Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [130]
The tractor itself was still in the drive shed; her grandmother used to drive it before she got too old. Now the fields were worked by Ron Sloane from down the road, and he used his own tractor, his own baler, all his own stuff. The second week Karen was there one of the hens went broody and made a nest on the tractor seat instead of in her box. Karen found her, sitting on twenty-three eggs. “They’ll do that,” said the grandmother. “They know we take their eggs, so they sneak off by themselves. The other hens’ve been dropping their own eggs on her. Saving themselves the bother. Lazy sluts.”
That hen had to be moved back into the henhouse though, because of the weasels. “They come at night,” said Karen’s grandmother. “They bite the chickens in the neck and suck out their blood.” The weasels were so thin they could get through the smallest crack. Karen imagined them, long thin animals like snakes, cold and silent, slithering in through the walls, their mouths open, their sharp fangs ready, their eyes shining and vicious. Her grandmother sent her into the henhouse one night after dark, with the lantern, while she herself stayed outside, looking for cracks in the boards where the light shone through. One weasel in a henhouse, she said, and that would be that. “They don’t kill to eat,” she said. “They kill for the pleasure of it.”
Karen looked at the photo of her grandfather. She could never tell much from pictures; the bodies in them were just flat, made from black-and-white paper, and no light came out of them. The grandfather had a beard and heavy eyebrows and was wearing a black suit and a hat; he was not smiling. Karen’s grandmother said he was a Mennonite, before he married her and broke with the rest of them. Karen was not able to make any sense of this at all, because she didn’t know what a Mennonite was. Her grandmother said they were a religion. They wouldn’t use anything newfangled, they kept themselves to themselves, they were good farmers. You could always tell a Mennonite farm because they farmed right to the edges of the fields. Also, they didn’t hold with war. They wouldn’t fight. “In wartime they aren’t too popular,” she said. “There’s people on this line who still aren’t speaking to me, because of him.”
“I don’t hold with war, either,” said Karen solemnly. She had just decided that. It was the war that gave her mother so many nerves.
“Well, I know Jesus said turn the other cheek, but God said an eye for an eye,” said her grandmother. “If people start killing your folks, you should fight back. That’s my opinion.”
“You could just go somewhere else,” said Karen.
“That’s what the Mennonites did,” said her grandmother. “Trouble is, what happens when there’s no place else to go? Answer that one, I say to him!” Her grandmother often spoke of the grandfather as if he were still alive – “He likes a good pot roast for dinner,” or “He never cuts corners.” Karen began to wonder whether he was indeed still alive, in some way. If anywhere, he would be in the front parlour.
Maybe that was why they never used the front parlour, only the back one. They would sit in it and Karen’s grandmother would knit, one bright afghan square after another, and they would listen to the radio, the news and weather mostly. Karen’s grandmother liked to know if it was going to rain, though she said she could tell better than the radio, she could feel rain in her bones. She fell asleep in there every afternoon, on the sofa, wrapped in one of the finished afghans, with her teeth in a glass of water and the pig and the two dogs guarding. In the mornings she was brisk and cheerful; she whistled, she talked to Karen and told her what to do, because there was a right and a wrong way to do everything. But in the afternoons, after lunch, she would droop and begin to yawn, and then she would say she was just going to sit down for a minute.
Karen didn’t like being awake while her grandmother was asleep. This was the only part of the day she found frightening. The rest of the time she was busy, she could help.