A Liver with Onions
Lord, confound this surly sister
Blight her brow with blotch and blister,
Cramp her larynx, lung and liver
In her guts a galling give her.
—J.M. Synge
At this point in a proper romance, the heroine should find herself facing a large obstacle challenging her bliss, such as a rival in stilettos, or an inconvenient war. Since the nineteenth century, the conventions of the genre have been consistent: the heroine runs away from marriage, a clever suitor figures out how to win her, the heroine finally relents, they tie the knot and live happily ever after. From Jane Austen to that Mormon lady who wrote Twilight, authors always make the heroine marry Mr. Right in the end. If he wasn’t Mr. Right, the heroine would not have married him.
When the woman ends up with Mr. Wrong, she isn’t the heroine but the sidekick. She is there to make the heroine look thin. I didn’t want to be heroine or sidekick. I wanted to be Tolstoy, so I started writing about John and turned him into the heroine. Turnabout is fair play. Besides which, he was the one who always wanted to talk about The Relationship, asking me awful things like, “How do you feel about us? Where do you see this relationship going?” “What relationship?” I’d reply in astonishment. “We’re living together!” he’d bellow in disbelief. “So?” I’d retort, and refuse to speak to him until he apologized for being so mean to me.
Exasperated, my friends told me I was being unrealistic. That social conventions would indicate that living with a man means that I am in a relationship with him. From my perspective, I was in a monogamous heterosexual cohabitation experiment and doing my best not to bias the scientific outcome. Expecting it to turn out a certain way undermined the entire process, and so I was just living it day to day, and seeing what happened. Talking about “the relationship” just created unreasonable demands based on the bizarre belief that I would stay with him.
Consequently, I did not get worked up when John asked me to accompany him to his parents’ house in Maine for the weekend. For generations, John’s people have been from Bethel, a ski-resort town in a southwestern part of the state that I ended up not knowing very well on account of my dad being the way he is. As it happened, my dad had been assigned a church in one of the nearby towns, and we were all set to move there. Then the minister who’d been appointed to the Houlton church refused to go, because it’s so far north that the local television stations are Canadian. To keep the peace, my dad agreed to switch churches with him.
It’s fun to wonder if John and I would have been summer sweethearts if my family had moved to the Bethel area as originally planned, but I wasn’t much interested in boys back then. My mother was convinced that the bad influence of boarding school had tipped me over the edge and turned me into a hairy-legged lesbian. (Somewhere on a Venn diagram, the brain spheres of minister’s wives and frat boys are intersecting. This is why I love Venn diagrams. They illuminate our shared humanity.) In her mind, being a lesbian was still no excuse for not getting married and giving her grandchildren. Just as, in my mind, going to Maine with John did not mean we were getting serious. It was not to meet the parents, though such a meeting was a corollary effect of staying at their house for the weekend. It meant that my cohabitation experiment was shifting to a trial application phase.
After I agreed to go, the conversations began to change, so I started taking notes in an effort to extract relevant data from subject B (John), with myself as subject A. He didn’t notice, because I was writing an academic book about zoos at the time, and he was used to me staring at him with an odd expression on my face, frowning suddenly, and then typing furiously on my laptop. Up to this point, everything that had passed between us was prep work: the mundane but necessary task of setting parameters, clarifying objectives, and controlling for variables. Now that I’ve agreed to travel with him, the parameters shift. From now on, everything unfolds in the imminent present, because this is still a monogamous cohabitation experiment and not foretold by fate. I don’t know the outcome, and neither does he. Which is why he asks this awful question:
“Do you want to enter the wife-carrying contest at Sunday River?” John asks sweetly over breakfast.
“What for?” I ask suspiciously. Sunday River is the resort where John grew up skiing. Along with other warm-weather activities, it hosts a wife-carrying contest when the snow melts.
“Obvious, isn’t it?” He gives me a big, sunny smile.
Now, some women might think this is a man’s roundabout way of proposing. However, John is nothing if not direct, and he also knows better than to ask me. Because we are opposites in all things, he is the marrying kind. I’m the kind that flees. We live together successfully because he’s good at running after me. “We’re not married,” I point out, and calmly eat my eggs.
“True!” he grins, peeking at me from behind his newspaper. “But the man doesn’t have to be carrying his own wife. She just has to be married.”
“A weirdly literal sort of race,” I squint at him. “And it still doesn’t apply to me!”
“I’m just making that up!” he laughs. “The race people changed the rules! No more ‘wife,’ so I can carry you!”
“That is interesting,” I muse aloud. “Do you think there’ll be straight men carrying lesbians? Or gay men carrying straight men? Or . . .”
“I don’t care about that,” he cuts me off in aggravation. “I want to know if you’ll enter the race with me. The prize is the ‘wife’s’ weight in beer!”
“You still have to carry me,” I remind him.
“So?”
“. . . in a race.”
“. . . weight in beer,” he repeats, setting down his newspaper and getting up from his chair. Then he leans over, scoops me up, tosses me over his shoulder, and starts jouncing me experimentally.
“What if” (jounce jounce) “. . . it’s a brand . . .” (jounce jounce) “. . . of beer . . .” (jounce) “. . . you don’t like?”
“Completely missing the point.” He puts me down and soothes me back in place. “Can we practice anyway?” He smiles winningly at me. “Please?”
Eventually, I give in and say yes because I’m curious to find out what will happen. I suspect this is the same reason many women agree to marriage, thinking that it’s going to be a romantic lifetime of being swept off their feet, only to find themselves in goofily compromising positions never mentioned in ladies’ magazines. I’m thinking he’ll put me in a fireman hold and sling me across his shoulders, or maybe toss me over his head and let me ride piggyback. The image in my head is vaguely like ice dancing, sparkly and graceful, featuring me wearing a flippy skirt and a tiara as adoring crowds cheer, huzzah! Instead, he’s going to use the “Estonian hold,” which means that my legs will be wrapped around his head and my nose buried between his butt cheeks.
“No, no,” John interrupts me before I get too lost in random thoughts. “Not ‘butt cheeks.’ Sand pits!”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re going to practice in the sand pits out back,” he declares. The Wellesley house is not only walking distance to his son’s school and next to a fishable pond, it’s also a few steps from a dirt sidewalk the town grandly calls the “hiking trail” because it cuts through the woods. The sand pits used to have something to do with men cutting ice from Morse’s pond and shipping it to Boston in freight cars, so a defunct railroad line runs by them. This spot is great fun for kids practicing tricks on their dirt bikes. It also works pretty well for men running off with women slung over their heads.
So that evening after supper, we pull on ratty clothes and head to the sand pits. It’s light outside for a few more hours, and the early fall temperatures are pleasant.
“You ready?” he asks, as we teeter at the rim of the main pit.
“Yah.”
“Good!” All of a sudden I am once again upside down on his back, my nose planted between his butt cheeks and legs wrapped around his head. With a bellow, he plunges downhill through soft sliding sand. “Comfy, baby?” he hollers thoughtfully as he tightens his grip on my thighs.
“Mmmmf mmmf!” I reply.
“Hang on, baby!” he cheers. Once he reaches the bottom of the sand pit, he charges full speed ahead.
It is harder than it looks, being carried upside down by a large man running full tilt with a few Friday-night beers in him. You can’t just hang there like a sack of potatoes, not if you want to enjoy yourself, and certainly not if you expect your team to win. I had to tighten my arms around his waist and press my head into his ass, fusing my belly along his spine. Hold too tightly, he can’t breathe. But if he forgets you’re back there, you can squeeze out his brains with your thighs. It’s all about finding a yin-yang sort of balance between cooperation and homicide. I make sure he likes it by humming the tune to Rocky as he runs. It’s amazing what making happy noises down there will do for his ego.
He huffs and puffs around the sand pit, then flips me back over his head and sets me down on the ground. “D’you know what Patrick said when I told him I wanted to enter the wife-carrying contest next year?” Patrick is John’s youngest brother, a confirmed bachelor who lives full time in Maine. Patrick said, “You need to get one of them skinny wives!” And John busts out laughing as if it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
So John has been telling his family about me and showing them pictures. I am not sure how to interpret this, but I believe it means—to him, at least—that we are now a couple. “Har, har,” I grouch. “Besides which, don’t you want me to gain weight? Ten more pounds on me means ten more pounds of beer you might win!”
He scratches his head and gawps at me as if I’d just asked him to invent time travel.
“You need to eat, honey bear,” I tell him soothingly. “Your brain doesn’t work.”
“Hur,” he agrees and, because he’s too tired to talk any more, he picks me up and carries me back home, piggyback style.
In 1793, shortly after the Revolutionaries of Paris, France, decided to behead their king, the good citizens of Township Number Four, Maine, renamed the town. They picked “Paris.” Nobody knows why. Township Number Four didn’t have a king. They didn’t even have any queens. What they did have was churches and dentists, which explains why John’s people who live around here brush their teeth religiously: twice a day, with waxed floss and mint toothpaste. In this neck of the woods, everyone is related to everyone else, either through bleeding gums or through Christian community.
The first church in Paris, Maine, was founded by the Calvinist-Baptists in 1795. Then the Free-Baptists established their own church. Soon enough, pronounced the Maine Gazetteer in 1886, there were also societies for Baptists (who are not, I should add, to be confused with General Baptists, Regular Baptists, Separate Baptists, Universal Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Old Regular Baptists, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists, or, Lord help us, Anabaptists, better known in this country as the Amish.) The nineteenth-century town of Paris also had one society for Congregationalists, two societies for Universalists, and three for Methodists. With a population of about two thousand eight hundred, Paris wasn’t especially churchy. It also had five post offices.
Improbably, I find myself standing in the driveway of John’s parents’ house, which is outside of the town of Paris and about ten miles from Bethel. Bethel is often praised in travel magazines as one of the prettiest small towns in the U.S. But in Hebrew, the word “Beth-el” means “House of God,” and this house is halfway between Paris and Bethel in more ways than one. The house backs right up to a mountain, and there’s a cleared sixteen-acre field doubling as the front lawn. More mountains rise up in the distance, the kind of natural monuments that aren’t looming and dark, like Mount Doom, but nice, friendly mountains that can be climbed by chattering Boy Scouts. The house itself is scaled large, because John’s father is nearly twice my height and the rooms were built around him. It’s a big house. It seems perfectly obvious to call it the Big House.
“‘Big House’ is slang for prison,” John growls.
“I’m still calling it the Big House,” I insist. Because that’s what it is.
For lack of a better way of putting it, this weekend is a trial by meat. Our back-and-forth relationship has been going on for years, but this is the first time I’ve met John’s parents because his father doesn’t like to travel. Don and Ruth are aware that I exist, and they’re relieved John’s found a . . . a . . . a something, let’s say, uh, “friend,” which is better than them calling me “the shameless hussy what’s leading our son down the path of iniquity.” They’re trying to be supportive. They want him to be happy. They’re just not sure if I make him happy or just drive him crazy. Factually speaking, I’m a never-married woman corrupting their firstborn with her fancy feefle-farfle. (“What is she?” I can hear them complaining inside my head. “A Pentacostal?”) It was bad enough that John became a lawyer instead of signing up for the military. The Maine plates on the back of Don’s Ford truck say VETERAN, same as Patrick’s truck, whereas Ruth’s truck is a lady-like two-seater with an old Bush bumper sticker. John’s pickup is a Nissan with out-of-state plates, and me in the passenger seat. I’m just another symptom that he’s been living in Massachusetts too long and heading straight to Blue Dog Democrat hell.
The spacious house is spick and span, warm with pine and handmade braided rugs. Inside, there’s no evidence that the men hunt. No rifles, taxidermied heads, or mounted trophy racks on the wall. Outside, however, there’s a deer in a flatbed truck.
It has been gutted and tagged. Both warm dark eyes are open. Deer die with their eyes open. Soldiers die that way too. The buck doesn’t look like it’s staring, and it doesn’t seem asleep. It doesn’t look alive, but it also doesn’t look dead. Lying on its side, its limbs are loose, its pelt soft and clean. There is no visible wound except the slit up its belly, but the fur masks the gap. To find it, you have to go looking. It has a perfect set of antlers, gracefully curved, no points broken and no chips marring its smoothness. The buck weighed in at 195 lbs. of hide, muscle, and hooves. The same as John standing naked in a snowdrift wearing nothing but boots.
“Been tracking this fellow for three days,” Patrick states with pride, pointing at the buck. He’s tall, affable, and rangy, with a loping gait and large hands. “Early this morning,” he narrates in a strong Maine accent, “I saw a group of does, about ten of them, down low on the mountain. I could tell they were heading up, so I just followed. I listened to him crashing about for a least an hour before he came into range. He was standing in a cope, hidden behind some trees. As soon as he poked his head out, I took a shot. Hit him right in the liver. There’s nothing left of it.” He looks at me appraisingly, and adds, “Sorry.”
Nice to meet you too! Carefully, I lift up the deer’s side as if it were a toupee worn by a giant. The inner cavity is empty and perfectly clean.
“Get the tenderloins out before the butcher steals them,” John’s father reminds Patrick, gesturing behind my back and over my head. Don is more than a little bit scary. He is not a smiley fellow. He’s a man of few words because he lost part of his hearing in Vietnam and it never returned, like so many things taken for granted and lost in the war. He doesn’t approve of existential navel gazing. That’s okay. I can do it for him since his navel is pretty much right at my eye level.
“Already got them,” Patrick affirms without elaborating, but his hands are empty, and the truck bed is glaringly clean. All it holds is the deer. I have no idea where he put these choice lumps of meat. The obvious place is one I can’t check and, unlike my sister, Patrick doesn’t expand while he eats.
The deer looks out with warm soft eyes free of judgment. It doesn’t seem to have a belly button.
John’s mother Ruth wanders out of the house to see what the fuss is about. She has no official opinion of me. As far as Ruth is concerned, my main virtue is that I am not John’s ex-wife, a nightstand Buddhist whose preferred meal is bean sprouts served on a yoga mat. The ex-wife wanted the divorce because she thought John was too boring, but her favorite form of entertainment still seems to be yelling at him for being a rightwing conservative who watches the Military Channel and expects to eat a hot breakfast, lunch, and supper. I think this very funny, because I yell at him for the same things. Otherwise, I don’t think about her at all.
So far, the only part about this visit that surprises me is how young his parents are. John is a year older than me, but his dad is at least fifteen years younger than mine, and his mother is still quite heartily alive.
“Hey, Ruthie,” Patrick’s hunting buddy Keith calls out, his face lighting up in greeting. He’s sitting behind the wheel of a muddy ATV. Like Ruth, Keith is a ruddy-cheeked type with short white hair and water on the knee. “You want a liver?”
“. . . a liver?” I echo, my ears perking up.
“Folks down the street took a buck yesterday,” Keith explains. “They don’t want it so they gave it to me,” Keith natters. “It’s just sitting outside ’cause they butchered the buck themselves. I don’t care for it. Why don’t you take it?”
“Sure,” Ruth replies easily.
“I took a shot at a buck yesterday,” Keith says conversationally, “but one of the points was dropped. So I know it wasn’t the same deer as this one. This one is bigger, too,” he adds, making Patrick beam with pride. “Can’t keep up any more,” Keith shrugs, a rueful expression on his wrinkled face. “That’s how it is when you get old.” He shakes his head, chuckling, but he knows, the way all terminally ill people know, that laughter will not cure what ails you.
He’s dying. But so are we all.
“This one here dropped right away,” Patrick elaborates, “but I couldn’t find him at first, ’cause he’d tumbled down into a ravine. First I had to find him, and then I called Keith on the radio so he could come up with the ATV.”
“I wasn’t much good out,” Keith apologizes. “That’s the trouble, only having one lung. Can’t breathe in cold weather.” He smiles wanly.
“It was a lot of work getting him out,” Patrick says reproachfully to his large empty buck, which doesn’t say anything back. “We had to make a sled out of sticks, you know, an Indian hammock, and drag it out that way. Then we tried tying the sled to the back of the ATV but that didn’t work. The deer kept on flopping over and the ATV was just popping wheelies. So we ended up tying it to the front.” He’s wearing a full set of hunting woolens coated with tree smutch, and his face is grimy from the forest. He’s tired and hungry but none of that matters. Every once in a while, a silly grin slips out, ruining his practiced air of nonchalance. “It was a lot of work,” he repeats.
On nights when clouds hide the moon, the forest is very dark. Hunters in Maine have eighteen hours to get the deer out and tagged, and they have to take the entire animal. If you must leave the carcass overnight in the woods, the best thing to do is to string it up to keep the coyotes from getting it. In deep winter, the carcass will simply freeze. In the warmer months, however, the venison may spoil. So you bring it out, even if it’s so dark you can’t see your own feet.
This, too, is hunting, and it’s not about killing animals. It’s about caretaking their graves.
As the men stand around and chatter in the driveway, breathing in the cold and basking in the sunlight, Ruth heads off somewhere down the road. A while later, she comes walking back with a plastic grocery bag swinging from one hand. Wordlessly, she hands it to me. I untwist it and look inside. It’s a liver.
“There’s a leaf on it,” I tell Ruth.
“That’s because the deer was gutted outside,” she explains, as if it’s perfectly obvious why it came decorated with plant life.
Holding the bag, I march into the house so I can clean the contents for dinner. Ruth is an excellent cook but she’s happy to let me deal with the liver. She knows I grew up cooking for church suppers, thus I know how to portion for large quantities. This is important, because the men in this family have serious appetites. So far this weekend, she’s watched me pare apples and chunk up the squash without slicing off my thumb. It remains to be seen if I can handle the forest’s version of a slippery wiggle pudding.
The liver is large, dark red, heavy, and flexible. The texture is perfectly smooth, with just a few surface pimples clustered in a small area. There are two large lobes, flat and thick like giant lima beans. But a liver looks like nothing else, not even other livers.
In France, I’d once stumbled into an outdoor market with a stall that specialized in variety meats. The butcher had set out a showcase of fresh livers from cow, calf, pig, sheep, goat, rabbit, goose, duck, turkey, and chicken, just one of each, lined up like specimens in a natural history museum. They were pretty pink purses filled with everything a girl needs, thicker than butter and softer than ripe peaches. Groaning with strong cheese, woven baskets bounced merrily around me as I stared and stared, unable to wrap my head around these livers of good lives, fragrant with lemon wedges and fresh sprigs of thyme, so I tore myself away and pottered under the big tent, tasting wild honeys, sampling olive oils dipped in good bread, and poked and prodded and nosed and ogled until I was back at the meat booth again, staring at the goodies under glass. Somehow they’d rearranged themselves while I wasn’t looking, like mischievous toys coming out to play while the grownups were asleep. It was so exhausting trying to choose between goat liver and pig liver that I gave up without buying anything.
In French, the word for liver, foie, sounds the same as the word that means time, fois, which is hardly different from the word for faith, foi. I sometimes wish I had more time and some faith, but I do not. Perhaps this is why I crave liver, since it’s the only one of the three that can be bought with money. My father is a man of faith. He trusts in God and he is content. His life is good and he is blessed, regardless of all the tragedies that have happened to him. He knows it is God’s plan at work, and he puts himself in God’s hands. He’s living proof that God works in mysterious ways, and in order to accept my father I have to concede that his beliefs are true for him, even when they don’t make sense to me. He has refused worldly success, turning down promotions that would put him in positions of prestige and power, choosing instead to stay poor, not a bishop but a pawn to be mocked and used by others, as the poor always are. He doesn’t feel that way, you know. He has no money but his faith gives him joy and he gets health insurance from the Church. So when you consider the larger picture, he’s doing pretty well.
He doesn’t judge others, because only God can. Officially, however, he disapproves of the fact that I’m living in sin. He knows perfectly well that I’m temperamentally unsuited to marriage but he must protest against my trolloping ways since that is his job. He also suspects that what binds John and me together is not a meeting of minds but a collision of flesh. Because he is nearly eighty, my father worries that bodies wither, that strength dwindles, and warmth fades. I run cold. John runs hot. Like a lizard, I bask in his body heat until a strange equilibrium is reached.
“What if he’s not hot anymore?” my sister clucks disapprovingly, because disapproving of me is everyone’s favorite activity. She also knows, even though she’d really rather not, that John and I have already been together for two years and we still entertain each other extravagantly in bed. By now, the ladies magazines say, he should be bored silly of me, especially since my unmentionables come in packets of three. My bourgeois baby sister waggles her married finger in my nearsightedness, tsk-tsking me for being so shallow, then we burst out laughing because she sounds just like Mom. “Aigu!” she shrieks, and topples over laughing again. But John isn’t my friend. He’s my man. That pretty much sums up what I expect from him. John knows that his hotness is terribly important to me. He also knows that when he stops being overheated, he’ll be a corpse in the ground. So I really don’t worry about some kind of cooling effect over time, whether in terms of his core temperature or his inexplicable ardor for me. I may not have faith but I do trust him. He has a good heart. It will not conk out on me.
My liver is weak, said the Chinese doctor who diagnoses Chi, but I hold a good one in my hands. Ma foi, il y a une fois, un foie. . . Welling richly with blood, this portion of the deer can’t be bought, and it can’t be gotten just by asking. Thus it is like true love, decent neighbors, and world peace. The wellness of the liver shows this is a good spot, here at his parents’ house in Maine, where well water burbles in the backyard and wild strawberries grow freely.
Carefully, I rinse the slices and soak them in milk. It makes good visual poetry—the milk, the blood, the stuff of vampire lust—but it doesn’t do much in terms of improving the taste of something already lavished with health. Either you like liver or you don’t. Sexing it up doesn’t change the sound of swallowing inside your head.
Because there is plenty of good daylight left, all the men go out hunting again except for Keith, who goes home to rest. A few hours later, after dark, they come back empty handed. They are tired, dirty, and hungry, but they don’t look disappointed. Hands washed and faces wiped, they come to the table still wearing their hunter’s woolens. Dinner is deer liver with onions, served with potatoes, squash, green beans, and bread, followed by apple pie and ice cream for dessert. The only food items that come from the store are the wine and the butter. From well water to firewood, John’s parents’ house is an almost self-enclosed food system.
Almost, because they don’t have a cow to milk, though there are plenty of dandelions for wine.
Almost, because I’m here. A food system includes the eaters.
Crusted golden brown, the liver looks and smells delicious. But “the proof of a pudding is in the eating,” cautions the British expression, because the “pudding” was a sheep’s stomach stuffed with meat and oatmeal. Around this table, the men take dainty forkfuls, hesitantly smacking their lips. A verdict has been reached: the liver is good. Under the table, John squeezes my hand.
The men begin eating in earnest, pausing between bites to recount the details of the hunt. As the humans chat and eat, Basel clicks around the table, looking for scraps of attention. Mostly German shepherd, Basel sleeps inside the house, just like indoor cats that eat tuna from a can. He belongs to Patrick’s latest girlfriend, who is from New York. Christy’s family is Italian-Polish—“big hair people,” she says wryly—and her entire clan views the Great Outdoors as a mistake to be avoided. She doesn’t know how she ended up a plain talker who can handle a rifle and a chainsaw, but she had the good sense to move to Maine when it became clear that it wasn’t a phase.
During the summer months, Christy works as a park ranger. In the winter months, she works odd jobs that pay the bills. Unfussy with long dark hair and chapped lips, she’s blessed with the kind of long-limbed looks that mean she’ll still be attractive when she’s sixty. It doesn’t bother her that Patrick’s beagles go hunting every day, taking Patrick along with them. But she usually tries to make herself scarce when the field dressing begins. She doesn’t have the stomach for it.
“So . . . what happens to the hide?” Christy finally asks.
“It gets thrown away,” Patrick shrugs.
“What!” she exclaims. “Can’t you give it to someone?”
“Who?” Patrick replies. “Right now cow leather is so cheap, dealers can’t make a profit from deerskin. It costs them more money to scrape and tan the hides than they’d make from selling them. They can’t even break even. If I drove the skins to the tanner in Norway that’d cost me at least ten dollars in gas, and I’d get nothing for it. So I’d be losing money by trying to give it away.”
“But it’s disrespectful of the deer,” she complains. “There are some things more important than money. That deer died because of you. It deserves to be treated with consideration.”
Patrick gives her a look. “Well, if it wasn’t for people like you, who won’t wear leather or fur, then maybe there’d be some use for the hides. As it is, there’s no market for them.”
“Can’t we tan it ourselves?” she asks plaintively.
“Sure,” Patrick snorts, “if you want to scrape off the hair and then sit around chewing the skin for a few weeks, the way the Indians did it. Otherwise, you have to buy a whole bunch o’ chemicals, and they’re nasty and expensive. And then what would you do with the hide? It would be too small for just about anything, and you’d only have one.”
Christy glares at him, but she’s stumped. States have different bag limits on deer, but in Maine, the annual limit is one. It would take years to get enough hides for a shirt. Plus, the “nasty” stuff he’s talking about is lime and battery acid.
How did the Indians cure hides? According to Theodore R. Davis writing in Harper’s Magazine, 1878, the entire process is both difficult and time-consuming. The pelt (of a buffalo, in his example) is stretched out on the ground, flesh side up, and secured at the edges with little wooden pegs poked through small cuts made in the skin. Using sharp stones or shaped buffalo bones, two or three women scrape the hide free of all fat and flesh, reducing the thickness of the hide in the process. The scraped hide is then moistened with water in which buffalo brains have been steeped, producing “brain water,” and for ten days the stretched hide is kept damp with this fluid. Once a day, the women unpin and rub the hide using only their bare hands, a task that nearly takes their own skins off, Davis tells us, because the hides are so rough. This process continues until the buffalo skin is soft enough to be used as a robe. The tender, yielding results are white as snow. According to Davis, the hides were often traded for sugar, coffee, and other coveted items.
I do not know what was in the brains, but apparently it was powerful stuff.
The “brain water” method was all-natural, non-toxic, and utterly dependent on the gendered division of labor. Scraping hides was women’s work. Men literally never touched them, not until it became clear that money could be made by processing them in giant batches. According to the Hunter’s and Trapper’s Practical Guide of 1878, it began by giving the hide a good soaking in warm water, after which point the flesh and fat could be scraped off. The cleaned hide should be hung in a warm room “until the hide begins to give off a slight smell of hartshorn.” Take the skin down, scrape off the side with hair, and then soak the skin for two to three weeks in weak lyme water. Rinse the skins clean, scrape them again, and then soak them in wheat bran and water for another two or three weeks. Throw the skins into a “pickle of alum, salt, and water,” stir well, and then throw them back in the bran water for two or three more days. Take them out, and then partially dry them in a warm room. The partially dried skins should then be thrown into a trough filled with a paste made of 3 ½ pounds of salt, eight pounds of alum, twenty-one pounds of wheat flour, and nine dozen egg yolks. Dissolve the alum and salt into water, mix in the rest of the ingredients, add enough water to cover the skins, and beat the mixture into a froth. Remove, dry, stretch, and smooth with a warm iron. Then sell, sell, sell!
Quasi scientific, with fancy chemicals and precise measurements, this method for tanning deer hide is a lot like modern cookery. It requires a list of added ingredients as long as my arm and enough eggs and flour to make twenty-two pound cakes. It only sounds quaint and charming. It smells like rotten eggs. Unlike the American Indian system, the white-man’s version requires an extensive network of specialized supplies that paves the way to NAFTA. You don’t want to buy foreign supplies? Try making your own alum. It happens to be the essential ingredient in baking powder, which transforms cakes into light and fluffy confections. Without it, your biscuits will be harder than hockey pucks. The 1875 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica provides several helpful recipes for alum, including a method used in Paris, France, where this trace element is not naturally found in the soil. It instructs: Mix together 100 parts of clay, fifty parts of niter, and fifty parts of sulfuric acid of the specific gravity 1-367. Put it into a “retort” and distill it. If the ingredients are mixed correctly, “aquafortis comes over, and the residue in the retort being lixiviated with water, yields an abundance of excellent alum.” Easy-peasy! I lixiviate and retort daily. But where do you get niter and sulfuric acid? How do you make those? And down the rabbit hole you go . . .
Here is the ingredient list for the Indian way: buffalo, sunlight, water. Hides can be tanned without leaving the woods as long as there’s a stream nearby. Still, before the romantic haze sets in, turning the world before the White Man into a banquet for bunnies, I will repeat two words: brain water. A dish best poached, not fried. Those who wore these snow-white buffalo hides wore the skins of Indian women too. With every silent scrape of short fingernails they bound themselves to the hides, marrying body to body and skin to skin. The human touch made the finished hides soft and beautiful but the cost to make them was very high, because they extracted beauty from women in return. Naturally, in today’s market, these hides are worthless. As Patrick says bluntly, no one will take them. Not even Christy, who can’t afford them because she’s a young woman with good looks. She does not want to sit outside, under the beating sun, scraping and rubbing for days and weeks and months until her skin crisps in the heat and her back begins to crack, turning her into a hunched and leathery crone nobody wants.
Beauty for beauty. Skin for skin. A pound of flesh. Fresh, the hide weighs much more than that. Care to donate an organ? Lend a hand or two?
Who pays? As always, the animals do.
“Pass the potatoes,” Don growls to Ruth, who is sitting at the other end of the table, blasé in the company of two of her three grown sons. All the slices of liver are gone.
Nature gets hungry too. So the deer skins get thrown to the wolves, the potato skins go to the insects, the apple peels feed the worms, the eggshells go to the garden. And the earth is fed.
Basel clicks around the table, hoping for treats. He doesn’t like liver, so I pet him instead. Under the table, John keeps holding my other hand. It’s been a good day for both of them.