Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [51]
“I asked them what sort of animals we should have,” Tig said one day after coming back from the store at the crossroads.
“And?” said Nell.
“They said, ‘None.’ ”
“That sounds like a good idea,” said Nell.
“Then one guy said, ‘If you’re going to have livestock, you’re going to have dead stock.’ ”
“That’s probably true,” said Nell.
After several days, Tig said that if they were going to live on a farm, they ought not to let the land go to waste, and that would mean having some animals. Also it would be added value for the boys to learn where food really came from. They could start with chickens: chickens were easy, said the farmers.
Tig and the boys built a somewhat lopsided chicken house so the chickens could be protected from predators at night. They also made a fenced-in yard where the chickens could run around safely. Tig and Nell and anyone else who was there would be able to eat the eggs, said Tig, and then they could eat the chickens themselves, once they got too old to lay eggs.
Nell wondered who was going to kill the elderly chickens when the time came. She did not think it would be her.
The chickens arrived in burlap sacks. They adjusted to their new surroundings immediately, or they appeared to: they didn’t have a wide range of facial expressions. The farmer who’d supplied them had thrown in a rooster. “He said the hens would be more contented that way,” said Tig.
The rooster crowed every morning – an ancient, biblical sound. The rest of the time he stalked the hens while they were scratching in the dirt and pounced on them from behind and stomped up and down on them. If Nell or the boys got too close to the hens when they went into the yard to collect the eggs, the rooster would jump on their bare legs and rake them with his spurs. They took to carrying sticks, to hit the rooster with.
Nell made the chickens’ eggs into pound cake, which she froze in the freezer they’d found themselves buying, because where were they going to keep all the stuff that would be produced by the kitchen garden once it really got going?
Then Tig got some ducks – not ducklings, this time – which were allowed to fend for themselves in the pond, and then two geese, which were supposed to lay eggs and produce goslings; but one of the geese injured its leg, so it had to be taken up the road to Mrs. Roblin.
Tig and the boys and the Roblins were now friends, though Nell suspected the Roblins – the senior Roblins, who ran a dairy operation, and the junior Roblins too, of which there were many – laughed at them behind their backs. The Roblins had been on their farm for a long time, and knew what to do about all farm emergencies. The nearby cemetery had a lot of Roblins in it.
Mrs. Roblin was a square-shaped, round-faced old woman – Nell thought she was old – with short but surprisingly strong arms and red, deft, stubby fingers that (Nell suspected) had never seen the inside of a rubber glove. The boys said she pitched in when necessary, and Nell understood that this pitching had nothing to do with baseball and everything to do with manure. Mrs. Roblin was clearly capable of any kind of enterprise involving guck and muck and blood and innards – the boys had seen her reach up into a cow and pull a calf out, legs first, a sight that had filled them with awe. While telling this, the boys would look at Nell, not critically, but dismissively: there was no way Nell would ever find herself up to the elbows in a cow’s vagina, said that look.
Nell had hoped Mrs. Roblin would set the goose’s leg and put a splint on it, but that wasn’t what happened. The goose came back in oven-ready form, which, said Tig, was the way things were done in the country. The remaining goose, or was it a gander, wandered around for a while, looking sad, thought Nell, and then flew away.
By this time there were also two peacocks, a pair Tig had found at a peacock farm on one of the back roads and had given to Nell as a present.
“Peacocks!” Nell said. Tig was intending to please her. He always did intend it. How could