by Dessa
Matt for President, as far as I was concerned. We hung up and he emailed me a PROMIS.
Descartes was a douchebag in a lot of ways, but I admit I’d always kind of liked his mind-body stuff. I studied philosophy in college, and reading Descartes made it sound like you got to keep your mind clean, in a ziplock baggie, out of the muck the body had to wade through.
Earning a philosophy degree involved a lot of thought experiments. We were always pulling ethical levers on train tracks or harvesting one healthy patient’s organs to distribute to a dozen other sick people, that sort of thing. One hypothetical in particular stuck with me:
Imagine you’re in a loving, monogamous marriage. You’ve got a good job. You’re happy. Then one day a stranger tells you that your life is not what it has seemed: your spouse is cheating on you, doesn’t love you at all. You can learn your true circumstances or the stranger can erase the conversation from your memory, Men-in-Black-style, and you can continue as you were, happily.
It’s essentially a romantic version of the red-pill/blue-pill thing: The Matrix meets The Notebook. And despite how much everyone talks about happiness, I think the majority of us sides with Keanu: we want something even more than we want to be happy. We want to have an authentic experience—to understand our lives, even the sad, lonely, and unsolvable parts.
For most of my life I’d presumed, without much consideration, that being sad meant I was doing something wrong. My brain was making chemicals in the wrong ratios and I was doing a bad job at falling in love and then when it was time to fall out of love, I couldn’t jump out of the damn plane when everyone else did. But maybe my sadness wasn’t just a failure to be happy. Maybe it was a feeling I should try leaning into for a while.
Fortified by my conversation with Matt, I wrote my letter to Lloyd’s of London.
Dear Lloyd’s of London Representative,
I am a songwriter looking for a line of commercial insurance. I make my money writing torch songs and I’d like to buy insurance against a makeup with an ex. (I believe the policy would fall under the Disability category, but I think it’s best conceptualized as the opposite of Divorce Insurance.)
Most of my writing runs on heartache—an asset that I believe can be fairly appraised. I’ve attached a psychometric tool called a PROMIS here.
I’m looking for $40,000 in coverage, to be paid out in the event of a romantic reconciliation that renders me unable to perform professionally in my current line of work.
The likelihood of a settlement, however, is very low. He and I have had many years to sort ourselves out and we haven’t managed it. I’ve recently moved across the country, in fact, to prevent any chance encounters. I live in a stamp-sized apartment now on the Upper East Side and everything in this place I carried up the stairs myself—I’m just stacking up nightstands to make a chest of drawers. The guys at the thrift store greet me by name; I found a Latin bar that I like; and I spent forty dollars at Staples on a huge pad of Post-it notes—I papered the whole kitchen with them, so every time I have an idea I can just pick up a Sharpie and write it on the wall. I’m just a little bit blue, which some people think makes a person self-absorbed, but I don’t find that to be true; I feel sensitized to other people’s sorrow, like I’ve got night vision. I still think of him every day, but the crying jags are over and the dreams about him have stopped or I have stopped remembering them. I bought a keyboard on Craigslist and I’m working long hours, trying to make some music out of this feeling again. It’s a delicate process that’s easy to screw up, like a soufflé or a house of cards, but I know the steps to this particular kind of alchemy very well. It’s as though I’m sitting at a spinning wheel in a room full of hay. And I am the maiden, with her work laid out before her, and I am Rumpelstiltskin who comes to her aid, and I am the heartless king who put her there in the first place, and I am also the hay.
Thanks for your time and consideration. If the premium is affordable, I’ll look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
Dessa.
After a few days without a response to my letter, I decided not to send a third. It’s monastic and it can be a little lonely, but I’m living how I want to live. And if I find myself beset by an unexpected bout of happiness, well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Slaughter #1
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The morning of my mom’s first slaughter, I was twenty-nine, a pescatarian, and living on a rapper’s schedule—I wasn’t usually out of bed at 9 A.M., let alone outdoors, communing with the allergens. But I stood beside her, squinting in the sunlight, waiting for the slaughter guy to arrive. On the other side of an electrified fence, her small herd shaded beneath a stand of trees in the distance. She’d been raising cattle for less than a year and I got the sense she was anxious about the big day. I’d made the ninety-minute drive from Minneapolis to offer a little moral support. I was also morbidly curious; I’d never seen a complex organism die, let alone be killed. Death isn’t usually an event you can pencil into your day planner. Over the phone, Mom had explained that the slaughter guy would come to the farm and do it right there in the pasture. In a matter of minutes, he’d kill the steer, skin it, and butcher it in the open air. Most of my male friends thought he’d be using some sort of superpowered air gun, like the kind in No Country for Old Men. My female friends all supposed he’d just slit the steer’s throat.
My mom has since become an accomplished cattlewoman, but the learning curve that first year was steep. In the spring, she’d tried to castrate a female calf. She and her husband, David, had barely managed to confine their little bulls—and one misidentified heifer—in the handling area when the hired man pulled up to perform the castrations. He made quick work of the first bull and the second, but then reaching in to do the third, he announced, “Wait a minute, this a two-holer.”
My mom decided to become a cowgirl in her sixties. I didn’t love the idea. She’d grown up in tenements in the Bronx, a New York Puerto Rican, and had worked in offices her whole life. During my childhood, we’d raised only gerbils and did even that badly. I’d dropped one when it was still a newborn and ruined it so that its neck bobbed in circles whenever it walked. My mom knew it had to be put out of its misery, but couldn’t bear for either of them to face the job sober. She drugged the broken thing with red wine before taking it outside with a cleaver. To my knowledge, that was her only slaughter to date.
But growing up in New York, she’d always dreamt of living on the prairie. She read the book Silent Spring and became an environmentalist before there was much of a movement to join. She’d left the city as soon as she had the chance, locked it down with my dad, and bought a house in Minneapolis to do the middle-class family thing. She tilled our backyard until it was nearer a field crop than a garden. She dehydrated everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor.
By ten, I’d learned to dye my own muslin in beet juice in the backyard. I planted sweet corn (because it was the closest thing to candy that grew out of dirt) and morning glories (because a flower that could open and close and climb fences seemed at least partially self-aware). I quilted at the Minnesota State Fair and knew most Amish designs by name. There is more than one picture of me in a bonnet. I was sometimes a reluctant participant, but was also an arrogant quilter—my piecework was on point and I knew it.
Sitting in the kitchen with me and my brother, my mom loved to imagine what it would have been like to live in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s era: the heated stones we’d use to warm our frozen bedsheets, the preserves we’d eat during winter months. Her face would brighten as she listed all the things we wouldn’t have. Survival was her favorite game; her dream house would have been made of sod.
She was only a naturalist on nights and weekends, though. Working in communications, she was all executive polish. She wore a dot of Chanel No. 5, black-and-white fitted suits, and small pearl earrings. With long limbs, a narrow waist, and wide-set eye
s, she was more beautiful than I would become. Like most people, I just liked looking at her: a Puerto Rican gazelle right there in the kitchen and in a darted blazer.
Mom had been canning and quilting and catching wild yeast for sourdough starters since before I was born—when those were still things poor people did, before the Great Pinterest Revival. As I became an adult myself, the amplitude of my mother’s enthusiasm for grassland was mysterious to me; prairie is just what happens when you miss your exit. The rap career I was building was not culturally compatible with homebrewed mead or stiff-brimmed bonnets. I toured too much even to keep a houseplant. (Though I tried once to take a basil plant with me on the road. I named him Milagro, miracle in Spanish, and he died in my cup holder.)
My mom was already divorced, remarried, and nearing retirement when she started talking about grass-fed beef. She was such a slight, elegant thing—so easy to imagine crunched, that the idea worried me. I was afraid she’d get kicked or trampled (which is really just kicking without malicious intent) or that she’d just burn through her retirement money and go broke trying to be a cowgirl.
My opinion, however, was not solicited. One December evening, on her commute to her country home, my mom saw a herd grazing on the side of the road. She thought, Those are the kinds of cows I want for my farm. She’d lived modestly for most of her life and had some money saved up for exactly this bovine ambition. She pulled over, knocked on the door of the nearby farmhouse, and asked the eighty-year-old woman who answered if she’d be interested in selling. The elderly woman, who declined to open the screen door, said her husband would have to answer that question—and he was out in the field. My mom, still in her corporate attire, slid a business card in along the doorjamb. On her way back to the main road, she saw the lanky farmer coming in. She headed him off and made an offer right there in the snow. He agreed to sell her five bred cows and one steer. She wrote down the price in a tiny mileage notebook, and asked him to sign the page.
To me, this whole story was like one step above magic beans.
A week later, the cattle were delivered. My mom wrote press releases by day, then changed into work boots at night to mend fences, dig holes, bale hay. She got a big belt buckle. A John Deere hat. And I remembered what it was like to start rapping, when every trapping of the culture was a fresh thrill—Here I am checking a microphone! Here I am in the middle seat of a tour van on the way to OMAHA! Here I am making a thoughtful face in a real mixing studio, pretending to hear a difference when that guy turns the black dial! Even the problems were exciting at the beginning: the cost of hay for her, the delays at the vinyl manufacturer for me; the ill-tempered cows, the sleazy promoters. Complaining is a special pleasure for initiates: it’s proof you’re too familiar to be awestruck anymore; it divides the hobbyist from the glory-worn professional. And it’s intoxicating to hear yourself begin to sound like the thing you’d hoped to be.
On the morning of that first slaughter, the lone steer was slated for harvest. She’d named him Burger. He was now twelve hundred pounds and dark brown with a white stripe around the middle, where a cow would wear a corset. Her breed is called BueLingo and they all have that middle stripe; her neighbors called them Oreo cows. Meat from this first harvest wouldn’t go up for sale; she and David would cook it at home and share some with the neighbors. The slaughter guy, when he arrived, would get to keep the hide.
“Should I call them now?” my mom asked. “They could walk off before he gets here.”
“Then don’t call them now.”
She handed me two cameras, one for stills and one for video. I was supposed to document the occasion for her blog. To promote the farm, she had started a website, a Twitter feed, a radio show, and would eventually print up business cards with a QR code and the tagline Farming with a tiny carbon hoofprint™. I was both impressed and distressed that my mother seemed to know more about podcast distribution networks than I did.
“Boy, I wonder if I should start calling them.”
“Mom, do not call the cows yet.”
My mom spun her wedding ring with her thumb and squinted at the cattle. “Okay.”
I wanted to do something nice for her, but my allergies were starting to kick in, and allergies make it hard for me to be nice to anyone.
My mom surveyed the field, presumably seeing a world of small chores that were invisible to me. I knew she had to roll the hay into bales, but I didn’t know when in the season that was supposed to happen. I knew some of the fence posts needed replacing, but couldn’t tell which ones. And I knew that she and her husband were forever at war with the stones. Their land was very rocky, a problem for bladed equipment. So with bowed heads they walked every acre to find, heft, and set aside the large ones. When they were done, they’d start again; the heavy grey rocks pushed up through the topsoil continuously, unstoppable. Although my mom had described it with only mild irritation, the prospect of this particular duty horrified me—endless, eternally unwinnable. I wanted to say, You know there’s a famous story about that, right? About a guy who has to push a rock forever?
When the slaughter truck arrived, we discovered it was actually a two-man team: Slaughter Guy and Helper Guy. They pulled up in a flatbed pickup, rigged with a little crane in the back. Slaughter Guy wore a grey T-shirt, pulled taut around his belly, thin from wear and washing. He carried a .22 rifle and a thin, curving blade. Helper Guy was smaller and moved laboriously. He spoke only to his employer and did not make eye contact with women.
Slaughter Guy asked earnestly if my mom and I were sisters, to our respective delight and bitter sadness.
After introductions, Mom set out into the field at a fast march, carrying a bucket of corn and a bell. I fumbled with the video camera, afraid to miss the magic moment when the cows were enchanted by her bell and feed. Slaughter Guy said, “Ha. A camera.”
It’s a petty hang-up, but I really don’t like being dismissed. By anyone at all. Doesn’t matter my opinion of them.
“She’s got a website about the farm,” I said. I hooked my fingers through imaginary belt loops and announced in a pretend homesteader’s voice, “I’m just the lowly city kid come home to point the camera.” He laughed—score. I was back in Slaughter Guy’s good graces. I knew my role in this scene: I was a woman in Converse High Tops, obviously in the throes of a serious hay fever, who had tucked her yoga pants into her socks in a last-minute panic about ticks. I was not the boss here, was not a member of the in-crowd. But, having shown Slaughter Guy my underbelly to acknowledge our respective hierarchical positions, we could now resume amicable relations appropriate to our relative status. I confided in neither Slaughter Guy nor Helper Guy that I did not eat red meat.
My mom began to sing a little cow song, which sounded like it had been transposed from a baritone register. She spilled some feed, rang her bell. The cows kept their distance, snubbing my mother’s offered charms. The low-battery signal flashed on my camera. I suspected my mom might be feeling embarrassed in front of me and the guys, didn’t want to look like a rookie. Slaughter Guy interjected with an explanation to save her farmer’s honor: “Well, I don’t think they’re coming; they knew it’s us.” I didn’t hide my wonder in asking him, “Can they really tell it’s you? Is it the smell of the truck?” He wasn’t sure exactly how, but he seemed to think that on some farms, particularly those he’s visited before, the condemned were wise to his purpose.
He reassured my mother, “If they don’t want to come close, I just get the big gun and shoot the son of a bitch.” He pulled the rifle out of the truck. This was not the type of language likely to endear Slaughter Guy to my mom, but I was warming up to him.
“Which one is it?” Slaughter Guy asked. My mom pointed to Burger, his large head down and grazing, his herd tight around him. Slaughter Guy loaded his gun, then hoisted himself into the flatbed to take aim. He would have to shoot through the cows to hit his target, like a sniper aiming at the bank
robber with a hostage in his arms. I wanted to stay close to the action; my mother kept urging me back. I watched Slaughter Guy aim for what seemed like a long time, then the gun bucked against his shoulder and issued an echoing crack. My eyes raced to the herd—they were running again. Did he hit Burger? Where the hell was Burger? I berated myself for watching the gun; I should have been watching the steer. But yes, Mom confirmed that Burger was in the grass. It struck me as strange that we didn’t hear him fall, that such a heavy thing could go down without a thud. We started toward the carcass.
The steer was well shot, right through his big, dark head. Slaughter Guy’s previously cavalier demeanor was replaced by a shrewd taskmaster’s as he issued crisp directions to Helper Guy. At this point in the process, speed became important. The faster the carcass was quartered and hauled off, the less meat would have to be cut away from the surface to prevent flies and other nasties from contaminating the meat.
The two men ran hooks through the steer’s rear ankles. Using the crane mounted on the truck, they hoisted the carcass into the air so it hung upside down, tongue lolling, blood draining into the grass. Hung that way, the steer made a rough crucifix against the sky. It looked like he had somehow flipped into the air with uncowlike agility—frozen in one last leap. The steer’s belly was slit, his corset opened, so that Helper Guy could pull his guts onto the ground. They came out in one neat package; there was some sort of membrane holding them all together, as if he has been pre-bagged, conveniently designed to come apart. Burger was decapitated and skinned. Eventually he was chainsawed down the center, so that his two halves swung freely, difficult to reimagine whole.
