Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [52]
“Peacocks are a northern Himalayan pheasant,” Tig said. “They’ll take care of themselves. They’ll be fine in the cold.”
The peacocks were always together. The peacock would display, unfurling his huge tail and rattling it, and the peahen would admire him. They flew around easily, and sat in trees, and pecked about here and there. Sometimes they flew into the hen yard. The rooster knew better than to get into a fight with the peacock, which was a lot bigger than him. At night, the peacock couple roosted on the crossbeam of the barn, where they must have thought they were out of danger. They screamed like babies being murdered, usually just before dawn. Nell wondered where they would make their nest. How many little peacocks would they produce?
In the garden, Nell planted everything she could think of. Tomatoes, peas, spinach, carrots, turnips, beets, winter and summer squash, cucumbers, zucchinis, onions, potatoes. She wanted generosity, abundance, an overflowing of fecundity, as in Renaissance paintings of fruitful goddesses – Demeter, Pomona – in flowing robes with one breast bare and glowing edibles tumbling out of their baskets. She put in a herb garden with chives and parsley and rosemary and oregano and thyme, and three rhubarb plants, and some currant bushes, a red and a white, and some elderberry bushes so they could make elderflower wine in the spring, and a bed of strawberries. She planted runner beans that were supposed to grow up tripods made of poles.
The local farmers did not recognize this bean method. On their regular sightseeing forays into the yard – there was always an excuse, a stray dog, the loan of a wrench or hammer, but really they just wanted to see what Tig and Nell were up to – they looked hard at the structures of bare poles. They didn’t ask what these were. When the beans started creeping into view, they stopped looking.
“Hear your cows went on a spree again,” they would say. They had a way of staring at Nell sideways: they couldn’t figure her out. Were she and Tig married, or what? The way they half-grinned at her said they didn’t think so. Maybe she was a free-lover, some sort of hippie. That would fit in with her busting her ass in the garden. Real farm wives didn’t have gardens. They loaded their pickups with groceries once a week from the supermarket in Garrett, twenty miles to the east.
“Hear it took three days to get them cows back in the barn. Maybe you should take ’em to Anderson’s.”
Nell knew what Anderson’s was. It was the abattoir: Anderson’s Custom Slaughtering. “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Nell. “Not yet.”
They had the cows because Tig had decided they should raise their own beef: the coffee-drinking farmers all did. “Raise four, sell three, put one in the freezer, you’re all set,” was their pronouncement. So Tig purchased four Charolais-Hereford crosses on credit from one of these helpful farmers, who didn’t tell any actual lies, but it would have been better for Nell and Tig if they’d asked a few informed questions. They didn’t know that the cows would be able to jump, and jump so high.
The fences had to be raised and strengthened, but sometimes the cows got out anyway and ran off to join a large herd of other cows nearby. Tig had to take the two boys to get them back – throw some ropes on them, wrestle them into the truck they’d borrow for the purpose. That was dangerous, because the cows were skittish and never wanted to come home.
“Maybe they know we’re going to eat them,” said Nell.
“Cows want to be with other cows,” said Tig. “They’re like shoppers.”
The cows’ names were Susan, Velma, Megan, and Ruby. The boys had named them. They were warned about doing that – humanizing the cows – but they did it anyway.
Oona always telephoned on the weekends. At first she’d wanted to speak to Nell as well as to Tig and the boys – she wanted to enlist Nell’s help, and issue instructions – but after a while she’d stopped doing that. Once in a while curt messages were relayed