by Camas Davis
* * *
—
IN THE END, Martha ran the pictures of pork chops in the magazine. The pig head never made an appearance.
Before the awards ceremony in New York, each awardee was asked to pose on the red carpet with Martha, after she posed with actual celebrities, like Christie Brinkley and Bobby Flay. Cameras flashed. A crowd gathered. I kept turning to my fellow awardees to see if anyone but me felt at all out of place—I mean, where had Christie Brinkley even come from?—but no one gave me a knowing look back.
When it came my turn to pose next to Martha, she kept her face pointed toward the cameras and didn’t look at me.
“Look straight ahead,” she said. “Keep smiling.”
As we posed and smiled and looked straight ahead, she talked to me out of the side of her mouth.
“So you’re the butcheress,” she said. “Most people don’t know this, but I come from a family of Polish butchers. You want to know the best way to kill a turkey?” she asked me. Thanksgiving was right around the corner.
“Tell me,” I said.
“You feed it vodka first.” She looked over at me with a defiant look in her eyes and winked.
I wondered if those words, let alone a pig head, would ever grace the pages of her magazine. I understood, finally, that including me in her magazine at all—posing with a cleaver and those tender, mild, inoffensive pork chops—was something of a risk for her, a risk she might not have taken four years earlier, when I went to France to learn how to kill my own dinner, but which she was now willing to take. I liked to think that I’d helped to make that possible.
Before I held my first Portland Meat Collective class, Jo had asked me what my long-term goals for the project were. I told her that I hoped someday the Portland Meat Collective wouldn’t even have to exist, because everyone would already possess the knowledge that our classes offered.
“That’s a long game you’re playing,” she said.
It was indeed. It still is.
FORTY-TWO
It has been nine years since I first went to France to learn how to turn a pig into pork chops and a pig head into pâté. My classes still sell out. I have competitors now, other people who see the need for such education, which means that the long game hasn’t gotten any shorter. Occasionally—usually when Levi and I hold a rabbit slaughter class—someone threatens to protest. I always call Levi up to warn him, but we never cancel.
As I write this, Kate and Dominique are heading to Oregon to teach with me, as they have every other year since I went to France. But this time will be different. Last year, a few months before Dominique retired, with plans to take his pig show on the road with Kate, his doctor diagnosed him with a serious form of cancer. When he comes to Oregon, we will gather as many students as we can who passed through the doors of the salle de découpe after me. We will butcher and cook and eat with him. We’ll show him what we’ve done with all that he and his family taught us—the butcher shops and meat schools and full-circle pig farms we’ve each started. He will remind us to stand up straight, to breathe, and to smile. Tout seul, tu meurs, he’ll say, while slicing his formidable jambon for us to taste. We are a tribe now, all of us who dropped whatever it was we used to do, whatever it was we thought defined us, stepped into that black hole, and decided to linger there long enough to find the meaning we’d each been searching for.
Every year, Kate holds a Grrls Meat Camp somewhere in the world. When I am able to attend, I find myself surrounded by women who, like me, also dropped almost everything sure and reliable in their lives in search of the real thing, the genuine article. We’re also a tribe. When I say my name is Camas, they ask me for my story. When I am done telling it, I always ask them for theirs.
* * *
—
A PHOTOGRAPHER CAME to my house recently. Studying me through her camera lens, she probed for more information about the classes I offered, but when I began explaining, she interrupted.
“Actually,” she said, “don’t tell me.”
I laughed, but she wasn’t joking.
“No. Really. I mean it. I just don’t want to know,” she said.
“I don’t ever want to know what that feels like,” I said to her. We didn’t even bother to make small talk after that.
* * *
—
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, after I have hung up the phone from my once-a-year catch-up with Jo—all we ever really allow ourselves anymore, since she moved north with her wife to start a new life in a different fertile valley, since she is busy with her new daughter and I with mine—I ask Andrew whether he wishes I’d shared with him all the lurid details of my relationship with this woman I once loved. Sometimes I think I want him to know.
I don’t really need to, he usually says.
I like to think I am the kind of person who will tell him anyway. But I do not. In truth, I am thankful that I will not need to go digging for new words to explain that unseen road I entered upon so long ago.
* * *
—
SOMETIMES, when I am at the dentist or the doctor or making small talk with a stranger at a party and they ask me what I do, I do not tell them the full story. “I’m a writer,” I say. Because it’s easier that way. Because most people can conjure a story or a picture in their head when I say this. Sometimes I don’t want to risk the stories they will tell themselves if I say, “I am a butcher, but not a butcher, not really.” Sometimes when people ask me my name, I just go ahead and tell them it’s Jennifer.
* * *
—
THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS we do not want to tell. So many things we are not told. Often, this is out of convenience. It’s just too long and arduous to tell, after all, and that’s all the not telling is really about. Who has the time these days? Besides, sometimes people just don’t want to be told, so the feeling is often mutual.
Or maybe an adult thinks a child is not ready—and maybe, in fact, the child really isn’t. Or a writer decides not to tell the whole story—just the parts that seem most relevant to drive home her point. Or a politician thinks his or her constituents are not prepared to swallow the truth, because the truth often involves sacrifice, which in turn agitates the populace, and so the politician tells some of the story but covers other parts, to minimize the risk. And, sometimes, don’t we know this is happening but just let it go? Isn’t there something about not telling that we are all complicit in?
There are, of course, more generous ways to look at not telling. After all, sometimes the not telling keeps us always wondering, which may be a delightful and flirtatious way to move through life, but only if someone throws you a few bread crumbs every once in a while. A literature professor in college once suggested that Victorians, while seemingly tight-lipped and buttoned-up, swathed as they were in all that tucked garb with one hundred clasps, were masters of the slow, controlled reveal. The mere appearance of a bare anklebone sent them all aquiver.
Plus, whole families, governments, corporations, and cultures—not to mention our entire industrial food system—are built on the tenets of not telling, so one might argue that not telling is important to the stability of our lives. But I have often not told, or not wanted to be told, out of a false sense of stability, and maybe also out of laziness or fear, or both. And lately, I worry that not telling—and, thus, not knowing—will, over time, dull me into thinking things are simpler than they really are.
“Sometimes things just really are simple, sis,” my twin brother, Zach, often says to me, which is not at all to imply that he is in any way simple, or simple-minded—he is, in fact, quite the opposite. But still, he has asked me more than once, “Why do you always have to process everything?”
By process he means, I think, an insistence on revealing everything at every given moment. Everything out on the table. Empty your pockets. I want the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. An insistenc
e fueled by a persistent belief that, always, there is something that has not yet been revealed, which maybe implies that there is no such thing as everything out on the table. Because, even once you’ve emptied all your pockets, I’ll still squint at its contents, all spit and shine under the bright lights, and say, I don’t believe you. Is that all there is? Show me something else.
* * *
—
STILL, I find myself not telling when I think that the telling will be too hard, that it will require too much of my energy, and too much of anyone else’s. I wish, out of empathy, to prevent others from bearing the weight of it.
A student once told me that when her grandfather found out she’d attended a pig slaughter class with us, he’d been disappointed. “We worked so hard so that your life would not be hard,” he said. “Why would you want to go and make things hard again?”
And it’s true. They did work hard to make our lives easier. They fought in wars. They lived in mud huts. They traveled in rickety wagons through snow and sleet. They made grave mistakes. They did terrible things sometimes. They also invented dishwashers and refrigerators and vacuuming robots and spaceships and cars and mechanized slaughterhouses and Styrofoam and underpaid migrant labor and bubble wrap and Scotch tape and electric chain saws and pull tabs and vitamins. And frozen chicken nuggets, which are so much easier than having to kill and butcher and fry up a chicken all by your lonesome.
* * *
—
A FRIEND’S THERAPIST recently said to her, “You know, you don’t have to be honest all the time about everything.”
Imagine that.
My friend went on to explain that her therapist had meant she didn’t have to bring up every difficult thing with those around her all the time, because not everyone wanted to talk about everything, especially if everything was too hard.
My friend and I, both being the sort of people who have a tendency to want to wave our hands above our heads and point and yell, “Look! Look! There’s an elephant in the room! An elephant!” on a somewhat daily basis, went back and forth about it for a while and concluded that not telling, not revealing, was simply inefficient. Because whatever hard thing you’re working so hard to make sure no one knows, or to make sure you never have to know, will always catch up with you—and them—eventually. And then, when the catching up occurs, everyone’s freaked out, screaming, “How could you! The horror! What happened? How did I never know this? Why did you not tell me! I don’t want to know!” It all seemed like a lot of wasted energy to us.
I think, in our own stubborn, idealistic way, my friend and I were arguing for a kind of communal willingness to grapple. Come out, come out, wherever you are! Let the silver light in! Let us see you! But we were also maybe being absolutist brutes, flattering ourselves into thinking we could handle being told just about anything at any given moment. In truth, neither of us has ever been that strong.
* * *
—
ONCE, WHEN MY NIECE, Georgia, was quite young, she asked her parents a very important question. She asked it at night, just before going to sleep. It had been a long process getting her into bed. There was the brushing of the teeth, and the washing of the face, and then the brushing of her stuffed rabbit Bobby’s teeth and the washing of his face. And then the taking off of the day’s clothes and the putting on of pajamas. Then Bobby’s pretend pajamas had to be put on. A few pages from the latest chapter book read out loud. A song or two. Then the dimming of the lights, but then she was out of bed again to check on an empty shelf just to make certain it was empty. Then the tucking in again. Another song. When Georgia finally felt safe and warm and settled enough to begin sucking her thumb and close her eyes, my brother and sister-in-law kissed her on her cheek and smiled at her. “Good night, Georgia. We love you.”
As they pulled the door closed so that just a crack of light from the outside world still shone into her dark room, Georgia called out.
“Papa?”
“Yes, Georgia?” My brother opened the door and poked his head back inside to look at his daughter.
“What’s this?”
“What’s what?” my brother asked.
Georgia sat up in bed and extended each of her arms out in front of her body on either side as far as she could and, scanning with her wide-open eyes the entirety of the space between her hands, she said, “All this. What’s all this?”
My brother sighed and sat back down on her bed. “That’s going to take a long time to explain,” he said, smoothing back her hair with his hand.
This was probably eight or nine years ago, but sometimes, when I have not seen my brother and sister-in-law for some time, and become frustrated with our lack of contact, I try to remind myself that they are probably still sitting at the foot of my niece’s bed explaining all this to her, and so a phone call or a quick glass of beer are simply out of the question. Meanwhile, they both well know, Georgia will already have burst forth into the real and true all this, with arms and legs swinging.
This is probably not my story to tell, but I tell it anyway, often, because I like how it forces those in the room, me included, to try to remember what it was like to be on the other side of all this. Not to imply that we master it by the time we become adults, but there comes a point where you step into all this, and you can never back your way out of it again, at least not in the same direction from which you came.
It reminds me, too, how very difficult it is to remember correctly, let alone comprehend, the person we were before we stepped into all this. And, really, all this isn’t even just one realm. It’s a multitude of realms—hidden chambers of the heart, expansive black holes, vast pastures, potholed dirt roads—which means there are a multitude of selves whom we can hardly comprehend we ever were. I’m not so interested in If I knew then what I know now. I’m interested in How I might ever know again what it was like to not know then. There is really no such thing as a tell-all, in other words.
This may all be self-evident, but when someone sits down to relay the story of who they were before they entered some kind of midlife alternate version of my niece’s all this, complete with sharp knives, cumbersome cleavers, and those always problematic pig heads, they are not only committing themselves to sitting at the foot of a reader’s bed in order to explain all this, for as long as it takes to explain and no matter how difficult. They are attempting to expose the complex relationship between known and unknown, seen and unseen, told and untold. They are folding experience back in on itself, “comparing like with unlike,” as John Berger puts it, “what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant.” They are, in fact, risking severe temporal hubris.
But here I am anyway, stretching my arms out in front of me and staring at what lies between. I forgot to mention that I am known for my irregularly long arms. When I’m standing up straight, the tips of my middle fingers reach just about all the way down to my knees.
“It must have been so disturbing,” so many people say when I tell them my story.
“It sounds so hard.”
“Why would a girl like you go and do something like that?”
During those first few weeks in France, Dominique instructed me to open the pig like a book.
He meant this literally, of course. You run the tip of your knife underneath the rib cage to release the fascia and fat that adheres this elongated and warped fence of ribs to the shoulder and belly. Then you set your knife down and, with your own two hands, you open the rib cage away from the pig’s once alive, now dead body in the same motion you would use to open one of those big, old hardcover tomes that need their own pedestal to rest on.
I suppose I took it literally, too.
As in.
This pig.
A book.
All this.
A telling.
A NOTE FOR ALL THE SEARCHING PEOPLE WHO HELPED TO MAKE THIS BOOK HAPPEN
>
I swore I wouldn’t write about my time in France, but the story eventually got the best of me and I am thankful that it did. There I go thanking the story. Who does that? I do. But also, during my first few weeks in France, Colman Andrews dropped me a note, told me as much would happen, and encouraged me to at least think about writing a book about it. “I’m not ready,” I said, but I secretly thought about it for a long time, so thank you for planting the seed, Colman. Thanks, too, for bringing me into the fold at Saveur so long ago, because the fold—Margo True, Melissa Hamilton, Kathleen Brennan, Caroline Campion, and Kelly Alexander—taught me that you can make food writing do anything you damn well want it to.
Once I decided I was actually ready to write the book, Emma Parry, my agent, expertly shepherd me through the process. Thank you to Jessica Applestone for introducing us. Emma not only helped me to give shape to what was then a rather dense brouillard of an idea at best. She helped me, in the most seamless and graceful of ways, to find the book its proper home here and abroad. Emma also repeatedly assured me, after many panicked calls—yeah, no, this whole writing-a-book-thing is not for me—that I was entirely capable. I can’t really imagine writing another book without you, Emma.
Ann Godoff and Scott Moyers, as soon as I sat down in your office and Scott pulled out that crinkled piece of paper from his pants pocket with his chicken scratch on it, smiled, and said to me, “This is what I think your book is about,” thus causing Ann to adjust her glasses and look up and to the left in a display of deep curiosity—I knew you were the ones for me. Thanks to you both and the rest of your team at Penguin for seeing the project clearly from the very beginning. Thank you, especially, to Scott and his crack editorial team, Christopher Richards and Kiara Barrow, for guiding me when I could no longer see.