Julie Morse fiction short story The Pig Butcher
New Pink Spring Blooms by Gloria E. Moses, Oil on Canvas, 10″ x 8″.
The Pig Butcher
by Julie Morse
Dave was delegated to the napkins. His daughter Jade patiently showed him how to fold the dark blue linen into triangles, but on his own, he made pleated blobs. He folded at the round wood table full of grooves and ridges, just like the floor and the ceiling rafters. Jade’s mother’s house looked like a mahogany boat turned inside out. The two-story cottage was gilded in prayer flags, tribal bowls, hemp tapestries, and terra cotta. Dave acted like a careful guest when he was there, even when he was a part-owner—for as brief of a stint as that was—and being back in the house for his daughter’s wedding felt like a baseless punishment.
Jade’s friends, who all shared an aversion to makeup and hair brushing but were fresh-faced and beautiful like Jade, flowed through the house like graceful elves. Many were concentrated in the kitchen, stirring tall pots and prodding Dutch ovens. Dave smelled rosemary and oregano, but there were at least a dozen other herbs wafting from the stove that he couldn’t identify. He knew some of the friends by name, but most blended together like the house’s array of cultural wall hangings and trinkets. Pashmina shawls, polychrome leggings, metal headbands, kinetic earrings: each wore a slightly different strain of the Gustav Klimt palette.
Dave had put creases in a dozen napkins when Jade came to check on him.
“Dave, you’re in the right direction, but you’re missing the triangle,” she said, and in three seconds folded the napkin so that a triangle appeared.
She had been calling him ‘Dave’ instead of ‘Dad’ since the divorce when she was nine, and Dave still considered the title change as part of his list of punishments that were too puzzling to analyze.
“There,” she said and squeezed his shoulder and floated to the kitchen to commandeer the savory haze that fogged up Dave’s glasses and made him sneeze. To see Jade take the reins in her wedding made him proud but also wary that matrimony would rid her of her gentle curiosity and turn her into a woman with unwavering mission, like her mother.
He heard Jade whack something with the meat tenderizer. Dave had successfully folded enough triangle napkins to make the table look like a twee ocean. The cartoonish artfulness of it would impress Jade, he thought, and he stood up to fetch her. But as soon as he smoothed his slacks with his hands, he felt something soft and tense as a timpani roll behind him.
“Your napkins are something, Dave,” said Johanna, Jade’s mother. Her cheeks and chin were dull ovals where sharp planes used to be, but her big eyes were still dark like river stones. Dave’s fingers flicked with the impulse to stroke her long mane of black hair.
“Thanks, Jo,” he said and narrowed his eyes.
“It’s good to see you,” she said and repositioned a napkin. “Will you help us do a once-over of the lawn, and the tent might need to be re-hoisted. I think you could be the judge of that.”
“Sure,” he said and followed Johanna through the stained-glass doors to the backyard.
Rows of collapsible wooden chairs faced the small pergola that Dave had made. A carpenter-turned-therapist, his compulsion to keep his hands busy never went away. He had made countless false prophesies of what Jade needed built, among them a potting bench for her botanical business, an accordion door for her pantry, and a dog sled for her old foster beagle. The hurtful disappearance of these pieces was negated by Jade’s request for a pergola, and he smiled at the cedar’s angles and hand-planed edges. It was a centerpiece that complemented the other earthen accents at the wedding, and best of all, the pride it gave him served as a distraction from the worst part of the day: Jade’s fiancé, Ben.
Ben stood in a snug, white apron at a plastic table several yards from the pergola and chairs. A taut and clean undershirt was tucked into his black groom’s pants. He peeled and sliced a pork shoulder with the assertive finesse of a marimbaist. His hands were clean of blood, and he seemed unconcerned with the hooves dangling over the table’s edge. One overzealous cut and the carcass would slide off the table and onto the ground, Dave thought. The fantasy of instant contamination made him unclench his teeth, and with an emboldened grimace, Dave yanked the tent pole up a notch and drilled the screw so hard he stripped it.
Johanna’s wink of a smile acknowledged a job well done, and then he was out of her periphery. Dave walked backward to take a look at his handiwork. The tent was level, thanks to him. He took a dozen photos with his phone of the white tent against the blue sky and a few of the floral arrangements. The warm breeze tousled the bouquets Jade had made, which were everywhere at the wedding. Flowers were a quintessential theme in matrimony, but to Jade, they were her world. She was the best gardener and the only herbalist he knew. The stir of pride made Dave stand up straighter. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t responsible for his daughter’s green thumb; she had a gift, and by association, that meant he deserved a nudge of merit.
Dave adjusted a couple of chairs and reflopped their cushions. The wedding day stagehands tended to endless tasks, but Dave’s two assignments were complete and all that was left for him to do was look busy, something he had substantial practice in. His idleness was apparent to no one. He was a timely and dependable ensemble member. These traits were simultaneously appreciated and overlooked by Johanna and Jade. If he could do a little more, not just build the pergola but invent it too, then maybe he’d rise to the level of full-fledged father.
Yet, there were perks of being a marginal parent: warmly-met, low expectations and a mutual lightheartedness between him and Jade that made Dave forget how difficult things could be. His face had hardened to his passivity over the years: tired, wide-set green eyes fixed on waterfalls of wrinkles and a tight, apostrophe smile. His shoulders, once broad and supple in his twenties and thirties, were now caved slightly inward as if he carried a yoke.
He scooped up the scattered late August leaves on the unmowed grass. A stack crunched in his left hand, and he shoved some in his pockets. The job was relaxing, and he imagined how much better the wedding photos would look without speckles of dried leaves in them. By the time he picked up all the leaves, the ceremony might be ready to start, he thought. Then he was interrupted.
“Dave, what’re you doing?” said a voice. The low timbre startled Dave, and he bolted up from the ground. He winced when he saw the voice belonged to Ben. Dave showed him his fists of leaves, and Ben raised eyebrows in response. “Want to help me with this pig?”
Dave walked over to his table. Hunks of flesh were piled on the side, and the smoker was going. “I need you,” said Ben, and handed him a cut, “to lay these in and baste them.” Dave rested the meat in the smoker and sprayed it with the bottle that had the pungency of every hardy herb. There was no better smell than burning rendered fat. He didn’t mind coughing from the smoke; anything was worth inhaling the deliciously salty animal flesh. There was enough crispy and juicy belly, ribs, and shoulder to stuff the thirty or so non-vegetarian guests, and he could probably get away with taking some home.
The two fell into an instant rhythm. They didn’t talk, but Dave could anticipate the size of Ben’s next cut and made room for it on the smoker just before the slice was ready. Together, they arranged the smoked pieces across a few breadboards, each complete with an equal assortment of parts. Dave hoped their assembly line would continue until the start of the ceremony. Their momentum made him forget that this man, who was only two years younger than him, was going to be his son-in-law in a matter of hours.
“You have to moisten them better,” said Ben, and Dave let out a wheezing hack that triggered a coughing fit. He took a big step away from the smoker and rubbed his eyes. “It’s not a big deal, just douse them like they’re gnats that need to be drowned. I have a gallon of this stuff.”
Dave smoothed his hands on his pants and glanced down at the giant grease stains.
“Sounds good, man,” he said mid-cough. Ben smiled at him. His skin was equally rugged and sun-worn as Dave’s, but half of his face was covered by a brown beard heavily tinseled with white. It was an impeccable beard, lush but trim and roughly angled like a yacht captain’s. Dave dragged the back of his hand against his sandpaper stubble. Identity seemed to have little to do with facial hair, but when he looked at Ben, he wondered how much worth was derived from a man’s beard.
Dave spritzed ferociously. The more liquid that hit the grill, the more smoke, sparks, and coughing. Splatter shot over his glasses, and he searched for a napkin while covering his sour eyeball with his hand.
“Just give me a second,” said Dave, and made his way to the house.
“You alright?” Ben shouted after him. Dave gave an exaggerated nod and weaved in and out of the stream of people entering and exiting the stained-glass French doors.
He was third in line for the only bathroom in Johanna’s house. The kitchen was still a zoo, and he saw Jade on a step stool stirring a pot. She looked up and showed him her wooden spoon dripping with green and brown stew.
“Looks great!” He said in a tempered rasp.
“What?” yelled Jade. Dave removed his hand from his eye and gave her two thumbs up. She grinned and returned to the pot. The sound of a harp being tuned echoed through the house, and a jazz album played on the record player at a volume low enough that Dave could tell it was Ethiopian and not the Harlem jazz that Johanna liked. Was Ben the wedding DJ, too? he wondered. If Dave had been invited to choose the music, he would’ve curated something everyone could’ve enjoyed: a little World, reggae, some Ravi Shankar. Jazz was too sleepy.
The bathroom door swung open and banged on the wall, making the record skip. Johanna’s brother, Neil, a large pink man with a patch of oily hair above the nape of his neck, emerged.
“I request everyone take four giant steps away from the bathroom,” said Neil, and shoved the door back into the jamb. Dave and the others let out embarrassed chuckles and scooted down the wall. Neil whacked Dave’s shoulder with a thick, wet hand. “How you doing, bud?” he said with a pirate smile and sauntered outside. The first person in line held their breath and shuffled into the bathroom.
“Sensory overload,” said the woman in front of Dave. She rolled her eyes and smiled. Knobby shoulders, indigo head wrap, linen skirt gathered at her ribs, face like a cat: this woman was familiar in the sense that all of Jade’s friends were, but there was something about her that registered in Dave’s memory. Did he meet her at Jade’s college graduation a couple of years ago?
“I love the commotion,” said Dave. “And I love weddings.” He suppressed a sigh with a cough.
“What happened to your eye?” said the woman.
“Occupational hazard with the smoker,” he said and gave his eyelid a pat.
“I should’ve guessed. You reek of it, but in a good way. Ben does the best smoked pork I’ve ever had,” said the woman. “It doesn’t even taste like normal pork you’d get at a restaurant or something. It’s so juicy and salty, but it feels healthy.”
“I believe it. It really seems like he knows what he’s doing.”
“Wait, you haven’t tried it before? I thought you worked at his farm or something.”
“First timer. I’m in for a treat,” he said with a croak and wiped spittle off the corners of his mouth with a finger.
“Where do you know Ben from then?”
“Jade. I’m Jade’s dad.”
“Oh my God, right. Jade’s dad,” the woman’s eyes widened.
“I think I met you at graduation.”
“Yes, graduation. What a blur.” The woman inched closer to the person in front of her and took her phone out of her skirt pocket.
Dave adjusted his stance and watched Jade hover over another patchouli pixie and instruct her on the soup.
♦ ♦ ♦
He thought back to graduation. Jade’s forthrightness was dormant then, or didn’t exist yet. That day, he picked her up at her student apartment in his Subaru with a duct-taped gas valve. She had spent days making wreaths for graduation caps. Berry vines curlicued over dried day lilies and bay leaves, an odd touch that Johanna was against, but Dave heartily embraced the rare appearance of Jade’s quirks. Milk crates full of wreaths filled the car, and the plan was to hand them out after the procession when everyone was taking photos. They were pure gifts, tokens to celebrate her classmates’ foray into the real world.
Graduation was where he first met Ben. He was another shiny, wrinkled brow in the sea of casually-dressed parents. Ben seemed out of place without a son or daughter in his vicinity, but then his arm was around Jade’s waist, and her head leaned against his armpit. Dave took a moment to catch his breath when he realized this was the guy his daughter had been alluding to the last several months. Chicken farmer, cross-country cyclist, once lived in a country that didn’t have sidewalks: those details indicated that Ben was older, but it never crossed Dave’s mind he could be his age.
Dave searched his shirt pockets for his sunglasses, but they weren’t there. He stared straight at the sun anyway. His burning eyeballs were no contender for the brutal embarrassment that had him breathing out of his mouth, which was fixed in an open smile. He leaned a little to one side and dug his thumbs into his belt loops to keep his balance. Neither Jade nor anyone else seemed to notice Dave looking partially lobotomized. A blue shadow cast over his vision, and Dave blinked and pivoted his body away from the group. Careful to keep Jade and Ben out of his periphery, he shifted his sights to the graduation scene.
Couples were everywhere: students holding hands in their regalia, parents with their arms around each other, and scattered sets of grandparents in lawn chairs. He thought of the guy who could’ve been his old foreman cozied up to Jade. How did Dave, a dandelion of a father, let this happen? What did he do wrong? Jade could’ve had anyone, the slogan of every single-minded parent who sees their child as a more attractive version of themselves, but Dave knew in Jade’s case, it was true. He saw her co-op roommates—the lanky hikers with Viking haircuts who acted more like monks than Vikings—flirt with her. He had always thought she’d end up with one of them. The guy whose personality balanced steadiness with kindness like a funhouse mirror. The guy he could teach how to make butcherblock. The guy who would help him harvest wood for Jade’s flowerbeds and canoe the Connecticut River with him. Not his contemporary, not a man whose existence labeled Dave as a heart-skipping, Freudian stereotype.
A thick hand landed on Dave’s shoulder, and he turned around.
“Hey, man,” said Ben. His voice had a deep, kind resonance, and he spoke soft enough for only Dave to hear.
“Hey,” Dave said faintly, his mouth still agape.
“Those graduation cap wreaths came out awesome. Jade said they were your idea?”
“She did? No, I mean, we used to make wreaths when Jade was little, but this was all her,” he said with a sigh.
“That must be what she meant, you planted the seed.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, they turned out great.”
“Yeah.” Ben’s big blue eyes blazed into Dave’s. He was handsome in a European way. Black eyebrows, freshly cropped salt and pepper curls, a wide smile that almost touched both ears, and a shelf of a clavicle that hinted at chest muscles Dave had never attempted to grow. Dave seldom felt the need to compare his looks to other men. He was well aware of his bookish handsomeness. His narrow face and high cheekbones were like that of a minstrel in a Medieval painting. No matter the setting, light reflected in his green eyes, and his thick gray hair suited his golden ash complexion. Women gave him long glances at the grocery store, but hadn’t had a romantic itch in years. Yet, standing face-to-face with Ben made him consider asking the next smiling, silver-haired woman for her number.
Jade wanted the four of them to hand out the wreaths together. Dave sidled up close to Johanna so he could smell her sage deodorant. The students fastened the wreaths to their caps and hugged Jade in thanks. Jade and Ben were still laughing even after all the wreaths were gone, and Dave winced every time Jade cackled big and leaned onto Ben’s arm. The fact that Ben wasn’t a bad guy and actually objectively good enough for Jade didn’t matter. Dave needed to leave.
♦ ♦ ♦
Back at the wedding, Dave’s desire to flee had reached a new height in the bathroom line. He saw Johanna maneuver through the thicket of guests. She was headed his way with a stout lavender cake in her arms.
“Johanna,” said Dave, but she kept straight ahead. “Johanna,” he said again, louder. She widened her eyes at him. “Where are you going?”
“To the cooler,” she said without stopping. Dave shifted out of the line and followed her out. The cooler was on the other side of the tent, away from Ben. As she walked, guests cooed at the two-tiered cake that was dappled with walnuts and sweet basil frosting. Dave floated his hand under hers as she lowered it in the cooler, but she set it down without his help.
“It’ll be good in there, right?” said Dave. “It’s cold enough?”
“Where did I put those?” Johanna searched her batik-patterned sleeveless silk dress that hung off her narrow shoulders like a potato sack. She fished out two tiny figurines from her pocket. “Here they are. Look,” she said, turning to Dave. They were wooden bride-and-groom cake toppers. Faceless things with peeling black and white paint. The bride’s mouth was a dot of red.
“Something old?” Said Dave.
“Exactly. And these are so old. They were on my parents’ wedding cake. I’ve been saving them for decades.”
“Really? We didn’t use them on our wedding cake?”
Johanna pursed her lips and gave a long nasal exhale.
“We didn’t have a wedding cake.”
“Sure, we did. Right there. Behind where your garden is now. That’s where we had the ceremony, and we had our table with our cake right there. It was white, the cake.” He tried to catch her eye. “Or that’s what I remember.”
“Honey, Dave, we didn’t have a cake. We could not afford one.” Johanna hovered the toppers over the cake, strategizing where they should be placed.
“Then what did we have instead, if not cake? I’ve never heard of a wedding without cake.”
“We had ice cream,” she said and turned an eye toward him. “I bought five gallons of vanilla ice cream. It wasn’t nearly enough.” She shook her head and arranged the bride and groom to face each other.
“It was a real budget wedding, wasn’t it?” said Dave.
“We didn’t even have a proper dinner for people. Salad. I think we had a lot of brassica that year and just turned it into buckets and buckets of salad. Don’t you remember we used actual hardware store buckets?”
“I got the nips,” he said and smoothed his slacks.
“Right,” laughed Johanna. “We ran out of those baby Jim Beams, too. Well, consider this wedding a major upgrade from ours.” Her gaze drifted towards Ben and his butcher station. “Our Jade gets to serve an actual meal.”
Dave let out a whisper of a groan. The ceremony was encroaching, and the lawn and house were crowded with guests. There was no place for him to flee. A dozen had gathered around Ben’s meat table, his curls bobbed above the heads of the mesmerized group. The late summer breeze blew in the direction Ben faced so that the pork splatter landed on his apron and not on the guests’ folksy attire. Dave glared at his worn khakis, which had grease streaks from his upper thighs to his knees. Some fifty people he vaguely knew were about to watch him walk his daughter down the aisle, looking like an overdressed rube. He needed to get back to the sidelines. The less he involved himself with Johanna, Ben, or anyone else at this wedding, the less he toiled in shame.
Shame followed him to the meat smoker, the bathroom, in every little task he executed with no one caring or noticing, but he wasn’t prepared for its grand ascension at the ceremony. Rows of chairs filled with chatty guests. Dusk came early in August, and everyone’s faces glowed cinnamon under the big white tent. Jade, Johanna, and Dave stood outside the tent’s entrance and watched the guests get settled. Jade clutched Johanna’s hands in a prayerful fist every time she tried to futz with Jade’s brown tresses and bun.
“I’m sorry,” said Johanna and whinnied a sigh.
“Then stop doing it. I just spent forty-five minutes getting this wave.”
“I know, I know. My heart is exploding, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m so happy for you, Jade.”
Jade turned to Dave wistfully. Her eyes held him, soft but serious; it was the first time she had fully focused on him all day. The afternoon shadows, the makeup, and the excitement made her look like a teenager. He thought back to when she was thirteen or fourteen, and he taught her how to make wreaths. She squeezed the pliers too tight and her fingers trembled untangling the rose vines. He saw a glimmer of that same uneasiness in her face.
“Everything ok, Jade?”
It was a necessary question, one that could save her. It would be a hassle to cancel the wedding, but it would be the right thing to do. Visions of him directing traffic down the driveway and brusquely rolling away Ben’s smoker didn’t let him hear her say yes.
Johanna hugged them both. She was the first to slide through the tent and walk down the aisle. One of Jade’s friends sang a folk song, and another accompanied her on the flute. Ben’s mother, a thin woman in her nineties who carried her cane at her chest like a pastoral staff, strode down the aisle next. It wasn’t a theatrical wedding. No groomsmen, bridesmaids, or flower girl. No one was dressed fancier than Jade, who wasn’t even that fancy in her cotton and lace dress she found at a flea market. She wore ceramic sunflower earrings and a yellow satin ribbon wrapped around her bun to match the lace that had yellowed at the neckline.
At the altar, the tent opened to an expanse of rolling hills and interweaving pines. Johanna’s house might have been shabby and not up to code, but it was on a sweeping acreage, and prismatic light echoed in every direction. When Dave and Johanna bought the property, they agreed that the house was just a structure, a shelter. The valley that surrounded it was the real living space. The pergola’s red cedar against the trees and sky heralded the beauty of a simple, organic wedding and the importance of unpretentious romance. How special that he raised a daughter to cherish meaning over commodity, wilderness over the cosmopolitan, quality over quantity.
Ben shared that same sensibility. His chicken farm looked like one of those rustic homesteads in rural Europe. The chickens roamed the neighborhood for hours and had no trouble finding their way back to the coop. Dave could see how hard Ben worked to keep this operation afloat, even if nothing had been replaced or updated in the last fifty years. It was dilapidated and dangerous, but no one was luckier than Ben. He could make ends meet without advertising or renting a farmers’ market stand. He was a modest success.
Ben was good. He worked hard; his goals were earnest and realistic; he was committed to Jade. He loved her. They had a predictable, steady love. Before Ben, Jade was unsure, too careful, and nervous. She was beholden to Johanna and her plan, a plan that Dave was never more than peripherally aware of. With Ben, she was free and didn’t need her mother. She had always been a skilled gardener, and with Ben, she had a collaborator. It made sense that Jade would feel comfortable with someone whose dining room table centerpiece was a skill saw. Ben and her were meant to be.
But they were so wrong for each other. Jade should be with someone her own age, and Ben should be making the most of his last years. A pairing like theirs screamed what was wrong with the world: innocence peeled and picked at and then ravaged by the powerful, while everyone stood back with their arms folded and rolling their eyes. Of course, what if Ben wasn’t a predator, a backburner question that never ceased to stir Dave’s bowels. What if his and Jade’s massive age gap was a fluke and they really did have a thing built on true compatibility? Even so, how could Ben keep up with someone whose life has just begun, who hadn’t ever filed her own taxes? Dave had his accountant do both of theirs, a task that up until that moment he faintly resented because Johanna put him up to it. That last remnant of fatherly responsibility would soon be relinquished to Ben, who most likely had his own accountant. And then what purpose would Dave serve? Did all husbands make fathers redundant? Or just the ones who were old enough to be their wives’ fathers?
For a second, Dave wasn’t sure if he was saying this out loud or if he was shouting in his head. He needed to tell someone. Johanna maybe. Did she like Ben? He had never come up in their brief exchanges about pick up times and seating arrangements, but he assumed she did. At what point in the history of the world had a handsome, gregarious chicken farmer been rejected? Never. Life would be a lot easier if he could put this resentment to bed. But to do so, he would need to make his approval clear. Dave was the outlier and needed redemption. But how? He could give Ben a pig. Dave had never hunted before, but as soon as the wedding was over, he would find a machete or an axe and slaughter a pig, and Ben and him could roast it together. A primal truce.
Dave mimicked Jade’s slow and light footsteps. He meditated harder on the pergola the closer they got to Ben. He couldn’t look away or at his feet or anywhere else. His job was to stare straight ahead. But as they tracked closer, Ben’s beaming, worn face came into center frame. Tears filled Dave’s eyes. They edged down his face and disappeared in the grass. His mouth twisted, and his eyebrows jutted down. The wet film on his cheeks sealed his performance, his duty as a father. He avoided Jade’s eyes as they hugged, squeezing her hand goodbye at the altar. He made his way to the empty chair in the back row and continued to cry.
Julie Morse is a writer and case manager for asylum seekers and lives in Western Massachusetts, where she grew up. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The Nation, VICE News, The Rumpus, The Believer, Pacific Standard, among other publications.
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