Butcher by Gary C. King Read Free Book Online Page B

feeding the chickens and taking care of the pigs, and he couldn’t keep the calf with him every waking minute, even though he would have liked to if it had been possible.
    One day, approximately three weeks after he had purchased the calf, Willie went down to the barn to feed his new prized possession, but it wasn’t there. He looked around the barn for it, and at first thought that perhaps it had somehow gotten out. The door, however, had been closed and locked, so he reasoned that it couldn’t have gotten out on its own. After spending a few minutes looking for his calf outside, he walked over to the area that he called “the piggery,” which was really nothing more than a slaughterhouse, where the pigs were butchered. He thought that the calf might have wandered over there. When he went inside, he got one of the first major shocks of his life. His calf was there, all right, hanging upside down, slaughtered, just like one of the pigs.
    “They butchered my calf on me,” Willie recalled.
    He was furious, and couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened to him. He refused to speak to anyone for several days, and “locked everybody out of my own mind…. Oh boy, was I mad.”
    His dad eventually paid him $40 for the calf, which was good money in those days, but it did little to placate him for what had happened to the calf that he had planned to keep for a long, long time. He was told that he could take the money and buy another calf, but Willie wanted no part of that—the calf was to have been with him for life. It was then that he realized that life held little, if any, permanence.
    “We’re only here for so long, and that’s it,” he said in the tape-recorded message to Victoria. “When your time is over, your time is over.”
    Although Willie couldn’t remember the precise time frame, he recalled that his mother and father had met at the Aristocratic Restaurant, a “hamburger place, where they make hamburgers and breakfast, and this and that.” They were married a short time later, in the early 1940s, he thought. In addition to the hard life that he described to Victoria, Willie told her how he and Dave frequently skipped school by “playing hooky,” particularly how Dave would pretend to go to school but would return home and hide beneath his bed until school was dismissed for the day at 3:00 P.M .
    During his youth Willie’s mother had always pushed him to learn more about butchering farm animals, and wanted him to learn by watching their family friend, Bob Korac, during the slaughtering process.
    “‘Go see Bob, see how he’s doing,’” Korac would later recall Louise as having said as she urged Willie to take lessons from Korac. “‘Because maybe you need it, like tomorrow, you know.’”
    According to Korac, however, Willie just didn’t seem to have much interest in slaughtering the farm animals, and would rather go fishing. He loved the farm animals, and talked more about feeding and nurturing them, as opposed to killing them. When he was away from the farm for any length of time, his first concern upon his return was always to feed the animals. When in another mood, however, Willie could go on seemingly endlessly about how he hated being stuck on the farm, and sometimes complained that it was the farm that had kept him from having dating opportunities with women. He explained to Victoria that he had hoped that “we’d be out of here long before this, but it’s holding me all back.” The truth of the matter was, after his parents died, Willie could have left the farm, permanently, any time that he so desired—but he always chose to stay.
    Willie claimed that he never wanted to learn things by following in someone else’s footsteps. Instead, he wanted to learn things on his own, through trial and error and learning from his own mistakes—including the butcher trade. Perhaps Willie held such strong feelings about learning things on his own because he had been dominated for much of