Indignation

death. And in my days as a butcher’s little son, learning what slaughtering was about, they would hang the animal by its foot to bleed it. First a chain is wrapped around the rear leg — they trap it that way. But that chain is also a hoist, and quickly they hoist it up, and it hangs from its heel so that all the blood will run down to the head and the upper body. Then they’re ready to kill it. Enter shochet in skullcap. Sits in a little sort of alcove, at least at the Astor Street slaughterhouse he did, takes the head of the animal, lays it over his knees, takes a pretty big blade, says a bracha—a blessing — and he cuts the neck. If he does it in one slice, severs the trachea, the esophagus, and the carotids, and doesn’t touch the backbone, the animal dies instantly and is kosher; if it takes two slices or the animal is sick or disabled or the knife isn’t perfectly sharp or the backbone is merely nicked, the animal is not kosher. The shochet slits the throat from ear to ear and then lets the animal hang there until all the blood flows out. It’s as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that’s how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain — and I saw all this when I was a boy. I witnessed it many times. My father thought it was important for me to see it — the same man who now was afraid of everything for me and, for whatever reason, afraid for himself.

My point is this: that is what Olivia had tried to do, to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law. Olivia’s telltale scar came from attempting to perform her own ritual slaughter.

It was from my mother that I got my height. She was a big, heavyset woman, only one inch under six feet, towering not just over my father but over every mother in the neighborhood. With her dark bushy eyebrows and coarse gray hair (and, at the store, with her coarse gray clothes beneath a bloody white apron), she embodied the role of the laborer as convincingly as any Soviet woman in the propaganda posters about America’s overseas allies that hung in the halls of our grade school during the years of World War Two. Olivia was slender and fair, and even at five-seven or — eight seemed diminutive beside my mother, so when the woman who was used to working in a bloody white apron wielding long knives as sharp as swords and opening and shutting the heavy refrigerator door gave Olivia her hand to shake, I saw not only what Olivia must have looked like as a small child but also what little protection she had against confusion when it came at her full force. Her delicate hand wasn’t just clasped like a baby lamb chop in the big, bearish paw of my mother; she herself was still in the grip of whatever had driven her, only a few years beyond childhood, first to drink and then to the edge of destruction. She was yielding and fragile to the marrow of her bones, a wounded small child, and I finally grasped that only because my mother, even under assault from my father and prepared to go so far as to divorce him, which would be tantamount to killing him — yes, I now saw him dead too — was anything but fragile and yielding. That my father could have gotten my mother to go on her own to see a lawyer about a divorce was a measure not of her weakness but of the crushing power of his inexplicable transformation, of his all at once having been turned inside out by unrelenting intimations of catastrophe.

My mother called Olivia “Miss Hutton” throughout the twenty minutes they were together with me in my hospital room. Otherwise her behavior was impeccable, as was Olivia’s. She asked Olivia no embarrassing questions, did not pry into her background or into what her arranging my flowers might signify about our acquaintance—she practiced tact. I introduced Olivia as the fellow student who was bringing my homework out to me and who was carrying back with her the written assignments I completed in order to keep abreast of my classes. I didn’t once catch her looking at Olivia’s wrists, nor did she register suspicion or disapproval of her in any way. If my mother hadn’t married my father, she could, without difficulty, have held down any number of jobs far more demanding of the skills of diplomacy and the functioning of intelligence than what was required for work in a butcher shop. Her formidable figure belied the finesse she could marshal when circumstances required an astuteness in the ways of life of which my father was ignorant.

Olivia, as I said, didn’t let me down either. She did not even wince at finding herself repeatedly being called Miss Hutton, though I did, each time. What was the something about her that necessitated such formality? It couldn’t be because she wasn’t Jewish. Though my mother was a Newark Jewish provincial of her class and time and background, she wasn’t a stupid provincial, and she knew very well that by his living in the heart of the American Midwest in the middle of the twentieth century, her son was more than likely going to seek out the company of girls born into the predominant, ubiquitous, all but official American faith. Was it Olivia’s appearance that put her off then, the look of privilege that she had, as though she’d never known a single hardship? Was it the slender young female body? Was my mother unprepared for that supple physical delicacy crowned by the auburn abundance of that hair? Why again and again “Miss Hutton” to a mannerly girl of nineteen who had done nothing as far as she knew except to help her recuperating son while he was a postoperative hospital patient? What had affronted her? What had alarmed her? It couldn’t have been the flowers, though they didn’t help. It could only be a quick glimpse of the scar that had made unspeakable and unsayable Olivia’s given name. It was the scar together with the flowers.

The scar had taken possession of my mother, and Olivia knew it, and so did I. We all knew it, which made nearly unendurable listening to whatever words were spoken about anything else. Olivia’s having lasted in the room with my mother for twenty minutes was a heartbreaking feat of gallantry and strength.

As soon as Olivia had left to take the bus back to Winesburg, my mother went into my bathroom, not to wash up but to clean out the sink, the tub, and the toilet bowl with soap and paper towels.

“Ma, don’t,” I called in to her. “You just got off a train. Everything is clean enough.”

“I’m here, it needs it, I’ll do it,” she said.

“It doesn’t need it. They did it this morning first thing.”

But she needed it more than the bathroom needed it. Work — certain people yearn for work, any work, harsh or unsavory as it may be, to drain the harshness from their lives and drive from their minds the killing thoughts. By the time she came out, she was my mother again, scrubbing and scouring having restored the womanly warmth she’d always had at her disposal to give me. I remembered that when I was a child in school, Ma at work would always come to my mind whenever I thought of my mother, Ma at work, but not because work was her burden. To me her maternal grandeur stemmed from her being no less a powerhouse of a butcher than my father.

“So tell me about your studies,” she said, settling into the chair in the corner of the room while I propped myself up against the pillows in my bed. “Tell me about what you’re learning here.”

“American History to 1865. From the first settlements in Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay to the end of the Civil War.”

“And you like that?”

“I like it, Mom, yes.”

“What else do you study?”

“The Principles of American Government.”

“What is that about?”

“How the government works. Its foundations. Its laws. The Constitution. The separation of powers. The three branches. I had civics in high school, but never the government stuff this thoroughly. It’s a good course. We read documents. We read some of the famous Supreme Court cases.”

“That’s wonderful for you. That’s right up your alley. And the teachers?”

“They’re all right. They’re not geniuses, but they’re good enough. They’re not what’s uppermost anyway. I’ve got the books to study, I’ve got the library to use — I’ve got everything a brain requires for an education.”

“And you’re happier away from home?”

“I’m better off, Ma,” I said, and better off, I thought, because you’re not.

“Read me something, darling. Read me something from one of your school books. I want to hear what you’re learning.”

I took the first volume of The Growth of the American Republic that Olivia had brought me from my room and, opening it at random, hit upon the beginning of a chapter I’d already studied, “Jefferson’s Administration,” subtitled “1. The ‘Revolution of 1800.’ ” “ ‘Thomas Jefferson,’ ” I began, “‘ruminating years later on the events of a crowded lifetime, thought that his election to the Presidency marked as real a revolution as that of 1776. He had saved the country from monarchy and militarism, and brought it back to