As I passed by, I gave Elian a quick wave, but didn’t stop. Not this time.
Dad was waiting for me at the exit to the cramped warehouse, still teeming with activity even though the sun had lost its fight with the toxic clouds for the day.
“Any jobs?” he asked me as soon as I reached his side.
I shook my head. No one had need of a handyman. Or, if they did, they would do without Dad’s skills for now. Winter was coming, and with it a new chill on the wind.
I pulled up the collar of my jacket as we started the long walk home. At least it wasn’t raining, not like last weekend. The drops burned whenever they found skin.
Dad grumbled to himself, as he always did when work was lean. He insisted I come to the market with him each weekend to help him scope out jobs. We could cover the market twice as fast, and Dad often said I had a face that was hard to say no to. Not that that helped.
We were only a couple of miles away from the farm when Dad’s steps slowed. I glanced back at him as he pulled a small packet from the inner pocket of his coat.
“See this, Em?”
I came to a stop and wrapped my arms around my chest. “What is it?”
“A cure for the cows. Makes them breed again, produce milk.” He unwrapped a small vial. It looked like an old cough syrup bottle. “We just have to mix it into their water.”
“But the scientists said—”
“But nothing. The goddamn scientists don’t know everything. Macmaster’s heifer calved last spring even though the scientists said the fallout rendered livestock within 500 miles of the radiation zone sterile.”
I didn’t point out that the calf had eight legs and had to be put down soon after.
“Just think. We’ll be the first farm in the region with cows producing real milk! If this works, the man I bought it from has one for the chickens too.”
I shook my head. Not the chickens. “How much did you pay for that?”
“This?” He held the bottle out and snapped the handmade label with the nail of his index finger. “Not too much. Don’t you worry.”
***
At dinner, Dad was in a jovial mood, despite the fact my brother Broden left his job repairing a neighbor’s plumbing because he couldn’t pay. Dad just said, “Well, maybe we can figure out an appropriate trade.”
I met Broden’s raised brows with a shrug.
After I collected the wrappers from our supplement bars and put them in the trash, Dad marched us out to the cows’ water trough. It was covered with a translucent plastic dome, pitted with milky scars where the acid rain found purchase. Dad opened the tank and switched off the pump. The chugging water slowed to idle swirls.
The water came from the stream that ran on our property, fed by headwaters to the north untouched by the fallout. After the government took their cut to help provide water to the needy, there was still enough to keep ourselves and our animals watered. But we were prohibited from selling the water to anyone else. Something about taking advantage in times of crisis.
In the absence of the pump’s whine, the lowing of the cows could be heard, insistent and familiar. As if this was any other day.
I was there when the government livestock agent came and examined our animals. Said they were contaminated, sterile. Dad got quiet at that, but shook the man’s hand anyway when he took his leave, said to get on with a cure in a friendly voice. And we still took care of the beasts. The pigs we couldn’t slaughter. Chickens that wouldn’t lay eggs. Cows who went dry.
But they weren’t dead yet. “The scientists will figure something out. You’ll see,” Dad would say.
Months passed, and our livestock aged: gray whiskers, inflamed joints, rheumy eyes. Even if we could eat them, meat off the youngest would still be stringy. At the market, I heard tales of folks desperate enough to eat their animals. Tales of the bleeding and vomiting and shedding of teeth and hair so like the dark months right after the fallout.
It wasn’t worth it. But Dad, a fifth-generation farmer, would not accept that. And now, with no other options, he had resorted to potions.
Broden laughed at the silly grin on Dad’s face but I stayed silent as he poured the brew into the tank with a snapping flourish of his wrist.
***
That night, I crouched in front of the hen house, heart thumping in my throat. The roosting birds only murmured slightly when I raised the latch and slipped inside. The feathers would fetch a good price. The feet too, once I was done with them. The rest would have to be discarded. A waste, but a necessary one.
I wrung their necks. I thought I’d be rusty as it had been over a year since I butchered a bird and trussed it up for our table. But the movements of my rubber-gloved hands were smooth and quick. By the time I was halfway through, the remaining chickens caught on. They broadcasted their distress in great clacking screams, flapping their wings and kicking up feathers and dirt. I cut off their voices bird by bird until the night was silent once more.
I brushed the sweat from my brow before the chill took over. Feathers drifted back down to the ground. I’d need to collect those too, but I stayed there, huddled in the hen house, until I was certain Dad and Broden had not woken. My panting breaths surrounded me in white mist. But it was done.
***
The following morning, my fingers were raw from plucking all the feathers from the lean carcasses. My vision blurred as I made the morning tea, pouring three cups.
Dad stumbled from his room, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. “What time is it? I didn’t hear the birds.” Somehow, after all that had happened, the damn birds still knew when the sun rose in the gray sky.
I pushed his mug toward him. He took it and sank gratefully into his seat at the table. “Thanks, hon.”
Sitting across from him, I cleared my throat. “Dad, I’ve been through the accounts. We’ll barely have enough for food this winter, let alone the energy to heat the house.”
His face hardened, much like the field stone that marked the border of our property. “We’ll manage. Always have, always will.” The same line he told the local charity group.
“Not this time. But don’t worry. I have a plan. The chickens—”
His chair crashed to the floor. “What did you do?”
“I—”
He pushed through the back door and stalked toward the barn. I slowly followed after him, fists at my side. I heard his anguished cry, a lament on the cold morning air.
I stopped at the barn’s entrance, my shadow in the leaden morning light the only thing brave enough to go inside.
Dad looked at me, then gestured to the carcasses stacked on one side of the pen, the feet strung up by twine draining from the railings. “Why, Emmeline?”
“Someone needed to do something.”
He spat on the ground, thick and wet. “You had no right—”
“We aren’t going to freeze this winter. Not again. I won’t allow it!”
The red blotchy anger faded from his face, leaving behind a painful paleness. Savage victory surged through me, even as my hands twinged in frostbit memory, as the moth-eaten smell of the charity blankets momentarily blocked out the stench of old hay and too many animals.
Dad shouldered past me and headed inside, slamming the door behind him.
***
None of the dairy cows were pregnant yet. No pregnancies, no milk. Our bull kept to himself on the far side of the pen, surly and unable to service the females. But Broden and I knew better than to point that out. Besides, Dad wasn’t talking to me these days, but that was okay. There was too much to do, and the work kept me warm against the encroaching cold. The first night the temperature dropped into the teens, Broden complained at dinner, but he went silent after seeing the look on Dad’s face.
Once the feet stopped oozing, I pulled down the line and placed them into a box filled with salt. Not too much; economy was still important. Even though it was practically useless, Dad felt better having a large supply of iodized salt around th
e house. Just in case it happened again.
After Dad left for the market the following week—by himself for the first time I could remember—I crept into his room and found Mom’s jewelry box shoved to the back of the closet’s top shelf. She lost herself in the cold when radiation poisoning took my baby sister, so I didn’t think she would mind this. I fingered a few necklaces, too precious for this endeavor. Then I found a strand of shiny beads, bright like the gypsy girl’s kerchief. Perfect.
I had already sorted the feathers into eight-ounce bundles. As it got colder, people would be desperate for anything to insulate their clothes and bedding. Most people had already killed off their farm animals, with food and water too dear to spare. But Dad wouldn’t listen. For once his stubbornness had worked in our favor.
I kept a small pile of feathers for myself and dyed them black with ink. They would decorate the charms, along with the beads and wire from clothes hangers that wouldn’t be missed.
At the end of the second week, the chicken feet were dried into brittle little knots. I dumped them out onto the kitchen table, the middle claw of one of the feet extended in an obscene gesture. It wasn’t like I asked for this.
Using a pair of Dad’s pliers, I made a loop for hanging with the wire, then wrapped it around the base of each foot. Then I attached beads and feathers with thread.
I had nearly finished them all when Broden leaned over my shoulder. “What’s that one for?” he asked, fingering the one with blue beads.
“Protection.”
“And this one?” He pointed to a charm with green beads and another with yellow.
“Health. Prosperity. Red is luck.”
“You just made that up.”
I shrugged. I had, but it didn’t matter. They would still sell.
He picked up the nearest foot, rubbing the pad of his thumb along the claw. “Still, there’s something about them.”
***
Market day came round again. I took extra care with my clothes, selecting an old dress from another life. I hunted around in my closet and pulled out a floral-patterned shirt I’d never fit into again. I cut a large square of fabric from the back of the shirt, then stood in front of my mirror.
I draped the material over my head, over the dark hair that was still so slow to grow back. My eyes stared back at me, but I was a stranger.
Downstairs, I filled the old egg basket with the trinkets and put the bundles of feathers into an old pillowcase slung over my shoulder.
Dad watched my preparations in silence—always that—his mouth a thin line parallel with his brows. I might have asked him if he was coming if I thought it would do any good. It wouldn’t, so I set off, as I had nearly every other Saturday since we emerged from our shelters after the fallout.
I only glanced back once and pretended I didn’t see the dark figure following me a half-mile back.
***
It didn’t matter that my eyes were brown, not blue. That I was olive-skinned and tall, not pale and delicate from hunger, then sickness. I was the gypsy girl that day as people flocked toward me to gape at my odd wares. Before noon, nearly half of my chicken foot ornaments had sold. But any exhilaration at my success was swallowed up by the dead feeling in my stomach, almost as bad as my bout with radiation sickness.
I thought I’d have to do more grandstanding to generate interest, but people came to me. Faces brimming with desperation, with fascination at the strange ornaments. I used to roll my eyes at the gypsy girl’s promises of luck and true love and good health. All that was taken away from us in the fallout. Didn’t people know that?
But the feet kept selling.
A woman with a hungry child clutching her skirts bought one with money better spent on supplements than good luck charms. She said, “Bless you. I know this will keep us healthy,” as she selected a foot with green beads. When she opened her pouch to pay me, I saw how empty it was.
My hand closed over her money anyway.
The old man from the requisition office shuffled over and pawed through the feet with his meaty hands. He ended up with one for prosperity, not that he needed it. My mouth hurt from smiling when I pocketed his money.
“Emmeline, is that you?”
Elian’s familiar face peered down at me. He had seen through the costume? My lungs squeezed as he bent down and inspected my basket.
“I never pegged you for a gypsy girl,” he said, lips upturned as he handled one of the ornaments.
“I’m not. I just…” Heat crawled up my neck when his eyes pinned me in place.
“I’ll take one.”
I was already shaking my head. “No. You can’t. They’re…worthless.”
“But you made them, didn’t you? So I’ll take one.”
“No, Elian. I told you, they’re junk.”
I tried to pull the basket away, but he grabbed the handle and picked up a chicken foot with red beads, the gnarled claws dark against his skin.
“I’ll take this one. For love?”
I shook my head miserably. “Luck.”
Love would have made more sense for the red bead. I hadn’t even assigned the properties correctly. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t supposed to matter.
He nodded anyway. “Can always use that.” He pulled out the bills and forced them into my hand. With the same smile he always brought me sweets from his parent’s shop.
I thanked him through gritted teeth, all too aware of the other market-goers around us.
Elian leaned down, his breath puffing across my cheek. “Don’t worry, Em,” he whispered. “Your secret is safe with me.”
He rocked back on his heels and gave me a conspiratorial wink when another man approached, eyes riveted to the chicken feet in my basket. After the sale, I looked for Elian, but he was already lost to the crowds.
***
Dad waited for me at the exit of the warehouse, eyes hooded. I gave him a small nod, and he grunted in response before turning on his heel. I fell into step beside him.
All my feathers were gone, and I sold all but one of the chicken feet. Maybe I’d hold onto it, to remember this…everything. Even the terrible necessary weight in my stomach.
Three hundred dollars. More than enough to keep us warm this winter. I could tell the women who kept checking in on us after Mom died, with their barren charity and their musty old blankets, “No, thank you. We don’t need your help.”
They would have no answer to that, their hands plucking the air, as I shut the door in their faces.
I looked down at the chicken foot in my basket. At the beads clutched in its claws. Blue for protection.
We’d manage. We always have.
(Editor's Note: originally released in audio and digital format by Wily Writers. Printed here with permission of the author.)
Yundah
By C.S. MacCath
1. _Yundah: a sealwoman chant from the Outer Hebrides – Scottish
2. _Yundah: an expression that explains the value of exchange through trading - Australian Aboriginal
Kat dug these graves for me six months before she passed away. She was waning fast, but she got up one morning in a final fit of vigor and made sure that every living thing in our care had a place to go when it died. I put her in the wheelbarrow when the cancer took her; she wanted to crawl out to it the night before so I wouldn’t have to move her body, but I held her close to my breasts and whispered our best stories into her ears until she fell asleep listening to them. It took me six hours to get her here, and Fergus followed me all the way, his old black tail beating against my leg. Now and again he’d whine and bury his snout in my sweater, and I would put the wheelbarrow down and grieve with him, for Kat, for the way it was ending, for the dog-sized hole he would fill someday soon. That was two years ago.
The only old dog at the gravesite today is me, and the weather is upon me now, real and true. This autumn Samhain came in like a late summer storm; it blew still-blooming petals off asters too confused to know they should be dying.
Fergus laid on the couch and watched their fat little yellow and white heads bend in the wind through a window that shouldn’t have been open that late in the season. I’m sure he thought it was a good thing; the sunlight warmed his bones, and the wind gave his doggy nose something to do. But I could hear the earth under my feet, under the floor, through the concrete in the basement, and I knew the asters were right to feel disoriented.
We saw it coming, Kat and I. I was twenty-four when the hurricanes first hit Florida, but even then my Mother was strong in me, so I could tell it was the beginning of an Age. Kat said it wouldn’t be too long before the U.S. started folding northward into itself; its southern cities abandoned to the heat, the high water, the insects, and the poor. I imagined a mass migration like a great tsunami rolling up through Atlanta, Boston, Portland, and eventually into Toronto and Montreal, destroying everything in its wake.
“Megan, we have to get settled and get busy,” Kat said to me the weekend my grandmother died. My chest tightened a little when she said it; it was hard to think of grandma in the past tense. But she was right. The house and orchard were mine now, and if we were going to survive long enough to be old women ourselves, we had to start making use of the gift soon. So she quit school, I left my job at the hospital, and we drove all the way east until we came to my grandparents’ apple orchard gracing the shoreline and their old, white, maritime farmhouse standing sentinel on a hillside overlooking the waves.
Nova Scotia was good for my Kat. She was a McElroy on her mother’s side, a fire maiden by birth sign and by complexion, and she had always wanted to walk in the way of her ancestors. She signed up for Gàidhlig classes at the Cape Breton college the day we unpacked the moving van. Of course, she didn’t tell anybody up there that she was a Pagan. But she brought the language home with her in little packets of verbal joy and spiced the Eco-Scottish soup of our rituals with things she learned during her weekends away.
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