by JoeAnn Hart
And here we are full circle, Vita mused, with the employee cars exiled to the frontage road and the back parking area reclaimed by the members. She ran her fingers along the carved egg-and-dart trim of the bench seat. Would the members come back to the garden now?
No, they wouldn’t. They liked the sweeping vistas from the porch, big scenes that made them feel expansive. Brick walls only turned them back on themselves, and that was far too close for comfort. But that’s just what she liked about the place, the enclosure of it, the safety, its sense of being untouched by man. Until recently, that is, when Gerard banned smoking by the Dumpster, scattering employees to every hedge and boulder. She stood up, the seat of her jeans cold from the stone, and walked over to the marble urn in the corner. Even in the dark, she could see a pile of white-and-tan cigarette butts snubbed out in the mossy dirt. Ashes to ashes.
She felt weak, on top of being sick to her stomach, so she went back to the bench. This time she lay down, crossing her hands to her shoulders like a saint on a sarcophagus. As much as she tried to distract herself, there was no escaping what lay ahead of her. She shut her eyes, but there it was: By dawn the geese would be dead. “No dolor,” Mrs. Suarez had promised. No pain.
Vita’s eyes flashed open. A painless death. Did that make it right? The geese had led happy, hand-fed lives, but still, was it okay to kill and eat them just because they’d been treated well?
She could only stare at the mute night sky. The stars were already gone, the half-moon fading away as its black backdrop changed to a deep lavender. Her eyes were burning from lack of sleep this past week as she wrestled with the business of taking a life. Something else bothered her too. Night after night, she stewed over the sudden absence of Dr. Nicastro. The one she loved to feed, who loved to be fed. Now, gone. In her sleepless haze, the two—killing and feeding—had become all mixed up.
At first she thought he’d been offended that she’d offered him that shirt, that she was out of line. But then, as she lay awake pondering the goose question, she realized it was more serious than that. Dr. Nicastro, with his exquisitely attuned sensory organs, must have detected the scent of murderous intent upon her. She’d seen how the members had avoided Mr. Lambert after he hit the goose with the golf ball, as if the act of killing had set him apart, turning him into something sacred, or simply insane. Would she too be changed to the core by the carnage that lay ahead of her this morning?
As she massaged the tightness from her shoulders, she wished she was still as innocent as she had been earlier in the summer, when she’d negotiated the butchering arrangements with Mrs. Suarez (who was to receive a set amount of cash and two of the geese). Vita had assumed that she herself would have nothing to do with the grisly act. She imagined she’d take delivery of the animals at the kitchen door as nonchalantly as if accepting a crate of mangoes. But through her daily interaction with the geese, she began to see them as more than just raw material for her art. They became, against her will, individuals, and even though she knew better than to name them, she could not help herself. The largest one was Wilbur, the smallest, Penny. When she started calling a particularly annoying goose Gerard, she knew that what she had on her hands was a moral struggle with the very nature of food and life itself.
She closed her eyes again, and Dr. Nicastro’s face appeared to her, with his dark, amused eyes, his rumpled hair, and his cheeks shapely from a lifetime of contented meals. If only she could feed him again! Her job was to nourish life, not snuff it out.
But maybe the one could not be separated from the other.
She sat up with the chill of sweat on her forehead. Must food preparation begin with a death? She had, with deep regret, come to the conclusion that the answer was yes. Life came from life, and in the end even humans were just meat for worms. The battle raged inside until she thought her head might burst. Vegetation was life too, wasn’t it? It had to be killed, if that was the word, in the name of dinner. Was a head of lettuce so different from a goose? What separated the goose from man? The goose, the grass, the gorilla in the trees—all manifestations of the same living cell. Where did it end? And where did it begin?
She swam in these questions, drowning in her misgivings, and still had no answers. But she had come to one conclusion: Instead of merely accepting delivery of the geese, she was going to accept responsibility for them. She had fattened them with dignity and respect, and now she must likewise kill them with her own hands.
She would kill that very morning. If she could not, she would give up meat entirely and renounce her world. Her delectable world, full of Maui-onion-and-garlic-stuffed lamb, lobster ravioli with oyster cream, and, not the least, maple-glazed duck breasts with duck-fat hash browns. Dr. Nicastro’s favorite.
She gulped back a sob. Yes, there were vegetarian avenues open to her, but staying at the Club was not one of them. She would have to work in some back-alley organic café, serving wet tofu to customers with carotenemia, orange-palmed picky eaters who had replaced their taste buds with ethics. How could she possibly live that way? She was devoted to the rapture of the senses. It was her religion.
Why, oh why, hadn’t they taught her at the Institute that to be a chef was to feed by murder? Her instructors had brought in prepared carcasses and taught her how to negotiate with suppliers, how to jolly them up to get choice picks, pretending they were the very source of food and not just an intermediary. No one ever made her look into the eyes of an animal and see for herself what life meant. But now that she had looked, she knew: Redemption for the meal’s blood could only be won by reverence of the sacrifice itself. There was no going back. In order to continue her vocation she must master the primal act of food prep. She must kill the geese with her own hands.
She stood up with a start, impatient now to begin. No dolor. She tugged at her sweatshirt and paced, making a full circle around the crumbling brick walks. Last fall’s leaves were still piled in the corners. She should get Barry to clean it up a bit, get the fountain working again so that water would once more pour from the mouth of Green Man, with his hair of wavy lettuce.
She stopped and looked around her. Lettuce. Rising up in her mind were the elegant parterres she had visited during her semester in France, with orderly triangles of sea-blue kale and rusty nasturtiums and lettuces so creamy they bruised when touched. She could do that here, in this space. An herb and salad garden. A steady supply of fresh organic greens in season. She thought of that rat bastard Utah, and her eyes narrowed. Never again would she let herself be at the mercy of some two-timing greengrocer. But Dr. Nicastro, surely he would come to visit her raised beds, pinching the basil and sniffing the thyme.
She heard a car. The muffler was coughing, so it had to be Luisa’s ancient Toyota, a luxury she could finally afford now that she was a waitress. Vita ran to the gate and clutched her hands on the wrought iron. They had come for her. She watched the headlights switch off as the car pulled up behind a utility shed. Mrs. Suarez, who was dressed, as always, like a nun, in a dark dress and sweater, black stockings, and sensible shoes, came out of the darkness and into the circle of the security light. Her teenage boys, Anselmo and Paolo, both a head taller than their mother, were dressed like Vita, in hooded sweatshirts and jeans. They were armed with buckets, boards, and burlap bags, which they loaded into the two golf carts left ready by Barry. Luisa waved good-bye to her family, then, even though she could not see Vita in the dark, gave a thumbs-up to the garden as she passed to the kitchen, where she would wait for the call making sure all was safe to smuggle the dead geese back to the Club.
Vita, for whom all occasions, even this one, called for food, picked up a basket packed with croissants stuffed with scrambled eggs and chives, fresh orange juice in one thermos, hot coffee in another, and, in case her strength failed her, a flask of cognac, as sweet and heavy as sacrificial wine. In the other hand, wrapped in suede, she carried her knives.
“El puerco,” Mrs. Suarez whispered, folding her hands tightly on her lap. On the driv
e across the golf course, she sat in the back of a cart with Vita while Anselmo drove. Paolo followed closely in the other cart with the equipment. They did not turn on their headlights, and so the turf was black beneath their wheels. Vita turned her palms up, indicating that there was nothing she could do about the waste Mrs. Suarez had just seen in the Dumpster.
Mrs. Suarez was indignant. The Club should get a pig, el puer-co, not a Dumpster. They could fatten a dozen pigs with a steady supply of garbage such as she had seen. Vita turned away to smile and looked out at the course. Pigs at the Club. She could make some unkind comment about that, but even as she smiled to herself, she could not help envisioning succulent roast pork, the fat scored and crisp, surrounded by aromatic vegetables and served with a dried cherry sauce. They drove past a thickly wooded copse, and she imagined a pig pen tucked away in the trees. What a golf hazard that would be. Then she shook her head back to her senses as the carts rolled up to the water’s edge.
In complete silence, the two women and the sleepy teenagers moved the butchering equipment to the two small skiffs. Paolo rowed his mother and Anselmo took Vita, too antsy to row the boat herself. She put her hood up, leaned back against the stern and closed her eyes, listening to the gentle splash of water against the oars and she felt herself drift into a different realm. All her misgivings fell away, one by one, with every stroke. When the boat’s bottom scraped the sand of the island, she was as ready as she was ever going to be.
The boys mumbled as they emptied the skiffs but were shushed by their mother. Vita led the group, single file, through the narrow paths of the underbrush. With hoods up and burlap sacks over their shoulders, they looked like monks to matins. What few words they exchanged were whispered in Spanish, simple commands, “Cuidadase” and “Silencio.” Take care and be quiet.
This was not the boys’ first time on the island. They had come at dawn the day before to hammer in three open-ended metal killing cones into the trunk of a swamp maple at the edge of the clearing, and they had brought with them mesh cages to round up the sleeping geese. The birds had to fast. No food for twenty-four hours, just water. The intestines would be cleaner that way. Vita had not questioned—she was coping with enough questions—but now, as she stepped into the sandy center of the island where little would grow, she was unprepared for the sight. The utilitarian arrangement of cages stacked on one another was a stark reminder of the cold-blooded truth of her task. The geese slept with their long black necks curled elegantly under their wings. So beautiful. So alive, even in sleep. Vita worried that she might not be able to go through with it after all. And yet, there was no turning back. Was there?
She put down her basket and knelt to unwrap the suede knife carrier, unrolling it on the damp ground. Her knives, with their metal rivets, honed edges, and wooden handles made dark by the oil from her palms, were extensions of her own hands. They beckoned to her. She picked one up. The familiar, balanced heft gave her strength. This was her calling. It was her life.
“Vamos a seguir el andando,” she whispered. It was time to get on with it. She stood up. They had close to thirty geese to stick and gut, which was not in itself time-consuming—the more labor-intensive job of plucking would take place next week—but they had to be finished before any obsessive golfers—or Gerard—showed up.
Her conscience twitched ever so slightly. She’d never quite got around to explaining about the hanging to Gerard. The dead, feathered geese would need a cool room for a few days to get “high,” so the tendons and muscles could relax. Rather than bother Gerard with these details, Vita had made the necessary arrangements directly with Fergus, the maintenance man, who missed his mum’s cooking. So, with one of Vita’s haggis in his backpack, Fergus told Gerard that the air conditioner in Room #13 was out being repaired, so not to rent it out. Later, after the deposit of a box of fresh shortbread in his supply closet, he gave Vita the only key to the recently changed lock on the door.
The plan was to hang the geese by their feet on a rope stretched across the room, and when they were ripe, Mrs. Suarez and her boys would return in the middle of the night, and, using the barbecue grill outside to boil water, they would scald the birds and strip them of feathers. Then the fun would begin. First, the geese would get washed with warm water and bran to whiten the skin. Mrs. Suarez’s seasoned salt rub would be massaged into the birds, and they would sit that way for a couple of days to draw the toxins out and flavor in. Then they would all get a refreshing shower, a firm truss, and a quick boil, followed by a long, slow roast, like a sauna, to render the yellow fat without cooking it. After the grease was drained off and the birds patted dry, the skin would be basted and glazed with lime and sugar, and a generous dose of Mrs. Suarez’s herbal potion. Back into the oven they’d go, stuffed, with the heat on high so the skin would form a shell to hold in the moist goosiness. Vita would then present the members with a bird with meat as tender as baby flesh, skin as crisp as a wafer, exuding a virile essence that would bring gasps of passion from even the most reserved matron of the Club.
She crossed herself and nodded to Mrs. Suarez, who gave a hand signal to a bored Anselmo to gently pull a goose from a cage, swiftly, before it could quite wake up, and put it into one of the killing cones. The underbrush was black in silhouette against the lightening sky, with foliage jutting up in some places, low in others, so that it seemed they were surrounded by a crowd. “Tranquilidad,” Mrs. Suarez whispered to Anselmo. Be calm. Vita had at least been taught this much at the Institute, that livestock could have no fear at death, or else it would release adrenaline and taint the meat. It had not taught her that the only way to be sure was to do it yourself.
Anselmo held up a half-awake goose by its scaly legs and lowered its head down into a killing cone, like a giant metal ice cream cone with the bottom cut off. He put his other hand up the open end to feel for the beak, and pulled it through. The body of the goose stayed confined in the metal, with only two webbed feet and a bit of tail sticking out from the top, the head jutting out from the bottom.
Vita held a flashlight on the animal and bent to peer at his face. They looked each other in the eye. What was he thinking? Did he think?
He blinked. Awake, but not aware. Mrs. Suarez had told her that the blood would rush to the bird’s head and make him sonso, or slightly sedated. But Vita could feel his eyes upon her, and she prayed. In silence, she apologized and thanked him for his life.
Then she handed the knife to Mrs. Suarez. The older woman would show her how it was done. In the beam of light, Mrs. Sua-rez’s hands were white and disembodied against her black clothes. She pried open the beak quickly so that the goose had no time to react, and then she forced the knife to the back of his throat with a twist. The goose jolted as if given an electric shock, and then relaxed. “Comprende?” she asked Vita.
That was it? It wasn’t that bad, was it? But then the goose seemed to rise from the dead, trying to push up out of the cone with its wings, shaking and quivering and frantically kicking its feet. The cone shook. Vita shook. “El morte,” said Mrs. Suarez, dismissing the commotion with a wave of her hand. “El solo impulsos.” But the reactions looked like more than autonomic impulses to Vita. Mrs. Suarez pulled on the head to straighten out the neck and made a small slit at the jugular. Blood poured out black in the dim light, pulsing in rhythm as the heart exhausted itself. Mrs. Suarez looked at the knife in her hand. “Muy fino.”
Nice knife. Was that all she had to say? But even as Vita stepped back, Paolo had the next goose prepared in a cone on the other side of the tree. Mrs. Suarez took Vita’s arm by her bloody hand and pulled her over. Paolo held the flashlight while Vita reached in and grasped the beak and pried it open with both hands, which took more strength than she had imagined. Concentrating on the physical difficulty of what she was doing allowed her to not think about what she actually was doing. Mrs. Suarez put the knife in her hand and then guided it in position for her. “Pulsar, Vita,” she said, and Vita pushed, giving the knife a quick
twist, then pulled it out. In what seemed to Vita to be slow motion, Mrs. Suarez extended the head and laid her hand on the neck to show where to make the cut, even as the goose began to shudder.
Vita cut. The slice bled profusely as the goose kicked, spraying the blood on its executioners. Who knew there was so much blood in a goose? But there was no time to let the enormity of her action sink in, no time for regret or glory. From then on, it was simply a processing line. The caged geese were waking up; time was critical. There could be no honking, which might alert the neighbors that something was afoot. The boys moved quickly, their hoods up so Vita could not see the expressions on their faces, whether they were disgusted or interested in their attendant duties. They were efficient, one holding the flashlight for Vita while the other readied the next goose in the cone. Mrs. Suarez watched with her arms crossed, nodding in satisfaction. The geese were all butchered in under twenty minutes, like a massacre. But it was far from over.
Mrs. Suarez had the boys arrange the piece of plywood on two rocks, making a low table. Anselmo put a dead goose in front of his mother, who motioned for Vita to kneel beside her. Vita knelt. There was a plastic pan between them for the guts, and a white food container for the livers. Paolo stood behind them with the flashlight, chatting with his brother in English about a rap concert downtown. Mrs. Suarez snapped, “Silencio.” All was quiet again as she cut a circular opening under the tail and continued up, with the other hand spreading open the stomach cavity, exposing the ropes of blue intestines. Mrs. Suarez tched to herself. Vita knew she disapproved of gutting the geese before hanging because the rotting innards of the carcass would add to the final flavor of the goose. But Vita wanted those livers fresh, and besides, she was not so sure the members really needed that extra bit of decay.