The three-inch solid maple of the butcher’s bench was freezing against the small of Len Vey’s back.
The wood had been scrubbed with boiling lye water every dawn for half a century, its surface bleached to the chalky white of sun-dried bone, scored by thousands of cross-hatched cleaver marks where salt beef and mutton joints had been butchered for the railway crews. An iron trough was bolted along the lower edge to catch grease and salt water. Today, it was catching the dark, dark-blood runoff from Len’s left arm. The cold wood drew the leftover body heat from his spine, chilling his upper-back bones through his damp woolen coat. But his nervous system was already too soaked with trauma to mount a shivering reflex.
Len lay flat on his back, his boots dangling over the far end of the bench, his heels drumming a reflex, shivering tattoo against the oak frame stand legs.
His uninjured right hand was clamped onto the cold, grease-slicked iron edge of the table. His fingers were dug so deep beneath the maple lip that his fingernails had turned a dead, bloodless white, the tendons in his right wrist standing out like taut cords of catgut. He had wedged his thumb into an old bolt hole in the iron frame. He locked his hand mechanically to the bench so that his body couldn’t roll. Just then, the pain overwhelmed his cortex.
