61st Reaping [D10]

Scutcher’s mom always cooked sausages on reaping days. The smell of hot seared flesh, the sounds of fat spitting and boiling in a pan was a pervasive memory running back through his childhood to now. Even before Tallow came to help him out of bed, Scutcher could easily predict the scene downstairs; Mom still in her battered old house coat, eyes red rimed, yellowing at the sclera with a night of not sleeping, her mouth pressed against the rim of an old coffee cup as though telling her secrets to the contents within, trying to read tealeaves like the wandering gypsy fortune tellers that Scutcher remembered would sometimes come through the town in the summer. They didn’t come any more though; perhaps they’d seen the future and realised that there was nothing to it, no more stories left to be told.

Dad would be another matter all together; his eyes would be red from the previous night’s drink, already clutching at a mug of home brewed gin, dirty and lined about the edges with flaking sediment like dead skin from the juniper berries which had fermented away into something wispy and ethereal. He’d watch Scutcher enter the kitchen and let his mouth twist into a slow smile, the yellow and brown stained sharpened pebbles of his smile glinting at his children. He’d take his knife and savagely rip into his meat, purse his lips and he’d start to sing…'And it's all for me grog, me jolly, jolly grog…All for me beer and tobacco ….Well I spent all me tin on the lassies drinking gin…So across the western forests I must wander …'his mother’s accompaniment would be a sigh or a choking sob.

“Hey, Noodle,” said Tallow’s soft voice rising over the sound of her own gentle knocking on his door. “You want some help?”

He’d dreamt of her hanging upside down from the hooks in the smokehouse like any of the pigs again last night. Tallow’s throat had been cut, her eyes open and lifeless- the blood from her neck had spilled into the hanging tangles of her hair, matting it, making it dark. Noreen had been there too, Scutcher was sure of it, hanging from another hook, another deep welt in her neck. Scutcher absentmindedly put his hand to his throat, finding the coarse material of gauze and medical tape under his chin. The wound where the glass had cut deep across the soft part of his jaw had stopped opening up whenever he moved his mouth, stopped the blood seeping into the material like inkstains or red roses blooming where a patch of snow had been cleared away but Scutcher could still feel it beneath the bandaging, red and raw, gaping like an open mouthed sneer.

Tallow told him fiercely not to scratch it and Scutcher pulled himself from bed, watching as her hand fluttered over her mouth, biting down onto her fingers as her eyes flickered over his body. She was already dressed of course, in a tea dress the colour of warm buttermilk and the sun on the brightest, most beautiful day you could imagine, her hair pulled up and, twisted, knotted and curled at the back of her head. His sister’s hands were magic like that, when it came to hair- she understood follicles like he understood pigs…deserved better than this, deserved to fly away to the capitol like a bird festooned with the brightest feathers.

Trying to raise his arms, Scutcher hissed as the pain in his ribs stung anew, just like they did every time he coughed, moved or just breathed, bruises running along his torso like the keys on a xylophone. Shutting his eyes, Scutcher plunged a fist into his mouth, also lined with healing cuts and scratches and bit down hard. Tallow’s light, spidery fingers were at them for just an instance before she said firmly, “Hey, hey, look at me…you’re okay. You’re gonna be okay.”

But Scutcher didn’t care about what happened to him, only wished he could promise the same to his little sister. She was only fifteen and he wanted very much for her to be okay too. Perhaps she thought he wouldn’t feel the tremble of her fingers as she buttoned up his shirt, stood on tippy toes to reach the top of his head, parting and combing it here or there, finding dried blood and dead skin from a head wound he didn’t even know he’d received, blinking down suddenly to look at her fingertips tinged only slightly with a little blood. She frowned for a moment, but wiped away whatever she was feeling along with the blood, on a towel hanging from a moth bitten old chair and smiled.

As always, as much a tradition as the sausages, were the flowers. Scutcher normally took care of that, but this time he’d forgotten what with one thing and another. Tallow hadn’t though, presented him with a small, slight purple flower which he pinned to his breast pocket while Tallow pinned hers.

“Viola tricolour,” he said quietly, “also known as Heart’s ease.”

“I thought we needed that today. How do I look?”

“Beautiful,” Scutcher touched his face bandage again, didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that the bruises and cuts on his face, the swelling of his nose looked horrific. “’Specially next to me.”

Tallow gripped the sleeve of his shirt, the special way she always had done, ever since she was a girl, in his memories where it was always autumn, and pulled it away from his face.

“You look better than beautiful, Scutcher Tansy,” she said firmly…“You look like a survivor.”

In all this time, he should have been used to getting separated from his sister in the district square but he never was. They were slow getting down to the reapings this time, Scutcher’s chest and limbs stiff and sore, refusing to co-operate so it was already filled by the time they arrived. The jab on his finger didn’t trouble him- just another drop in an ocean of pain- but he kept his head low, didn’t dare scan the crowd in case his eyes found Noreen’s, didn’t even dare look for the pen holding his sister though he knew that she would be looking for him.

It reminded him of the slaughter at the pig farm, when the cotton was at its highest, the birds at their loudest, singing their sweetest songs. He’d take the pigs, knowing each of them by name, into the smokehouse and hang them from hooks, watch them struggle and squeal, shake their legs, perhaps even pleade. Scutcher knew that he always tried to make it quick for them, but the waiting must have always been agony. They were all of them hanging from hooks, life in the oh-so precarious balance, waiting for the metal glint of steely knives. But it never seemed to come.

‘Ladies first…’ came the usual sound, marking the point where Scutcher would bow his head into his chest and repeat the mantra, like a prayer, like the chorus of a desperate song, ‘not Tallow, please, not Tallow’