Away with words

I realised early on that most people just talk. Saying things for the sake of talking. For the sake of sound. Saying things even they’re not certain of with impressive conviction. Talking endlessly and not saying much at all; just to be heard saying something.

I think that’s why I loved the Butcher Barrett’s boy so much.

He was born above the butcher shop. He grew up hacking up carcasses and hanging up limbs in windows. He was the talk of the town when he was born, so we were told.

The lamb chops Mrs. Lambert overcooks, the bacon Mrs. Garvey covers in gravy, and the sausages Mrs. Culleton puts in her coddle - all prepared by his hands. Those same Mrs. Lamberts and Garveys and Culletons who gossiped as to the dark karmas at play when his mother bore him, and who mythologised him as something of a folktale as he grew. There was even a rhyme about him in the town.

Nature played a trick on that boy,
A trick too cruel for one so young,
For when the butcher’s baby was born
The divil done cut out his tongue.
 
He wasn’t sent to school. Though when we started in the secondary school, we’d see him taking the air at the back door of the butcher shop each morning, and again on our way home in the afternoons. We’d see him on Sundays too, at mass with his father. Never with his mother. It was said she’d given up on God long ago. It was said, too, that she suffered fierce with her nerves.

He wasn’t shy or fearful. Indeed, he’d let his look linger on us as we passed. I think there was probably more fear in us than there ever was in him, huddling and clutching to each other in giddy nervousness. There was intrigue, too, weaved into the fear of what we didn’t know and what we’d been told. 

I didn’t like how the other girls would mutter insults, loudly so he’d hear them. He knew that too. He’d see me checking on him, apologising with my eyes while the others sniggered. That’s how I know he used to watch us intently, from one corner to the next as we traipsed across his narrow glimpse of the world from the alley.

I soon stopped walking with them, and it was soon after that he gave me the first letter. I was pleasantly surprised to see him holding out an envelope to me that morning, his hand steady and confident. I didn’t say anything as I took the envelope in mine, shaking and uncertain.

I read it in school, alone. He couldn’t speak, but that boy had a way with words.

For one who never went to school and spent ugly days skinning rabbits and plucking the hearts out of sheep on a saw-dust strewn floor, he sure could put thoughts in words with a beauty I’ve never heard spoken.   

I wrote him back, delivering my letter to him as I passed on my way home from school. He’d another for me the following morning, and so our daily dialogue continued for years. We talked about everything in those letters. He said things with impressive conviction.
 
His mother, who’d schooled him at home every day of his life, passed away in his seventeenth year. His father followed three years later. I’d grown fond of them both, was always made to feel welcome and at home there, above the butcher shop.

Not long after his father’s burial, he asked me to marry him on bended knee. I was speechless. Delighted.
He wrote beautiful vows, said “I do” with his eyes, and “I love you” with his tears.

We converted the space next door to the butcher shop, from where I sold flowers. People came to buy bouquets of “I’m sorry”, “I love you”, “get well soon”, “congratulations”, and “sorry for your loss” – pretty colours and scents to add weight to their words.

He ran the butcher shop, saying hello and goodbye with smiles and waves, and filling afternoons with hard work, hearty silent laughter at customers' yarns, and words of kindness on his face.

He wrote me a letter every single day, sometimes two. And in the evenings, we’d talk in glances, in kisses and hugs, and in dances. We did away with words.

Then, one day, his words fell silent.
I still have his letters, kept in a box. His voice preserved.
I often read them.
He still carries me away with words. 


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