Meat Head
- Jul 23, 2021
- 4 min read
by Rick White
The McDougall family business is meat. It hangs from hooks and decorates their history the way ornaments hang from Christmas trees in homes much different to theirs. Mr. McDougall, hands like ham-hocks, flings carcasses over his shoulder and bodyslams them onto the bench like a wrestler. He teaches his son, Joe, how to butcher each animal—to trim each individual cut, wasting nothing.
“Let the knife do the work, son, follow the natural line of the muscle. Always keep your knives sharp. Look after your knives and they’ll look after you.”
“Why do we call it beef not cow?” Joe asks his dad.
“Beats me son, I think it’s something to do with the French.” Dad replies with a smile.
Joe is confused.
“It’s just language son, eh? A word is what we call it, but a word isn’t the thing that the thing is. You follow?”
Joe doesn’t follow.
Cancer. Is a word. But it’s not the thing. It’s a word which means death. A collective noun for a great many nothings. Which is too much of a thing to understand.
The Butcher’s shop smells like shiny metal. The house smells like Mum’s cigarettes. Joe can taste the smoke in his food, even the cans of sugary orange pop in the refrigerator. How does the smoke get in? Joe wonders. Is aluminum porous? like a child’s imagination, or human bones? Bones can bleed. Joe knows that, he’s seen it. He knows that one day his mum’s bones will get so light she’ll simply float away out the open window by her bed.
Joe knows that a cancer is a thing that grows. A black little lump. And if they could, they would cut it out.
“But they can’t just cut it out, son.” Dad says. “God knows they’ve tried. People are just too complicated on the inside, see?”
Sometimes a knife won’t do the job. Sometimes you need to use a saw, like when Joe’s dad cuts though the shoulder of a pig, separating the picnic-end from the butt-end. Joe isn’t strong enough to work the saw just yet.
Some nights, Joe climbs into bed with his mum. “Come and watch the stars with me, Joe.” Mum says. She keeps the curtains and the window open so she can smoke. Joe gets in on the cold side, folding himself into the thin duvet. Inert for a moment, in heed to her brittleness. Then slowly, toe-by-toe, he shifts towards the spun-cotton warmth of his mother, who holds him close. So close that Joe can feel the parts of her that have been cut away.
There are no stars out tonight, but they look out anyway at the oven-door fog, softening the edges of the apricot streetlamps. In the beckoning gloaming, Joe tries not to think of the absence he knows is coming, the hole his mum will leave behind, the parts that will remain—bones, skin, eyes, teeth, hair. Laughter, scent, courage, comfort, love. The bits that are thrown into a plastic bucket once the animal has left the slaughter house for the cold store.
Joe’s mum floats away, just as the nights get longer. The mornings are silvery-pale, skeletal patterns of frost creep across the single-pane of his window. The sky is cracked porcelain; scum around a drain.
In the months that follow, Joe tries to help his dad with the shop. Scooping the gut-red beef out the mincing machine with a trowel, arranging sausages in the window between sprigs of plastic parsley—like fat bloodless fingers crawling out of a grave.
Mr. McDougall’s strength is leaving him. His limbs are thinner now, his belly distended, tongue lolling. His spine no longer holds him up; he’s a steer, stunned by a bolt. A thing that was many things and is now just meat.
Joe doesn’t have the words to make it better. He wishes he had something to offer his dad that would help. A hand, a knife. Something to hold on to.
One morning, Joe finds the shop is closed. He looks for his dad and eventually finds him, out in the back garden in a misty drizzle, digging a hole in the near frozen earth. Slamming the shovel into the ground, grunting with every thud of the blade.
“Come here boy.” he says to Joe without looking at him. Joe does as he’s told, walking slowly across the scrub-lawn, to the edge of the empty flowerbeds where his dad is standing.
Mr. McDougall moves his bulky frame aside and reveals something that was hidden. It looks like a plant you might see in a house, but Joe knows it’s a tree—a very young one.
“It’s a crabapple.” Dad says. “Something for us to remember your mum by. It should blossom in April, and we can make jelly with the fruit. Goes great with lamb, son. I’ll have to learn to cook us a Sunday roast, eh?”
Joe knows a tree is a thing that grows. He doesn’t know how tall. Taller than him maybe, but not as tall as his dad. He knows it will take a long time, but he likes the thought of seeing it from his window, of knowing it’s there. The delicate limbs and pretty leaves greeting the sun in the morning, reaching up past the streetlamps at nighttime, creating an image in shadowy relief, a framed picture. Something that wasn’t there before, and now, is.
Rick White is a fiction writer from Manchester, UK whose work has been published in Milk Candy Review, Trampset and Barren Magazine, along with many other fine lit-journals. Rick’s debut story collection, Talking to Ghosts at Parties, is due to be released later this year by Storgy Books.
