Gutted

Lise Funderburg

Word Count 998

Because it was his birthday, I did not nag my husband about the blood spatters he'd left on the window above the kitchen sink. I did not raise a stink over the clumps of hair and flesh crusting the five doorknobs between the kitchen and garage. Because it was his birthday, I zipped my lip and spritzed ammonia onto the speckled glass. I sprayed bleach solution across the crimson-streaked counters and silently wiped down the sill, faucet, and backsplash. It was the least I could do on his special day. If you're with a person long enough, you seize whatever gifting ideas come, including the priceless gift of tolerance.

When people talk about the components of a good marriage, they often cite shared interests as a key to longevity. They aren't married to John. Now well into our second decade together, it has become clearer with each passing year that our ticket to matrimonial harmony has been the willingness to put up with interests that don’t interest us at all. John, for example, holds down a respectable office job by day, but at night and on weekends, he engages in home butchery and probiotic alchemy. It's all blood, guts, and rot, a constant wagering of flavor against inedibility in a microbial game of Chicken. Sometimes played with actual chicken. Layer onto John's risk-taking bent a Calvinist aversion to "wasting" money on anything he could make himself—never mind that the offending price per pound likely has to do with the overhead of producing food in a sanitary, licensed, and insured venue—and he has tried to make just about everything you would or would not care to eat. Pastrami, prosciutto, and bacon. Pickled fiddleheads, preserved egg yolks, and salt-cured lemons. Pasta. Home-roasted coffee beans. Mostarda. Much of this involves shooting flames and sharpened carbon steel. Where other people's kitchen junk drawers stockpile plastic flatware and arthritic twist ties, ours holds styptic pencils, finger cots, and antibiotic-infused bandages.

John doesn't hunt, but he knows a guy who does, and that guy's bow hunting club culls our suburban deer population annually, downgrading its status from pestilence to pest. The hunters aren't in it for the venison, so throughout the fall and early winter, whenever John gets The Call, he drops what he's doing and zips off to the parking lots of agreed-upon meeting points, donut franchises or gas stations, where field-dressed corpses, sometimes swaddled in black plastic and sometimes naked to the eye, are deposited into the back of his Ford Ranger. And behold, our garage is thus transformed into an abattoir so that later, in the relative plein air safety of our driveway, whole animals of various stripes can be deconstructed on plywood stretched across sawhorses.

This repurposing gives me pause. I have crossed this outbuilding's threshold for SnoMelt or the odd screwdriver only to find a skinned doe hanging from the rafter, droplets of blood falling from her nose onto the cement floor. With larger deer, there will sometimes be signs of struggle, and upon witnessing the aftermath of John singlehandedly wrestling a carcass onto the hoist, I have suggested, in the gentlest and most encouraging of tones, that we might want to keep blood off surfaces other than the cement floor: my potting bench, for example; the circular saw; our granddaughter's car seat. Maybe this is conjecture rather than science, but I don’t believe the blood of four-legged animals that host eight-legged carriers of blood-infecting Lyme disease is a blood that should come in contact with a two-legged’s sippy cup. Of equal, if not greater concern, is climate change. Not the headline-grabbing polar ice melts and shifting sea levels that will wipe out Miami Beach condos and turn Manhattan into a wading pool, but temperature fluctuations we’re already feeling here in Mid-Atlantic Philadelphia. When the thermometer roller-coasters 40 degrees between a Monday and a Tuesday, today's deersicle could turn into tomorrow's putrid maggot lair.

John tut-tuts my fears. It'll stay cold enough, he will say before heading off to work in a light jacket. Just keep the garage door closed.

To be fair, not all ventures involve bloodletting, like the spring John set out to make a five-gallon carboy of India Pale Ale. The results changed my lifelong antipathy toward beer: a drink I'd never cared for I soon had to wean myself from. It was hoppy but not punishingly so; it tasted fresh and from the earth, neither a quality I'd ever associated with booze. He has also fermented cider from a custom apple juice blend he special-ordered and carted back from a farmer in Greenfield, Massachusetts, 277 miles from our home. From the start, John nailed it, producing a balanced, complex cider that was on the dry side, edged with tannins and a touch of effervescence. Light in alcohol, great with pork, a hit with my 94-year-old mother and nearly teetotaling sisters. So what if one stovetop attempt at pasteurization erupted, blanketing kitchen surfaces with shattered glass and leaving permanent dents in the ceiling? No one ended up in the emergency room, the gauge by which we determine the wisdom of all experimental undertakings.

Once the cider is in its carboys and bowhunting season has ended, John will swing by the wholesale restaurant supply house for which he has finagled a membership card and bring home a load of Boston butts or shoulders to grind or rub or smoke. He thaws out packs of frozen offal that have collected in the basement freezer and mixes them with the ground meat to produce family-sized bricks of pâté. Too much viscera for me, but the other ground-meat destination, sausages, I never tire of: seasonal rotations of chorizo, sage, Italian, and a fiery Thai version stuffed into thumb-sized casings, which we wrap in lettuce and top with mint leaves and basil leaves and slivers of ginger and squeezes of lime. And which is excellent, as it happens, with beer.

Lise's books include, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity. Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, and Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents. She conceived, commissioned, and edited an anthology of original work, Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents. Her essays have appeared in Threepenny Review, Harper's, New England Review, Cimarron, Broad Street, Brevity, The Nation, New York Times, Chattahoochee Review, Oprah Magazine, National Geographic, TIME, Best African American Essays, and elsewhere. She is a lecturer in creative nonfiction at The University of Pennsylvania. www.lisefunderburg.com