This Is Death

by Dayna Brayshaw

The butcher comes in a big white truck with the words “Bull Shooter” painted in red across the side. He calls himself “Keith the Killer.” I cannot decide if I want to stay inside.

“It could be interesting,” my sister says, and wanders towards the door.

We are in the house of our old neighbors, Roy and Wendi; I have not been here since I was two and I remember nothing about anything. I am wondering, vaguely, why I am even here, “Is this my life?” I am thinking, “was it really me who once lived here?” My sister was five when my father died and we moved to Washington . Being back, she has been getting excited about small things – “This is where our bed used to be,” she’d said when we visited the house, “And here, this is where I stood when you were born.” I am angry for my lack of memories, angry at the death which has stolen my father, angry that he could not at least have waited, three years, four, enough to give me something solid. A smell from his hair.

The air buckles with one gun shot. I walk warily outside, edging around the truck, towards the corral. The cow is lying, startled, dead in the dirt, eyes wide open. Keith the Killer stoops and slits her throat, deftly down her jugular; it’s a sound like fabric tearing. The inside of her skin is purple, milky.

I realize I am on the edge of puking, the day too hot, everywhere brown-backed Idaho hills and the smell: like chewed leather and warm, fresh meat. The blood is pouring like water out of her neck, her back left leg kicks gently, as if she is dreaming; running from this fate.

Roy sits on the edge of the truck and chats amiably with Keith the Killer. Keith, a lopsidedly fat man in green sweatpants whose wide fingers are caked dark with blood. He scratches his head with his wet, red knife pint as he tells Roy a story about his niece’s wedding.

The cow’s flesh under the skin is yellow with ropes of fat. Beneath the fat are white purple sinews, crossed with rust-colored muscle that is still twitching, slightly. He disjoints the legs at the knee—cutting half-way, and then breaking—and tosses them to the side. He attaches a pulley to her ankle bones, strings her up, and then slices open the belly. “Looks like she’s got a calf, “he says, and then goes back to his story – the friend from high school who showed up at the wedding, who has now gotten too fat. A gray sack falls to the ground amidst the stomachs, lungs, and entrails; he pricks it open with his knife and the head of the calf slides out. It is black and slick with mucous. Hooves pale yellow.

I am both fascinated and horrified, holding my arms across my ribs. Earlier my uncle had showed us the note that was discovered with my father’s body, simply “You found me,” it said. What did he look like? There must have been blood frozen in the snow. Were the windows closed, were his eyes closed, was his hand still holding the gun? I remembered my grandfather’s funeral, years ago, the only dead body I’ve ever seen. I remembered how I’d stood over him, his stiff, empty face. How I’d waited to feel something, waited to separate from the numbness, the vague horror.

The carcass of the cow is clean now—nothing but fat and muscle on bone. The butcher reels her into his tall truck and shits the door. There is a hoof lying hear my foot; he beckons for me to toss it into the tractor with the rest of the remains. Willing myself not to be squeamish, I bend to pick it up. I grab it just above the hoof, where the skin covers the ankle bone; it is soft and still warm, the muscle slides under my fingertips. It’s too much, I drop it suddenly, shuddering.

“Do you eat meat?” Keith the Killer asks me.

“Yes,” I say.

“This is meat,” he says, and swings up into his trick and drives away.

As the sun is setting, we drive out to find the spot. Somewhere on a forest road, we know, but are not sure exactly where—it has been almost twenty years now and no one can remember. There are five of us packed into the suburban, with two dogs in the back. Branches slide and whip against the windows and the dogs leap for them, cracking their noses, and then their teeth, against the glass. Wendi, who is driving, shouts at them and laughs; she is telling us a story about herding her cows, about the art of pushing them up the hills. The sky is lit in raspberry rows over the trees. One dog stops to pant over my shoulder chewed leather, raw meat steam.

Part of me is wondering why we are doing this; wondering if we should be solemn, quiet, if we should pray. I wonder, is it okay to laugh when there’s death, when I am picturing my father’s last moments, his careening drive through the blizzard of snow, his cold hands scratching out their last words – his will, leaving everything to us, my mother, my sister and I, and then he added, as if with a wry smile, “PS, I owe Rick as six pack.”

Coming up around the bend now, I recognize the spot in the road as surely as if I had been there with him. It is dark and there is one pine tree rising, opinionless, into the sky. “So this is it, Dad,” I say, and begin to cry, shaking with it, a fist in my chest.

And this is what I remember, this is the two year old child rising up in me; the child who, as the story goes, sat in the bathtub after the death and said, “You die, and then you live again, you die, and then you live again,” over and over, pulling her head in and out of the running tap water. “Your bath time ritual,” my uncle once told me, “You still knew what the rest of us had forgotten.”

That’s when it all begins to make sense. The open eyed cow, her tiny, unborn child, the smell of meat on the dog’s breath. The butcher who scratches his head with his knife. This is meat. This is death. It is the beauty of the cow’s purple, gleaming skin, it is the shape of my sister’s arm as she leans to hold me, it is the flower that my uncle now carries to me. “What kind of flower is this?” he asks, and Wendi comes over to look.

“A Pearly Everlasting,” she says.

Dayna Brayshaw is a senior at Fairhaven College with a concentration titled “Community Facilitation through Creative Writing and Dance.