To the south, workers are bound, constrained; the Garden’s tailors turning out piecework, new uniforms to be grown into, to death; needle and thread-folk sewn themselves into excessive bolts of cloth as protection from the elements: straightjacketed against the wind and fall, they’re swathed totally, windingsheets wound of sheet and human — they’re completely enshrouded, restrained, except for their hands, which have been left bare, exposed, to tailor free from any distraction, to work without the diversion of the other senses. They work in a tented gallery of burlap patched to canvas, stretched tightly just over the larval stoop of their forms, pegged with rope to spikes frozen to the ground. Beyond the flaps laps a fire (without a chimney, there are no other slits in the cloth, which is impenetrable; the smoke gathers, bellows, chokes), over which hunch their odd, shadowy forms, at their whirring machines, with panting foot ridiculously pedaling out their stitching, trimming and hemming, their taking in and letting out — shrouded themselves, they’re making shrouds, each monogrammed at the nape of the neck. They pile their finished products, as light and white as a whisper, in hulking bins of weathered hailresounding metal quartered at the edge of their encampment, once emptied of coal for inside heating — without the hindrance of meals or peers, bundled together against the cold in the warm they’ll eventually die in.
To the sanctifying east, which is the cardinality most consecrated, the olden orientation of the holy — down the singlelane, twoway access road rearing the Great Hall with its turreted vistas offering glary views over the ice to Governor’s, clear past the freeze as if one eye goes slipping as the other eye goes sliding across the slick to Red Hook, then north to Fort Greene, which like this Island is no longer a fort but only a plot of earth left indefensible as named; and between, the taut sinews of the Brooklyn Bridge, the delicate intestinal suspended to waver over the water, white and high and alone — there’s a tremendous cavern, secreted in a mound of ice, carved out roughly, its entrance blocked by a boulder that has to be rolled away every morning, an ordeal requiring the work of three of them, or that of any number with the strength altogether of three. It’s ritual by now; each to their own task: one mops pools stagnant to ice inside that first have to be pulverized with the handle of the broom used to sweep the floor littered with slop, old newspapers and plain brownpaper wrap, while another hoses down then wipes with rag the lavers clean, as yet another is tasked with the sacred office of examining then sharpening the knives kept stowed overhead, sharpdown amid a rash of bulbous and cankered tenderizing stones hung in their slings from racks and hooks, rusted, resembling to many of their visitors — the kashrut inspectors, assorted efficiency experts, the Commissary chefs — nothing less than the timeworn utensils of unenlightened torture. Then, to begin with the work of the day, which is slaughtering, the killing of meat, the knifing of it into product, into cuts as numerously diverse as appetites, and as grossly disarticulated, irreconcilable: these eyes of round allseeing, beeves in crosscuts, sirloins and tender-loins, rear rounds, roasts of flank and shank, brisket and chuck, butterflychops flitting through the dim, evading the chop of blades swung high to scalp, held as long and disjointedly sharp as the teeth of a starveling God; they’d cater also with chicken, with turkey, and innocent lamb: leg and rack, buffetworthy centerloin, neck slices alongside wings hacked flightless, breasts, thighs, legs and wholes, seething raw, porged, trabored, then soaked with salt — the carcasses even seeming to breathe and pant with the exhaustion of being sectioned and sold here, in the whirlwindy din of their slaughterhouse out at the edge of the Garden with a view from the top of its mound to the Battery and Brooklyn Herself; its partially underground vault a sepulcher of shrieks, snorts, and staggering animals with their throats slit lolling a roll of heads to death, its echoic expanse tolling thickly with the pitiless procedure of fast, mass execution; cleavers dull on meat, shattering to bone, to spew into the heavy moist air ringlings of sinew and vein as if the made flesh last gasp of an unfortunate fatling, death throes these scraps of gristle to garnish silence — the noise, though, stored within this facility as hermetically as if within one of the oversized masonjars stacked on the shelves that line the space, stocked with organs and glands.
