The Butcher’s Son
China
The sheep was tethered into a crooked light pole with a white rope. Large and restless, the sheep pulling at her little rope, biting it.
The butcher’s son, a boy with the wispy beginnings of a mustache and droopy eyelids was sent to fetch the sheep. We cross the road together and I watch him untie her and with a great struggle, pull her across the road.
The boy was 15 and small for his age. He was very strong. Soon he would take over the business.
“She is scared,” he says.
The road was quite busy, with bicycles, vans, trucks and minibuses. The horns from the traffic drown out the bleating of the panicking sheep. The boy deliverers a blow to the top of her head with his palm.
His father waited for us across the street. He was old, rail thin. The ground where he stood was littered with the remains of sheep; pieces of leg, bits of fur and little rivers of blood made solid by dust.
The butcher was wearing a mismatched suit with brown pants, pressed, creased. A lime green cardigan was worn over a black polo shirt. His leather shoes were splattered with dried, crusty blood. Upon his head was a forest green, gold and black cap with a cityscape of an Arabian oasis. “This business is my life,” he tells me.
“It’s all I know.”
The sheep looks at me as its throat is sliced. It’s a smooth, fluid motion. A small river of blood begins to flow, slowed by the fur, then running hard onto the concrete. It is much brighter, thicker than I had expected, this blood; rather like paint. The blood gargles sporadically in tune with the sheep’s rapid heartbeat. Little spurts of blood shoot from the animals’ neck.
Severed, its neck is pliant and flexible. One last time, she twitches and bucks wildly, held down by the sheepmongers son. I squat down to look inside the cut. The windpipe which has been severed looks plastic, when the sheep attempts to breath it moves up and down, mechanically.
The sheep is then moved by a boy having the characteristics of Down’s syndrome. He looks at me and smiles dumbly.
I breathe deeply and notice the odor. A powerful, and suffocating smell that obscures the senses.
Thick waves of blood are now leaving the sheep’s body. The struggling is becoming weaker.
The sheep is now dead.
Its legs are broken, a crisp and satisfying snap. A noisy air pump is brought out and inserted into a slit made in the sheep’s hind leg. With a whir the machine is turned on and, like a balloon, the sheep is filled with air. I thought she might take flight.
The butcher takes a large pot, fills it with water and washes his hands and his knife. The blood is dumped into a flowing river brook adjacent to the butcher block.
A vary thin cut is made down the sheep’s belly. With his hands, the butchers son tears the pelt from the body. It peels off, all in one piece.
The intestines and stomach are removed and placed on the ground in a wet, gooey heap. The sheep’s body emits clouds of pungent steam in the cold morning air.
A little girl deftly collects the intestine, stretching it thin like telephone cord into a tight bundle later to be sold.
The torso of the headless sheep is now completely stark and empty. The sun shines through the veiny skin, casting a pink shadow inside the sheep’s body.
“Do you like mutton?” I am asked by the butcher’s son.
“Yes.”
“Does this offend you?”
“Not in the least.”
“Some in your culture think this is bad.”
“Those people do not matter.”
