Jefferson by Byrd Max

Author:Byrd, Max [Byrd, Max]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780345544261
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

James Hemings remembered an excellent sentence in one of his books: “Les rues sont l’image du chaos.” The streets are the picture of chaos.

Swaying, he gripped the smooth iron shaft of the streetlamp and stared through the crowd at the butcher. If you stayed up by Jefferson’s house and the Boulevards, you never saw anything like this. You saw animals, of course, horses and oxen and little herds of fat white French cattle being driven through the streets, shitting and bellowing and knocking down fences and walls; you saw horses racing full speed over the pavement, huge dogs in front of carriages clearing the way, poultry, geese, wagons full of rabbits and ducks in cages. But in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel you saw life the way it was, coming apart in bright red explosions of blood.

“Un joli boeuf,” the Frenchman next to him said.

James nodded. In front of the crowd the butcher had now wrestled the steer down to the filthy cobblestone street. The butcher lifted a club the size of a brick and hammered it down in one straight overhead swing, so hard that even thirty feet away, pressed between dozens of chattering Frenchmen, James heard the skull crack and the steer’s head bounce against the pavement.

The crowd sighed. The steer writhed on its side and moaned.

With a bound the butcher had straddled its massive neck and pulled out of somewhere a long curving knife that glinted in the sun like a fish before it darted suddenly down toward the outstretched throat. The blood pumped horn-high in brilliant jets.

The butcher jumped back—skating on blood—then hurdled the steer’s flank and dropped on his knees by the belly. James saw his back, his head dipping, his red arm plunge. The steer roared and kicked its back legs high in wild convulsions. The crowd pushed forward, murmuring, watching intently as the butcher’s hands started to yank the entrails out, pink slithering ropes of skin that a boy caught and coiled in his arms. But James’s eyes never left the animal’s face. As the butcher sliced and pulled, James fastened his gaze on the brown snout, the great black wondering pupils. Each roar, each feeble shake of the horns drew him closer. The steer twisted his neck, raised his head in anguish. In the corner of his vision James saw the butcher’s hands again, then the red heart beating, then the knife.

Chaos to the steer. Order to the butcher.

Every Monday he had the day off, no cooking lessons, no household duty. In the spring months he had wandered the Boulevards until he knew every inch, stopping in like a regular at all the white men’s cafés, reading British newspapers at the bar, ending the day (or night) at Denis’s three-room bead-curtained brothel with young Marcella, she of the squirming black limbs. But come the hot weather and the long days he had taken to wandering east, far past the Opéra and the Boulevards and all that Jefferson, fancy, silk-swaddled Paris. Faubourg Saint-Marcel, the city’s

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