love and the butcher knife

They say good marriages are built on trust, and I've discovered this is never truer than when the love of your life, cleaver in hand, asks you to help him butcher a pig.

I hesitated.

It wasn't the pooling blood or the strings of sinew, the sharp edge of the leg bone that got broken by the arrowhead, or the trenchant smell of freshly slaughtered wild animal. It wasn't even the way the spinal cord glopped out of the vertebral column like a noodle from a straw, although that was a little startling. I grew up in Chinatown butcher stalls, but that noodle, I'll admit, is something I'd never seen before. 

But none of that made me recoil.

It was the cleaver.

He had skinned, deboned and given away much of the meat the day before, and all that was left were the ribs. They needed to be separated from the spine, and for that, he needed a hand to grip the bones while he cleaved.

Now, this had been my mom's cleaver, and as I got a good grip on the fleshy bones, I thought of Kevin Costner, my favorite Robin Hood of all time, telling Alan Rickman in their final duel that he would never fear his father's sword. But who the hell was I kidding? I definitely feared my mother's cleaver, especially when she'd been the one holding it!

Think about it: you can be tentative with a paring knife; you can be delicate with a boning knife. You can be elegant with a carver. You can make tiny mistakes and it'll be okay - one half of the strawberry will be larger; maybe your spiral ham will be kind of uneven. But you can't hesitate or miscalculate with a cleaver. And it's one thing to mind your own left hand while your right hand brings down the blade. But it's another when you have to worry about not chopping off your wife's fingers in your quest for super fresh lechón. And another still when you are the wife with the fingers in question.

Long story short - it was a quick twenty minutes of work, but it said a lot about how far we've come from the day we met. I didn't verbalize any of this while he was cleaving, but at one point he looked up and said, "Don't worry," just before he brought the knife down squarely into the bone. It wasn't a clean cut, and he had to do it again - several times. I gripped and he cleaved; he didn't hesitate and I didn't let go. I still have ten fingers; he has his first really good hunting story. We have a freezer full of fresh pork and a good marriage, and I couldn't ask for more.