Blood runs like sweat down the white beadboard of the kitchen cabinets. Our beagle is restless, sniffing the air. His nose leads him around the kitchen, a toy duck pulled by the string.
Don butchered while I was out. Butchered in the kitchen. The kitchen.
I was aware, before I headed out tonight, that my kitchen was to be a tableau of meat and organs, blood and bone. I call it Kitchen Venison Butchering. The perpetrator is my in-house hunter and cook. You’d think, being my employee, he’d at least conduct a thorough cleaning after butchering.
He insists he’s not my staff but my husband, and, as such, has the right to use our kitchen for butchering. As much right as I have, say, to use our rec room for Star Trek: Picard viewing parties.
He also wants to know where, exactly, I suggest he do the butchering. Outside? The shed? The garage?
Well, yes. Yes.
And no. Definitely not.
As I was primping to head out, Don opened a folding table in the center of the kitchen, Pete the beagle confident beneath. Like many good cooks, Don is a slob in the kitchen. To paraphrase Under The Tuscan Sun, Don cooks spherically, in all directions. Pete is hoping to benefit.
Don hauled his cooler stuffed with quartered venison into the kitchen, setting it perpendicular to the folding table. He arrayed a stack of tools across the surface. That’s it. No newspaper. No butcher paper – isn’t that what it’s for? No drain in the floor to swirl butchering detritus from this world.
I am getting picked up, in a few short minutes, for Book Club. I think Book Club is probably the opposite of Kitchen Venison Butchering.
I call my girlfriend and suggest she honk when she arrives. Avoid entering my house. I explain that an entire venison is in a cooler on the kitchen floor, and an entire venison hunter is standing next to it, ready to dissect.
Understand, I’m not disturbed by butchering. I just don’t think it needs to happen in the middle of the house. I am a teensy bit disturbed that my hunter never gave Kitchen Venison Butchering a second thought. That this, for him, is as natural as showering in the shower. I am more disturbed by his belief that the kitchen is clean in the aftermath of Kitchen Venison Butchering.
When I return home, the cooler, folding table, tools are all put away. Venison is piled in the garage chest freezer. Blood is working its way into the grooves of the kitchen cabinets. There are large drops of goo on the floor, like someone has tossed a handful of gruesome coins. Pete’s nose just isn’t that great.
“How was Book Club?”
“You would make a crappy serial killer,” I answer. “You’d get caught before you could ever get going.”
He is oblivious to the mess to which I am referring. I’d go to jail, too. His accomplice, cleaning up the scene of his crime.
My mother-in-law tells me I’m patient to allow butchering in the house.
I had an option?
I weigh this out. I could demand that the butchering be done elsewhere. But where? Our shed is too small. Our garage? It would still require cleanup, and since I’m the cleanup crew, I’d like someplace temperate and mouse-free.
There’s something else to consider. Don snagged a deer in the hour that his mom, the kids, and I were meeting him and his dad at The Cabin – yes, that will always be capitalized. It was evening by the time he got the deer to The Cabin. Well, evening and our wedding anniversary.
He strung the deer up between our Cabin and his parents’ Cabin. I don’t think he meant to terrorize his mother with an inverted deer 10 steps from her Cabin door but hey, it wasn’t her anniversary.
As Don’s mom regained her wits, I got to thinking. I can make all of this go away. Not by eradicating hunting. Long hunting trips that leave me flying solo are my justification for paying Hulu and Netflix to entertain me.
No. He continues to hunt. But I do the butchering.
Think about it. I don’t make a mess. With anything. I don’t terrorize my mother-in-law. She’s mandated by law to love her son; he can abuse that all he likes. Me? I need to stay in that lady’s good graces. I have a vested interest in protecting her from the menacing specter of field-dressed meat.
Weeks later, during another Cabin visit, I ask my father-in-law to show me how to butcher a pheasant. With his bare fingers, he finds purchase in the skin, pulling it off in one smooth piece.
Well, OK.
He chops off the head and legs so smoothly I don’t even realize it happened, and just then I appreciate another problem my butchering can correct. Do you know they, my husband and father-in-law, use the same ax for butchering as they do for chopping wood? You understand the problem, right?
Using the ax to dismember a pheasant makes the ax dirty. It will always be dirty. I mean, hello? Bird blood? I think that’s probably full of parasites and brain-eating amoeba and tapeworm or something, right?
So now you’ve taken the Pheasant Blood Ax and used it to chop wood. And many months later, you’re picking up that wood. It’s a 100% guarantee that you are touching that wood where the bloody ax touched the wood. By the Urban Dictionary definition of the transitive property, you now have that blood on you. Even if you can’t see it. You’re dirty.
The only way to remove this level of dirt is to shower. And you can’t touch anything else on your way to the shower because then that will be dirty too. Furthermore, you’ve just thrown that tapeworm-infested bloody log onto the fire. Now we are all breathing in aerosolized pheasant blood amoeba. Nice going.
Let me guess. I’m crazy, right? He butchers deer in the kitchen, but I’m the crazy one? OK.
Anyway, if I can butcher, that’s one more wrong I can right.
Hey. I’ll be like Sam Beckett on Quantum Leap.
Like Sam, I have to consider the future. I have two hunters and anglers being raised in my house. That’s a lot of animals left hanging outside of The Cabin.
You’d think with all of that meat lingering about I’d be well on my way to being a butchering pro. But hunters are tetchy with their meat. Well, mine is anyway. And if you live with a hunter, you probably understand. You know what goes into getting that deer. In the entire United States, less than 50% of hunters get a deer during deer season. In the Northeast, where Don hunts, it’s less than 40%.
I’ve seen a video on how to butcher venison. Now I need hands-on training. I’m contemplating getting a hunting license, hunting and butchering my own quarry when the universe gives me an assist. The 2020 BHA Rendezvous announces a skills session in butchering, and guess who just happens to have tickets to Rendezvous?
Then coronavirus sweeps in and steals my dream. With Rendezvous postponed, do I wait? Do I take matters into my own hands?
I decide to use some of the time at home to get a hunting license. I ask Don what is involved, and how soon I can I use that license.
In Pennsylvania, there’s a hunter education course. For $20, I can use the pandemic time to take the course online. And – good news here – once I pass, I can use my license right away. Of course the even better news is Don recruited a new hunter.
Yes. That was sarcasm.
I explain my goal. If I can hunt something small myself, I can practice my butchering well ahead of the November deer season. By the time that rolls around, I should be proficient enough that Don can allow me to butcher his deer without concern that I’ll, well, butcher it.
Don suggests turkey hunting, but I object. I need a quadruped mammal. If the cat I dissected as an undergrad was supposed to equate to human anatomy, wouldn’t a squirrel’s anatomy roughly approximate a deer’s?
Don disagrees. He offers to take me deer hunting. You know, I read a hunting article where some deer hunting aces picked November 7th through November 10th as the best days to hunt deer. How convenient that my wedding anniversary is November 9th. I am instantly suspicious.
Also, I’ll cry if I’m successful.
Don assures me a lot of hunters do cry. It’s not all Red Dawn, C. Thomas Howell chugging deer blood and all.
Anyway, I don’t share my suspicions. Deer hunting on our anniversary? He probably thinks it’s romantic. I can’t even begin to untangle that thread.
Although, Father’s Day is coming. Wouldn’t the perfect gift be a wife with a 100% on her hunter education course? Ready to hunt? Ready to butcher?
I registered for the hunter education course this week.
I’ll let you know if he considers that a gift.
As for me, I’ll consider the clean kitchen a gift.