Sometimes, it took two bullets to bring down the steer. Once, when I was a little girl, we’d been halfway to the barn when a second boom rattled across the pasture. Your gramps always had a revolver in case the rifle, or the person shooting it, failed. When the kids in our family were old enough to be trusted with a gun, we were all given the choice to help kill the steer—otherwise  we were to keep inside until after the shot was fired. 

One by one, my brother and older male cousins took their place at the barn. Us girls chose to stay behind with the younger kids. We waited in the house until our parents drug ropes tied to the back of your great-grandpa’s four-wheel drive to wherever the animal fell. Outside, we gulped the stinging air and exhaled great puffs of fog. Butchering was always at dawn on a Saturday in mid-October, cool enough so the meat wouldn’t spoil, but not so far into fall to interfere with deer hunting. When Grandpa wrote the date on the kitchen calendar, it was as firm as Thanksgiving or Christmas.

We crunched across the frozen grass in shoes that pinched our toes, the ones kept in the backs of closets and often discarded after butchering. The flannel shirts your great-grandma lent us to protect our regular clothes did little against the cold. We rolled up the sleeves until the threadbare fabric bulged at our wrists like a pair of donuts. We longed for gloves but knew they’d only get in the way.

When we reached the fence, we bickered over who would manage the gate. This would go on until our parents gathered beneath the tall H-frame in the middle pasture. We’d let the youngest slide the slat and make the oldest double-check the gate after we passed through.

“We battled for the honor of carrying the steaming liver, heart, 
and tongue, across the front pasture to the house.”

By the time we arrived, the steer’s throat was slit, and steaming blood pooled in the barnyard hay. It sounds gruesome, I know, but you get used to it. The metallic tang awakened something primitive. Everything looked crisper in the weak light, the red more vibrant.

Even after years of experience, we still jumped whenever the steer jerked or a muscle quivered. Those post-mortem twitches startled us more than any zombie movie.

Still, we inched closer, trying to reconcile what lay before us with the calf we’d named while holding a warm bottle to eager lips. We knew, even then, that after two summers we’d be standing over the animal, arguing whether we’d just killed Pepper or Oreo.

As we debated, our parents set a gambrel between the steer’s back legs and threaded hooks, tied to the ropes attached to the vehicle, between tendon and bone. Your gramps and his siblings worked in thick pants, flannels, and boots that fit, though were seldom worn.

After the hooks were set in the carcass, Grandpa revved the four-wheel drive, affectionately nicknamed his run-about vehicle, smearing a red path across the grass. He had a sedan for trips into town and church, but a ride in the run-about meant something more exciting than browsing the aisles at the IGA or settling into a hard pew: An exhilarating bounce down rutted mountain roads or, in this case, dragging a 1,000-pound steer across the field to the pulley we used to hoist it into the air.

There was a process that could only be learned by watching. Your great-grandpa told everyone which tasks they’d watched enough to perform. Our parents followed the steps, sometimes narrating their movements, sometimes lost in them. We fetched twine and newspaper for the unpleasant but necessary job of tying off the rectum. No one but Grandpa wanted that responsibility. It was disgusting, even by our standards. And if you messed up, you could dirty the meat.

We battled for the honor of carrying the steaming liver, heart, and tongue, across the front pasture to the house. The bucket weighed more than one set of arms could manage, so a pair of cousins shared the task. Never siblings. Siblings were likely to fight along the way and spill the offal.

Those who had reached a certain age, too young for the rifle yet old enough to handle a knife, were skinners. Before we began, Grandpa reminded us not to nick the hide, which he sold to recoup some of the cost of raising the steer. The adults made the first cuts at the legs and worked off enough of the hide to grip. We wrapped handfuls of skin and coarse hair around our freezing fingers, coating our nails with blood that took a scrub brush to wash clean. With razor-sharp knives, we severed the thin connective tissue with varying skill and speed. Though each gash lowered the hide’s value, Grandpa allowed mistakes, knowing it was the only way we’d be able to teach our own children.

Our parents pulled the ropes of the block and tackle rigging, lifting the carcass to a slight angle and spilling the remaining entrails with a slurp. We kept skinning until the hide lay on the ground like a reversed rug. Once the meat had been tugged several feet into the air, Grandpa would pat one of the salvaged utility poles that formed the sides of the H-frame, as though congratulating it, and himself, on a job well done.

Your great-grandpa had worked forty years as a lineman for the power company. The ground under our outgrown shoes was not the vast farmland of the prior generations who scratched out a living in rural Appalachia, but five acres to supplement the family’s fortunes after uprooting to the Shenandoah Valley for better prospects. A couple cows, a few pigs, a massive vegetable garden to stretch an electrician’s paycheck and give a taste of a different life.

~

The pig barn had long sat empty. The daily work became difficult for your great-grandparents once your gramps and his siblings left for college and careers of their own. When Grandpa’s doctor told him not to eat pork, he stopped raising pigs. Our parents told stories of hogs with sharp teeth and ornery dispositions to ease the sting of never naming a piglet. All those years later, Grandma still had a bit of lye soap, rendered from the fat of the last hog. She reserved the brittle bars to treat poison ivy. We complained when the harsh soap scrapped our bubbled skin, but she insisted it dried the rash better than anything from the pharmacy.

During our summer visits, we’d spend hours in the garden with its rows of corn, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, and cabbages. Not to mention the squash, cucumbers, and red slashes of rhubarb crawling beneath a canopy of lush leaves. Each visit offered a novel task. We eagerly snapped beans, shucked corn, and peeled tomatoes while our parents complained of the countless hours of their own childhoods lost to the sweltering kitchen or hoeing rows in the garden. It took days of preparation to serve summer with every meal. By the time school started, jars lined Grandma and Grandpa’s cellar, and neatly labeled containers filled the freezer.

Despite his complaints, every summer your gramps left his air-conditioned office and dipped his hands into rows of heirloom tomatoes. Not because he had to, but because he couldn’t stomach the perfect spheres from the grocery store. He claims store-bought tomatoes are as tasteless as the cardboard they’re shipped in. The tomatoes he and your great-grandparents grew looked deformed until peeled and sliced thick. We ate sandwiches until our mouths grew canker sores. From the best tomatoes, Grandpa removed the tiny seeds with care and dried them on white cloths as pure as communion linen.

~

Our parents adjusted from boardrooms to barns with reptilian ease. The day before butchering, they donned suits and dress slacks and drifted into buildings to work like all the other moms and dads. With the same casualness, they fetched a chainsaw and placed a ladder under a swinging carcass.

We braced for the noise and stepped back from the spray of bone and tissue as the mechanical teeth ate through the spine. Once, when the flesh swung apart, the spinal cord remained intact.

We passed it around with reverence, at first. Then someone remarked how similar it felt to the sticky hands spat from toy vending machines. All solemnity was lost until Grandpa reminded us to mind the chainsaw. Our parents laughed and prepared to make the final cuts when a shrill “Oh my God” rose from the road.

A couple in Spandex pedaled by on Route 727, their eyes wide. They clearly hadn’t anticipated slaughter on their bike ride through the picturesque hills and farms that surrounded your great-grandparents’ quaint town.

“…in those days, butchering an animal was unremarkable 
in the Shenandoah Valley, to anyone rooted in the open spaces”

We’d heard the reaction many times before. While some of us called out the hypocrisy of burger-eating boys and girls before trying to blend back in, those of us who wanted to be “normal” by suburban standards didn’t mention the source of our Sunday pot roasts.

But in those days, butchering an animal was unremarkable in the Shenandoah Valley, to anyone rooted in the open spaces that had pulled the cyclists from their usual lives. We raised our bloodied hands and waved.

“Look away,” one cyclist snapped to the other. They averted their eyes and pedaled faster to reclaim the pastoral.

Our parents revved the chainsaw and worked together to quarter the meat at the third rib, dropping the shoulders into the utility trailer hitched to the run-about. The back two quarters soon followed, leaving only a pair of fetlock joints and hooves dangling from the hooks.

As Grandpa drove to the processor—who would age, then package the beef into paper-wrapped parcels—we discussed what to do the rest of the day. We usually had barbecued chicken for dinner since, by that point, no one wanted steak. Then we’d pile into cars and head to the mall for a movie, sharing overpriced popcorn and claiming a slice of weekend normalcy we could tell our friends about on Monday.

I’m sorry I can only tell you about these things, skills learned by watching and taught by doing. I collected diplomas instead of heirloom seeds so we can live in a big house with a small yard and never worry about grocery money. We pay others to mow the grass and weed the flower beds because I don’t want to waste a precious moment outdoors with work. To be fair, nothing I ever did at your great grandparents’ felt like labor. Unlike the generations before us, we played at being farmers, enchanted with the difference from our suburban lives, much like those cyclists who relished the bucolic beauty of the countryside but cringed when confronted with gritty realism.

I know ours is a life beyond my grandparents’ wildest dreams. Each generation surpassed the prosperity of the one before, our comfort purchased with their hard labor. But sometimes, standing alone in the meat section, I dip my uncalloused hands into a refrigerated case and think back to those cold October mornings. I let my fingers chill, longing for the family I rarely see and the life you almost had.

Born in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, Kathryn Hively has been migrating northeast for two decades. She holds an MFA from George Mason University, and her work has appeared in Scary Mommy, Ravishly, and Prime Number Magazine, among others. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two daughters.