0544325265 by Brendan Jones

Author:Brendan Jones [Jones, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

That evening, on the beach in front of the cabin, Betteryear clamped plywood to the sawhorses. He set the meat on the board and began carving from the forelegs and hindquarters, tossing scraps in a bowl for the table-mounted meat grinder. He showed her how to shave off globules of fat, pat the cuts dry, and separate them into piles. He ran an extension cord from his generator and plugged in a vacuum sealer, and they packaged the steaks, the warble of the sealer followed by a soft zip as the plastic heated. The burger grinder made a rhythmic squeaking sound as she turned the crank.

When she went inside with the bowls of packaged meat, she saw that he had washed her blood-splotched coat and hung it above the stove to dry. The orange cat splayed its body across the rug by the fire, turning at the hiss of droplets from the cuffs against the cast-iron, blinking its leaky eye. Betteryear dangled a cut of heart over the creature, who took the meat down in gulps.

He cooked the liver and heart with golden chanterelles on the single burner, boiled the tongue, setting it with a bowl on a muslin cloth in front of her. Carefully, she peeled off white skin, revealing the muscle beneath. Betteryear fried the backstrap in a buttered pan, poured huckleberry wine into a canning jar, and raised it toward her. “I give thanks for your good eyes,” he said.

The words lit her up from the inside. Flushed with the compliment, she cut the meat carefully, using the same hunting knife she had used to sever the buck’s neck, held a cube of heart on her fork, squeezing it between her teeth, letting the juice run over her gums. The backstrap was more like tuna than any sort of beef she had tasted.

“Oh my god,” she murmured.

“Yes,” he said. His eyes, a lazy black, were glazed with firelight. The muscles of his face, so taut over the course of the day, relaxed. He dabbed the sides of his lips with the cloth napkin, flipped the tines of his fork, and pointed toward her. “This is food from where you live, Tara. Do you know that?”

She looked across the table at him and found herself resting her hand on his. “Thank you.”

He took her hand. Quickly she stood and began clearing the table. Then she remembered the letter in the duffel.

Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she’d send it.

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