Inside/Insight

This piece is about the death and processing of an animal. I don’t think it’s particularly gory or disturbing, but make your own call.

I arrive, driving past slow waddling ducks waggling their way unhurriedly out of my path. I see people gathered on the farmhouse porch, and, wrapping my dark wool cloak around me, proceed to them. As usual, I feel like I am late and am not. I sit in the most out of the way spot I can find, listening to them chatter and sharpen their knives. I spent twenty minutes this morning looking for a sharp knife to bring, or even my own knife sharpener to contribute, and found nothing. I bring only myself, hoping it’s enough.

“Thank you all for being here,” Webber speaks up with his soft, disarming smile. He’s tall and lanky dressed in Carharts and rubber boots. He comes from Olympia, but I never met him at college there. I know him through Raguel, a short dark haired curvy slip of a dancer I’ve sometimes crushed on, danced with at college, and always admired. Her rubber boots are planted behind his chair, her hands massaging his tall shoulders, and her glimmering eyes watching us all.

Webber has us introduce ourselves - our names, where we’re from, and any previous experience with slaughter. There are eleven of us. A couple that I nickname The Greys for their muted garb and the man’s bright blue/grey eyes. Another from Seattle, who bring dumpster-dived chocolate and seem to subsist together on urban roadkill. I set them in my head as Carrion and Diver. Two women, the last to arrive, one my age, one in her mid forties that I nickname Spirit and Song, two men I know from town, “The Oyster man,” as he was first introduced to me, and remains forever in my head, and Eithne’s friend and one-time lover Michael - I still haven’t sat down and had a real conversation with him.

Of us, only Webber, Raguel, and Michael have killed anything larger than a chicken. Several of us have processed roadkill, and several of us have killed chickens. We’re all excited to go meet the lambs. We carpool together, and I slip, cloaked in habitual silence, into the back of the Grey’s truck with The Oyster man. I feel vulnerable, exposed, in the way I often do in a group of new people. No one pressures me to act a role so I stay quiet as our vehicles disgorge, and we approach the fence where twenty or so lambs circle and bleat.

We all watch, several crouching, Spirit, the woman in her mid-forties, walks forward and puts her hand through the fence. The lambs crowd away from us except one who approaches her, eyeing her hand for sustenance. Several more of us approach, standing against the fence, sad quiet stillness is over all of us now. I wrap mine closer around me and watch these animals, intently. One, an unmarked plumper female with brown wool meets my eyes for a long moment, and I know it’s her.

We circle around an altar in the field, light a candle that threatens to blow out in the wind, and Raguel takes center stage, explaining the tenants of sacred slaughter. She talks about how we are culturally obsessed with a quick and painless death, and to some extent she believes this - that an animal shouldn't suffer more than it has to - but there are other values. A conscious death. A peaceful death. A death slow enough that the animal has time to come to terms with its dying.

Listening, I’m struck by the echoes of my own thoughts. Ghosts are made in accidents, deaths so fast the dead don’t know what happened, I don’t want to be a ghost. I want every aspect of my life to be experienced in all the slow power of its happening.

I want it all: I want to experience trying to conceive a child - not just have it happen by accident. I want to be present for the births of my children. I want to be present for the deaths of my parents. I want to be there for the births of my grandchildren - and in the end I want to be there for the one experience that is truly assured me in my lifetime. I want to be there for my death.

Raguel continues, we’ll be using the Halal method - a Muslim slaughter with Kosher roots. A knife across both arteries allows the animal to bleed out. Blood-loss brings calm. My body remembers as she speaks. I used to donate blood in the Evergreen lobby. The soft sensation of almost sleeping as my blood drained away. I remember one particular emotional day I came in and let them draw my blood, and found myself calm, unperturbable the rest of the day, laughing about the benefits of medieval leaching.

A truck drives up and two more join us, a man named Earth who I’ve heard a lot about but not yet met and know immediately by his demeanor and hat, and another man who’s name I never get, making thirteen. We go around the circle now, naming why we are here and what we hope to gain. Many talk about the obligation of meat eating. A few about wanting to do this themselves on their own farms. I name a Scorpionic desire to plunder the insides of things.

Webber goes into the pen and gets a lamb. He demonstrates the easiest way to move them, both hands under the chin, leg straddling on either side. He shows us how to grab the opposite back leg and flip the lamb on its back. “These animals main way to survive is running, once they’re on their backs they’re defenseless and they know it. Usually they’ll stop struggling here.” His lamb struggles from time to time but largely proves his point. He touches the lamb tenderly as he talks. Sing begins humming and the rest of us join in.

Webber shows us where on the lamb’s neck to cut, then he straddles the lamb and pauses, thanking the lamb and breathing. Then he takes the knife and cuts. Blood pools onto the grass, the lamb thrashes a little, calms, and then its eyes grow glassy. I think its dead, when it begins moving again but in death’s motions. I know these motions and sounds, intimately - Papa made them as he was dying. Webber holds the lamb as it moves and moans, its breath rattling to the tune of an exiting soul.

I am so sad as the lamb is about to be slaughtered, which transitions into impact as the lamb dies. My whole body is shaking as its body is shaking and stills as its body stills, left only with the feeling of monumental change. Alive. Dead. We transition then to each person choosing their lamb. I follow Michael as he moves the lamb, skillfully tipping it, quickly, cleanly, cutting its neck. I am left feeling like it was too quick. Thank you, I think, for reminding me to take my time.

Usually in these things I like to be the first or the last, but I feel called in the middle. I watch The Oyster man as he tips his lamb, emotion coursing through his beautiful face, as he cuts, present as it dies. I move to the next. Witness as the Greys move their lamb together. The husband offers the wife the knife, and she takes it with a breath. He holds as she cuts and I long for that even as the impact of the death hits me again.

It is the Grey Husband, who comments to Michael later that the first death was profound, but by the third it was normal. I do not experience this. Every death hits me with the same impact.

Spirit grabs hers but I am behind her, and don’t witness her lamb, hearing later that it’s a hard death, she takes several slices to get through the wool.

I go into the pen and as Raguel holds the fence so they’re trapped. I go through touching each one. I‘m not sure if she’s the one I saw earlier, but at the same time I am. I pull her out. She struggles but I’m so much bigger and stronger than her. I notice my strength. I pull her to the spot and easily flip her onto her back.

“I am your death,” I tell her. “I am going to honor you as best I can. I will use every part of you I can. I will treat you with all the respect I have. I am grateful for you, and still - I will kill you, and there’s no getting around that.”

Holding one leg is enough to keep her on her back, and so my other hand roams across this still living body. I mostly feel sad as I caress her face and neck and flank, but unexpectedly I also feel tender. I haven’t killed often. As a boy killing a chicken I felt anger, revulsion, even hatred. As an adult killing a mouse I felt fear, and sadness. Again with a weasel that had killed five chickens I felt vengeance that bled into awe. Now though I feel . . . tender.

I feel the rush to do it, the implied expectation, but I ignore that. There is no one waiting for me. Others are taking their turns. I take my time. I wish that I had known this lamb longer. I had met it before, on an earlier visit with another friend here on the farm. We went out to look at the lambs and I hadn’t caught any. I don’t really know this lamb.

So I try, in this brief moment, to get to know her. I caress her face and ears. I run my hand along each leg. I tangle my hand in the sun-warmed wool of her belly. I tell her I love her and wonder at that phrase. I tell her she’s beautiful and feel it in my entire body. I bury my head in her wool until my body has stopped shaking and I’m here in the sun with this lamb and not a little bit anywhere else.

I sit up and the lamb looks at me. I read a lot into that look. She stretches out her neck then, in just the way I need it to be to run the knife. Okay, that look and gesture seem to say. I would rather not be here. I had grass I had planned to eat over there with the other lambs, and I would rather live, but you have me here and you will kill me, and I accept my death.

I surrender.

I straddle her and, with a knife I took from the altar, I slice. It surprises me how small a motion. No harder than I might slice ham or cheese or bread. In one tiny movement, I cut both arteries, and she starts to bleed out.

Carrion jumps in here. “Can I harvest some of that blood?” he asks. It’s the wrong moment, and later he’ll apologize for it.

“No, I’m going to let the soil drink it,” I say. I don’t have the time to make a different decision and it seems only a moment until the blood slows to a trickle, wicked into my jean leg or drained beneath the grass. I’m off her now, both hands on her warm belly.

She begins to gallop, still upside down but feet racing as fast as they can.

Run! Run to the afterlife! Run to the green pastures beyond, I enjoin her. I’m with her - running as she runs wherever it is she goes. Her running slows, and she makes a few more dying sounds, just like Papa made, just like I will make when I die, then she falls all the way still.

I feel release, maybe even joy. There’s sadness too, but that has relaxed its fist inside my chest. Mostly, I feel the profound import of what I have done. I bury my head against her belly, hands tangled again in her wool, not so different from a moment before. Alive. Oyster man comes up behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders. He doesn’t expect anything, he’s just here as witness, as I witnessed the death of his lamb. He moves back to his own when, in time, I sit up.

Earth comes to me now and explains the first few cuts to prep the lamb to hang so we can process from there. I easily carry her, still warm, over to the truck and put her in, absolutely sure now that I will recognize my own. The rest of the day will be spent in awe of the beauty and complexity of a body, fingers slipping between muscle and skin, marvelling at the honeycomb of a stomach and the ease of unfrozen meat, but right now we circle again to reflect.

The man who came with Earth mentions his Christian roots and the sacrifice of the lamb feeling that much more profound after experiencing their surrender. Diver has recently been at a birth, and notes how similar the sounds and movements are. Several of us felt the physical ease of the act - we’d built up such a mythology around killing. Yet more of us are reminded of our own mortality.

The connection I sense with this animal is real, embodied, intimate. Though my certainty will fade into impracticality, I speak with conviction in the moment before we pile back into our cars.

“I don’t want to eat meat I haven’t killed myself.”