About the tools of her trade

My grandmother was a butcher. This is a true story.

No more than two weeks ago I had in my hand two tools, weapons really, that my grandmother used to separate muscle from tendon from bone. Once each part of the animal was properly separated, another tool would weigh it accordingly, for sale.

She tended to a trade that her mother had taught her: butchery. She didn’t slaughter the animals as such, she paid someone else to do that, she just carved up the pink and red carcasses for sale.

As a child, I loved going in to the room in her house where she would carve and sell the meat. I don’t know why I loved that room so much, it wasn’t particularly nice. In fact, it was really dank and dark and always had a very thick sickly smell of tallow and damp newspapers. It also looked as you would expect, grisly hooks hanging from the ceiling holding all sorts of animal parts for sale.

I loved that room, there was something rather alive about it, despite its purpose. People would come in regularly to buy what they needed, each purchase requiring my grandmother to use her clunky and complicated scales to make sure the right amount was sold for the right price. There was always conversation, sound, colour and, movement. Every Sunday when we would visit my grandmother, I loved spending as much time in there as possible.

My grandmother never tried to shield me from the realities of what she did, it was just what she did and I think in some way, she thought my interest in her craft was kind of fantastic. I wasn’t ever allowed to watch the slaughter however, that used to happen downstairs in the basement. I once snuck out to see how it was done, I won’t ever forget watching that cow die and how incredibly bright red it’s blood was… and how much blood. I would have been no more than five years old.

Recently, while holding her old axe and scales in my hands, I got to thinking about her, about what her life must have been like. Holding her work tools, I felt this connection to her as a woman not just as my grandmother. A woman who had to work in the demanding job of carving and separating flesh until she was 65.

She wasn’t just my grandmother anymore, a woman who as far as I was concerned, existed only to devote herself to me. She was a woman, with struggles, thoughts, dreams, ambitions and challenges who also happened to be my grandmother.

It’s not as if I wasn’t aware that my grandmother was a woman, it’s just that I never stopped to think about her being an adult in the same way that I am: imperfect, scared, insecure, unsure but surviving.

I always thought of her as that kind, soft spoken woman who had such tightly curled jet-black hair that always smelled of Vaseline hair oil. I always thought of her as that wonderful lady, with the soft but steady hands that would always make me chicken noodle soup and give me warm milk with a tiny amount of coffee added. Or who, as a treat, used to give me cold sugar water, or who would make one of my cousins take me to the traditional Easter festivities of her village.

My memories of my grandmother were those of a favourite grandson, a five year old, a boy. However, holding the heavy and rusted tools that she used for years made me relate to her as a fellow adult. I wondered how many nights did she lie awake wondering how, as a sole parent, she would feed her children and put them through school. I thought about how hard it must have been to continue trading through the civil war, which claimed the lives of thousands. Apparently both the government soldiers and the leftist guerrillas would demand their respective pounds of flesh from her butchery to supplement their own munitions.

I remember once the government had declared martial law and imposed a curfew because the civil war was well and truly raging so my grandmother hurriedly stopped my frantic playing and ushered us inside, locking all doors and barricading all windows. It was getting late she said, I had no option but to agree.

We had to go to sleep, there was a war on.

I learned that night that the night itself was to be feared, that’s when the death squads did their work. The dead were always found at dawn.

As a child, I resented being told to stop playing by my grandmother that night. Holding her tools in my hands, all I could think about was how she must have felt then, what she must have thought, was she scared? I don’t remember feeling scared, but maybe that’s because my grandmother felt enough fear for the both of us.

It’s a strange feeling, relating to your family as people first and family second because it’s usually the other way around. How can it not be? In the normal course of events, you grow up in and with your family until death do you part. Your stories are intertwined and often, so if all goes well you will just forever only relate to them as your family members first and foremost because there isn’t a reason to not do this.

However, I was separated from my grandmother because of that civil war when I was five years old, reunited again when I was eight, separated once more at age 11 only to be reunited for one last time when I was 21.

When I did return to her old shop, some fifteen years later as a 36 year old, she had already died. I don’t know if this non-linear relationship I had with her makes it easier to separate the myth of her from the legend of her from the everyday person she must have been. And how I wanted to talk to that person, just one last conversation, adult to adult. But what would I even say?

What I do know, is that in that moment while I held her old axe, I felt more connected to who I was than I ever have before. I felt that she was a part of me, she wasn’t just the kind old lady of myth, she was a woman, and a worker with a story that didn’t always involve me. In fact, her being my grandmother was only a small part of her life.

And how I missed her.

How I miss you, and above all how I missed out on knowing who you were, instead of just what you were to me.