Unspeakable Things(32)

You’d think after war that Dad wouldn’t want all that blood and violence. He seemed to crave it, though, always grimly happy on butchering day.

Once the chickens were headless, I was sent to retrieve the animated corpses. They jiggled when held upside down. I’d bring them to the feather pot boiling over the camp stove, an enormous metal vat in which we’d dunk the newly killed hens. The dirty smell of wet feathers would be in my hair for days, no matter how much I scrubbed, but I preferred this job to holding the beaks so near Dad’s swinging hatchet. We’d watched Roots in school, and that scene when Kunta Kinte loses his foot stuck with me.

Thunk.

I couldn’t hold that beak, not for love or money.

Dad, he didn’t mind the gore. He made sure to mention that any chance he got.

“How many?” he asked, still pushing the butchering log, pulling me back into the here and now.

“What?”

He stared at the bucket I was holding, then back at me. “How many eggs?”

I hadn’t even counted them. “Nine,” I guessed.

He stopped rolling the stump directly in front of the coop. The chicken blood that had pooled in the hatchet divots had grown black. I squinted. The sun radiated directly behind him. He was wearing raggedy work clothes, but he possessed the outline of the statue of David. Tall, strong, muscled. When I thought of stepping forward and hugging him, I shuddered. He could just as well be crawling with maggots for how close I wanted to get to him. I realized that with curiosity. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. Maybe that’s how it was for all girls and their dads.

He spun on his heel toward the chicken coop.

“Dad?”

He stopped but didn’t turn. “Yeah?”

“Since we have to butcher tomorrow, can Sephie and I have the rest of tonight off?”

He stepped into the coop without answering me. He appeared a minute later with an egg in his hand. “You missed one.”

I stood in place as he brought the egg over and placed it in my bucket. It was covered in poop. It’d be a pain to clean. A roar on the gravel road drew my attention. I turned. A huge truck was rolling past on our quiet road. It had a bucket on its back, STEARNS COUNTY ELECTRICAL on its side.

Dad tensed. “Goddamned invasion is happening already,” he said.

I could hear the hate in his voice. He’d moved us out here to escape the real world, to find a place where he could hold his parties and build his sculptures and create his magical forest pathways without anyone telling him different.

“They can’t take our land,” I said, heated.

He was quiet for a while. “Yeah, you can play,” he finally said. “But no complaining when it comes to butchering time tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. I started to walk away and then stopped. “Dad?”

He hadn’t moved, his eyes pinned on me. “Yeah?”

I almost lost my nerve, but I couldn’t shake the image of Wayne on the bus, scared and mad at the same time when I asked him about Clam. “Did Sergeant Bauer tell you any more about Hollow boys getting attacked?”

A clot of blackbirds took to the air in Mom’s garden, probably scared off by Meander.

Dad laughed, an ugly cut of a sound. “They’re not getting attacked.”

I took a step back. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re lying if they say they are.”

But he couldn’t know that. He hadn’t looked into the eyes of the animal that’d taken up house in Clam’s body, or the terror in Wayne’s face. Dad was hiding something. Something different than he usually hid, I could feel it, something to do with Bauer.

I’d have to poke through his drawers.

I’d done it before. It hadn’t felt good, digging through those dirty magazines, those red-and-black pictures he sketched that were so different from his sculptures, that book he claimed to always be writing but that read like a diary except everyone owned laser guns. I hadn’t discovered anything surprising, nothing except some letters that Aunt Jin wrote him when she was a little girl. She called him her best big brother. That caught me off guard, but I suppose they’d all had a life before I was born.

I’d never snooped in his studio, though. Or the basement. That’s probably where I should start, as soon as Mom and Dad were both out of the house. Maybe I could talk Sephie into helping me.

I found her on her knees in the bathroom, cleaning the bathtub grout with an old toothbrush. “Dad said we can have the rest of tonight off!”

She sat back on her heels. “Doubt it.”

“For real! Cuz we have to butcher chickens tomorrow. He said we only get it off if we play willowacks, though.” I grinned. It didn’t matter if she knew that last part was a lie. It was funny either way.

We’d been playing willowacks since we were five and seven. It involved covering ourselves in sheets with a headband over our eyes holding them in place, tying ourselves to one another, removing our shoes so we were sock-footed, and blundering through the woods circling our property. Where we ended up was anyone’s guess. We lost hours playing willowacks, laughing, collecting cockleburs. It was the best fun, but Sephie had refused to play since last summer. She’d said it was because she was starting high school. I’d told her it was probably her little boobies throwing her off balance.