Not to cut too deep I say here is lesson 6: We don’t want dung & piss on everything & she cuts shallow & clean all along the belly-line really quite to my surprise.
Then D. took her two hands in his & he pulled the entrails loose & the whole heap of guts fell out & I felt sick & went into the house but I vomited & had done because we were right in the middle & I couldn’t leave A. there alone, then they sorted the intestines so that she could see the dirty & the clean the pizzle & the bladder & the gall-bladder & the small intestine & the large intestine on one side & heartlungskidneysliver on the other. A.’s right sleeve by that time full of blood as if she’d been injured & I nauseous all the time & irritated with the circumstances & the spectators.
Lesson 7: The one place where you can soon find out whether a sheep is healthy is in the intestines. Look for worms in the gut & parasites in the lungs they must be nice & spongy & red & the liver soft & dark the right size like the fist of your right hand. Small & hard or waterlogged means there’s something wrong with the heart quite probably with the whole sheep the heart is the blood’s windmill I teach her if it doesn’t cast the whole animal dries out.
Made A. touch everything & identify everything. Just after a while couldn’t take the bloody sleeve dragging through everything any longer either you take off that jersey I say or we push that sleeve up but A. latches onto the bloody sleeve with her thumb. Dawid hangs the sheep under the bluegums from wire hooks in the heels so then A. can’t reach. He brings an apple box no I say it’s not strong enough cut longer hooks so then the kitchen-girls start singing oi oi oi five pigs in a heap, raise the girl or lower the sheep.
Shut your traps I say but they dance buttocks in the air all around A. her lip trembles & I say it’s just kitchen-skivvies don’t take any notice of them they’re getting only head & guts & tonight you’re having chops.
There the sheep is hanging cut off the head I say it’s dripping on her feet. So then I see D. first cuts off the ear & pushes it into A.’s pocket without notches not marked yet for slaughter as we do with the hanslammers. Saw him say something to A. which I couldn’t hear & I didn’t want to ask in front of everybody (must beware of intimate contact between A. & the men-workers).
Then D. shows A. how she should loosen the skin & push away the meat from the membrane & I hold it & at first it’s a struggle she cuts now too deep now too shallow. I say take your fist knead the skin loose from the membrane while you feed the blade & only then it improved a little the right fist in the white crocheted jersey a bloody stump looked as if it had been amputated but she persevered well even though it took three times longer than usual but then she knew all the cuts also from the neck to the loin & the groin & what one can best use it for, for braai, for roasting, for baking in the oven or for stewing.
Well done my little girl now you know meat. Next time we slaughter an ox you’ll get to be the prime butcher here on Grootmoedersdrift I said we’ll just have to think of something for that little arm of yours a butcher’s sleeve.
5
Noon silence. The floorboards in the passage creak. Is it somebody standing by the telephone table, shifting weight from one leg to the other? Or studying a photograph on the wall, or hesitating, overtaken by a thought, an afterthought? To-ing and fro-ing? Pro-ing and conning? The floorboards creak of their own accord.
There is nobody there. These are the sounds of an old house.
My house can make more sounds than I.
Sometimes I imagine that I can hear footsteps, swiftly from the front to the back all the way through the house, a hurried, peremptory tread in the mornings. At night, in the afternoon hours between two and three, a laboured pace, a shuffling gait, a walking stick.
As if somewhere a recording has been made of all the times that I’ve walked in the passages and rooms of my house, as if it were now being played back to me on a worn audiotape, a record without clear information.
What must I make of it? What is the message? I was intended to be an upright animal? Intended to stretch my limbs, delimit four quarters in the air, a golden section, my reach the compass of my intentions? Created to swim, to walk, to climb, sufficiently sanguine to attempt flight?
Here I lie. Drawn and quartered would be preferable.
Sometimes there’s a knocking on the rooftop, once, twice, thrice, four times, loudly as the roof beams contract in the night. Then I wake up and wonder who has arrived.
Who wants to come in? I want to cry out, who is there?
But there’s nobody there. When Agaat leaves me alone, like today, I am nobody. Between me and me no fissure of differentiation.
In the mornings when the roof beams heat up, there’s a tick-ticking above my head for an hour. As if there’s a pacemaker wanting to help me think, an apprehension that on my own I cannot shape into thought.
I am less than a roof.
I am a gutter.
I hear, sometimes, a rustling in the door frames. Woodborer it must be, mice perhaps, or cockroaches. Gnawings sifting down between the wood and the wall, mice probably, insects.
I should be able to impress upon Agaat to bring me a cockroach in a bottle so that I can see it scampering with its grey flat body, scrabbling with its feet against the glass. She’d find mirth in my envy of a cockroach.
My bed in which I’m tilted, makes my weight palpable to myself. My loose weight inside my fixed weight. Each time I can feel my intestines welter inside me. My heart in a basket, my guts a roll of chewing-tobacco tumbling about inside a crate. That’s all she’s done for me today. Came here to tilt me. Without a word.
My meat is unfairly distributed over my bones. The weight of my skeleton is my only honesty. My meat makes me cry.
I see the contours of my feet under the cover. My feet are logs. The tension has deserted my toes. My feet look like knees, my knees look like wodges, like half-loaves, my hip-bones form ridges and in-between is a basin. My chest inclines towards me, on either side of my breastbone there’s been nothing but folds of skin for a long time now. I remember the weight of my breasts, the shadow of my breasts.
Now light plays around me, a clod in a field, a shallow contour. It gradates itself over my heights and depressions, a crafty modeller. The cover is white, the shadows blue. The light sketches the railings of my bed around me like a barred cage. I am a skeleton within a skeleton, a crate in a truck, but I still have time, in me is my time, my wasting flesh preserves my time within me.
One should consist entirely of bone when the dying starts. But an animated skeleton. A skull full of flashes, a hand that hinges like a railway signal. One gesture must be granted you over the creatures that are permitted to die in innocence. And then you have to step back into line.
Darknesses slip along the skirting boards, light rings out over the floorboards, over the chrome, over the piles of white linen, over the jars and tubes and cloths. Stipples and stripes and spots. What is the time? I don’t want to know. In the front room the grandfather clock ticks.
My room limns itself from hour to hour, completes itself every day. My room is a perverse painter. I am the still-life. The fold in the cloth, the turned-open book.
I page myself to the outside. The sounds of the last harvest come to inscribe themselves in me.