My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love by Dessa

Author:Dessa
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Slaughter #1

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The morning of my mom’s first slaughter, I was twenty-nine, a pescatarian, and living on a rapper’s schedule—I wasn’t usually out of bed at 9 A.M., let alone outdoors, communing with the allergens. But I stood beside her, squinting in the sunlight, waiting for the slaughter guy to arrive. On the other side of an electrified fence, her small herd shaded beneath a stand of trees in the distance. She’d been raising cattle for less than a year and I got the sense she was anxious about the big day. I’d made the ninety-minute drive from Minneapolis to offer a little moral support. I was also morbidly curious; I’d never seen a complex organism die, let alone be killed. Death isn’t usually an event you can pencil into your day planner. Over the phone, Mom had explained that the slaughter guy would come to the farm and do it right there in the pasture. In a matter of minutes, he’d kill the steer, skin it, and butcher it in the open air. Most of my male friends thought he’d be using some sort of superpowered air gun, like the kind in No Country for Old Men. My female friends all supposed he’d just slit the steer’s throat.

My mom has since become an accomplished cattlewoman, but the learning curve that first year was steep. In the spring, she’d tried to castrate a female calf. She and her husband, David, had barely managed to confine their little bulls—and one misidentified heifer—in the handling area when the hired man pulled up to perform the castrations. He made quick work of the first bull and the second, but then reaching in to do the third, he announced, “Wait a minute, this a two-holer.”

My mom decided to become a cowgirl in her sixties. I didn’t love the idea. She’d grown up in tenements in the Bronx, a New York Puerto Rican, and had worked in offices her whole life. During my childhood, we’d raised only gerbils and did even that badly. I’d dropped one when it was still a newborn and ruined it so that its neck bobbed in circles whenever it walked. My mom knew it had to be put out of its misery, but couldn’t bear for either of them to face the job sober. She drugged the broken thing with red wine before taking it outside with a cleaver. To my knowledge, that was her only slaughter to date.

But growing up in New York, she’d always dreamt of living on the prairie. She read the book Silent Spring and became an environmentalist before there was much of a movement to join. She’d left the city as soon as she had the chance, locked it down with my dad, and bought a house in Minneapolis to do the middle-class family thing. She tilled our backyard until it was nearer a field crop than a garden. She dehydrated everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor.

By ten, I’d learned to dye my own muslin in beet juice in the backyard.

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