Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [66]
After Claudia died, after he’d dragged her body to the edge of the woods and left it there, food for whatever sort of thing that might happen to come along and take it, Max had to fend for himself. He wasn’t very good at it. He couldn’t figure out how to coax milk from the cow and finally decided just to butcher it for its meat. But the cow didn’t cooperate at all, finally running off down the snowy path, bleeding from a dozen minor cuts and lowing angry insults into the cold air. After killing four chickens, cutting them into useless jumbles of blood, gore and feathers, he finally managed to get one more or less intact onto a roasting spit. He did better with the pigs, having learned his lesson from the mess he made with the cow. He reached in and cut its throat first, before trying to cut or stab the animal anywhere else. Then he could chop at the dead pig all he liked, hacking off ragged chunks of meat as he needed them. But then, on the sixth day in a row that he trudged outside to cut his daily chunk of pork shoulder off the nearly frozen pig, he discovered that some beast had come in the night and dragged the remainder of its carcass away.
“That’s not fair!” Max shouted up to the indifferent sky. “There was so much left!”
As the early spring rains came to start washing the snow away, Max killed the last pig, and this time he cut every bit of meat he could get off it all at once, taking all day and half the night to complete the bloody work. Then he hauled all of the meat inside the cabin, where it would be safe from predators in the night. It took him several trips to tote every piece inside and he piled it on the table and counter and on the top of the sideboard, after he’d cleared all of Claudia’s fancy serving dishes off it. Within a month the cottage smelled like a charnel house, and Max was sick in his belly from rotted pork.
Aching and half delirious, he tossed the remainder of the rotting pig meat out off the front door, hurling each piece as far from the door as he could. Then he took to his bed and stayed there for eight days, writhing in a deep fever, until it finally broke and he felt well enough to get up.
The next day he trudged out to the animal shed again, empty now except for the chickens and a few remaining sticks of firewood. “Gerwulf lied about the firewood too,” Max said, perhaps talking to the chickens. Perhaps not. “There was plenty. Didn’t he realize that would be the first thing I’d check?” Max chose to ignore the fact that he hadn’t actually checked. Then, with nothing more to say about the wood, Max gathered the eggs which had accumulated over the past eight days and brought them back into the cottage, where he boiled them all in Claudia’s biggest copper pot. While the eggs boiled, he gathered up the remaining potatoes, carrots, onions, oats, sugar, salt, yellow cheese, and other sundries, and dumped them all into a single burlap sack. He didn’t take the flour, because he had no idea how to turn it into bread, or piecrusts, or any of the thousand other wonderful things traitorous old Claudia was able to do with it. When the eggs were boiled, he added those too to the sack. Then he filled the pockets of his coat with plenty of flint and tinder for starting fires, after which he was more or less ready to be on his way.
He donned his warm coat of diverse colors, to which a goodly amount of pig’s blood had recently been added, buckled on his sword belt, took up the sack of victuals. Then he stepped out the front door for the last time.
Patches of snow were still nestled into the crooks and crannies of the earth. The air was filled with the sounds of ten thousand trickles of water, melting off the remaining snow, running downhill, where it accumulated into the forest path, which acted as a makeshift drainage ditch, turning its ground into a soup of slick rocks and mud. “Better than struggling through the forest though,” Max said. Then, once again picking his direction at random, he set off down the wet path, leaving the ruined little cottage