Empanada Del Amore fell madly in love with the butcher, a Basque Quaker who was never seen without a bloodied apron knotted lengthways round his waist. He chopped and minced, diced, cubed and decapitated legs, shoulders, torsos and heads, cleaning up the offal and gristle with a wire broom and a hose, sluicing the castaways and offs into a sewer grate he had built flush with the slaughter-room floor, which was built onto the back of the butcher shop. He had canary yellow teeth and a hooked nose that bridged the space between his eyes and perineum above his upper lip. She seldom kissed him, and when she did with eyes closed and lips clenched, their teeth clacking like castanets. Empanada came from Puritan stock, so saw nothing unfitting about a man who cared little for his teeth or went about unshaven, one suspect hair coiling from a mole that served as a spar between his two eyes.
Ignatius, the butcher’s uncle on his mother’s side, was a snake handler who worked for an Episcopalian mission in Macaw where he taught the Episcopal Bishops how to charm a snake without being bitten or en-venom-ed. The butcher’s mother gave up reptile handling after being bitten one too many times, the last leaving her with a palsied left hand and half a thumb. The butcher’s father was a stern Presbyterian and daft in the head, or marbled, as his mother never hastened to say, and had no patience for his wife’s evangelistic enthusiasm for snakes and cannons. Empanada wore smocks and knee-socks and white linen blouses with floral embossing on the collars and elbows. She seldom if ever wore anything else, unless it was a skirt, which she accompanied with black nylons and braid-over-braid sandals, gifts from her father’s father, a gunrunner with a Phthisis-pubis birthmark just below his eye and to the left of his cheekbone.
Her grandfather hated the colour green, advocating for a moratorium on anything that fell within the rubric of salads and side-dishes, even green ales or pilsners on the bicentenary of Parnell’s birth, which he celebrated twice, even though Parnell had come into the world but once. The butcher butchered everything he could get his hands on, pork, mutton, beef, hogsheads and horse meat, some of which was still twitching when it arrived at his doorstep, and was known to slice through a bull’s scrotum without blinking an eye, blood splatter and gore flying every-which where, bits of bone and cartilage collecting in the folds and creases of his butcher’s shirt.
Empanada’s great, great grandfather plied his trade as a phrenologist in the cafes and dime-stores in and around the hamlet where he lived with his wife, a failed seamstress (her fingers had been callused down to the bone) and a dog with three legs, one of which was peripatetic, moving in the opposing direction of the other two. He had an assortment of phrenological tools, many of which were made specifically for him, which he kept in an autoclave in the basement next to the boiler. His wife, now that she was unable to sew and hem, made sure the tools and medical implements were kept clean and sanitary, or his impalements, as she referred to them in salon talk. Empanada’s great, great grandfather knew where each bump, hillock, cone or indentation was situated on the head, and kept a cartographic foolscap of them in his desk drawer, the very same one where he kept an eyedropper and a bottle of liquid morphine. He kept his syringe, a glass one with a bendy rubber plunger with centigrade markings on the side, in a rosewood box stowed away underneath his desk, far out of sight of his wife and the dog.
Ignatius, the butcher’s uncle on his mother’s side, was a snake handler who worked for an Episcopalian mission in Macaw where he taught the Episcopal Bishops how to charm a snake without being bitten or en-venom-ed. The butcher’s mother gave up reptile handling after being bitten one too many times, the last leaving her with a palsied left hand and half a thumb. The butcher’s father was a stern Presbyterian and daft in the head, or marbled, as his mother never hastened to say, and had no patience for his wife’s evangelistic enthusiasm for snakes and cannons. Empanada wore smocks and knee-socks and white linen blouses with floral embossing on the collars and elbows. She seldom if ever wore anything else, unless it was a skirt, which she accompanied with black nylons and braid-over-braid sandals, gifts from her father’s father, a gunrunner with a Phthisis-pubis birthmark just below his eye and to the left of his cheekbone.
Her grandfather hated the colour green, advocating for a moratorium on anything that fell within the rubric of salads and side-dishes, even green ales or pilsners on the bicentenary of Parnell’s birth, which he celebrated twice, even though Parnell had come into the world but once. The butcher butchered everything he could get his hands on, pork, mutton, beef, hogsheads and horse meat, some of which was still twitching when it arrived at his doorstep, and was known to slice through a bull’s scrotum without blinking an eye, blood splatter and gore flying every-which where, bits of bone and cartilage collecting in the folds and creases of his butcher’s shirt.
Empanada’s great, great grandfather plied his trade as a phrenologist in the cafes and dime-stores in and around the hamlet where he lived with his wife, a failed seamstress (her fingers had been callused down to the bone) and a dog with three legs, one of which was peripatetic, moving in the opposing direction of the other two. He had an assortment of phrenological tools, many of which were made specifically for him, which he kept in an autoclave in the basement next to the boiler. His wife, now that she was unable to sew and hem, made sure the tools and medical implements were kept clean and sanitary, or his impalements, as she referred to them in salon talk. Empanada’s great, great grandfather knew where each bump, hillock, cone or indentation was situated on the head, and kept a cartographic foolscap of them in his desk drawer, the very same one where he kept an eyedropper and a bottle of liquid morphine. He kept his syringe, a glass one with a bendy rubber plunger with centigrade markings on the side, in a rosewood box stowed away underneath his desk, far out of sight of his wife and the dog.
3 comments:
Love the grandfather description. You know a memory clicks forward that a phrenologist came to my grandfather's place when I was small. I remember him feeling the heads of my two or three uncles. I was too small to understand what he said, only that one uncle took it as an insult. Wish I could time travel back to that audio stream.
[,] after "You know".
[,], yup, I would have no memory, screen or otherwise, rebuse, too, of your grandpapa...though he does sound like a most interesting man, bumps and all.
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