The Meaning of Blood

[bobvincent]

THE MEANING OF BLOOD

Early one grey summer morning on my
in-laws’ Polish farm, I was roused at six
to help with killing a two-year-old pig.
They were short of meat,
the weather forecast predicted a few cooler cloudy days
and a big sow in the sty was ready.

Awakened before the snoring victim,
I watched as it was disturbed from its straw
and hopped, trembling or shivering or both,
a rope tied around a pink front trotter,
to the intended place of its slaughter.
My wife, obvious old hand at these matters,
knew that it must be coaxed across the yard,
a bucket of fodder before its snout,
in a final but benign betrayal.
“ Come on, little one,” twice, as to a child.
Some little one! Chosen for age and size,
the weight of several men and long as me,
it was long fully grown yet still tender,
so no more swill would be wasted on it.

Thus selected, it reached the open shed
by the barn where my wife’s father waited.
Veteran pigman and butcher for hire,
he refused requests to watch the killing:
it was bad luck and might prolong the death;
so we hid out of sight in the grain store
and awaited the inevitable.
We counted three, then two, then two more thuds
as the gaunt old man strained to fell the beast.
A strong man in his prime, he could once down
and stun a pig with two blows of the poll of his axe,
then butcher it by nightfall.

But now, pushing seventy and weaker,
he was sweating, strength sapped by violence,
and sat, panting, as we emerged to help.
The pig lay still on the sand, brain ruined
beyond repair. Next. its blood must be let.
So, wielding a large curved knife I had seen in the kitchen,
my father-in-law ordered me, heaviest of those there,
to sit on the haunch while he pierced the throat.
The pig bucked its last spasms beneath me
as its life drained into a plastic bowl.

Once stone dead, rope wound around hock tendons,
it was hoisted up by block and tackle
to a thick beam to be washed and shaved clean.
Boiling water was brought in buckets
from a rusted contraption in the pigsty
and the sow’s pink hide was scalded redder.
The bristles were furiously scraped away
with hot knives, the most stubborn stumps singed
with burning straw soused in wino’s purple meths.
Its belly was then swiftly slashed open
to reveal the steaming mass of warm guts.
Little would be wasted save the spleen, snout,
pancreas and other inedibles.
The old yellow dog angrily guarded
the discarded bladder from its kennel
but eyed the severed head hungrily,
so, inured now, I hung it in the pear tree
out of reach, clean and whole for brawn and tongue.
It dangled there, dully supervising
the scene of its own disintegration.
While one duck flapped in a puddle of blood,
two others contested a piece of gut,
the winner nearly choking on its loot,
before I saved, I hope, the unlikely carnivore
by pulling the tripe from its beak.

My father-in-law, honest workman
and proud master of all peasant trades,
hefted and butchered the meat with renewed strength,
so by evening, there was little sign of swine
in the yard save bloodstains and scraps of gut.
By nightfall the pork was portioned in joints
familiar from butchers’ slabs and hooks,
brined in heirloom dugout troughs for smoking,
or minced for sausage stuffed in its own guts.
The pig, sleeping and dreaming at sunrise,
was quartered and preserved in a day’s work.

I felt no guilt for my part in its death;
the sin of its slaughter was atoned
by the honest intent of this close-knit clan
to feed one other the best way they knew.
My wife, despite eighteen years’ furlough,
her parents, sisters, brother-in-law,
niece and nephew all played their roles without prompt.
Not ones to cavil, slacken, skive or shirk ,
for them it was a sacrament of work,
the conversion of a death into love.

At the end, my father-in-law,
whose last killing this would be before his cancer,
thanked God for the cool cloudy day
which kept the flies quiet in that searing summer.

But with no blood kin there save my daughter,
I felt unconnected and strangely saddened.
As an orphan and only child,
I envied my wife for her family
and looked for my own offspring, quietly sidelined,
speaking when spoken to, like me
at her age: shy, reserved and self-absorbed.
How could I have shared or doubled my love?
Was all of it poured into this one child?
Like me and my mother before me,
she must live with a measure of loneliness:
something large in life had eluded us.

[ray miller]

Though it took perhaps more than long enough to make its point I found the tale interesting and moving - and I'm a vegetarian! You describe your feelings well in the final section and I enjoyed reading it