Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [53]
One of the hens escaped from the yard and was found among the rhubarb plants with her throat slit. “Weasel,” said Mrs. Roblin, having inspected the wound. “They drink the blood.” She asked if Nell wanted to take the hen home and stew it, as it was still fresh and the blood had been let out. Nell did not – the victim of a weasel murder was surely tainted – so Mrs. Roblin kept the hen, saying she could think of a use for it.
Another hen set up shop behind a jumble of machinery parts in the drive shed, where she hoarded eggs – her own, and those of other hens avoiding their brooding duties. By the time Nell found her, she was sitting on twenty-five eggs. What could be done? The eggs were too old – too well developed, too full of embryos – to be eaten.
The boys were going to spend the rest of the summer at the farm, said Tig – a last-minute arrangement, because Oona was going on vacation. She was heading for a Caribbean resort, not alone.
“Do you mind?” Tig said, and Nell said of course not, though it would have been nice to have been told ahead of time. Tig said there hadn’t been any ahead of time.
Nell stuck a list onto the refrigerator with a magnet. It was a list of cleaning duties: sweeping, clearing the table, washing the dishes. They would all take turns. She herself would continue to do all the laundry, in the temperamental second-hand wringer machine they’d found; she’d continue to hang it on the line. She was already baking the bread, and the pies, and making the ice cream, with some of the extra eggs and the cream they were getting up at Roblins’. Also there were the currants to be considered – she couldn’t make every single currant into jelly. She’d tried to dry some of them in the sun, but then she’d forgotten about them and it had rained. Despite the various lists she’d been making, she couldn’t keep track of everything.
There were numerous auctions that season – farmers died or sold up, and then everything in the house and barn would be put on the block. Nell felt like a scavenger; still, she went. She got a couple of quilts that way – they needed only a little mending – and a wooden chest, with missing hinges, but those would be easily fixed once she got around to it. She wanted things that would add up to a look – a farm look. More or less olden days.
Tig bought a baler, dirt cheap because it was an out-of-date kind. It produced small oblong bales – not the outsized cinnamon buns of hay that were the fashion now. He and the boys would take off the hay, he said. They could feed it to the cows in the winter and sell the excess hay at a dollar a bale. He’d pay the boys, of course – whatever you’d pay an unskilled labourer. Tig and Nell would lose money on this venture, or break even at best, said Tig, but it would be a terrific experience for the boys, who would be able to do some real work and feel useful. What did Nell think of that?
“I think it’s fine,” said Nell. This had become her standard answer when it was a question of Tig’s enthusiasms.
While Nell and Tig were going to farm sales, the boys spent time in the barn. They got up to lots of things in there. Alcohol was consumed, psychedelic substances tested, cigarettes and dope smoked regularly. The dope came from local back fields, where some of the younger farmers were growing lucrative though illegal crops of what they called “wacky tobaccy.” Inside the barn, plots were hatched. Making off with the car was considered, running away to Montreal, or at least to Garrett, to see horror movies. These plots remained theoretical, and the boys did not shout or smash things, unlike some Nell had heard of, so Tig and Nell had no idea. They found all this out much later, once the boys had grown up, and had passed through their twenties and their anger at Tig for having left home, and had begun to share their reminiscences.
The boys weren’t getting on too well at school – Oona had forwarded their report cards, implying that this lack of progress