’t rocket science,” he kept telling the students. “It’s a body, just like ours. This is a liver, just like ours.”

  Not too long ago, Levi said, this was a common annual ritual among communities all over the world: slaughter the hog, butcher it, and then preserve the meat by making hams, bacon, sausage, and pâtés.

  “Ask Camas. She just got back from Gascony, where they still do that,” Levi said.

  For this group of urbanites, however, it was new territory. For us, a book on slaughter and butchery—which Levi had placed on the worktable in front of us—stood in for a grandmother in an apron and a grandfather with a shotgun.

  After preparing liver pâté and finishing off the head, we broke for a lunch of meat, cheese, and bread. Robert arrived and poured us some wine, which prompted Levi to tell us about his childhood.

  In Estacada, Oregon, on the communal farm—“a pot farm,” he told us, “that eventually got busted”—where he grew up in the seventies and eighties, with
nine adults and five kids, they raised and killed their own animals for food. “The first time I was part of killing an animal, my uncle told me to plug my ears. I was six. He pulled out a pistol, shot a goat in the head, and then hung the thing up and asked me to hold it still for him. I gave it a big hug while he tied its feet.”

  Levi’s friend John Taboada, a local chef who did whole-animal butchery occasionally in his restaurant, Navarre, showed up. He’d agreed to show us his butchery method on one half while Levi followed along with a knife on the other half. We all joined them around the table. From a folded dish towel, John unwrapped what looked like a small paring knife and began cutting the tenderloin away from the vertebrae and ribs, just as Dominique had shown me.

  “I read once that when the lion kills its prey, the first thing it eats is the tenderloin,” John said. “The tenderloin is what I always take out first, because it’s valuable, and you could accidentally cut it as you start working on other parts.” Lions. French grandmothers. Rich American businessmen. The story of the tenderloin was getting more and more complicated.

  John’s knife scraped against bone. “Hear that? That’s what you want to hear when you’re butchering.”

  “In the United States, there are something like twelve basic cuts on a pig,” Levi said. “In France, there are something like forty-eight. Right, Camas?”

  “Something like that,” I said, although I didn’t actually know and it seemed to me that the number depended on the butcher and what he or she was going to do with the meat. Perhaps there really was no such thing as American cuts and French cuts. There could only ever be Dominique’s cuts or Levi’s cuts or John’s cuts or my cuts—cuts that made the most sense for the people who would eventually eat them.

  “My friend in Italy keeps trying to get flank steak from his butchers after I cooked it for him in my restaurant,” John said. “They have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s different everywhere you go.”