by Carla Funk
Butchering Day
THE DAY ALWAYS started in darkness, and every man always brought his own knife. And always a gunshot cracked open the morning—then another. Two, three more shots.
I lay in bed, bracing for the squeal. When it came—and it always came, that shrill operatic rasping, unearthly, enough to churn the gut—I pulled the pillow over my head and hummed to block the noise until a final bullet dropped the screeching pig.
“Last one turned its head,” Uncle John said later, laughing in his high-pitched stutter. “Yup. Got its ear pierced.”
Light from the kitchen flickered beneath my bedroom door. The smell of komst borscht, a beefy cabbage soup, and the sound of my mother singing to the radio filtered in. At the back of the house, voices rose above the idling of engines—my uncles, my dad. When I stood on my bed and pulled back the curtains, my window lit up with headlights through the autumn fog. The shadow-shapes of men lurched from pigpen to truck as they lugged and loaded each dead hog.
Schwein schlachter happened every fall. Though our clan was not as Mennonite as most, we held on to certain customs and beliefs with a death grip—most of them having to do with God and food—and pig butchering was one of them. When morning frost began to cover the ground with a foreshadowing of snow, and the season teetered toward winter, my dad and his five brothers marked a Saturday on their calendars, then announced it to their women, who spread the word to the rest of the extended family. Come for Schweine-schlachten, they said, and bring your knives.
SMOKE PLUMED A grey cloud above the roof of Great-Grandpa Martens’s shed. Though the sun hadn’t yet risen, cars and pickups already clogged the long gravel driveway. Aunts in kerchiefs and flannel jackets trundled boxes stuffed with thermoses of coffee and tea, pies, cookies, and squares. The cousins, my brother, and I, bleary-eyed but hyper with excitement, buzzed around the yard with rocks and sticks in our grip, little primitives waiting for blood. Through the trees, from their cabin at the back of the property, the old bachelor uncles came, jowly and carrying their knives.
In a lean-to connected to the shed, the men stood in a circle, passing around a whetstone. Each one spit on it, then drew his blade down and down again, scraping and sharpening until it gleamed. They stood beneath that lean-to for as long as they wanted, rubbing their thumbs slowly across the sharpened blades, talking in Low German—sounds familiar to me, but words I didn’t understand. They smoked, talking trucks and bush camp, and drank their coffee, and when they were done, they snuffed their cigarettes and swigged their dregs, and the work began in earnest.
When they hefted the first pig into the scalding trough, and from a huge vat over the fire drew buckets of water to pour over the flesh, the smell that rose was like a mingling of smoked ham, rusted tin can, and outhouse sewage. As the steam cleared, the men hunkered in with their knives and began to scrape their blades across the skin to get rid of the hair and bristles. As soon as one pig was cleaned, they hoisted it up onto the long wooden table, and the next station of workers began their job of breaking down the carcass.
I loved to watch the pig being unzipped. Into the belly, right below the sternum, an uncle stuck the knife tip and dragged a slit clean down the torso. As innards oozed and bubbled up from the open seam of flesh, more hands set to work sorting the parts. In the doctrine of the butchering shed, everything that could be saved should be saved. What spilled from inside was a source of mystery and wonder. Here was death up close, and the mystery of what lay hidden inside a creature was gloriously on display, giving clues to the future I couldn’t yet frame. When one of the knifed-open big-bellied sows spilled four tiny piglets, the uncles hollered for us to come and see.
“They look asleep, not dead,” Aunt Agnes said when Uncle Corny pulled the piglets from the split-open sow, splayed on the table in the butchering shed. Everyone seemed a little sad and surprised.
With the other kids, I crowded around the table. Each piglet, small enough to curl in a Styrofoam cup, was perfectly formed, its hooves soft as new fingernails, the end of its snout like a button on a baby’s sweater. In my hand, the piglet felt like a rubber toy, something the dog would drag to its bed and gnaw.
“It’s a shame to just throw them away,” my mother said, and so she slipped them in an old ice-cream bucket and set them in a cooler at the side of the shed. “We’ll figure something out.” Later, back at home, she’d pickle them in formaldehyde, two to a jar, their pink bodies snow-globed and floating in flecks of lifting light.
In the butchering shed, I peered over the table edge as the kidneys, liver, heart, spleen, stomach, and entrails were pulled from the pig, each warm, dripping organ named and held up for inspection—healthy, someone would pronounce, or looks a little sick—then either set aside in a bowl for use or tossed into a five-gallon oil bucket at the end of the table.
That bucket, full of the glibber and gristle and guts, was bound for the town dump, but until the uncles hauled it away, we kids were free to poke around in it. Like bargain-hunters at the discount bin, we jostled for spots at the rim, stabbing our sticks in as we fished for some glossy clot or slippery bit, then hoisted it close to each other’s faces, saying, Smell it, smell it!
Of all the cast-off parts, I loved the bladder best. My mother washed it off in clean water, tied off the ureter with a double knot, and tossed it to me. The bladder, warm and wobbly, was the size of a football, but harder to hold on to. I tossed it to my brother, who set it on the ground and jumped on it. The bladder squirted out from beneath his feet but did not burst.
“Catch,” he hollered, and threw the bladder back. I tried to grab it as it sailed toward me, but it slapped into my hands, slipped my grip, and blobbed to the dirt.
Kid to kid, we hurled the bladder as hard as we could huck it, in hopes it would splatter and spill its pee on someone. No luck. The bladder held, picking up dirt as it plopped, quivered, and rolled across the yard. We fell into loose teams, marked out boundaries, tried new ways of throwing and catching, and kept up our game of bladder ball, unaware that we were enacting the well-played game of our ancestors, or at least a version of it. To raid the rubbish heap and turn junk into some joyous thing was a creed that ran blood-deep. What child needs a china doll when she has a dried corncob wrapped in an old flannel diaper? Why beg for a BB gun when rock and stick will do? Who needs a pigskin when you have a brimming bladder? We played until the bladder landed near a grouchy uncle’s feet. He bent down with his knife and slashed it, told us to go find some work to do. We crouched around the sack, watching it drain, pretending not to sniff the air above the puddle at our feet.
While the boys shadowed the men, who wielded the largest knives and blades and passed around a bottle of homemade wine to swig, I stayed with the women at the other end of the butchering shed. Everyone had a job to do. As the youngest female, I took up my post at the huge vat in the corner of the shed. The cast-iron cooker rested on a metal frame, inside of which a fire burned. Into the cooker, the aunts dumped cubes of fat, and as the fat melted and rendered down to lard, I stirred with a long wooden stick to keep it from burning. Every half hour, Grandma came by and dipped her finger in the white, greasy simmer, testing the temperature. Too hot and it will ruin the lard, she said. When it was nearly ready, Grandma dipped in her wire strainer and pulled off the cracklings, bits of pig skin separated from the fat and fried to a crisp. She ladled out the lard in stainless-steel tubs, and once it cooled, she poured it into syrup tins and coffee cans. At the bottom of the tubs of lard, the pig butter settled, to be scraped out into small plastic containers and divided at the end of the day. This was the Schmaltz my dad loved to spread thickly on a slice of white bread doused with salt and pepper, which he would then fry in a pan until crisp and smelling like bacon. He’d pour himself a tall glass of milk, sit down at the table, and with a fork and knife, cut the golden, toasted bread into small bites. Each forkful he dipped into an egg’s runny yolk, then ate in silence, swigging milk every few mouthfuls, wiping the grease f
rom his chin with the back of his hand.
After the lard was emptied from the vat, my dad came from the men’s end of the shed, gripping the pig’s head by the ears. He dropped it into the vat and covered it with water, then fitted the wooden lid on it, leaving it to simmer until the skin easily pulled away from the skull. Then, two uncles came to hoist it out with long forks. The pig’s head, rising from the smoke and steam of the vat, brought every one of us kids close. The eyeballs had already been cut out and given to us to play with, our fingers working the stiffened lids and long lashes to make them blink like our own eyes. Now, the sockets stared back at me darkly. The mouth hung open in a loose smile. I’d see this head in dreams for years to come, an allusion I didn’t know how to read, but one that merged with the face of every dead relative to become a ghost mask haunting me in sleep.
“And now we make headcheese,” Grandma said, and pulled up a stool to the table. She bent her own kerchiefed, powdery face over the pig’s head, her glasses steamed over from the heat. With her sharpened paring knife, she carved away every scrap and shred of fat and flesh, tooling away around the snout, collecting in a stainless-steel bowl every edible fleck found on that cooked skull. She’d mix the meat together with some of the hocks, adding salt, pepper, and spices, then let it set in pans like a jelly until firm and ready to slice.
WHILE THE MEN broke down the pig into chops, roasts, hams, and ribs, while the lard cooled and the headcheese rested, sausage preparation began. One at a time, the long, translucent intestines were drawn from the innards and brought to the women. Around the side of the shed, my mother and Mrs. Banman set up a washing station for the intestines. Mrs. Banman wasn’t a blood relative but came to all our butchering days. At family gatherings and Sunday meals at my grandparents’ house, right before we sat to eat, Mrs. Banman appeared at the back door in her kerchief and oversized coat, a look of worry always on her face. She has nothing, my mother explained, not even running water, not even a husband who’s alive anymore.
Mrs. Banman came to work so that she could bring home meat at the end of the day. She was small and wiry and wore rubber boots, with long johns beneath her dark dress. Her thin face peeked out from a scarf tightly knotted under her chin. Her round glasses always seemed to be sliding down her nose. But she worked hard, her red, chapped hands flying to whatever task was given her. As Mrs. Banman held open one end of the intestine at chest-height, my mother poured a stream of warm lye water from a pitcher. My job was to hold the other end of the intestine away from the ground. As the liquid washed through, it pushed out whatever else was in the intestines. Out of the bottom end, into the dirt in a slosh at my feet, tapeworms slished and slithered in a yellowish tangle. When I prodded them with the toe of my boot, my mother warned, Don’t touch them, you’ll get worms, too.
After they washed the intestines, my mother and Mrs. Banman turned them inside out, then brought them in a bowl to the table where aunts with their paring knives scraped away the membranes, working down the length of each intestine to remove the pinkish tissue from the casing. The men, at their end of the shed, cleaned the knives and saws, hosed down the scalding trough, and set up the grinder. They stood over the butchering table and fed the scraps of fat and meat into the hopper. It oozed from the grinder’s holes into a huge stainless-steel bowl. Grandma took charge of sprinkling in the salt and pepper, the brown sugar, then dug her bare hands into the meat and worked the seasoning through, turning and churning the mixture until it was a pinkish paste flecked with white, tasting bits of it as she mixed.
With the sausage nozzle attached to the grinder and the intestines washed and scraped and washed again, the sausage-making began. Grandma slipped a limp, thin intestine onto the nozzle, and the men took turns cranking the handle as Grandpa fed the ground-up meat back into the machine. As the meat oozed out to fill its casing, Grandma twisted the sausage into lengths, tying off the end and sliding on another intestine, the repeated motions of her hands like well-rehearsed choreography, sausage after sausage, until the grinder was empty.
What had been blood-streaked bits of a dead pig became something altogether new. The blood’s iron tang had shifted to what smelled like food, our food, like the meal we’d share on Sunday, seated at the tables joined end to end to fit the whole family. When we all gathered around the butchering shed, it was like Christmas and a funeral, the togetherness and the feasting and the dead body close enough to touch.
After the scalding and scraping, gutting and cutting, cleaning and grinding, after the vat was scrubbed, all the meat cooled and wrapped in brown butcher paper and portioned out by family, after the smokehouse fire was lit and the meat hung, after the long wooden table had been washed and bleached and wiped dry, we gathered for a late-afternoon meal—Faspa.
Across from the butchering shed, on the other side of the dirt road, we shuffled into my great-grandparents’ house. There, in Grosspa and Grossmama Martens’ dining room, the women set out the food on long tables. Plates of cheeses. Pickles. Cold cut meats. Jams and jellies in glass jars. In a porcelain mug, peanut butter and corn syrup stirred to a sweet, gluey spread. Pots of soup—zumma Borscht with smoked ham hock, green beans, carrots, potatoes, and sweet cream, and komst Borscht with cabbage and beef—warmed on the stove. And day-old homemade buns sliced and roasted in a low oven until they turned to zwieback—that twice-baked dark and golden toast hard enough to scrape the gums when bitten.
As afternoon gave way to vesper hours, we gathered around the table to share the meal. A bit of this, a bit of that—for Faspa, whatever was on hand became the feast. While in the shed the hams and sausages swung on their twine, we stood together as Grandma Funk led us in the doxology, our family’s prayer for every meal—Praise God from whom all blessings flow, we sang, Praise Him all creatures here below—then sat and passed the plates around.
Grosspa sat frowning and jowly as a basset hound at the head of the table, his white hair in horned-owl tufts. Beside him, Grossmama countered with her soft, round face and quiet smile, what few words she spoke coming out in Low German. From them, my dad’s family flowed. Down either side of the table, aunts and uncles and cousins on stack stools talked and laughed and ate. Toddlers and babies fussed and chewed and banged the Formica with noisy cutlery. Tucked in among us was the widow Mrs. Banman, hunched over her soup, spooning it eagerly, wiping her nose with a paper napkin between bites. The food didn’t stop moving, always in plates and bowls passed from hand to hand around the table, the constant clink and clatter making a song of its own.
Above us, the heavenly host praised too, or so we sang. I pictured them as they were portrayed in the Uncle Arthur books—full-colour bright-blonde angels hovering above the green, green grass of Heaven. Around them, orchard trees glossed with plums, apples, pears. A blue, sparkling stream and sunlight beaming overhead like God’s face shining in glory. And in the middle of it all, the banquet table overflowing with vast piles and platters of food—clusters of grapes, milk, bread, honey in the comb—like the all-you-can-eat Bonanza Steakhouse smorgasbord my father loved, but this one free and going on throughout eternity.
Below, at our meal’s end, like voices cued in unison for a benediction hymn, my dad and his brothers loosened their false teeth, and with wooden toothpicks pulled from their chest pockets, picked at flecks and bits of gristle, tasting again the food we all had eaten, as the women rose from their seats, collected the dishes, and carried them back to the kitchen, dividing all the leftover food into containers, some for Mrs. Banman to take home, some for tomorrow’s hunger.
After our feast and final cleanup, beneath a darkening sky with hardly a moon shining through, the butchering shed emptied, fire snuffed, lights out. Behind a skiff of dusky cloud, waiting in that other world of stars, the season’s first snow hung, only days away from falling. We carried our haul of food to our cars and pickups, smoke and grease in our hair, the smells of the day woven into our clothing. My father and his brothers hollered in German back and forth across the
yard, some joke about a pig, death, and a good sharp knife.
WINTER
Target Practice
IN ONE MILKY Polaroid, we stand on the landing where the stairs split into two levels. At our back, the front door, and in the windows framing it, the winter dark from which we came. My brother wears a rubber mask over his whole head, turning him into a grey, straggle-haired man with a hooked, warty nose and missing teeth and eyes with soot-rubbed sockets. Beside him, I wear our dad’s work boots and coat and his trucking company’s blue ballcap, a pillow stuffed beneath my shirt to fatten me. Together, we’re tramps come in from the cold. A minute earlier we were out on the porch, banging on the door until our mother answered, slurring our words, jeering and laughing at the joke we had become—two drunks on the road, begging for food, hollering, Hey, lady, let us in.
In another photograph, we sit side by side on the piano bench, our hands on the keys in duet form, my brother the bass, me the treble. No matter the hours we practiced, the song wouldn’t come out right, his fingers, my fingers, stumbling over the shared notes. One slip on an accidental, one stuttered triplet, one tripping over the metronome’s steady count and we devolved into fists and insults, the songbook tossed from the ledge, the lid slammed shut on someone’s hands.
Though linked by blood, we were two creatures never meant to occupy the same close quarters—like the hamsters our dad decided should try sharing a house, for fun, to see if they might become friends. My brother and I had leaned on the fireplace hearth, watching our father lift Aunt Evelyn’s hamster, the fluffy one we were looking after for the weekend, from its plastic dome, and slip it through the little door of the cage where Teddy, our own pet hamster, ran manically on his wire wheel. As soon as the guest rodent hit the wood shavings, Teddy, mid-jog, launched himself straight at his trespasser. The shrill, whistling screech that came from the cage made us all jump back. The two creatures, locked in a blur of white and gold fur, tremored and scrabbled and shrieked until our dad plunged his hand through the door and grabbed hold of one, which sank its tiny yellow teeth into his thumb. He yowled and dropped it on the living room rug, where it lay, bloody and with one eyeball hanging loose. We looked down at what had been Aunt Evelyn’s fluffy hamster, now shredded and quivering. Back in his cage, Teddy panted frantically, his mouth and white chest fur streaked with red. “Well, that didn’t go so good,” said our dad. He scooped up the half-dead hamster from the rug and carried it down the stairs, out through the garage door, and into the darkness of the frozen yard so he could “take care of it.” My brother and I pressed our faces to the kitchen window that overlooked the driveway, jostling for space on the countertop, elbowing each other, trying to see the end of the failed experiment.