Something Rotten (Charade)
Aug 4, 2012 17:27:19 GMT -5
Post by kneedles on Aug 4, 2012 17:27:19 GMT -5
It starts with a sudden lameness; when a healthy pig lies in the dirt for days, squealing in an agony that it can’t comprehend. The blisters form ugly and pulsating around the edges of the hoof; its mouth thick with frothing saliva as the animals grows restless with the heat from a high fever. Scutcher sat up all night with the first pig to succumb (a docile, slightly dippy sow named Blackberry) isolated from the rest in a cleaned down, quarantined pig hut; she put her heavy head onto his lap while he patted her stomach, rising and falling with each strained heartbeat. I’m here, he whispered when her eyes flickered towards his and he saw fear in them, it’s gonna be okay- the way that his sister would do for him when the old blood from a beating began to crust over in his nostrils. It was a lie though and she didn’t get better, nothing was okay and he’d had to kill her before the sun rose over the pig farms and the stretching fields like wide green and golden oceans of District Ten.
Blackberry’s was the first body to burn on the pyre, piled low with the scraps of twigs collected from the trees in the yard, but it was far from the last. On the second day there were three more- two piglets from Blackberry’s last litter, infected as they suckled at their mother’s teat, who slipped away unassisted in the afternoon and a stout, wizened brown boar called Pops who Scutcher had raised for breeding since he was fourteen, bled out in the smokehouse by Scutcher’s hand. On the third there were five more for the fire and the low pyre grew and grew. By the fourth day the smoke rose up into the sky like an inky black dye swirling through water.It blotted out the stretching fields and enveloped Scutcher’s world in ash.
We’re finished, no one said as the fire rose above the slumped mound of naked, lifeless pink flesh, smeared with dirt, ash and the last lingering traces of blood. But they were all of them thinking it.All of the pigs who had fallen ill were on the pyre- about two thirds of the herd- but there could be more. The whole farm could be sick for all Scutcher knew, would have to spend the next days in an agonising wait for the disease to present itself. And even if he burned the last of them they wouldn’t recover from this for a long while.
The rent is due at the end of the month, we’ll never meet our government quota in a million years- which means a fine probably. There was only one thing in the entire world that Scutcher could do; run his farm and keep his family hanging onto the edge of poverty by the tips of their bruised and blistered fingers. And somehow he’d failed at that just like everything else. Pigs and Math…that was supposed to be his thing.
Goodbye Blackberry, Pops, Toffee and Stella. I’m sorry that I let you down, Ojo, Dandelion, Seedling, Buckthorn and Brambles along with all the rest. I never wanted any of you to suffer.
But the numbers wouldn’t add up now, even if he took out as much tesserae as he could right now it would never see a family of four through the summer and then all through the autumn and the winter as well. There was no way never ever ever he was letting Tallow do the same, either- not after Noreen. They’d be starving by the new year, Scutcher could see it as clear as the dawn rising in the east, a heavy weight on his chest and the traces of stinging tears still playing in the corner of his eyes and his nose, making him sniff sharply. We’re finished. Might as well divide up what few possessions they had and scatter it to the wind. It starts with a sudden lameness, ugly blisters and frothing saliva; it ends with a family in tatters, out on the street.
“Better block the whole f-cking area off,” his father yelled sharply at him, over the sounds of flesh crackling and charring. Scutcher couldn’t help but watch the fire, as entranced as he was appalled. They couldn’t feel it, he reminded himself, like he might have to do when one of his favourite pigs lay out gutted on his work table. They’re just meat and matter now. They’d burnt Noreen’s body too, he’d heard, before they sent her back home. In some strange way he’d been hoping for an open casket, once last chance to touch her hand and see her face. But that was days and days ago by now- she would have already started to rot quickly after death; Scutcher was no stranger to what could happen to a body. The eyes were the first to go.
He and Tallow used to talk, cuddled up close under thick blankets in winter, about setting the farm alight- it was mostly Tallow, admittedly- and watching the whole world burn. But not like this, when he couldn’t be sure if it was the smoke or the sadness blurring his vision. Loomis Tansy tossed Scutcher a length of string. “Write something on the road too. Warnin’ anyone who might pass through. The town’ll have us lynched if there’s an outbreak and they trace it back here. You can write can’t you dumbass?”
So Scutcher tied a rope across the entrance of the house, separating them from the rest of the world- which, for the most part they always had been. The strange secrets of the Tansy family; the alcohol on their father’s breath, the blood of his firstborn smeared across his knuckles while the children shared fevered kisses in bed at night and their mother sat, slowly shrinking into the furniture- all of it hidden away within the confines of a tin can house. Sniffing sharply, Scutcher found white paint in the smokehouse, leftover from when Tallow had white washed the fences a couple years ago to try and cheer the place up a bit (it hadn't worked).
Crouching down on the dirt path outside of the house, the smell of hot pig meat thick, tiny flecks of their bodies reduced to ash wafting on the air like snowfall in August, Scutcher wrote in large thick, messy letters;
REAL BAD INFECKSION! DO NOT ENTUR.
[/size]
[/justify]
