THE BUTCHER AND HIS DOROTHY

 

THE BUTCHER WOULD COME home late, apron stained red and pink. His daughter would welcome him at the door. She would study the spatters while he carefully untied his boots in the mudroom. She would help him disrobe, and he taught her to safely roll the apron for storage before the next day’s wash. They would then head to the sink and wash their hands together, she in front of him, standing on the stepstool he built for her, and he behind, his massive frame hovering over her so that he could smell the sweet and sweaty girl-ness in her hair. The Butcher would wrap his arms around her bony figure and they would share the water, passing the cake of soap back and forth, scrubbing their four palms and wrists, their nineteen fingers together in a tangle of nail and knuckle to confirm their cleanliness. Then they would dry their hands on fresh towels and he would carry her to bed.

He had lost his left ring finger in a botched chop during his first year at the slaughterhouse. This was before his daughter’s birth, which meant she never knew that finger, understood it only as a gaping void in the grandeur of his hairy, calloused hand. She would ask him where the finger now lived and he would offer a series of conflicting stories: in a vast field of ice up north; riding waves in the warm ocean currents in the west; in a zeppelin ever-hovering over islands no one knew were there; in the eye of a storm that twisted and coiled far above them but never touched the earth.

After her death, he was ashamed to say he found great solace in the dark layers of meat at the slaughterhouse. The way that inside there exists a standardized order, one that follows the laws of windblown grain or cream in coffee, those swirling rows of tendon, the delicate layers of muscle curling and curving, the way music might look if we could see it. In a world where everything changed, he was comforted to know, when he broke open the body of a steer, the patterns of the beast persisted unadulterated. The night they found her, she was carried away before he could see the pile of gore that was his girl. Still, he lets himself think that had the someone who took her broke his daughter open the way he splits a steer, she would follow these same patterns, where an invisible code offers guide for the meat of all beasts. He is comforted to know that when he admires those muscles’ delicate waves, he is not so far from her.