About Crows

Robert Frost in the Slaughterhouse

8 Ro b ert Fros t i n t h e Slau g h t er h o use Flies freeze into puddles beneath the dripping meat hooks as we maze the swinging, skinned bodies to the backroom adjacent the loading docks: a group of four or five men— day laborers and a driver— funnel a steer from a wooden cart into the “jaws of death.” Hind legs quickly roped, the beast is pulleyed into the air, where they cut its throat and drain the warm blood into a pail held by a young boy, almost my age, dancing perilously beneath. All afternoon Father drinks cup after cup to cure the sickness that has settled in his lungs, and by the time we squint out into the sun, my jaw is numb—though the fog has lifted one more day off the distant hills of Sausalito and Marin. ...