To Be A Butcher

Tom Chiarella (thanks, Casey): The sink is full of tongues. Beef tongues, each as big as a man's shoe, frozen into one icy clump the size of a propane canister, defrosting for an afternoon pickup. There's a lot of mouth, too, I guess, or palate — I'm not sure, because the top tongue is unfrozen enough that I can see a bone that looks like a little saddle. But right now the guys in back are breaking cows — sawing the hindquarters down with a handsaw, cutting the hip on the band saw, then the shank, thumbing out the ribs for short loin. Short loin is their money cut. No one is particularly worried about the tongues. You don't have to rush the tongues, they tell me.

"Who ordered tongues?" I ask. Sometimes it's loud in a butcher shop. The grinding saws or the clattering, the cuber, the vacuum sealer, the hasp and slam of the walk-in-refrigerator door, the radio. Not a cruel, industrial noise — no one wears earplugs. This is the loudness of commerce, the fail-safe cadence of call-in orders, the rattling meter of the morning butcher-shop routine.