Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych

Chapter 18

39 ANOTHER GOVERNESS The butcher had a daughter. The butcher worked in the back of the shop and the butcher’s daughter worked in the front of the shop. When people passed the shop, it was the butcher ’s daughter they saw through the window. Everywhere the butcher’s daughter went the townspeople recognized her from the butcher shop, but if they saw the butcher they did not know him, except that the butcher’s nails were black, because blood had dried beneath the butcher’s nails, and the butcher had a thick pad of skin on his thumb from always chopping with the heavy knife. The townspeople did not connect the butcher’s face with the butcher shop. Instead, it was the butcher’s daughter that they pictured when they thought of the butcher shop. The butcher’s daughter was a very black girl, black eyes and hair and she laughed so that the dark inside of her mouth was always visible and her large dark lips covered her white teeth. Men made special trips past the butcher shop 18 40 JOANNA RUOCCO to look at the butcher’s daughter. Other girls in the town were very black but none of them caused the men to make special trips just to look through the window at the darkness inside their big, wide mouths. One day, an old woman bought a calf’s liver from the butcher shop and died. When the townspeople thought about the bad liver that killed the old woman, they pictured the butcher’s daughter and they could not be so angry anymore. The butcher’s daughter was a very black, very merry girl and the townspeople connected her face with the butcher shop and her dark and full body that the men liked to look at through the butcher shop window, and they were not so angry about the death of the old woman. In the back of the shop, the butcher cut the meat and in the front of the shop, the butcher’s daughter stood behind the counter with meat behind her on the hooks. Then a pig-sticker moved to town. He was young and strong and soon the townspeople were bringing him their pigs to stick and cut into good pieces of meat. The townspeople still came to the butcher shop for the heads and livers and hearts and tongues and skirts of cattle and sheep, but they bought their bacon from the pig-sticker. One day, a woman fed a calf’s liver from the butcher shop to her young son and he died. The woman came into the butcher shop and slapped and scratched the face of the butcher’s daughter. The butcher’s daughter walked around the counter. She pushed the woman backwards so hard that the woman fell through the butcher shop window and the glass went into the woman’s body and deep into the kidneys and the rump of the woman and she bled in a great spout and quickly the blood thickened and turned very black and the woman died. The butcher was cutting meat in the back of the shop. He did not come to the front of the shop. He did want anyone to connect his face with the dead woman who had fallen through the window in the front of the shop. He cut meat in the back of the shop 41 ANOTHER GOVERNESS and the butcher’s daughter covered the woman with her apron in the front of the shop until the woman’s people came and took the woman away. In the evening, the butcher asked his daughter to go away. The butcher loved his daughter. She was a very black, very merry girl and the butcher had no one else to stand in the front of the shop, but the butcher had decided that she had to go away. The butcher’s daughter left the shop merrily. The butcher’s daughter thought she might marry the pig-sticker, who was young and strong and did a good business and would soon have a shop of his own, but the pig-sticker had decided to marry the steel-grinder’s daughter. Everywhere the butcher’s daughter went, the townspeople recognized her from the butcher shop and they closed their doors to her. Men pelted her with old black-spotted meat. A washerwoman said she would hire the...