Jeremiah Healy - Right To Die

The plant itself was three stories high and roughly square. The tall windows were recessed into an old facade of gray brick, giving the impression of a structure that had been built for one purpose and converted to another. I drove a circuit around the plant. On one side was a receiving dock, a Mack tractor-trailer just pulling away. On the second side, facing west, the windows were boarded up. On the third side of the building was another dock, this one with men loading boxes into the back of another trailer. The fourth side fronted a parking lot for a hundred cars, maybe fifty vehicles in it on a Wednesday morning. I left the Prelude next to a large sign saying SARREY CO-OP PACKING – BEST VEAL IN THE EAST.

Inside the main door was a staircase and a blank concrete block wall. The stairs seemed more inviting. At the top was a door standing ajar and a catwalk. The catwalk curved out of sight toward sounds like a carpentry shop in high gear.

The doorway led to a minimalist office, a young woman in a lumberjack shirt and jeans behind an old partners' desk. She was drowning in a sea of multipart invoices and order forms. As the

woman flailed through the paperwork, the bangs of her hair fell to her eyes.

I said, "Excuse me?"

She looked up through the bangs like a sheepdog. "Help you?"

"I'm looking for Ray Cuervo."

"He's down on the kill floor with the rabbi."

"How can I find it?"

"If you're not in the business, mister, maybe you don't want to know."

"Please?"

The woman blew out a breath, more to clear her hair than to show exasperation, I thought. "You're not dressed for it." She pointed to the catwalk and said, "Follow the walk around. You'll know it when you see it. Might want to stay on the walk for a while, get used to things."

I thanked her and moved around the walk.

Below me, about forty men and women were wearing white butchers' outfits, yellow aprons, and black hip boots. At one end of the huge room, a worker prodded a calf from a wooden corral down a concrete ramp. Another worker affixed shackles, trailing chains from the ceiling, to the animal's hind legs. As soon as he was finished, a woman touched a long wand to the calf's temple. It jerked spasmodically and went down like a sack of potatoes. The shackler cranked something, and the calf rose by the shackles, hanging upside down.

The chains moved the calf forward to a burly man in a full beard with ringlets of sideburns. He was dressed like the other workers except for a yarmulke on his head. With one clean slash of a big knife, the man cut the calf's throat. He stepped away from the torrent, joining another man who was holding a clipboard. As the man in the yarmulke sharpened the knife, the man with the clipboard talked with him. I pegged Clipboard to be in his early thirties, about six feet tall and slim, with wavy black hair and a black mustache.

The calf began to move slowly along the line, workers gutting the animal and sorting the organs. Next, two women and a man skinned the calf with hand-held rotary saws like a pathologist would use on the skull during an autopsy. After they finished. one of them brought the hide to a washing machine, taking other hides out and heaving them down something like a laundry chute. At the next station for the carcass, the head was taken off and put on a rack next to twenty or so others, the tongues protruding. Then the rest of the animal, still hanging from the shackles, went off to a room from which I could hear water jets like a car wash. All in all, the process seemed pretty humane, kind of a reverse assembly line in which each part seemed destined for further use.

The only problem was the blood smell. A warm, steamy thickness to the air, like being in a kitchen when someone was steeping the wrong kind of soup.

"Hey?"

I turned around.

Clipboard, stripped to a dress shirt, tie, and slacks, was standing on the catwalk ten feet from me, grinning. "Ray Cuervo."

"John Cuddy."

"Come on into my office. We can talk."

"Sure you don't want some coffee?"

"No, thanks."

Cuervo sipped from his paper cup. We occupied two metal chairs in a cramped room. The shelves above and behind his desk held some looseleaf binders and a couple of photos in frames. One photo showed a house with beige stone walls and an orange tile roof, the walls bordered by small trees, kinds I was pretty sure I'd never seen before. In another photo, an adolescent Cuervo was standing near a man who resembled a dark-haired Cesar Romero, both wearing hunting gear. An elaborate telephone and a fax machine took up most of the desk.

Cuervo hadn't asked me for any identification, so I hadn't yet brought up why I was there.

"This your first time at the co-op, John?"

"It is."

"We've got a great operation here. Only the second true growers' co-op in this part of the country. We patterned ourselves after Penn Quality out past Albany. Veau Blanc?"

I nodded as though I knew what he meant.

"Toughest part was coming up with the financing. The growers around here, like everywhere else, would just sell their calves to the packing house, never had much idea about the business side of running a plant themselves. But once we got them to see the advantages of fair price and fair grading for their product, they came up with their share of the front money, and we're in business. Doing eight hundred calves a week most weeks now, and that's not bad. Penn's a shade ahead of us, but they started before we did, and they've got this all-star named Azzone selling for them. It'll take us a while, but we'll catch them."

To keep him going, I said, "Where are you concentrating?"

He set down the cup. "Boston, for now. With veal, you know, you're pretty much selling to the supermarket chains and the restaurant distributors. And you pretty much have to hit the ethnics, your Italians, your Jews. I was lucky to get into the business, since it's mostly a family trade. But I'm from Spain originally, and a lot of the Hispanics in the New York/Boston corridor like their veal."

"You ever visit the restaurants on Newbury Street?"

"Newbury? You mean, like in Boston?"

"Yes."

I seemed to put him off track. "Once in a while. Couple of small accounts there. That where you are?"

"A few blocks away."

Cuervo came back on track. "So, what do you think of our operation?"

"Impressive."

"Damned right. State-of-the-art equipment and sanitary standards. You saw the schochet down there?"

"The what?"

"The rabbi, like."

"Oh, yes, I did."

"You don't run a clean plant, you don't have to worry about the government inspectors. The rabbis, they'll close you down first. Only use the front quarter of the animal, but you got to have them."

"Even so, it didn't look like you waste anything."

"Right again, John. The heads we send to Mexico-they go for the brains and the cheek meat down there. The hearts, the Italians, they stuff them. Kidneys to the fancy French bistros. The rest of the dropped meat we send off to Europe. The hides to Japan for tanning, then to Italy for gloves and shoes."

"You get a lot of heat from the animal protection people?"

"Pickets once in a while. They'd have us all living on bean sprouts and Velveeta, they had their way. But, hey, there wouldn't be any veal calves if it weren't for the dairy herds, right?"

"Right."

"I mean, what's a dairy farmer supposed to do? He needs the bull to knock up the cows so they'll give milk. But when he gets a boy calf instead of a girl that can grow up to give more milk, he doesn't have too many choices. One, he can let the calf roam with the mother and suckle, which cuts down on her milk production. Two, the farmer can let the calf loose in the fields to feed on grass and become a beefer. Three, he can sell the calf to a Bob-packer who whacks the animal at all of one or two weeks of life and maybe eighty pounds of weight. Four is us. The dairy farmer, if he's smart, can auction the calf to a fancy veal grower like the ones who own this plant. The grower's going to raise that calf for sixteen weeks and come in here at four hundred pounds, giving us maybe two hundred sixty pounds of meat. Now, those are the choices, right?