He turned around, putting his back to the old man. He spit into his bloody hands and worked the saliva into the cuts to soothe them. The flesh rolled away. He heard his father shuffling behind him, and in his panic he destroyed the evidence by quickly eating his skin.
“What’s the holdup, son?” Pa asked.
“Sorry, Pa. Just tripped on a root there. I’m fine.”
He went right back to the corn and started shucking, but the old man wasn’t dumb. He scowled and grabbed Billy’s wrists, turning his hands palms up. Billy had balled them into fists.
“Open them mitts before I box your ears.”
Billy did as he was told and closed his eyes. After a moment he heard Pa telling him: “Get inside and wash these out. We don’t want no infection neither, so swab them wounds good with the iodine. We got some bandages in the bathroom cupboard. Wrap yourself on up, and then get back outside, you hear?”
“OK, Pa.”
“More work is what you need,” he told him.
With that, the old man raised his hands up and showed Billy his palms, which were as rough and leathery as an old saddle.
“Keep on working, boy,” he said. “You keep skinning off that baby fat, and one day you’ll have the respectable hands of a man.”
* * * * *
By the time Billy had returned to the field, it was close to eight o’ clock. The migrant workers had arrived and were harvesting, so Pa sent him on to milk the cows. On the way, he threw feed to the chickens and tried not to daydream. When he got inside the barn, one of the cattle, a big bossy named Bertha, mooed at him. She’d always been affectionate and liked to lick at him with her sandpaper tongue. Pa liked to say that she’d been true to her name ’cause she’d birthed them some busk calves, which Pa had sold at weaning.
Billy knew in his mind that she was crying out to be milked, but in his heart he imagined that she missed her babies. He started to pet her, careful of his wrapped hands. She responded right away, nuzzling him. He opened the partition and went in, sitting beside her. Her udders were swollen and dripping, the veins as thick and hard as grapevines. She ached to be milked, and it showed.
At first he wasn’t very surprised by the sight of blood in her milk. He knew that it was common enough after calving. But as he continued to pump, the fluid turned to more blood than milk, and it began to flow steadily even as he stopped pumping all together; it began to gush out of Bertha, the discharge turning dark purple as it fled from her body. Billy stood and stepped back as the bossy began to bellow, and the hay at his feet blackened as the dirt floor turned to mud.
He covered his mouth so as not to scream.
* * * * *
With Bertha in the trailer, he and Pa took the old Ford up to see Uncle Merle at the knacker’s yard. It was a professional slaughterhouse with state-of-the-art machinery, unlike the shack they had behind the barn — which Pa referred to asThe Lil’ Abattoir, smirking every time he said it as if he was some sort of sophisticate. But they called Merle’s workplace a knacker’s yard for a reason. It was not the place to go if you wanted meat suitable for eating. Billy knew where they were taking Bertha, and why, and it simply made him sick inside.
Why couldn’t it have been Rosey? he thought. She wasn’t just a junker, she was dumb, and mean to boot. He wouldn’t miss her like he would ol’ Bertha.
They pulled up at the rear of the building and got out of the pickup. When they opened up the trailer, Pa pulled Bertha out, her bell clanking loudly and echoing in the small confine. Billy swallowed back a bit of rising bile when he saw the floor of the trailer, caked in the darkest blood he’d ever seen. A throng of black flies swarmed around her like a curse, and it was all they could do to shoo even half of them away. Uncle Merle came out of the building, and Billy couldn’t help but think that he looked like a mad scientist. He wore a shiny apron that was slick with gore and a pair of goggles strapped to his head. He was slathered in sweat, and an unlit cigar shifted from one corner of his mouth to the other.
He took one look at Bertha and snorted.
“Lord, Judson, this is one sorry-looking beast.”
“Yeah, but she’s big. A lot of meat on this one,” Pa replied.
Uncle Merle had a voice like a grizzly, and a face to match. He wasn’t mean to Billy, but he was gruff. He was a thick brute of a man, and Billy feared him almost as much as he did Pa. He’d been told all his life that Merle was his Momma’s older brother, but he could never bring himself to believe that they were related. He had a hard enough time accepting that Merle was even human.
“Look at the blood pissing out of her,” Merle said. “I doubt she’s well enough to have her chops pass for dog food. She’s fertilizer at best.”
Pa squinted, the folds of his face deepening.
“Just make me an offer, Merle, and remember I have your dying sister in my loft.”
Merle didn’t have a snappy retort, so he looked down at Billy and ruffled his hair. He frowned at the bandages on his hands.
“What in tarnation happened to you now, boy? Stigmata?”
“No, sir. Just skinned myself shuckin’.”
Merle turned back to his Pa and asked “Why’d you bring him here, anyway?”
“I thought it’d be good for the boy to see it done proper.”
Merle’s face fell slack.
“Come off it, Judson,” he said. “This ain’t no place for a wee boy.”
“He’s almost 12,” Pa barked back. “But he still has a lot of growing up to do. I thought a dose of the real deal would get his head out of the clouds and his thumb out of his backside.”
“I’ve just been prying out tallow and lard for the rendering plant. Ain’t nothin’ to see in there but buckets of waste product.”
“But we’ve got this bossy right here. I thought the boy could help slaughter her.”
Billy gulped and shuddered all at once. He felt the tears building up. They were emotional this time, and he didn’t know how well he could hold them back.
“Jud …”
“Jud nothin’,” Pa said. “You get the first grab at every bit of unfit livestock I have. All I’m asking is that you show your nephew here the trade, and maybe help him man up in doing so.”
There was a pause filled only by the macabre symphony coming from behind the metal sheen of the slaughterhouse. Merle shook his head.
“It’s mechanical now,” he said. “We don’t even use the bolt pistols here. We send 300 volts through them before they’re killed. I can’t let a kid operate that kind of equipment.”
“You still use a knife, though, don’t ya?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the boy knows how to use one of those right proper.”
Beside him, Billy felt Bertha nuzzle his armpit. He tilted his head, hoping the tears would sink back into his eyeballs. Above them, the tree branches rocked in the breeze, the dead leaves dropping off as mementos of a more innocent summer, now gone.
Merle took the rope that hung from Bertha’s collar.
“I’ll get her set up. Meet me inside in a few minutes.”
* * * * *
The corridors of the knacker’s yard were cold and metallic, as unfriendly as a museum. Large men in bloody aprons walked along steel grates carrying tools he didn’t recognize, and it seemed that everywhere he looked there was a mangled mess of meat. When they entered the main hall, the pale carrions that hung by hooks from one long girder mystified Billy. They didn’t resemble animals or meat, but some morbid hybrid of the two. What he did recognize, however, was the massive cow that hung from its hind legs over a big bowl. Its throat was slashed, and it was offering a crimson waterfall.
They entered the chamber where his uncle was with Bertha. She was standing at the base of a metal square that clamped her on either side of her neck, keeping her head locked inside of it. Her eyes stared deep into him, looking like two black planets, gleaming.
“What is this?’ he asked, wincing at the whimper he heard in his voice.
“Your uncle is gonna stun Bertha, son,” Pa told him. “Once she’s brain-dead, we can string her up and you can bleed her yourself, like a man.”
“But, Pa …”
“For God’s sake, don’t you start bawlin’. I need a man around that farm, not some sissy.”
“Pa, don’t make me …”
“Damn it, Billy! When I was your age, I had to crack open cows’ heads with a sledgehammer, and I had to do it when I was a lot younger than you are now. You wanna be a little boy forever? Spend all day long laying in a haystack, making pictures out of the clouds?”
“No, Pa, I just don’t wanna kill Bertha. She loves me.”
“She’s too sick for you to love back, boy. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, love ain’t go no part in it.”
He began to hyperventilate, and the old man slapped him across the face.
“Now, Judson,” Uncle Merle butted in, “this ain’t no easy thing for a young’un. Maybe we’ll do it some other time.”
Pa was inches away from Billy’s face, livid and baring his nicotine-stained teeth. His graying hair was on end like the spine of a mad dog, and his nostrils had little red bolts of lightning streaking across the skin.
“If you can’t be a man, you’re no damn good, boy,” he snarled. “You’re dead weight, just like your momma.”
* * * * *
That night, Pa did not allow him any supper. He was only allowed in the house to clean the pots. The smell of the food was torturous to him, and he knew it was part of his punishment. He told himself that he had it coming. In the sink, his bandages washed off of his hands almost right away, but his wounds had scabbed up mighty fine, and the hot water felt good.
When he finished, he went to leave, to rest in his shepherd’s shed and watch the flock, but he was puzzled by the sounds coming from upstairs. They weren’t running-water sounds, but plops and splashing noises like you’d hear down at the wading pond.
He tiptoed up the steps to the bathroom, seeing that the door to it was half open. He crept up to the doorway, doing his best to hide in shadow. Had he not been so morbidly captivated by what he saw, he might have noticed that the wall he leaned against was infested with a slick, black moss. Burrowing within it were small insects, stampeding in a way that made the mold itself writhe.
Pa’s back was to him, and he was leaning over the tub. Draped around his shoulders were the spindly arms of Momma, looking like ghoulish claws reaching out of a grave. They had a ghostly pallor and were covered with sores of a bottomless black, a color of such putrid finality that it stopped Billy’s breath. As Pa continued to bathe her, he leaned her back against the tub. Billy could see the rest of her now: the scarecrow rib cage, the flesh so white that it gleamed almost purple, and the pendulous teats that hung like satchel handles. Her body was merely rancid carrion now. The beauty had been stolen, as if her very life force had been pilfered by some unseen poltergeist.
Billy looked upward to avoid the sight. His gaze landed upon the ceiling, which was a dead sea of mildew. He stared into it, not caring about being lost in daydream now, needing any distraction from this heartbreaking horror. He felt almost hypnotized by it, as if he were floating freely in its encompassing gloom. The black mold called to him, crooning in a seductive lure. It seemed to tell him to lose himself, to exit the prison of his body and his miserable farm-boy life. Billy shuddered then, for it was more than the desire for escapism, it was the baiting of something carnivorous, something he reckoned was stalking his home and plaguing his kin.
He snapped his gaze away and looked at his folks again. He couldn’t explain it if he had to, and he didn’t fully understand it as it was. But he felt the subtle, horrid resonances. The nuances of this waking nightmare danced around him like a halo of locust. He had not recognized his momma for some time, but now, seeing one side of his Pa’s face and the tears that ran down it, he no longer recognized the old man either.
Momma was beautiful.
Pa didn’t cry.
Where had his parents gone?
He turned around so as not to bear the sight of it any longer, and when he did his palm reached for the wall, finding the fuzz. It pulsed between his fingers and oozed a dark slime. He pulled his hand away as if it were a flame, convinced now that it was some black moss of sorrow, a harvester come for their very souls.
“You got them,” he whispered to it, “but you ain’t getting me.”
* * * * *
The first strange thing Judson noticed was the absence of the cock’s morning caw. It hadn’t woken him at dawn, and he thought that odd, but one look at the empty whiskey bottle gave him the explanation. He rose from the sofa and felt his boozed brain bounce off his skull like a ricocheting cue ball.
He wandered to the window and noticed the stillness right away. The livestock tended to get a little rowdy come morning time, anticipating feed and labor, but today the farm seemed like a tomb. He didn’t bother changing into his overalls. He was too perplexed by the eerie calm. He slipped into his boots and walked out.
He saw the chickens first, spread across their plot like a hurricane had ripped through. He winced at the high cost of this loss. Every damn one of them was shredded to pulp.
“Damn it!” he hissed, cursing first the pack of coyotes he assigned blame for the massacre, and then redirecting that anger toward the boy who should have taken notice from his shed.
He stepped into the coop and glowered. Upon bending down to inspect the mess, he noticed something peculiar: The chickens hadn’t been mauled; they’d been pulverized. Judson walked from one to another, seeing the same thing. Their heads had been mashed to the texture of soup. He went to the edge of the coop and leaned on the plank, puzzled as he stared off toward the stable. It was then that he saw Paddy, one of his Clydesdales. The horse’s head hung limply, its long neck resting on the bottom door. From the angle at which it was propped, it looked as if the blow had fractured its face, but its neck had been snapped on the ledge, forced by its own weight upon falling.
This wasn’t some pack of coyotes. This was some sort of sabotage.
Probably one of those damn fruit pickers I had to lay off, he thought.Goddamned savages!
He sprinted toward the barn where he kept the cows, and gasped at the emptiness within. They were all locked in wooden partitions of their own. Had they been standing, like usual, he would have seen them. But he didn’t, and that meant that they were all lying down. He crept up to the first crate gingerly, praying it wasn’t so, but his prayers, as always, went unanswered.
The first bossy lay before him in her box, her face smashed in and her throat slit. Her left eye had popped and her lower jaw had been dislocated. Her tongue hung out as if she were lapping up the pool of her own blood.
One by one, Judson checked on the rest, finding that they’d all been turned into so much head cheese; each had met an identical fate. Panic began to seize his heart, and sweat beaded in every crevice of his body.
“Billy?” he cried out. Not knowing whether to feel anger or fear, he began to drown in both.
He raced toward where the sheep grazed, nearly tripping over the first carcass. He paid it no mind and hurtled past the other piles of wooly gore, terror thudding in his chest with the ferocity of a thresher as he spun through this valley of death.
“Billy!” he called out, louder this time.
He made it to the herder’s shed where Billy slept and flung open the door with such force that it snapped the top hinge. He trembled at finding it empty. It made his bowels churn and his flesh go goose.
The boy must be hiding, he told himself.He must be scared to death, and this time I don’t blame him none.
He turned, scanning the fields for any sign of his only child. The October sun cast elongated shadows that made puppetry of the fences and barbed wire. Judson saw ghosts now on crates and demons clawing at the broad side of the barn, while all about him the stench of fresh, hot death germinated.
He turned b
ack toward the house in a mad run.
He lunged up onto the porch and burst through the front door, calling his son’s name. Finding the kitchen as empty as the den, he rushed upstairs. After finding all the other rooms vacant, he finally went to the bedroom, not wanting to upset his wife but seeing no other option. He tried to calm himself before going in, wanting to ease her through this, to remain ever vigilant as the man of the house. If he could show composure, it would soothe her, and he knew that with the cancer eating her, she needed whatever hope he could give her, no matter how false it may be.
“Sarah?” he called to her as he entered the gloom.
The bedroom was always as dark as a morgue, and it bothered Judson that he could never see when he was in it. He moved forward and reached out to the lump he could make out on the mattress. The stink hit his nostrils like a sucker punch; the smell inside the room was worse than ever, copper-like and thick. He found himself holding his breath.
Where he expected her shoulder to be, he felt another shape. It took him a moment to realize that it was her ankle. He moved his hand along the base of her calf. For some reason, she was lying backward in bed. This puzzled him, because he knew she was too weak to make such a drastic shift.
“Sarah, are you all right?”
No answer.
He reached for the lamp by the bedside. Turning it on, he immediately wished that he hadn’t.
She had been turned around because there were long gaps in the footboard of the bed. She’d lost enough weight that she’d shrunk, and her head could fit through one of those slots with a little pushing. Once the poles were around her neck, she’d been too weak to wiggle out. Her hands were draped across the headboard where she had clutched it. There were bloody scratches where she had clawed at it, breaking off her fingernails. Below her head was an old bucket. It had overflowed with her blood.
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