The Lucky Ones // Charity

Having decided that Scutcher was no use, still gaping wordlessly at the news as though silently screaming whenever they even tried to ask him a question, they hurried to the Tansy farm in silence, ignoring the sign out front warning people not to enter, that the land was infected. How apt it was though; the sickness running deep into the core of every single one of them. Scutcher was surprised to find that Loomis had moved from his chair in the family room, away from the reaping footage, now hovering outside of Tallow’s door like a moth beside a flame as the screams from inside had not subsided in the time it had taken to fetch the midwives. Maybe he should have joined his father in his hovering when the midwives pushed open the door, maybe it wasn’t the done thing- the scene in the room behind it that secret women’s world that no man should ever be privy to, but Scutcher didn’t care. Let them try and keep him out, just wait and see what happened.

The room stank of blood, overwhelming Scutcher with the festering scent of blood and death, clots like glistening black current jam spread across the bed linen while Tallow was reduced to something animal and screaming. It’s…it’s…it’s something that Scutcher couldn’t put neat words and emotions to and everything seemed to be falling in on itself. He delivered all the pigs himself, pulling piglets from out of their mother’s by the hind legs all through the spring nights and though it was messy, bloody and the pigs would squeal and kick, it was nothing compared to this. Their momma was sat, tears in her eyes while Tallow groaned, sweating thick layers like a second skin.

“Has she passed anything yet?” Petra asked coming to stand beside the bed and surveying the scene. Momma shook her head.

“Just blood and I don’t think her waters have broken….that might be a good sign, right?” Midwives, waters, it’s really real, it’s really happening.

“Unlikely. Can’t say for sure right now, though, these things can take time,” said Petra, rummaging in a bag, and Scutcher saw her pull out all these dried herbs, clusters of fresh hops and a sinister jar of chicken fat like she was making a roast dinner of some kind, not helping Tallow and her baby. “And I’m afraid time aint something we got.”

“I’ll make the tea,” said Bawn with a nod and Scutcher was mystified by the calm way she heads of to the kitchen as though this was simply the two midwives entertaining guests for supper, he couldn’t imagine what tea was going to do when his sister was hurting and crying.

“When did you start bleeding?”

Tallow shook her head, fat tears rolling down her cheeks, too muddled up with the pain to really remember and Scutcher forced himself to stop lingering in the doorway and step into it properly, reaching out to take her hand. She gripped on tight and let out a sob, he could feel her fingers trembling.

“Do you know how far along you are?”

Breathing she risked a glance at him, their eyes met for a brief second before hers flickered away quickly, as though she couldn’t look at him any longer. “Nineteen weeks…maybe,” she whispered in a low voice, squeezing her eyes tight. “I….Aaaaah….I weren’t really keepin’ count. I can’t…I want…make it stop.”

Nineteen weeks. If she thought it was nineteen weeks then that had to mean that for nineteen weeks she’d suspected deep down that she was pregnant and she hadn’t told him. Nineteen weeks was a little over four months, it was one hundred and thirty three days, three thousand one hundred and ninety two hours, one hundred and ninety-one thousand five hundred and twenty minutes and in any one of those weeks, months, days, hours and minutes she could have told him- but she didn’t. Why?

Because he couldn’t have helped her, came the painful admission. He was too stupid to offer solutions, he was too poor to help her find a way out and if there did have to be a baby he couldn’t be what she needed and what the baby needed. Not the way it was supposed to be.

Sometimes Scutcher would see Jack in town with Noreen’s twins- with Briar who had eyes just like her mother and wisp of unruly curls on her head like the thickets encircling the garden she was named for and Joshua with fair hair like Jack but Noreen’s nose who was going to grow up tall, Scutcher could tell and would have overtaken his mother easily by puberty- and think to himself that he could have done it. She’d wanted them to be his, in the dream even if he knew now that it wasn’t real, and when he was in the garden, clipping back the roses and weeding out among the zinnia he’d think about them finding the garden one day, stopping to ask him questions about their mother, feeling maybe- though it really was quite stupid- that because he’d loved Noreen so much while she carried them and because that love couldn’t just vanish now that she was gone, maybe some of it had stuck to them and they were, in the smallest of ways just a little bit his too. But he had to get his head out of the garden and into Tallow’s room because there was another baby now and it was all his.

It was almost impossible to imagine up a child, when two people came together it made one baby- but Scutcher and Tallow were the same person, two halves of the same whole (‘more like masturbatin’ than fucking, Scutcher, and how can anyone have a problem with that?’) did that mean the baby would be half a person too? But all at once, it was incredibly easy to picture the baby as well- born in five or so months from now. There was no question about what colour his or her eyes would be, its hair would lighten almost blonde in the sun but grow dark in winter with Scutcher’s curls and Tallow’s mousey ears below them.

They could be happy. And if not, they could at least try. Making do the way that the Tansy kids always did. Scutcher and Tallow against the world. Scutcher and Tallow and a child. He’d be kind to the baby, even if it was sick he’d love it anyway- the way that all children deserved to be, even if there was something not right with their brains, even if they’d been made all wrong. Their baby would be able to help him out in the garden too when he or she got big enough, would smile in that way that Tallow did, a secret smile that meant nothing but love and he or she would climb trees, look down at the rest of the world which seemed so tiny and never ever be sad, would never be ashamed of what they were or frightened of his or her father. And he began to feel a protective surge, intensifying as he grabbed tighter at Tallow’s hand, for the baby, small enough to fit in a cupped palm and only partially formed, and for Tallow. Tallow who’d turned grey and then lolled against the sheet. “Tal? Tallow?”

“Tallow honey? Tallow,” Petra leapt into action, slapping her on the cheek as the world erupted into life around them, leaving Scutcher lost and alone at the centre of it. “You need to leave, now,” she said, pushing at Scutcher’s arm. It was far from a perfect moment, the fear twisting in his gut like the coil in a spring, the sweat pooling in his neck and his heart thumping so hard was ready to thump right through his rib cage, but if time wanted to stop then and there then he wouldn’t have minded. If he moved forwards then he might open his eyes to find Tallow dead, might hear a cannon fire somewhere in his mind even if there wasn’t one physically here.

“Is she gonna be okay?”

Chest heaving, he couldn’t breathe deep enough, the shallow rattling of his lungs making his shoulders shake and his stomach hurt. There were spots before his eyes, blood draining from his brain as his head grew light. The midwife didn’t answer him , just pushed at him again, “No! I…I can’t. You can’t…”

“Deal with him,” snapped Petra sharply to his Momma. “I got my hands a bit full here.

Petra pulled Tallow’s legs apart as though she were a rag doll, rolling up her dress past her ass and he couldn’t remember that a normal brother would have looked away at this point when his hands had been there, he’d tasted her and loved her and he wasn’t a normal brother. He was her lover, that was his baby and the urge to confess burned in his throat. But he remained silent and they simply pushed him away.

“Go Scutcher. Just go,”barked Momma, standing up and grabbing his arm.

“Is she gonna be okay?” he was still yelling as she pulled him out into the hall, the door shutting behind him. Fingers like spider’s legs, Scutcher bristled with more nervous energy than he even knew he was capable of, usually as slow and as stagnant as pond grown thick with jaundiced moss turning out into the hallway to gaze at the dust that had built up along the skirting board, dried mud cleaving to the concrete floor tiles that made the entire house bitter cold in the winter. The kind of bitter cold that made the breath in front of their mouths form winding tendrils in the air like cigarette smoke and blistered their hands red and raw, she’d huddle in close so that he could feel her hair under his chin like spun gold while the wind howled through gaps in the windows. Turning sharply into the door, Scutcher hit it a couple of times before pressing his nose against the wood. It was always better to focus on the ache in his knuckles than anything else.

“Chucked you out huh?” he heard the stridulous growl of his father’s voice, throat clogged up with tar and phlegm from somewhere on his right, looking down to find Loomis Tansy swathed in a thick fog of cigarette smoke, sitting on a chair from the dinner table and clutching onto his drink as though it were one of his appendages. “Better off out of there, women’s business. Messy business.” One glance at the dried blood on Scutcher’s shirt and hands and there couldn’t have been a truer statement of fact. He must’ve decided that, with one look at his son’s face, which seemed to have slipped lower than a winter sun at five o’clock in the afternoon and turned the same inhospitable shade of grey as the cement beneath their feet, that he needed a stiff drink because Scutcher felt the bottle brush at his finger tips, took it in his hands and held it to his lips.

It tasted like those promises of a new life slipping away from his grasp, like darkness, like pain, the smell of lavender in the garden, sadness, dirt, Tallow’s smile and the way the name Noreen used to feel on his tongue. The burn sluicing down his throat was people laughing though he never know why, his sisters kisses and the way they’d danced at the fair when no one was looking. It tasted like oceans of green and golden fields, like solving a math problem, winning a blue ribbon for a prize pig, chaining him up and slitting his throat. It was the thought of something small and half formed, with a heartbeat of its own that they had made. It tasted bitter and it tasted sweet and everything in between. Gasping, Scutcher slid down onto the floor, knees held into his chest and a hand knotting backwards and forwards through his hair.

What followed was an insurmountable silence as he strained to hear the chatter from behind the door and could feel their father doing the same. When he heard her crying, he didn’t think he’d ever be more happy to hear his sister in pain. The pain meant she was awake. It meant she was alive.

“How could you let somethin’ like this happen?”Loomis finally breathed out and Scutcher had to snap his head up to stare at his father. He often wondered if he had some kind of window into Scutcher’s brain and a map to navigate the fog, his father knew all the places to pick at to make him bleed again, knew where to twist and tug and exactly what to say to make Scutcher feel small and maybe now he could make out the swirling guilt and worry in Scutcher’s brain. How could you let something like this happen? I thought we’d be okay. I thought it was enough to leave it to her.

“Brothers are supposed to be lookin’ out for their sisters.”

But she was the one who soothed him when he got distressed, she stooped to tie his shoelaces whenever he needed her to and trod the messy path of life in front of him, doing her best to unknot the twisting weeds and brambles ahead, her arms reaching out to hold and to guide him. He left it to her to do everything, in the heat of the moment with all the blood gone from his head to other parts of her body and now she was pregnant. And she could be dying.

“Fuckin’ hell, poor girl never had a chance,” Loomis sneered and Scutcher had to agree. “You know him…the guy who knocked her up?”

He prayed that he wasn’t blushing-though he needn’t have done when his face would likely never have colour running through it again. I know him, he thought, struggling not to come out with it, hating the lies and the secrets pushed into his face. The secrets between the two of them, the secrets Tallow had kept from him when they were supposed to be the only two people in the world either of them could trust. It was the combination of all the lies and the secrets that had brought them here.

“I…I…” he started impotently but Loomis Tansy shook his head, already fairly sure that Scutcher didn’t know anything at all.

“Tell you what I’d do if I had my leg…head into town, round up some of the guys, find the sorry bastard and kick the shit out of him. It’s what you should do…if you weren’t such a pathetic piece of ass. For family honour. A guy defiles yer sister and he’s defilin’ your whole name…”

He’d kill him if he knew. Not just beat him badly, not just make him bleed and break every bone in his body. If he knew about them, Loomis would take Scutcher’s life, cup it in his hand like fragile moths and crush the life out of him. No doubt about it.

And if Tallow died, maybe he’d confess everything anyway. After Noreen, after Tallow and his pigs were gone what would there be left but misery wrapped up inside a tin can shack?

Scutcher counted the minutes under his breath, he counted the cracks in the wall and the spider’s webbing in the corners of the ceiling. He counted back across one hundred thirty three days and tried to remember how it had been when they had made their child. No different from any other time, as far as he could recall; nights in his room holding her close, sneaking off together in the smokeroom and the outhouse…the night that Naif had interrupted them. And after that she’d been pregnant the entire time. He sat, he counted, tugging at his hair so tight that he could have come away with fistfuls of curls. And then, when he could hear the screaming again Scutcher decided that he wasn’t going to wait outside and count things impotently anymore.

“Scutcher you can’t be in here!” his momma cried again and the fat blonde midwife, Bawn, came to block the entrance. He could see everything over her shoulders though, knees pulled up to her chest, tossing her head.

In the time he’d been waiting outside they’d given her a cup of sweet raspberry-leaf tea, but Tallow had vomited it back up, dribbling bile onto her chest. Bawn had chopped up some ginger root and made her eat it, though that too had ended up down the front of her dress with the tea. She’d been force fed castor oil and made to chew on cinnamon bark though surprise surprise she couldn’t keep any of that down either. So by the time that Scutcher burst back into the room she was looking like a sweaty, oily, tea stained gingery mess. It was a million miles away from the girl who’d stood on stage in a stolen dress and stolen the heart of most of the men in district ten when she’d won the beauty pageant, ‘stupid thing don’t mean anything’ she’d always insist, her crown now tucked away at the bottom of the wardrobe, out of sight and out of mind. But Scutcher had seen her and had to pinch himself that for some reason she wanted him. Despite his stupidity, his plainness, coarse hands and nails thick with mud, despite the fact he couldn’t tell jokes or charm anyone, despite the fact that they were related even, she loved him more than anyone else in the whole world, more tangibly than Noreen even. She’d been pregnant then too. She could have told him.

“You’re a good brother but there’s nothing you can do, hon,” said Bawn in the same slow, loud way she’d used before. Above her lips was a layer of fine, downy blonde hairs, tiny beads of sweat clinging to them.

Shut up I’m not, he longed to wail. It’s my fault. I did this to her.
But Tallow wailed for him and he was given a rough push and from somewhere behind Bawn, her partner said in a grave voice, “I think this is it now.”

“She…” Scutcher started feebly. “Now? But she…”

“Everyone’s gonna look after your sister. It’s gonna be okay.”

Whimpering and keening in a sad little voice like the wind howling through empty plains in the east, carrying with it the cries of a she- wolf, some final and primordial cry from deep inside of her slipped past Tallow’s throat echoed a thousand times by thousands of women for as long as there had been people and with it, on a wave of pain and misery, came what could have been their baby. Bawn shut the door on him again.

There were scarecrows up on the Thompson Farm just behind theirs; Scutcher could see them out on the field through the window, which was thick with grime and tar. He allowed himself to stare intently at them, thinking that if he could concentrate on the them and the field and the oceans of green and gold and the garden and everything good in the world then the bad stuff wouldn’t overtake him, make it so he couldn’t even stand up or think straight. The scarecrows always stood out in the middle of the field, arms outstretched and tied to crossed slabs of wood, Scutcher didn’t know when the Thompsons make them, but it felt as though they’d always been there- wearing painted sackcloth faces, dressed in old shirts, rolled up pants tied up around the middle with twine and wide brimmed hats. By winter time they grew raggedy and wilted, the colours of their shirts faded in the rain, rolled up pants fraying at the edges as the twine around their middles begins to unravel. The straw they were stuffed with fell away easily onto the earth, tumbling in separate strands on the wind. And then in spring, as though by magic, they were new again- new shirts, new stuffing, new brighter faces painted on the sack cloth material.

It felt like winter for Scutcher, pieces of him falling away into the earth like so much straw flung across a field.

I need you to change this faded shirt, Tallow, these rolled up pants fraying at the edges, paint me a new face over what’s beaten up and bloody, gather up the fallen parts of me lying on this ragged scrap of earth and stitch me back together.

But she couldn’t because he’d ripped her apart too.

He needn’t have look so stunned, slumping against the wall, realising how quiet the room had gone now that the screaming had stopped. He shouldn’t have been surprised. There was always a price, there had always been this sorrow lurking deep in the blood of how they were made- the Tansy kids alone in a world that twisted strange and out of their control. It was always going to be like this, half-formed, not allowed to breathe- clutching their secrets close inside of them, fearing what would happen when they found the light of day. He noticed that it was darkening rapidly, the moon ripe round and fecund in the sky when everything below was skeletal and barren. Even with the agonizing seconds spend waiting the day had hurtled quickly out of the control of Scutcher’s brain. They’d told him he was free, the threat of death passing over him like a thick black curtain being lifted, only for it to explode messily in his face. He’d been a father, almost, for one hundred thirty three days only he hadn’t known it and now that he did know…he wasn’t one anymore.

Say something, he wanted to command of his father, still in his chair, still smoking what could have been the same cigarette from hours ago. He needed words to pierce the silence and the fog in his brain. Even if it was something cruel it would be better than nothing. Fucking say something. But Loomis Tansy couldn’t even give that, as though he knew when to speak to hurt and knew exactly when his silence could be more painful than anything else. Silence gripped Scutcher by the throat and he couldn’t breathe, gasping out for air, making his head feel dizzy and strange. Just because the baby was out didn’t mean that the midwives stopped, and an hour might have passed, a life time maybe, (time didn’t seem to matter anymore, it was fluid, it was transient and something people had simply made up to mark the pointless spaces between birth and death) before the door swung open again.

“She’s gonna be okay,” said Momma in a teary whisper. “She lost a lot of blood but…they said she’d get better.” He felt like he was back at the reaping all over again when they had called out the name of girl he didn’t know, felt the same rush of relief before he remembered he was still in the tin can shack with a shirt stained with blood and a heavy, sombre feeling in the air.

The two midwives were at her side, Petra wiping her hands on a piece of cloth before she added. “These things happen sometimes… ain’t no accounting for it, ain’t nothing anyone can do. But she’s young; she’ll recover and have plenty of healthy babies…when she’s ready.”

She won’t, Scutcher thought for one sickening moment, it’s always going to be like this.

There were solemn words exchanged under their breath, falling like dried dead leaves on the earth, that Scutcher didn’t try to listen to, didn’t pretend to understand, discussing Tallow and Scutcher’s lives, their baby like they had nothing to do with it, while they were out of earshot. Scutcher wanted to go to her more than he wanted oxygen but he could just about make out that she was resting- they would have never let him go in anyway.

They knew that the Tansy family didn’t have the money to pay for them and tried to waiver the fee in a way that made them all baulk. Violet pressed a jar of preserves into Bawn’s hands, Petra was presented with a pouch of chewing tobacco from Loomis and Scutcher, determined to outdo them- Tallow and the baby were his after all cast about wildly for anything he might have of value. Noreen’s ring attached to a chain on his neck felt cold against his skin and he tugged at it idly for a moment, before deciding that he couldn’t go through with it, gathering up instead the flowers from his room into a slightly limp, muddy bouquet for Bawn. Loomis sniggered and Scutcher felt a very real pain in his heart- like someone had stepped on it. Thanking them for the gifts, they nodded, tightened their grips on the bag and left.

Leaving the Tansy family the way they always were, isolated, wallowing in their own misery.

“Healthy babies when she’s ready!” scoffed Loomis before the door had even shut all the way. “I’m nailing her fucking legs shut is what I’m doing.”

Violet let out a small tut and shook her head, glancing over at the washing she’d had piled up while Scutcher clenched and unclenched his fists so that he could feel the blood where he’d broken skin and Loomis turned on the television again. It was nothing but static all year until the reapings began and then they showed repeats, showed pundits dissecting the footage, over and over until you knew the tributes’ faces better than you knew your own neighbours. Maybe Loomis was thinking the same thing as Scutcher when he sat back to watch the television, for all their horror, they were still Games, still far away behind a sterile screen. Noreen had died but there had been no stink, no feel of blood and in so many ways it felt like a dream. Today had been firmly planted in the here and now, with no cameras to watch, to feel their burden and understand their pain. Today had been messy and ugly and all too real.

Slipping away, no one told him not to bother her, so Scutcher went into Tallow’s room again. He expected it to have changed in a very tangible way for some reason, all of the papers fallen from the walls like the shedding of skin and everything else that had come before. He expected the room to have been stripped down to a skeleton, still smeared with blood and vomit and pieces of things that they said were messy women’s business. But they’d changed the sheets, left the old ones in a crumpled pile in the corner and wiped everything away, her drawings were still up, her notebooks still on the desk. She lay with his back to him, curled up and retreating into herself like a snail pulled up into its shell so Scutcher took her for asleep.

Hovering in the door way, nervously bashing his knuckles against the doorjamb he was almost frightened to shut it behind him now that they knew no good come of two siblings shut away from behind a closed door but when he did, Scutcher shifted over to her timidly. She’d changed from her stained buttercup yellow dress to the same nightdress she’d worn this morning, the strap falling down her shoulder again to reveal her bare skin under the coveralls and he hovered his hand over it, wanting to touch, not wanting to, and not knowing if that’s what she wanted. Carefully, Scutcher kicked off his boots and slid next to her, not touching, but close enough to feel her warmth, to feel she was alive.

The silence was insurmountable and Scutcher was so tired, he’d not slept a wink last night worrying over the reapings though that seemed so pointless and unimportant now, allowed his eyes to drift shut, when, out of the heavy lingering quiet she spoke, softly and in a voice like shards of glass.

“It was a girl. I thought it was too early to tell, but the midwife said.”

Tallow didn’t turn her head, stayed looking at the wall, but when Scutcher moved in to wrap his arms around his sister she let him, her cold, very pale fingers twining with his. He didn’t think the hurt could get worse, didn’t think there could be any more surprises but the revelation of the gender of their child suddenly made the loss seem more corporeal than ever. It wasn’t just some shadow growing inside of Tallow that might have been something one day. It was the makings of a little girl, with robin’s egg blue eyes, long hair like Tallow’s that turned golden in the summer but kinked into loose curls like Scutcher’s did. She might have been smart like her momma, she might have been gentle like her daddy. They’d never find out and Scutcher felt something salty sting his eyes. Did half formed things go to the same heaven just beyond Orion’s belt, out among the swirling stars that he’d imagined Noreen was in? Were they supposed to name her? Were they supposed to grieve for somebody that they would never know?

“Where is she?”he whispered into Tallow’s hair, trying to keep his voice steady so that she wouldn’t know that he was crying.

“Petra? They went home hours ago, you saw them leave.”

“I mean,” it got more difficult “…the…our…the baby…”

“Oh…that,” Scutcher felt her shift, grip onto his arm with whatever memory had gripped her, something with a painful, powerful spike. “They took it. I don’t know where.”

He wouldn’t imagine what that meant, what became of the unborn babies in the district. Were they even supposed to be buried? Scutcher didn’t know, but it might have been nice to put her in the garden where all the flowers bloomed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Shifting a little, Tallow turned around in his arms so that she could face him. She wore her face like a hollow mask, her eyes shimmering and dead, like a corpse floating face down in the water, her colours washed away and her expression utterly blank. “At first I used to shut my eyes and pretend it wasn’t happening….thinking if I ignored it….then it would just go away. It’s real easy to do when you’re trying that hard. Then I was just trying to figure out how to fix it. But it fixed itself.” Her face creased like rumpled sheets and with a sob she buried her face into his chest, shoulders shaking with heart wrenching tears.

“I win. I always win.”

They’d say she was lucky. That they were lucky- if there was no more baby then there was no more proof of their dalliances, no need to take responsibility for their actions. A new life wouldn’t fill up their lives, they had no more mouths to feed, nothing to fret over and care for, and they were free to continue as they always did with each other. In a lonely barren wasteland. They were the lucky ones, alright. Scutcher kissed the top of her head and held his sister until the tears stopped and she drifted off, exhausted, emptied and bare into sleep. Scutcher hoped, in her dreams at least, she could find a way to be happy- but it seemed like too much to ask.

He would have held her all night but for, as unromantic as it sounds, the fact that he hadn’t urinated in over eleven hours. By then, her grip on him had slipped a little, the way that it always did. He’d creep into her room, or she into his at the moment they were certain that their parents were asleep. Without turning he can always hear her clothes hitting the floor, louder than her footsteps as though she’s floating, while the shadows dance across her body. And in the morning, when the old cockerel always seemingly seconds away from passing out dead, begins to crow- if she’s asleep, he’ll unpeel himself from against her, if she’s awake she’ll roll over and whisper, “stay” and kiss him with the stale traces of the morning still in her mouth. He’ll try to say ‘I have to go’ but it won’t come because he doesn’t want to anyway and won’t leave til she pushes him and admits, ‘they’ll be up soon’.

And little by little he could feel the ghost of a baby slipping into all of the memories, the way that the frost creeps shimmering and frigid over the fields in winter.

Up against a stump in the yard, Scutcher relieved himself, daring to look over at the house. Some part of him wondered if this was it now; if sadness only ever came in finite amounts and they were simply getting all of theirs in one go. Ready to lead long and happy lives the way that Noreen had promised he would. He shook the urine from his dick, did up the flies on his jeans before he had to jump as the voice behind him drifted in from seemingly nowhere.

“What was she thinking? We’re fucking bottom of the barrel without her bastard to worry about too.” Loomis Tansy sat on the porch, on one of the scavenged plastic chairs they had as furniture. He’d washed away the shock and perhaps, Scutcher was sure he’d seen it, the very real worry about his daughter with homemade vodka, as thick and as starchy as wall paper paste that clung and burnt to the backs of throats. And now all that was left was the anger, which was churning up like butter inside of him, once liquid and feeble now growing and solidifying.

“I bet it’s the Poers’ kid…everyone says he’s friendly with her,” he was slurring. He was always slurring though, but his voice began to rise in pitch, echoing over the almost empty pig farm. “He can pay me back for those fucking midwives, and…come to think of it, for all the food his baby got free when it was in her. Aint like he can’t afford it!” He grabbed wildly for his crutch, hauling his great frame to his feet. Above them the portent of a moth careened wildly around the porch lamp, like a dance.

“I’m getting the name of the father, even if I have to drag it out of her…” he growled and Scutcher thought of her curled up inside, cheeks dried up like cured meat from all the salt in her tears, wrapping his hand around his father’s arm.

“No.” he said with a low growl of his own, not sure why he was trembling. It wasn’t that he was frightened of getting punched and hit in the gut with the crutch, or that he was frightened of Loomis somehow managing to get Tallow to tell him everything (she never would though) - Scutcher didn’t feel like he could ever be frightened of anything at that moment, perhaps ever again. What was there to be afraid of? The bad things would happen whether you wanted them to or not, and being scared of them only made it worse. “You don’t yell at her! You don’t say anything to her! It’s not her fault.”

Scutcher thought of all the times he’d been hit and had never hit back and felt the wound up coils inside of him. He was a fist shaped Jack -in the box, wind the crank, twist the string until he couldn’t take it anymore. And then watch him pop.

Loomis Tansy laughed, a cruel and bitter laugh, as threatened by the hand on his arm as he would have been by a butterfly landing on it. “You know how babies get made dontcha? It’s partly her fault, didn’t have to open her legs did she? That bitch has no idea how lucky she is that it died, no fuckin’ id-”

It’s the pop, the bang, the incision to the main carotid artery that bleeds all that’s inside of him out onto the porch.

For a minute, Scutcher wondered why there was an explosion of pain in his knuckles so bad that he wanted to scream, instead choking out an ‘ow fffff-’ shaking out his hand to shake out the pain. One of the bones might have cracked- sounding like twigs snapping underfoot while he walks with Noreen through the woods and up to the garden. And then he realised that his father was now slumped on the floor, arms sprawled out from the impact of Scutcher’s punch. Good. Fucking good. Scutcher was done. Loomis Tansy hadn’t been in that room, seen the blood and then heard her whisper in a voice heavy with sorrow that the baby was a girl. Was that what good luck was supposed to look like? Scutcher almost wished they’d reaped him instead so he could have been shipped off to the capitol without ever having to know a damn thing about the baby and about what he’d done to Tallow, so he wouldn’t have to feel like this and he could get a taste of being unlucky for a change.

He was done being one of the lucky ones.

Not stopping to think about what he’d just done, not to feel sorry for hurting his father the way he’d done when he’d hurt Naif in the pig huts what felt like a whole life time ago, not to shit his pants over the fact that Loomis would be mad as hell and make sure he paid for it a thousand times over, Scutcher took off down the yard. While his brain couldn’t say for certain where he was going, muscle memory and something deep inside of him would always pull him in the same direction, to the same place every time.

He used the thin flickering flame from his lighter to guide the way and lit a clump of dried out weeds, already pulled up and discarded. In the jaundiced light from the fire he could see that the garden had already wrapped itself in autumnal haze, the sorrowful climax of a summer of drought. Standing between dead roses, Scutcher was suddenly struck by the cancerous emaciation of it. The leaves had started turning yellow towards the end of August and now began to fall, like a dance of prematurely withered bodies. The flowers scabbed brown and collapsed at the lightest touch though Noreen’s nameplate still had an almost mocking new sheen to it. The world was dying and he was still here, still heaving in oxygen through the ragged remains of his chest, still pumping blood as though each cell was the blade of a knife. One of the lucky ones.

Fisting at a handful of knotgrass to prevent it from strangling the dahlias felt futile but his hands ached for something to do, some small distraction before he could slump into the earth, legs pulled up to his chest, staring up at Noreen’s plaque, still nailed to the tree where he’d left it. “How did you do it?” he whispered to the carved words, hand wandering to her ring on the chain around his neck. “You was so brave. And…and…you didn’t know if you was gonna see anyone again. Home. Jack. The babies.” His chest ached, rocking backwards and forwards, grabbing at more hair. “I feel like I can’t hardly stand it no more.”

Her answer was only the light rustle of branches. Scutcher wished that he could follow the wind, so that it would lead him to her, he was tired to his bones, still wearing Tallow’s blood smeared on his shirt and wanted to lie down in the dirt and pull the flowers and the earth over his body like a coverall. They’d be better off, even if Noreen said he was needed here. Momma, his dad and Tallow. Especially Tallow.

Miss District Ten in a blue dress, crown and sash- bright and pretty and so full of life. Scutcher was the weight around her neck, dragging her down into the dirt and making her sit with him among all the bones. Tallow and Scutcher loved each other selfishly, he grasped onto her for the way he had her secret smile, arrogantly pretending that they could be enough for each other. She was supposed to do things, get married to someone she could kiss in the district square and have everything that was supposed to make people happy, white picket fences, wide open spaces, something to hold in your arms and love, knowing that when you died there would be something left behind, that you wouldn’t have to be there and gone again just as easily, all that was you slipping away in a puff of smoke. And Scutcher was supposed to have shrivelled up and died the moment Noreen did.

How many Naif Malloc’s would it take to have them rip apart at the seams, how many more babies to break them?

“I gotta go, don’t I?” he said, staring so intently at Noreen’s nameplate it was as though he thought it might sprout a mouth and give him the answers to his problems.

Yes, Scutcher. You can’t mess around with your sister and expect nothing to happen, it wasn’t her voice, something sterner and harder around the edges of it. Take responsibility now, before you end up ruining her life.

But the pigs, and the debt and a million other reasons why I should stay as well as the only one that counts. This place. Don’t ask me to choose between Noreen and Tallow.

You don’t have to. Love both of them and leave both of them. Choose life.

All of the life was flowing out of the garden, overripe fruit filling the air sweet and strange, but after the winter was swept away it could begin again. If he stayed, then there would be nothing but memories and lingering elbow deep in bones, the ghost of a baby slipping in between Tallow and Scutcher and an empty barren life. If he left, then the garden would carry on regardless and even beneath the tangle of weeds there would be fresh green shoots deep under the soil. Choose life.

“It won’t be for forever,” he said quietly, hopefully, to the tree. Just long enough for the dust to settle, until the pain stopped being quite so sharp and the garden could grow again.

But you promised. He heard on the whisper of the wind.

There were a pair of secateurs close to a stump that he remembered because he’d used them to dead head the shrivelled up buds of old roses earlier in the week, scattering a few seeds into the earth when he did so and hoping a few of them would stick and Scutcher picked them up, going over to Noreen’s tree- the one that he’d affixed her nameplate to. He took the sharp edge of the secateurs and pushed it into the bark, knowing that the end results wouldn’t be pretty but that they were the best that he could do, under the circumstances, ever really.

“I…” he started, taking in breath sharply. “….I think you understand why I gotta go, I hope you do… I really do want to stay and look after the garden for forever and look after your babies like you would have wanted…but…even if I can’t do you think….you could look after mine?”

She didn’t have a name so Scutcher hadn’t really known what to carve into the tree, didn’t want to pluck one for her just out of the air without Tallow- who would refuse to think about it anyway- so he’d simply decided on BABY, carved in his rough scrawl into the tree.

He loved this place. More than anything in the world; from the way it had been slow to reveal itself, pale green things coaxed up gently from the ground before bursting into life. It was so… Noreen like that; slow to reveal herself to him and then before he knew it he’d fallen deep down. Inescapably.

He wouldn’t break his promise to Noreen, Scutcher was a least determined of that. Scutcher’s precious things could never be condensed into solid, corporeal possessions just like that. It would be impossible to hold onto the way the garden looks when the sun hits it just right and the light filters through the gaps in the dense thicket overhead. Nor could he ever grasp the thought of his sister’s fingers clenched in his, their bodies pressed tightly together to blot out the rest of the world or the last, lingering, traces of a dead girl’s smile and the way her name feels on his tongue. All the same, he’d give everything he has for a chance to capture them perfectly in the palm of his hand and carry them with him wherever he had to go now.

But you can’t catch memories and put them into little glass pendants any more than you can the stars. People were not just their bodies, not their objects like a ring or a nameplates or simply the places that they loved.

“I’ll see you again, Noreen.”

Even if they weren’t around, even if they had to leave or he had to leave them or they had never really even arrived at all then Scutcher knew that wherever he went he would find a way to carry them in his heart.

Scutcher was stupid, but even he wasn’t stupid enough to try the front door when he got in, slipped around the side of the house, out to the concrete slabbed back porch where Tallow’s window was. The longest night was nearly over, dawn breaking over the green and gold fields of district ten in a swirling pink mist, planting dew on the grass like teardrops, making him shiver beneath his reaping shirt. At least he could throw it away now, Scutcher never wanted to have to wear it again. In a tree a pigeon cooed softly to her chicks and he tapped lightly on Tallow’s window, sure that she’d be stirring. They always were at dawn, kissing away what was left of the night.

Wrapping her arms around herself, wincing and weak, Tallow opened the window, her brow crinkled up. “What?…Noodle, I do have a door.”

“I punched dad in the face,” he admitted, climbing through the window, tracking mud onto the bare floorboards. Her smile was faint, but it still lingered and choked all of the breath right out of him. It was too rarely that Scutcher knew something that she didn’t; he couldn’t lie or keep secrets from her, they would always come out, and this one was killing him. Turning, something pained on her face, she moved back to get into bed again- slow and shuffling like someone more than four times her age. Slipping his hand around her waist he helped her back into bed, thinking that it really was the least he could do.

“I can’t believe you done that. What the fuck did he say?”

“I don’t know. He was on the floor and I just…kinda… left him there.”

Tallow laughed weakly, but of course it carried a mournful lit like a mocking jay singing some lost winter hymnal. Sinking back against the pillow, she wrapped the blankets up around her neck as Scutcher perched at the edge of the mattress, twining his hand round the bedknob.

“What’re you gonna do?” she asked when the laughter died in her throat, he almost wished that she hadn’t because now he had to answer her directly instead of dancing around and around the subject the way that he probably would have done left to his own devices.

“Remember what we talked about? Before…when you said I should leave and get a place in town for us?” Before the world had crumbled, when she’d smiled at him and whispered later ,confident as anything that there would be one. Scutcher felt sure he would have given everything he had to go back to that moment, when she’d pinned the Forget Me Not to his chest. As if the memory of the dead wasn’t already tacked in bloody holes to his skin.


“Yeah,” she said and her slow smile made him want to die. The first real smile, the like break in the clouds after heavy rainfall. “Someplace small, a shithole…whatever; it don’t matter as long as it ain’t here.”

“I’m gonna leave the farm. I decided,” there was a crack in his voice. The baby, the whisper of voices and the thought of their future had decided for him, really. “And town aint far enough…I’m gonna go East maybe.”

“East is a shithole, Scutcher. But…I suppose…if we go somewhere where no one knows us, then it’ll be easier won’t it? I don’t really care where we go; I just wanna be with you.” Gently, she slipped her hand out from the bed covers and reached over to take his own, resting in a fist but he had to pull it away.

“Tallow…” look up to the ceiling Scutcher, count the cobwebs, if you don’t look at her you won’t crash. “I’m leavin and I’m goin’ out East but you won’t be comin’ with me.”

“What..not…you mean for now? So you can get settled? Or coz…because Petra said I can be off bed rest at the end of the week. And that’s at the latest.”

“I mean… ever.”

“I don’t understand.” Shaking her head, he reminded Scutcher of himself, stumbling through the fog. But deep down, both he and she knew that he understood him perfectly- it was easy enough to tell from the way that the tears began to prick her eyes. “I don’t get it.”

“Tallow you said it was all okay as long as we ain’t hurting anyone. But it’s hurting you…. real bad.” The sheets bundled in the corner swaddled the horrors of last night as the sorrowful dribble of colostrum stained the fabric of Tallow’s nightdress like tears for the lost baby. He’d never forget her wailing, the way she’d crumpled like dried pressed flowers in the district square, not if he lived to be a hundred years old.

“No…no…no…it’s fine,” tears started to skate down her cheeks to match the dew tipped morning and she dabbed at them fiercely. “I’m fine.”
“You…and you’re crying Tallow…and it’s coz of me. I’m the one making you sad.”

“That’s because you said you’re leaving. I won’t be sad if you stay. Stay.” Tallow began to shrink into herself before his eyes; from cold eyed and cynical right back into something softer. God, he could only think, swiping his thumb under her eye, she really is so young. Even if they thought he was naïve, that his slowness made him ignorant of the world- and in all honesty it almost definitely did he was still her big brother. He was still the one who was supposed to protect her. And it made the pill so much bitter to swallow. Lover, mother, father, caretaker- she’d taken on all the roles, each of them too much for a girl her age and now here was the cost.

“It’s not for forever….just…I don’t think we can be around each other no more. Not for a while.” It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to say. For better or worse Noreen had simply vanished from his life on the day of the reaping and she’d died a million miles away from him, the frigid safety of a glass screen and district lines between them. He didn’t have to look her in the eye, smell her, feel the meat and bone and reality of her eyes welling up with tears. Scutcher couldn’t remember his life before his sister, as it always went with siblings. She was always supposed to there, just across the hall, waiting with a smile to stoop to tie his shoelaces. It was too much to ask. Too much like taking someone for granted.

“Is this because…of…I don’t want a baby,” her voice rose in pitch, almost like the shrieking cries of a cormorant over the bones of a long dead animal, her face was a thick marshland watered down with tears, eyes sore and inflamed. “I don’t ever want one- I just want you! We’ll be more careful now…not so…”

“It’ll happen again. And it’ll keep happenin’.” They’d taken her. Why would they take her? Scutcher never even got to see.Where would they take her? Picturing a cemetery for thin wisps that the unborn children of district ten had for bones made Scutcher feel ill but it was better than any of the alternatives that his dull brain might reach upon. It was a message from the heavens, their version of the earth quaking and shattering condensed into one tiny life that was bigger than any natural disaster. A storm, Scutcher could deal with. He would sit back and watch the rivers run dry, watch the gold and green fields of district ten desiccate into dust and the sun boil up and burn the sky red. But he wouldn’t make Tallow bleed and push out the half formed body of another of their children. There was never any question to what colour her eyes would have been.

“No it won’t. I made a mistake…I fucked up, okay, is that what you want to hear? Just one mistake…and you’re fucking leaving? Just one little mistake.”

Even know she took it all on her shoulders and Scutcher shook his head emphatically. She blamed herself, and he had no idea how to make her see that she was all wrong. She wasn’t listening, she wasn’t understanding that he had to do this and he was running out of ways to show her. Tallow was just…crying. More than he’d seen her cry in his life once she got past the age of tantrums and screaming fits over scuffed knees. Smarter people would have the words, would make the cuts, cleaner. Because that’s what this was- an amputation. With all the blood and the hurt of one.

“You need me,” she whispered hopelessly.

Like a kidney, a limb or a lung. Like every breath of air and every drop of blood.

“Too much. I think we gotta make it so we don’t need each other like this. One day you’ll-”

“Don’t tell me that one day I’ll get married and have babies and be happy you fucking retard,” she suddenly shouted. “Don’t tell me what I want. I pick you, just you and fuck everyone else; we’re the same person, remember?”

They were. He’d never disagreed with her on that point- one person spilt right down the middle- but for the first time in his life he realised how much of a bad thing that was to be. People couldn’t live just by themselves could they? They couldn’t marry themselves or turn to themselves when they were in desperate trouble. Being by yourself for the rest of your life was so very desperately lonely. They pushed up against each other and pushed themselves away from everyone else into a cage made of their own bones. Looking at his sister, all he could see was a girl who was trapped and desperately lonely.

And she didn’t even know she was in a cage.

This was what she meant when she’d said they could be free now. He was a weight around her neck, the lock on her cage; too stupid, too selfish, too related. This was Scutcher, setting her free. Choosing life for both of them.

“Tallow I think…I would have really loved that baby, Tallow and… I don’t know if this….you and me…is enough.” The words were so hard. He hadn’t done them right; because Tallow’s face didn’t relax, her tears drying as all at once she finally began to see how what he was doing was for the best because instead, her face contorted up, her lips began to tremble and she pushed at him.

“Get out,” she barked, her face cold.

“Tallow…” Scutcher didn’t move. He was stuck. Stuck because he knew he had to go, but he didn’t want to go like this. Some part of him had been hoping that he might get to kiss her chastely on the lips one last time and they might even be able to muster up a sad smile, a nod like this is for the best and the promise that they might still be friends one day. Honestly, how stupid could you get?

“IF I’M NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU THEN YOU CAN FUCK OFF,” she started again, getting up onto her knees and driving her fists into his shoulders. It didn’t hurt; she was too tired and really in her condition it was too much exertion. Eventually- though some part of him was tempted to just let her keep hitting him, he deserved it- he caught both her fists and Tallow slumped against him, pressing her lips against his throat and whimpering.

“Don’t leave me with these people. Please Scutcher, PLEASE. Don’t leave me all alone.”

Gently, Scutcher picked her from him like pulling up delicate meadow flowers. They’d sit outside on a roughly woven rug in the spring, making daisy chains out in the field, blowing the wisps of dandelion fluff out into the air to tell the time, holding butter cups under their chins to see if they liked butter though they couldn’t afford any up at the house. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, wouldn’t say a single word because he wasn’t sure that he had any left.

He just stood up and opened the window again. He didn’t need to go to his room to back, he had fifteen dollars in his pocket and a vest underneath the shirt stained with blood. Even his clothes smelt faintly of her.

“And people say I’m the heartless one,” Tallow whispered as he was leaving. He wanted to get one last look at her, at that secret smile she kept just for him- but it had to be clean, the blade had to be sharp. And he knew that even if he did turn around that she wouldn’t be smiling at him.

I thought that I’d be here forever, Tallow, Scutcher thought as he tracked down their farm- passing the pig huts that they’d built themselves over one agonising summer. Past the washing line, the wash basin, that poor bedraggled rooster crowing out so desperately for the sweet release of death. He thought of the summer heat and sitting on the porch, their backs sticking to the corrugated metal with a sheen of sweat, of that one winter when the snow had been deep enough that Tallow could barely see over the crisp blanket of white. I thought that if anyone could have made it so we’d never be parted it was you. You always win Tallow, that’s what you say. No problem that you can’t fix, no hurt that you can’t overcome. One day you’ll march right up to the capitol and tell the president to stop, one day you’ll lay siege to heaven and tell them that they took Noreen and the baby too soon and that they should give them back right away. And when I’m with you I feel like I can win too.

But it’s not fair to expect that from you…you’re just a girl and I’m just a boy. The Tansy kids. Powerless and ordinary.

But I don’t think any two people in the world could have loved each other as powerfully and as extraordinarily we did.

The lucky ones.