Red Sky at Night (garden plot)
Mar 27, 2012 19:39:14 GMT -5
Post by kneedles on Mar 27, 2012 19:39:14 GMT -5
The old blood had crusted dry in Scutcher’s nostrils, into the colour of rust on metal. The lingering tang of iron was present in everything that Scutcher smelt now; in the torn up grass and churned up dirt beneath his fingernails, it was in the dried out cow pats from a herd on the move and even in the fleshy decay in front of him- it was the way the earth smells right after a heavy rainfall. That, of itself was kind of soothing, even if the rest of his face did throb red and raw. But Scutcher deserved it this time, he knew that well enough. It was his fault, after all, that they were dead.
Scutcher’s teeth were a bright, violent shade of vermillion, like new rosebuds yet to bloom and when he spat out a tooth that had come loose and finally wriggled free, coated in thick and bloody saliva, Scutcher half expected it to take root like a seed. He couldn’t see himself but Scutcher could feel it with the tip of his tongue, the wide, tender and gummy expanse where his left incisor had been before and the swelling of his cheek and nose so he could only assume he looked a right mess.
It was bound to be odd, then, that Scutcher actually felt a little proud of his old man for it- he didn’t know that Loomis Tansy still had it in him. Though of course, had Scutcher resisted even a little, the story probably would have been quite different and the lonely tooth nestled in the grass would probably still be with its brother’s. This time, though, Scutcher had taken it; the reason being the mangled corpse lying in front of Scutcher’s bended knees.
There was something about the blood against the earth peppered with bone shards that made Scutcher’s chest clench and tighten like wringing a wet t-shirt but it wasn’t the death that caused it, surely. Scutcher was a first hand witness to that hundreds of times over and it couldn’t be that Scutcher had caused it, however inadvertently, because well- doing that was part of his job.
Spring was oncoming, even without the new shoots rising through the snow and the weeping cherry tree at the front of Scutcher’s house blossoming cotton candy pink and marshmallow white it was easy to tell. When the numbers at school began to drop you always knew that it was spring. With the lambing and calfing and pregnant sows, pupils hung back at home to help out with the imminent arrivals and the Tansy family was expecting too, with eight sows swollen with piglets expecting to drop any day now.
Well, seven sows, thought Scutcher. A hot bead of blood found it’s way onto his eyelids, softer than a sigh or a whisper from somewhere he didn’t even know that he was bleeding from. Wiping it on his finger tips; he reached out to touch a pale pink snout covered in white, almost translucent glistening fur.
Her name had been Rags; Scutcher knew his pigs by sight alone, down to each marking and tiny imperfection. Of course it would have been Rags; Scutcher remembered her impetuous with a wanderlust that kept her at the outer edges of the muddy enclosure the pigs stayed in, an eye towards the rolling hills just beyond her reach and to whatever pigs associated with adventure. So of course it would have been Rags who, upon discovering- possibly by accident, though Scutcher had learned never to underestimate pigs- that a latch which should have been fixed and bolted was neither, would have taken her chance and made for the wild.
Scutcher had to admire Rags for that. Were it him, he imagined he would have stayed in the pen with the other pigs, terrified of freedom and finding comfort in his captivity. The fallout of Rags’ great and daring escape was a slowly forming network of bruising, threading through the delicate spider webbing of Scutcher’s capillaries and turning him shades of grey and puce as well as the dead pig in front of him.
In District 10 the people starved, but it seemed as though the predatory animals, a wolf or a badger perhaps, were not so discontented. Whatever manner of creature that had killed Rags had merely sampled her here and there and the bulk of the pig remained, swollen and stinking- more food for the maggots and mini beasts than the creatures that had killed her. Her belly had been ripped open by fang and claw, intestines chewed away, leaving a hollowed out centre of rib cages and in places flesh and skin and sinew had been stripped to bones, stray scraps dried out and brown along their surfaces.
Her full womb had been invaded and burst, with amniotic fluids, thick and pale and watery spilling with her blood into the ground and there was, nestled with savaged and partly ravaged intestines, the prone and alien form of an almost fully formed pig foetus. As for his littermates, they were probably the reason the rest of Rags had seemingly been abandoned.
That the pig hadn’t really needed to die but for the greed of a probably already full predator stung Scutcher the most. And he usually locked the gate without thinking; a muscle memory as instinctive and primal as a piglet’s knowledge of the milk in his mother’s teat.
Rags had found her end in full sight of the road, a few short minutes from Scutcher’s home. He had a spade, a length of old muddy tarpaulin and a battered wheelbarrow to dispatch of the carcass. No use attracting more of those predators. Scutcher imagined them as a bloated corpulent family of wolves, their legs buckling under their own body weight, smug expressions still flickering on their fangs still stuck with the scraps of Rags and her babies, driven wild with the heat of bloodlust and their own greed. Scutcher had nurtured Rags when she had come, wet and squaling from her own mother and the wolves had been watching and waiting, snickering to themselves.
The blood in the air began to attract the silhouettes of carrion riding the wind and as Scutcher knelt, in a sort of tribute to the dead pig, a group of crows found the scent on the breeze. On their black feathered wingspans they carried with them a blood red sky which descended as they did. Scutcher remembered his Dad’s old saying ‘red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning'. It would be a beautiful day tomorrow.
His family could not have afforded to lose a pig, especially not a pregnant sow so close to birthing season. There would have to be frantic, desperate calculations to stretch what they could afford when Scutcher got home, but he thought of his father and the dirty brown bottles of a friend’s home pressed cider- strong and as foul tasting as old dishwater and Sutcher found he didn’t particularly feel like hurrying back.
So what happened now? Well, Scutcher knew what was expected- he’d have to scrape his pig off the earth, sloppy and crumbling around the rib cage like a wet cake. He’d have to throw the pieces into a wheelbarrow and, once she was home, build a pyre and burn her with the rest of the waste and the dead leaves and old twigs. It didn’t seem fair that after such a pointless, painful death that Rags should be treated in such a fashion. Not when all she’d ever wanted was her freedom.
‘I could take you someplace nice,’ he said silently to the pig. ‘Someplace you and your babies could be free.’
He wasn’t supposed to now, of course. It was too dangerous and too light out even as the sun took its journey west, sinking beneath the rolling fields and Scutcher had made a promise. It was just...he owed Rags this.
As he stood, Scutcher’s ribs ached something powerful and he bit down on a cracked and splintered lip to stop himself from crying out. It was hard work, clenching his hands around the wheel barrow to steady it, harder still to stoop, spade in hand to collect up what was left of Rags. Even butchered like this, she was almost two hundred pounds of bone and bulk and babies still in one piece almost, but for where a hind leg- the ham joint- had been pulled away. Swatting a careening, sweeping fly besides his face, Scutcher tried to scoop the spade under her and lift. Her gaping, wounded belly jumped a little off the ground as Scutcher pushed on the spade, ignoring the tears prickling his eyes as something like a medicine ball thrashed against his ribcage and his cry was gargled and strangled as he dropped the spade, panting and clutching at his side.
Under Scutcher’s shirt, the bruises blossomed at his ribs like purple lipstick stained kisses, small and puckered against his skin. It wouldn’t work this way. He could chop her into manageable chunks, Scutcher supposed but he doubted the edge of his spade would do more than bastardize her body in the same way her killers had and had no inclination to leave her and go home for his butcher’s knife.
So he rolled out the tarp onto the earth and with much grunting and heaving, until the pain in Scutcher’s ribs brought on a white hot heat behind his eyes, Scutcher pushed Rags onto it. Tying the tarpaulin up at the corners like a macabre sack lunch and tipping the wheelbarrow on its side, Scutcher shakily pulled the pig into the barrow, scooped out and empty as though she were a pearl cupped inside of an oyster. Shutting his eyes, Scutcher forced out his rattling breaths and let his head fall against one of the arms he fixed around the wheelbarrow. He owed Rags as much, hoping that it would assuage his guilt.
The barrow was rusty and squealed in protest, catching in dips in the earth like a face filled with pockmarks as Scutcher pushed the bulging tarpaulin shroud along the road. Normally Scutcher didn’t mind the walk, but tonight the throbbing and searing made the journey seem almost unbearably long, so much so that he could have kissed the nettles around the edges of the thicket when he finally reached them.
‘Hope you like it girl,’ he said, patting the plastic tarp so it rustled in reply.
Heavily, he pushed through the nettles, barely noticing the thorns scraping at his leg what with the rest until he reached the length of chicken wire around the centre of the thicket. As he lifted his leg to step over it, the wheel barrow slipped to the side and Rags erupted over it with a dull thud into the underbrush, the next time a wave of pain hit Scutcher’s ribs he cried out in frustration along with burning heat and slammed his knuckles into his teeth, still dribbling a little blood around it.
‘Please Rags,’ he pleaded with her. ‘Help me out.’
He knew it was futile; even alive the pigs could sometimes be as stubborn and as unmoving as fleshy pink rocks. But he still asked her, plunging his fingers into the knots in the tarp and dragging her along the brown green lichen. The chicken wire buckled and bent as Scutcher dragged her over it until there was a sizable gap in the parameter rendering it useless but it worked well enough and a weak and breathless Scutcher found himself in the garden.
He called it the garden because it wasn’t his by any stretch and it wouldn’t be right to say that he’d inherited it from someone else either. That suggested a level of ownership that wasn’t right to attribute to this place. The land belonged to itself no matter what Scutcher had done with scraps of wood and seeds. There had been a garden here before he’d found it, if not this garden, and Scutcher had the hope that there would be a garden here after he had gone.
Even if it was only the daffodils- the only things that had bloomed so far in all this brown- then it would be something. The sky had turned a melancholy shade of navy which cast a green, slightly sickly pallor over the daffodils as they turned upwards to search out the last of the dying sunshine. In rows they seemed a little lonely, a little morose alone and waiting for something else to grow almost like the children of district 10 waiting in rows at the reaping.
Scutcher scanned his eyes among the upturned earth of flowers and vegetables waiting to grow and bloom to find a spot for Rags. Above in the thin poplar trees, the birds sang each other to sleep and while he fretted over the robins and swallows pecking at his seeds and later fruit, that Rags and her babies would lie under lullabies pleased him.
He secured her a place among the peonies and clenched his teeth. Just one more thing and he could collapse, stop running off the pain induced adrenaline and curl into a sore and scarred ball someplace. Driving his spade into the earth he began the arduous task of digging Rags’ grave. It seemed almost funny that a person might have stumbled upon this- Scutcher looking like he’d lost a fight with a wild and incensed buffalo, digging a grave for an unidentifiable body in an abandoned thicket.
Scutcher didn’t think of this though, he was busy looking over at where the raspberry bush would be and imagining up the flavour of a fruit he’d never even seen before until he choked up a little more spit and blood and was forced to deal with the dirt and rasp and reality of living. [/color]
