Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [57]
Nell didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. She hadn’t intended to say it. It had just come out of her mouth. She felt her lip trembling. This is ridiculous, she thought.
After the murder of his wife, the peacock started behaving strangely. He displayed to the hens in their yard, fanning out his tail, rattling the feathers. When the hens showed no interest in him, he leapt on them and pecked them. He had a powerful neck, and packed a hard wallop. He killed several hens.
Tig shut the hens up in their house and tried to catch the peacock, but he flew away out of reach and screamed. Then he went after the ducks, but they had the sense to skitter down into the pond where he couldn’t get at them. Then he caught sight of his own reflection in one of the house windows – a window with a mound of earth near it, on which he could stand. He displayed to himself, fanning and rattling his tail feathers and screaming in threat, and then attacked the window.
“He’s gone mad,” said Tig.
“He’s in a state of grief,” said Nell.
“It must be mating season,” said Tig.
The peacock took to lurking around outside the house, peering in through the ground-floor windows like a crazed voyeur. He knew his enemy was in there. Hate had replaced love in his tiny, demented head. He was bent on assassination.
“We should find him another mate,” said Nell. But they didn’t get around to it, and then one day he was gone.
The lamb was growing bigger and bigger and more and more fearless. He no longer waited until Tig’s back was turned, he’d now charge at him from any angle. His skull seemed made of cement; hitting him with a two-by-four merely encouraged him.
“We can’t let him go on like this,” said Tig. “He’s going to injure someone.”
“He thinks he’s a human being,” said Nell. “He thinks he’s a man. He’s just guarding his territory.”
“All the more reason,” said Tig. There was a farmer nearby – said the guys at the store – who’d been drinking one night and had tried to cross a field where a billygoat was pastured. The goat ran at him and knocked him down. Every time the poor sod tried to get up, the goat knocked him down again. By sunrise the poor bastard was almost dead. The lamb would soon be a full-grown ram; then he might pull something like that.
“So what are we going to do?” said Nell. They both knew what. But Tig wasn’t up to chopping the head off the lamb, and then dismembering it, or whatever had to be done; he wasn’t up to butchery. Hens were as far as he would go.
“We’ll have to take him to Anderson’s,” he said.
They managed to catch the lamb. Nell had to lure him over to where Tig waited stock-still with a rope, because the lamb trusted her and didn’t see her as a rival. Once they’d wrestled him down to the ground, they tied his legs together and carted him out of the barnyard. The other sheep and the cows looked over the fence, mooing and baaing. They all knew something was up.
Tig and Nell lifted the lamb into the trunk of the Chevy. He kicked and struggled, and bleated piteously. Then they got into the car themselves and drove away. Nell felt as if they were kidnapping the lamb – tearing him away from home and family, holding him for ransom, except that there wouldn’t be any ransom. He was doomed, for no crime except the crime of being himself. His muffled bleats did not stop, all the way to Anderson’s Custom Slaughtering.
“What next?” said Nell. She felt exhausted. Treachery is hard work, she thought.
“We get him out of the car,” said Tig. “We take him into the building.”
“Do we have to wait?” said Nell. While it’s happening, she meant. While it’s being done. The way you’d wait at a child’s first visit to the dentist.
Wait where? There was no place to wait.
Anderson’s was a long, low building that had once been white. The double doors were open; from inside came a dim light. Stacks of barrels stood around outside in the yard, and crates, and a closed van – a horse van – and some rusted machinery parts. A sort of pulley. The barrels and crates also looked rusted, but they couldn’t be rusted because they were made of wood.