Michael Blake: The Holy Road

“Yes,” the old man replied. “I have never seen a village of this size.”

He glanced at the colonel, then at the interpreter.

"There is something I do not understand,” he announced.

"Perhaps I can help you," the colonel offered.

"I have seen the white people feasting in the rooms where they pay money. I see them eat lots of meat. I see this in the pay money rooms. Do the families eat meat in their lodges as well?”

"Yes," the colonel affirmed. He waved a hand over the city. “Almost every house you see has a room for cooking meat and other foods.”

Ten Bears squinted skeptically at the vast settlement.

"But I see no one hunting. I see no game being brought in. How does the white man make meat?”

"We slaughter it," the colonel answered matter-of-factly.

"Slaughter it?"

"We kill animals in a big house.”

"Where is this big house?" Ten Bears asked and the colonel pointed north across the city.

"The biggest one is over there," he said.

"I will go there," Ten Bears stated.

The colonel and the interpreter looked at one another helplessly.

"But you are to have your portrait made this afternoon,” reasoned the colonel.

"I don't care about that," Ten Bears grunted, looking in the direction the colonel had indicated. "I want to see how the white man makes meat."

Leaving Ten Bears to wait outside with the interpreter the colonel disappeared into the offices of the war Department, where he relayed the visitor's request. After twenty minutes of bureaucratic maneuvering it was decided to grant Ten Bears' wish.

To the colonel's consternation, no one else could be persuaded to go and, within an hour he, the interpreter, and the old Comanche man were breezing through the city streets on a course for the great slaughterhouse that supplied much of Washington's meat.

End-of-day shadows were beginning their march across the landscape when Ten Bears' carriage came to a stop in front of a sprawling maze of stock pens, many of them crowded with the condemned.

Two unhappy-looking men, their clothes lightly spattered with blood, waited for the visitors at the head of a track that cut between the pens and terminated in front of a cluster of massive, dark, almost windowless buildings.

"You Colonel Bascom?" one of the men asked dully.

"Yes, and this is our guest, Ten Bears, and his interpreter, Mr. McIntosh," the colonel replied.

The man who had spoken made a little nod of acknowledgment and, with his companion, turned up the track leading to the gloomy set of structures.

“He want to see anything in particular?” the dull man asked over his shoulder.

"I don't think so," Colonel Bascom replied.

"We're doin' hogs right now," the man offered a remark to which Colonel Bascom did not reply.

Ten Bears had not been able to imagine the white man's place of making meat and was totally unprepared for what he saw as they passed pen after pen. He had never seen so many animals enclosed in one place, nor had he ever encountered such wholesale misery.

Many of the pens held what he recognized as the four-leggeds the whites held in high regard and called "cows'" A large number of the enclosures held a much smaller, hairless four-legged the whites called "pigs." He came upon a pen of horses and paused to stare in shock at the forlorn animals. Ten Bears had eaten the flesh of horses a few times in his life, but only to keep from starving. To think that any race would willingly kill and devour horses was incomprehensible, even if they were as poor as these.

That they would soon be killed was evident from the attitude of the animals themselves. Like the cows and pigs, the horses seemed fully cognizant of their fate and stood about in pronounced gloom, their heads hanging sadly a few inches from the ground, moving only when jostled by other animals. Some of them were suffering from broken limbs and a few carried ghastly wounds on their flanks or hips or chests where slabs of flesh hung open as if a butchering had been interrupted.

The strongest animals churned incessantly about the pens, whinnying, snorting, lowing, and squealing in abject terror, their eyes bulging to the whites as they danced in the ankle-deep quagmire of waste.

Ten Bears had killed animals all his life yet he knew them as brothers, and he pitied these, for the expressions on their faces were the same he had seen in his village when a child died in sickness or a warrior failed to return from a raid or a mother succumbed in childbirth. It was the same expression of abandonment he had seen on the faces of the men who returned from the battle at Adobe Walls, the men who had witnessed a nation of buffalo dead on the plains.

Through helpless eyes the animals in the pens asked the same questions over and over: Where is the Mystery? How can life end in this way?

As they neared the entrance to the gigantic box that was the largest in the group of sullen buildings, the dull man stopped and pointed to the end of the structure. Ten Bears was barely aware of Mr. McIntosh's translation, for he had already seen what the man had pointed out and was watching it carefully.

A long path, enclosed on both sides, angled up from the holding pens and went through a hole high up on the box. On the path were the beasts called pigs. They were moving forward in a single line, being driven by men on either side who were hitting them repeatedly with heavy sticks. The white men yelled angrily as they beat the animals, but this rough encouragement was muted by the shrill, cacophonous screams of the pigs themselves as their round, thick bodies vaulted and twisted and bucked in hopeless denial of what was about to happen.

Colonel Bascom did not want to go inside. Neither did Mr. McIntosh, and a brief squabble ensued before it was decided that Ten Bears would not need an interpretation of what he was about to see.

The old man followed the two men with bloodstained clothes through the doors of the slaughterhouse. Inside, they climbed a long stairway which led to a catwalk that gave a comprehensive view of every thing going on below.

But all that Ten Bears saw could not be taken in at a glance. And it could not be absorbed, even over time. The sight was too bizarre, and in the course of his watching, the images that settled in the old man's eyes had the sharp, surreal quality of something dreamt.

The natural light entering through a series of small, square windows mounted high on the walls of the cavern-like place steadily lost power as it drifted downward and was swallowed by the nightmarish, yellow glow of work lamps spaced at regular intervals along the walls.

Hatted men were moving about in the tawny, submerged light. Splotches of white shone through on clothes streaked with red as they went about their gruesome work with an air of impunity.

At the far end of the trileveled floor, men wielding axes chopped mechanically at the bodies of pigs, severing heads and limbs which were then cast with practiced ease into huge wooden tubs.

At the next level, Ten Bears saw a team of three men in the act of disemboweling one of the short-legged, flop-eared animals. One worker slit open the pig's belly and, with a few quick swipes of his long-bladed knife, emptied the abdomen of what little viscera had not already spilled onto the floor.

Another member of the team grasped the animal's hind legs and spun it across the slippery, metal floor to the lip of a slide. With a push from a glistening black boot the heavy body cascaded down the slide, coming to rest in close proximity to the choppers. A third man pushed the animal's viscera with an implement Ten Bears had never seen. The tangle of intestines and other vital organs disappeared over the edge of the floor and plopped into a large barrel already half full with the bowels of countless predecessors.