Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(61)

He drove the knife into the groin inside the top back leg to cut through that big muscle so he could sever the tendon in the joint. Afterward, with their father’s help, the leg could be pulled back away, leaving the gut exposed and accessible. It took a while, stabbing and probing, to find the tendon and then to free the joint, but he found it finally.

Try it, Sherman said. See can you pull his leg back, Tom.

Their father took Elko at the back cannon and pulled hard, wrenching it, carrying the long fine-boned leg back and up so that it stood up now into the air almost perpendicular to his body, awful-looking, horrible. Sitting on the fence, watching it, the boys began to understand that Elko was dead.

The rich muscle at his groin where Dick Sherman had opened him lay thick and heavy and raw, exposed to view like steak. The hide had torn some when their father pulled and was bleeding along the tear. But now the gut could be opened. Sherman cut into the stomach lining. Then the yellow bags and the blue knots of stuff spilled out onto the dirt and the wispy manure. There was mucousy blood and fluid, yellow-and amber-colored. The transparent membranes shone silver in the sun.

Sherman said, Have you got a tree trimmer handy, Tom? I could use one.

In the barn, Guthrie said. He stood up stiffly and walked along the side of the barn into the dark center bay and returned with the two-handled double-clawed tool he used to cut tree branches and the spirea bushes around the house. He handed it to Dick Sherman.

Sherman laid his knife down. Pull the hide back again, will you? he said.

Their father crouched over the horse and with both hands pulled the hide back away from his ribs. Then Dick Sherman began to cut through the ribs with the tree trimmer, one rib at a time, making a crack each time like a dry stick breaking; he was exposing the chest cavity. The boys understood then that the horse was dead completely. He couldn’t live through that. Watching it, their eyes grew round in their heads and their faces paled. They sat utterly still on the fence.

When enough of the ribs had been cut through, their father pulled the loose flap of the chest wall back so that Dick Sherman could examine the heart and lungs. He lifted them in his hands, turning them, poking and exploring with the knife. There was nothing wrong with the heart. Nor with the lungs. He probed with the knife into the aorta and large veins to look for scar tissue from worms but there wasn’t any; the horse had been thoroughly wormed. So he moved back again to the gut and raised the entrails, reaching into the stomach and lifting out more of the moist yellow intestines. He was straining hard now, wrenching the heavy insides out of the horse, and apparently more of it was coming than he wanted because he was discarding some of it, searching and lifting at it while it squirmed and tried to fill in, and then he had some of the bowel and it was too big and too dark entirely and he stopped.

There, he said. See that? That big dark part, kind of bluish-black?

Guthrie nodded.

He had a twisted gut. That’s what killed him. Sherman held it up in his hands, displaying it. Below here where it twisted, the gut died. That’s why it’s so black and bloated and off-color. He released the dead intestine and it folded into place among the rest as though it were alive. Poor bastard, he suffered enough.

The two men stood up. Dick Sherman bent and stretched, unkinked his legs and reached his arms over his head, while Tom Guthrie stood behind the gutted horse, looking at the two boys. They were still sitting as before, on the top board of the fence. You boys all right? he said.

They didn’t say anything but merely nodded.

You sure? Maybe you’ve seen enough.

They shook their heads.

All right. The worst part’s over anyway. We’re almost through.

It was past midmorning now. The bright sunlight of a Sunday morning toward the end of April. And Dick Sherman was saying, We need some baling wire, Tom. Or twine. Twine’d be better.

So their father left the corral to enter the barn once more and returned again, with twine this time, two or three long yellow strands of it. Sherman took the twine and began to close Elko’s stomach. Starting under the chest he knifed a hole into the hide and drew the twine through the hole, knotted it, carved another hole opposite the first and pulled the two flaps of hide together, then moved back six inches and did the same, again and again, moving backward, pulling it tight each time, while their father helped to push the rich organs and slick intestines into place, holding them there until the twine was tight. Soon his hands were as red and slippery as Sherman’s. When they had closed Elko’s stomach as well as they could they wound the twine around the top back leg and drew it down again, so it no longer stood up above the horse’s body, and secured it to his other back leg, then they tied some knots and called it good.

The horse lay in the dirt beside the barn with his eyes and mouth open, his neck reaching out and his long brown stomach crosshatched with yellow twine. From the fence, though, the two boys could still see the dark bloody insides of him through the ragged gap of hide because Dick Sherman and their father hadn’t been able to close the cut completely. There was too much of it. It was like a hole in the ground when so much earth has been opened that you can’t put all the dirt back in place again. Some of it still shows; the scar is still there. So the two boys could still see into Elko, and even what was no longer visible before them was still there in memory for recollection at night whether they wanted to recall any of it ever again.

But it was late morning now, approaching noon. The two men had risen from their work, stiff and sweaty, and had gone to the horse tank in the corner of the corral to wash their hands and arms under the spill of cold wellwater that ran through a cast-iron pipe from the windmill. Then Dick Sherman cleaned his knife and their father washed the tree trimmer. Finally both men stooped under the trickle of cold water, scrubbed their faces, drank and stood up again, dripping water down their necks, and wiped their mouths and eyes across their sleeves.