He opens the door to the bird yard and heads for the mewses. Screeches from the other gyrfalcons on their perches. There’s her stock — a white male with pale grey peppered over his back, and a female near perfect with only blue tarsus and nare, the ankle and nose. Each worth well over fifty thousand. But it’s not the money. All the birds here are related except the hawks. His charts fan from that first gyrfalcon, the bird he scooped from the nest and lost his leg for.
He opens the door to the white’s mews and sets her on her perch. Loosens the draw on the hood and slides it forward over her beak. She swivels her head round and plucks at the feathers on her shoulders. Across the drive at the hatchling barn, Kendra sits on the steps in her long johns, waiting for the power to kick on and heat water for a shower. He shuts the door to the mews. He’s losing something else, now.
He didn’t drink, but he didn’t fix the generator. Didn’t secure the gate. Allowed the cows to escape, and didn’t help haul the dead milker on the tarp. And now the class visit. He forgot.
The teacher has asked for knives — he carries Austin’s butcher set from the barn.
“Be my guest,” the teacher says. The man’s young, enthusiastic, oblivious to the pasture full of watery shit and Milo’s discomfort.
The knife case is a heavy-duty camo roll-up, and inside, the four-piece set: caping knife, curved boning knife, flexible straight boning knife, a skinning knife and sharpening steel. He nearly forgot about these knives and the farm goats Austin used to put down himself.
“Stand close in case she moves,” Austin would say, and make him shoot the animal. That’s as far as Milo went. It was Austin who’d squat — almost sit — on the back of the goat, tilt the head, and slice the throat to let it bleed. Slit the skin from throat to anus, string the animal from the “gallows tree” — a spruce at the edge of the pasture. It’s impressive that his old man managed the farm as long as he did.
Take the cow apart and she’ll be easier to dispose of. Milo — if he can’t do anything else, at least he’ll do this.
VI
The yard is full of Kratz twins and jocks and nerds and ditzes and idiots and Mr. Friessen, who holds a pack of dusty latex gloves that pull out of a box like tissues. Kendra strides home, in her underwear, across the paddock. Milo’s half-buried puke piles scatter the driveway, and this woman — presumably a chaperone — puts her arm around Melanie’s shoulders and says, “Aw, dear, the hair will grow back.” The woman’s own hair is a wad of coarse brown curls and a good inch of grey roots. Thread-veins redden the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks. Her down vest is stained, but still she’s smudged on lipstick — a faddish coral shade she’s either way too old for or never grew out of. The woman gives Melanie a shake and a kiss to the temple and tucks a pair of gloves into her hand. The chalky powder makes her skin crawl and her lungs close up. She’d hyperventilate but her throat would rather vomit.
Kids dawdle and fall from a single school crowd into their standard cliques around the yard in the muddy snow. One girl uses the bathroom and comes out pinching an eight-inch chunk of blonde hair, her hair. Of course. She left it all over the floor and vanity. The girl throws it at a jock, who flings his arms up and overplays his jump backwards.
Cody, hands aloft, walks past the twins and Angelique and the other girls who’ve swapped bracelets and hair clips to some code. These girls, they wouldn’t last a lunch hour against her old school and Candice, not with their catalogue parkas and knowledge of hay and horses and potato guns. Angelique — the tall brunette whose winter boots curve along her ankle and leg, and who, despite Melanie’s cut-off galoshes and oversized winter coat, had hung with her — grabs Cody’s elbow and flicks his bangs from his eyes. “Can you see in there?”
Cody blushes and squeezes by the group into her house.
“Maybe Melanie could give you a buzz?” Angelique calls after him. Melanie closes her fists. The girls squeal and whisper like they’re besties, “I can’t believe you did that,” and “Oh-my-god he’s adorable. Did you see the skirt?” Angelique steps toward Melanie and says, “Did you want to say something?”
Melanie crosses her arm over her chest and holds her shoulder. What can she say? Candice would have liked the kilt too.
Angelique puts on a concerned look. “No? Your mouth was open. But you know your hair looks great. I mean, it’s a lot less greasy short.” The Kratz twins titter. Angelique turns and huddles with the group.
She should leave. She’s in pyjamas — leave already. But she can’t make herself walk up the stoop and down the hall where the old man is, where his parts are. Maybe she should go in there — she could give anyone who walked in a real shocker. “Shut up,” she whispers. Shut up.
Milo presents Mr. Friessen with her grandfather’s knife case.
“Be my guest,” Mr. Friessen waves Milo toward the cow.
The class crowds the cow and Milo selects the old man’s butcher knife — long, but widely curved at the tip — and slices down the belly. The settled blood is an astonishing watery pink. She expected a creamy beading around the slit, but of course the cow’s not full of milk. Milo pries the flesh back and unfolds a calf — a wet slip of hooves and tacky fur. The eyes are blueish and pearled and useless, although the calf, judging by the size, might have lived if they’d cut it out sooner.
Mid-afternoon and already the sun’s jerked behind the western valley wall and let the clouds lower and darken.
“Should be one hundred seventy feet of gut.” Friessen and Milo scoop the heifer’s innards onto the ramp. A jock steps over and helps stretch the intestines across the paddock. A trio of nerds lift out the organs. The ditzes and idiots close in. There’s hacking and chasing. The eyes are removed — oblong things, filmy black at the front, gripped by red muscles at the sides. They burst and goop sprays down a Kratz sweater. The power flickers back on but there’s no talk of milking. Kids balloon their latex gloves into translucent udders and bop them volleyball style. Nose holding. Whining. Piling it all back on the tarp in the three o’clock dusk. Then her friends are back on the bus. “Sure you don’t want to come, honey?” Melanie shakes off the chaperone. Then they’re gone.
On the table: a silver sugar dish and a lighter, plates, a bucket of scummy water and a drowned cloth, cups. The kitchen isn’t untidy, it’s filthy. And cold. The sink is full of dishes, so he looks for the bathroom, where the vanity is covered with long clumps of hair.
Axel’s house, cluttered with dyes and leather, bird skulls on the shelves and feathers in vases, is eccentric. His place with his mom is too clean — so scrubbed it’s noticeable (his mom scratches the tub enamel with coarse cleaner) — but this house, it’s barely a house.
Someone coughs.
“Hello?” he says. “Are you all right?”
The kids across the field are counted — the teacher taps each teen on the head and calls a name — and they pile on the bus and drive away into the dark. Now that the power is on, she showers, wearing her long johns, in the outside stall of the hatchling barn. Heat steams off and streams upward. In the cold afternoon night, the clouds thin and are inhaled south along with the river, leaving the tops of the mountain bare and stippled wintergreen with hemlock and pine. Her underclothes turn brown and clear and heavy.
Axel locks the white in the flight pen and trudges over. He sits on the steps with his back to her. Her jeans and shirt and camera are draped over his shoulder. She peels her long johns and undershirt and underwear and leaves them in a pile at her feet. She takes the hard, yellowed bar of soap first to her hair and nails and then to her body.