Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [55]
Susan the cow went away in a truck one day and came back frozen and dismembered. It was like a magic trick – a woman sawed in half on the stage in plain view of all, to reappear fully restored to wholeness, walking down the aisle; except that Susan’s transformation had gone the other way. Nell didn’t want to think about what had happened to Susan during her period of invisibility.
“Is this Susan we’re eating?” said the boys, shovelling down the pot roast.
“You shouldn’t have named the cows,” said Nell. The boys grinned. They’d discovered the value of shock and horror, at least at the dinner table.
Nell was overrun with vegetables. She didn’t know what to do with them. Some could be canned, others dried and frozen, yet others – such as the mound of surplus zucchinis – fed to the chickens. Nell put up a dozen jars of cucumber pickles, a dozen jars of pickled beets. She stored the potatoes and carrots and onions in the root cellar, where they joined the bottles of homemade beer Tig had brewed and the crock of fermenting sauerkraut from Nell’s excess cabbages. Putting the sauerkraut in the cellar was a mistake – it filled the whole house with a strong odour of dirty feet – but Nell comforted herself with the thought that it was high in vitamin C and would be useful if they were snowed in all winter and began to get scurvy.
In the second week of October, Tig and Nell beheaded their first hen. Tig did it with the axe, looking a little pale. The hen ran around in the yard, spouting blood from its neck like a fountain. The cows became agitated, and mooed. The remaining hens cackled. The peacocks screamed.
Nell had to consult Mrs. Roblin as to what to do next. She scalded the hen and plucked it, as per instructions. Then she took out the insides. She had never smelled anything so nauseating. There were a number of eggs, of various sizes, in various stages of development.
That’s it, she thought. I’m not doing this again. Those chickens will die of old age as far as I’m concerned.
Tig made the chicken into a stew, with carrots and onions from the garden. The boys ate it with relish. They wished they’d been there to see the hen running around without a head. Tig had recovered from his pale moment and was revelling in the joys of description.
In late October, three ewes were added to the cows in the farmyard. Tig’s idea was that they would produce lambs, which could then be sold or eaten. The ewes waded into the pond for some unknown reason and got their legs tangled in a roll of barbed wire that was lurking under the surface, and Tig had to cut them free with wire cutters and carry them out. Their fleece was sopping wet and they were very heavy. They struggled and kicked, and Tig slipped and went sideways into the pond, and after that he got a cold. Nell rubbed Vicks VapoRub on him, and made him hot lemon with whisky in it.
In November, Tig’s bottles of homemade beer began to explode, down in the cellar. There would be a bang, then beer and broken glass all over the floor, like a Saturday-night car crash. Nell never knew when one of the bottles was about to go off: venturing into the cellar to get a carrot or a potato was like running a minefield. But the beer in the bottles still intact was excellent, said Tig, though very effervescent. He had to drink those bottles in quick succession so they wouldn’t be wasted.
Winter came. The driveway drifted over; the car had to be left at the bottom of the hill, where the big snowplow coming by regularly buried it. Then there was a sleet storm, and the telephone wires came down, and the electricity went off. Luckily the wood stove had been set up by then. Nell and Tig huddled beside it, wrapped in quilts, burning a flock of candles to keep the darkness at bay.
On other days – days without blizzards, or high winds, or freezing rain – the fields were dazzlingly white and pure, the air crisp. Tig loved feeding