The Locker I Filled for My Son

Locker thirty-one has a brass door about the size of a bread drawer turned on its side.

On Friday, October 30, the Friday before opening weekend of deer season, I opened it for the two hundred and sixty-first Friday running.

I did it at a quarter to one, same as always, with the compressor humming through the cold room wall and my breath showing in front of me.

I held a two-inch ribeye in my left hand, the best one in the case that week, trimmed the way my son likes it.

I had wrapped it in white freezer paper and written the date on it in grease pencil.

I laid it at the back of the drawer behind the others and shut the little door, and the latch clicked the way it has clicked since 1958.

Then I stood there in the cold longer than I needed to. I always did. A man does not want to look at what he is doing in a place that quiet.

My name is Alton Pisek. I am sixty-three years old, and I own the Pisek Locker and Meats on Depot Street in Rook Settlement, Indiana, a town of nine hundred people and one blinking yellow light.

I have cut meat in that building since I was sixteen.

My father opened it back when families on the county roads did not own chest freezers and rented a drawer in a plant like ours to hold the beef they butchered in the fall.

Locker thirty-one is rented in the name of my son. It has been since he was ten.

For five years I have filled it every Friday with the best cut in the shop, and I have never told a living soul why.

People who hear a story like this always ask the same thing. Why did neither of you just pick up the telephone?

I will answer that plainly, because it is the whole reason this story took five years.

My son did what I told him. I had said not to come asking for the key, and Cleavon has never once in his life done a thing I forbade.

And I had a sentence of my own, that I would call him when he called me.

Two stubborn men and a drawer in a cold room. That is all it was. I am going to tell it now, including the parts that do not make me look like much.

Cleavon was born in a March ice storm, eleven days early, in the back seat of a Buick on the road to the hospital in Jasper.

My wife Vespera always said that was the first sign he would do things when he was ready and not when he was told.

He grew up in that shop. By six he was standing on an upturned lard bucket at the cutting table with a piece of trim in both fists, watching Selby’s knife.

Selby Wuertz has been my head cutter for twenty-five years and is as close to a brother as I have.

People say the boy has my father’s jaw, and they say it like a warning.