All Mortal Flesh

THIRTY-ONE

It was full dark outside now, and the falling snow flashed like a thousand stars in the light from the MacEntyres’ garage. Clare was surprised to see Alanna MacEntyre behind the Subaru, stomping her feet and beating on her arms to keep warm.

“My brother would like to see you,” she said, jerking her thumb back toward the barn, where a row of cell-like windows glowed with liquid light. “There’s something he wanted to say without Mom listening in.”

So. She and Russ had been right when they guessed the boys had been up to something more than spinning tires on country roads. “Thanks,” she said. “Are you headed back that way?”

“Un-uh. My chores are done.”

“And you waited around in the snow to give me your brother’s message? You’re a good sport.”

The girl looked at her disbelievingly. “No,” she said. “I’m smart about not pissing my big brother off.” Then she shook her head-grown-ups!-and disappeared into the mudroom without another word.

Clare crossed Old Route 100 cautiously. The blacktop was whitetop now, even the recent boot prints of the MacEntyre children fading fast as the snow accumulated. The massive tractor-and haywagon-sized doors that had caught Clare’s eye when she drove past earlier were, she realized, on the second floor of the barn, atop an earthen ramp that was slick with snow. The row of windows was below it, at waist height. She found the door, an ancient accumulation of boards so low she had to duck to go through it, and entered into a blast of warm air and smells: the musky green of sweet hay and clover, the plowed-earth scent of manure, the acrid methane sting of urine. Once down four steps she could straighten comfortably, although a tall man would still have collected cobwebs in his hair.

“Aaron?” she called. She was in a narrow chute, its wooden walls hung with farm implements that could have doubled for medieval torture devices, its floor crowded by tightly covered galvanized cans. She walked forward and found herself near the midpoint of an aisle stretching from one end of the barn to the other, dividing two long rows of stalls where scruffy red-haired cattle gazed upon her in rumination. Halfway between where she stood and the far wall a low wagon squatted, half filled with a reeking mound of wet straw and manure.

“Aaron?”

“Down here,” he called, and emerged from a stall near the wagon leading a steer, which, as Clare got closer, seemed to be the approximate shape and size of an Abrams tank. He clipped the beast’s lead to a ring and pulled a pitchfork from where it stood quivering in the muck.

Clare skirted the behemoth and peered over the edge of the stall. “Your sister said you wanted to see me.”

“Yeah.” With quick, efficient motions, he began pitching the soiled straw out the stall door, grunting with the effort.

While Clare waited for him to continue, she glanced around. The beams and joists showed its age, but like every other working barn she had seen in the North Country, it was meticulously clean. Farmers might neglect their children, their spouses, themselves, but they never neglected their cows. She caught the dark and liquid eye of the stall’s inhabitant, and the steer lowed at her. Red freckles dotted its pink nose. It was so sweet-faced, it was hard to imagine anyone turning it into hamburger and ribs.

“It’s a Gelbvieh,” Aaron said in her ear. She jumped. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no,” she said. “I hadn’t noticed you’d finished. What’s a Gelbvieh?”

“Prinz.” As if recognizing its name, the steer thrust its nose into Clare’s palm. It was soft and cool and snuffly wet. “It’s a German breed known for the flavor of their meat. They have just the right, you know, mix of fat and muscle.” He reached up, grabbed a long loop dangling from a trapdoor, and, stepping into the center aisle, pulled it open. Straw torrented into the stall. Clare couldn’t tell how much was enough, but apparently Aaron could, as he snapped the door back into place and picked up his pitchfork again. He had his routine down pat. The bedding scattered across the floor without a single wasted motion on his part.

“I told your mother I might think about ordering a side of beef,” Clare said.

He emerged from the stall and unclipped the animal, leading it unresisting into its pen. “Prinz here’s ready, ain’tcha, big boy? We could do him tonight, let him hang for a few days, and have him all wrapped up for you by next Tuesday.” Clare made a noise. Aaron stepped out of the stall and latched it shut. “That’s if you want to let it bleed out and age a bit. Tastes best that way, you know.”

The steer had found its way to its hayrack and was contemplatively munching its hay. “I don’t know,” Clare said. “It’s a lot harder to think of it as pot roast once you’ve looked into its eyes.”

The boy shook his head. “It’s meat. It just comes prepackaged in a way that lets it feed and water itself. Really, it’s not any different than a watermelon.”

“A watermelon doesn’t have a pink nose.”

He gave her a look that was sly and a little challenging. “Wanna see where we do it?”

Clearly, he expected her to recoil in horror and decline. “Okay,” she said.

He led her back the way she had come, past the narrow entryway and stairs, past the remaining rows of placid cattle, until they came to a door set in a track at the end of the barn. Of necessity, it was low, but wide enough to have let the two of them and Prinz pass through, side by side. Clare half expected to see ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE carved around the frame, but instead there was a permit from the New York State Department of Health, certifying that the premises had passed inspection and that the operators were licensed to process meat for human consumption, etc., etc.

Aaron rolled the door open and flicked on a switch. Fluorescent lights sprang up, mercilessly lighting every nook and cranny of the slaughterhouse. Clare could tell at once they were a recent addition to the barn. She and Aaron reflected blurrily in the stainless steel plating along the walls. Four sides of beef hung from the ceiling, with several hooks free for the taking. The butchering side, identifiable by its steel table, rolls of paper, scales, and an armory of knives, was separated from the-what should she call it? killing floor? abattoir?-by a steel and tile divider. One side was hung with a deep steel sink; the other had two heavy-duty hoses coiled on rubber drums. On both sides of the divider, the smooth concrete floor was centered with a large grated drain.

“It’s… cleaner than I would have thought,” Clare said. Her breath plumed in the chill. “How come it’s so much colder than the barn?”

Aaron pointed to a series of narrow vents running along the top three walls. “We keep them open in the winter. Dad installed a thermostat switch, so if the temperature goes above forty-five degrees the AC kicks in.”

“It doesn’t look that much different from the butcher shop in the IGA.” She glanced at the rings on the wall where the unsuspecting animal would be chained. “Except for that, of course.”

“We can have ’em both in the same place because we’re so small. We don’t ever process more than one steer at a time.” Aaron crossed the floor to a metal locker and opened it. “In here’s the captive bolt gun and the bone saws. See, we cross-tie the steer”-he moved to the rings to demonstrate-“and then Dad uses the bolt gun in the middle of its forehead. The steel bolt punches through the skull, through the brain, the animal goes down on its knees, and then-” He made a slicing motion through an imaginary neck.

Clare looked away. Her eyes fell on the collection of knives, and she moved closer to examine them. “Your dad leaves all this unsecured? That doesn’t seem very safe.”

“You can padlock the door if you need to. But nobody’s supposed to come in here unless they’re, you know, working.”

She gave him a crooked smile. “Are you telling me you’ve never brought your friends in here to give them a good creep-out? Or maybe a girl, so she can scream and hold on to your neck? I bet with the lights out, this place is better than the haunted house at the fair.”

Aaron ducked his face, but not quickly enough to hide his grin.

“Has Quinn Tracey ever been in here?”

He looked up again. “Sure. He thinks it’s way cool. His mom and dad-they just want their meat to appear in little plastic packages at the supermarket. God forbid you see how it actually gets there. But Quinn’s not like that. To tell the truth”-he dropped his voice-“he wants my life. He’d love to be a farmer, or a soldier. Of course, he can’t tell his ps, because they’d have a heart attack if he didn’t go to college.”

Clare leaned on the stainless steel table. In size and height, it was not unlike the altar at her church. A chill reminder that her God had once required the blood of animals to be spilled before Him as a sin offering. “Aaron,” she said. “What was it you wanted to tell me that you couldn’t say in front of your mother?”

He folded his arms and stared at his boots. When he finally looked up at her, his face was a picture of indecision. “I’m not sure if I should tell this. Quinn’s my best friend, and I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

“You’re a smart boy, Aaron. I think you know that if Quinn’s doing something that could get him into trouble, sooner or later he’ll be found out.” Clare ran her fingers across the surface of the table. She could trace a score of fine lines almost invisible to the eye. The memory of the knife. “The question is, will he be found out before or after he hurts himself?”

“It’s not-I don’t know that he’s doing something.” Aaron blew out an exasperated breath. “Okay, this is the thing: We didn’t just drive by the Van Alstynes’ house. Quinn parked the truck and went in. He said he hadn’t been paid. He was in there for a long time.”

“How long?”

“I dunno. I listened to maybe half a CD while I was waiting.”

“So, half an hour or thereabouts?”

“That sounds right. So then he came out, and he was acting all weird. We drove off, and that was the end of it, right? Except later? At school? He told me that we had never stopped there. We just drove by.”

“Did you really see the Honda Civic in the driveway?”

“Yeah, that was there. That was why, after we found out Mrs. Van Alstyne had been killed, I thought we should say something to the police. Then Quinn told me we couldn’t, because Chief Van Alstyne had been there at the house.”

Clare went very still. “He said he saw the chief there?”

“Uh…” Aaron’s dark eyes unfocused as he thought. “No. The chief had been there, that’s what he said. I don’t know what he saw, but whatever it was, it scared him.”

“Quinn called the police, you know. He gave them the make and license number of the Honda Civic.”

“I know. He asked me to back up his story if anyone asked me.” The boy’s face was a mask of misery. “Have I done the right thing? I don’t want to make it sound like Quinn did anything bad. And I really don’t want to cause trouble for the police chief.”

Clare touched his arm. “You’re not. At least some of what Quinn told you was a lie.”

Aaron’s eyes widened. “How do you know?”

“Because I know the chief wasn’t at his house on Sunday afternoon.”