Cruise 2017 - Aboard Ship, Micro-Balconies / Perfume on the Slaughterhouse Kill Floor

1981 was my third summer working on the kill floor at IBP, and by then I knew my way around, both in Amarillo and at work.  Charley and Johnnie had split the year before, so instead of living in the plumbing shop I rented an apartment close to downtown.  And on the floor at work I was getting better with knives and doing some of the harder jobs, so they put me on the gut table.  Not as a gutter, though - instead they put me further down, in the last position on the conveyor.  My job there was three-fold; to separate the trachea from the lungs, to process the bile, and to throw any leftover fat into the fat chute.  A level-four position...nothing particularly difficult.

About the bile - if the livers were good enough for public consumption the gall bladders were already separated and just there by themselves.  In such a case - which was for the vast majority of the livers - I would pick it up, slice it open and allow a moment for all of the greenish fluid to pour into one of those 55-gallon white barrels, then throw the remains back onto the conveyor to drop over the end and into the floor below.  Sometimes, however, a liver was bad due to disease or whatever.  For those I would use my knife to separate the bladder first, then empty it in the manner described.  Each bladder produce about six ounces of bile.  I always started fresh with an empty barrel whether on the morning or evening shift, and it would be more than half full after eight hours (the depth of its contents through the day was how I measured the passage of time).

One day not long after starting the job I observed something peculiar.  I had gotten used to the smells on the floor through the years and they didn't bother me at all.  But at that post there was a new smell wafting into my space - something that smelled good.  What could it be on the kill floor of this slaughterhouse that smelled pleasant?  On a lark I ducked my head into the barrel filling with bile, and discovered that the bile itself was the source of the smell!  After asking a foreman about it he explained that IBP in fact sold the bile to perfume companies all over the world!

Isn't it true that at times sweetness and sunshine can be found in places that appear bitter and dark...