The Melting

by lize Spit

  The shovel has left a deep gash in his forehead. For the first few seconds, nothing comes out of it at all. I can see right down to the bone of his eye socket. The flesh is pink and juicy. A few seconds later, the wound gets organized and starts sending out blood in the appropriate amounts. It oozes out in two streams from the deepest parts of the wound, bright red.

  I drop the shovel.

  On my way out, I grab a few items of clothing. I need my pants. My Tessie notes are in there. Outside, in front of the workshop door, I throw on the clothes I picked up. My own pants, Laurens’s T-shirt. I quickly wipe the tears off my face. I leave the two bras and sweater behind.

  Laurens’s whimpering has turned into cursing.

  My bike is leaning against the porch. I jump on it and race out into the street. I grip my bare feet around the pedals so I can go faster. The soaked crotch of my pants sticks to the saddle. It burns. It’s okay, I tell myself, it’s just sand.

  My tires leave a trail in the hot asphalt. I race down the Bulksteeg, not sure where to go. I pedal and pedal. I feel something in the right leg of my pants, a bulge around my shin. It’s my crumpled panties. They sink further and further down with every rotation. A few hundred meters on, at the pollard willows, they fall out of the leg of my pants. They hang there on the pedal for two more rotations until they fall down and land on the side of the road. I don’t want to leave them there, but I can’t stop and get off either.

  I have to go home and wash up. At the canal, where the water level is low from the relentless sun, I can’t go on anymore. One of the fishermen, sitting under a raincoat propped up on bamboo sticks for shade, waves at me. Only then do I realize that home is where I came from. In the whole town, there’s no place left for me to go.

  Slurry Pit

  NEVER BEFORE IN Bovenmeer, or in the entire surrounding region, had three hundred grams of horse meat been cut into such thin slices as in the week after Jan’s funeral.

  “People just start telling me stuff while I’m slicing their meat,” Laurens’s mother replied when I asked her how she knew so much about the accident. I knew she was lying, that it worked the other way around. She moved the hams slowly and carefully through her razor-sharp blades so the people waiting would either have to start talking or keep listening. It was as if she had swallowed a cassette tape. She talked to customers about nothing else these days, their only choice was whether or not to press Play.

  Unlike the meat she sold—which was always weighed down to the gram, even if it meant breaking off an edge on the cheese or a corner of the pâté—the stories she gave away for free were a little less precise. As long as the overall storyline made sense, and the decades and surnames were correct.

  But Laurens’s mom wasn’t the only one to blame for the fact that there were twenty versions of what happened to Jan going around, each one more spectacular than the last. Everyone who came in to buy ringwurst or pâté in the weeks after his death so they too could hear the stories was at fault, myself included.

  I didn’t dare to ask Pim how exactly they’d found Jan and brought him up. I knew he would just repeat what had been printed in the local paper, in the hope that one day this brief summary would be all that was left of his trauma, three simple sentences under the headline “Farmer’s son (16) drowns in slurry pit”.

  Right after closing time, on the first Saturday of 2002, January 5, I walked into the butcher shop. It was really cold outside for the first time that winter. There was smoke rising from almost every chimney. Laurens’s mom let me in even though she’d already closed up shop. She handed me a cube of sharp cheddar after carefully cutting the edges off it first.

  It had been a good day. Almost everything in the shop had been sold. The stories about Pim’s family were still playing a role in that—while talking about tragedies and death, people are quick to order a few hundred grams extra, out of a sort of gratitude for the fact that they could go home and consume it with their unbroken family.

  I knew that Laurens’s mom had a particularly loose tongue when she was emptying the display case. The version I’d get from her would be peppered with untruths, but that was exactly what I wanted—not the truth, but for someone to talk about Jan again, to sing his praises, under the assumption that it was all just an accident.

  “Did you know that on the day he disappeared, Jan came by the shop?” she asked.

  Saying “no” at this point was the same as pressing Play.

  “He looked so good that day, so full of life. I was even surprised that he didn’t have a girlfriend. Behind all those pimples, he was a really nice, polite young man,” she continued. “Little did I know that less than a half-hour later, he’d be gone.”

  She told me how he bought at least thirty euros of meat—veal sausage, head cheese, pâté, bologna and even some of her delicious homemade onion confit.

  Her stories always contained a little advertising for her meat products.

  They were probably planning to have a family breakfast that morning, in between all the daily chores.

  “Actually,” Laurens’s mom said, “I should mention that his parents had wanted a dozen children, preferably sons, though a daughter or two couldn’t have hurt. That’s why they had that long kitchen table—they bought it before they knew there’d be complications. Shortly after Pim was born, they found cysts on that poor woman’s fallopian tubes and had to remove her uterus . . .”

  She paused for a moment and wrung out the rag over the bucket of dirty water.

  These dramatic pauses were becoming more frequent. She had already told this version of the story so many times that she knew exactly where they were needed, where the listener would need time to process, where there would be sighs, where handbags would be shifted from one arm to the other. I didn’t have a handbag with me, so every time she paused I nibbled off a corner of the cheese.

  Pim and his parents had no idea what they were waking up to that morning. They found the rolls and cold cuts on the table and sat down to breakfast, assuming that, like always, Jan would join them after he was done milking the cows.

  He never came.

  They didn’t wait. The breakfast table was cleared; the meat and cheese were put back in the refrigerator.

  Two minutes after Pim’s father had gone out to start his chores, he came back into the kitchen. “The cows haven’t been milked,” he said, alarmed. Pim’s mom needed to see it with her own eyes. She knew Jan was up already—she’d heard his alarm go off that morning, he’d gone to the bakery. But still, she went to check his bed.

  “The sight of that empty, crumpled bed—that must have been when she realized, that moment when you, as a mother, think, ‘No, it can’t be . . .’ ” The last words came out higher pitched so that it didn’t sound like anything Pim’s mom would say.

  Jan’s boots were missing. Maybe he went for a walk, his parents must have thought.

  But after a few hours, they were losing hope. Their son hadn’t taken anything with him, no bike, no car, no money, no tractor. He should’ve been back by now.

  “If you’re planning to be gone for a while, you’d leave a note, wouldn’t you?” Laurens’s mom pulled the little sign out of a lump of pâté, wiped the stick clean and stuck it back in exactly the same hole.

  “True,” I said. The cheese left a sharp taste in my mouth, as if I hadn’t swallowed my saliva for three years.

  “And Jan wasn’t the type to sneak out or plan surprises. He was just your average guy with no secrets,” she said.

  “True.” My chin was quivering. I clenched my teeth and followed the movement of her rag, of her eyes.

  “Isn’t that how you picture him—blond, skinny, with braces and pimples?” she said.

  “Yes.” I tried to imagine it, Jan standing in this very spot, how his voice must have sounded. I conjured it all up in my memory—his boots, the shape of his nose, his muscled arms.

  “If my son had that many pimples, I would’ve taken him to see a dermatologist. A splash
of lemon juice is no match for that kind of acne. But anyway—between you and me—those farmers aren’t much for beauty products, if you know what I mean. They probably think they’re too expensive, not that it matters, if they’d sell off some of that land, they’d be the richest people in town.”

  I nodded faintly.

  Laurens’s mom pronounced “pimple” as if there were a whitehead on the tip of the word that she could pop with her mouth—the way she articulated the syllables, it sounded like he had way more pimples than he actually did.

  I wish I’d had the nerve to challenge her on this.

  “After a few hours, Pim’s parents had looked everywhere—the stables, the hayloft, the grain silos, the milk tank. That’s when they saw the loose grate at the edge of the yard, above one of those pipes that drains the animal waste into—what’s it called, there’s probably a word for it—oh yes, a slurry pit,” she said.

  Pim’s dad poked around in the pit with a stick but couldn’t rule out the possibility. So they immediately called a company to come drain the pit.

  “They’ll do that for a hundred and fifty euros nowadays, but that’s usually excluding tax and travel costs, which they don’t say on their website, of course. They didn’t say anything about having to pay in cash either.”

  The guy from the pit-draining company came all the way from Brasschaat. He wanted to see the money first, so Pim’s mom had to jump in the car and drive to the nearest ATM in Zandhoven.

  Every time Laurens’s mother embellished the naked facts or deviated from the original story, she glanced in my direction. She started talking faster, more furiously.

  Pim’s dad didn’t warn the guy that there might be a teenager’s body at the bottom of the pit. He just kept telling him to hurry. They inserted the suction head, turned on the pump and let the tank fill up with muck. Then the machine stalled.

  “It must have sounded like a vacuum getting jammed on a sock or a tissue—you know what sound I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  It was a shovel, one that had been missing for a while, but no one was very happy to find it.

  “Pim’s father was always so fond of his tools. He was usually more careful with them—that’s just how we entrepreneurs are.”

  They turned the suction back on, the level of slurry went down a little more. Halfway to the bottom of the pit, the machine started malfunctioning again. Pim’s mom was back out there too at that point, holding the wad of cash in her hand.

  “That can’t be,” she said, “we’re not missing two shovels.”

  Laurens’s mom took a deep breath, looked over my shoulder at a point somewhere behind me on the wall, the jars of jam.

  “The first thing they pulled up was his left boot. That’s when the guy from the slurry pit company realized what they were really looking for. He stopped, said they should call the emergency services, but Pim’s father wouldn’t have it. He grabbed hold of the suction head and tried to suck away as much of the dirt as possible. He had to step back a few times though. Those fumes can be deadly—they’ll get you before you know it.”

  “Two minutes later,” she continued, “they found a body at the bottom of the pit. Pim’s father went down with a rag over his mouth. It was Jan all right. Pim pulled his own brother out of that pit with bucket hooks.”

  Pim’s mom shouted at them to only attach the hooks to his clothes, not to his skin, she wanted him in one piece. Once they got him out, they carried him to the edge of the garden and laid him out on his back in the grass. Jan’s father knelt down coughing over his son’s corpse and immediately began resuscitating. With every push, a bit of cow shit bubbled up in the throat.

  Pim’s mom fetched a towel and used it to wipe off Jan’s face, so she could be sure it was her son, her gangly boy with the long legs, big feet and head full of hair. Then she just started screaming, loud, in a way that only mothers can. Afterwards, the whole farm went deathly quiet.

  I could imagine the silence perfectly; even the geese stopped honking. And Pim’s father—I had no trouble picturing him either—knees in the grass, a brown circle around his lips from the CPR. Jan’s ribs cracking under the force of his weight.

  Pim—the man testified later—remained quite calm. As if he had just helped deliver a stillborn calf. After the first responders confirmed the death, he pulled off Jan’s other boot, cleaned them both and placed them next to the barn door, exactly where they would’ve been if Jan hadn’t put them on that morning.

  Laurens’s mom walked over to the roll of cling wrap and gave it a jolt. She pulled off about three meters. Together we covered all the salad dishes in the display case. I wiped up a splatter of cherry sauce on the counter with my finger, just to get rid of that sharp cheddar taste in my mouth. When I finally headed for the door, she grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Didn’t you come by to see Laurens?” she asked.

  I didn’t dare say no.

  “He’s at his grandmother’s, but we can call him if you want.”

  I shrugged. As I turned to leave, she finished her story.

  “In the end, the guy with the suction head was kind enough not to take their money.”

  She must have noticed the state she was sending me home in. Hence, the positive note.

  Jan was lifeless in a giant pit of manure, while I was sitting with Laurens on the swing set doing nothing—the thought of it kept whirling around in my mind, occupying my entire body. Of course, he was unconscious when he died, we all knew that, Pim’s parents repeated it often enough: the fumes were enough to knock any-body out. But unconscious or not, the body must have sunk to the bottom. The slurry must have seeped into every cavity; he must have gone down like a teapot in the kitchen sink. His lungs, esophagus, ear canals, every hole completely filled.

  Legs trembling, I headed for the fields between the boggy wetlands and the forest of the forest, towards the grassy meadow where the cows grazed.

  There were about twenty of them out there, huddled close together, with hardly any grass left to graze on.

  Standing there, gazing out into the field, I saw several of them lift their tails and relieve themselves. They just let it all out, totally unaware of my presence, or of the fact that I—along with a lot of other people—couldn’t just let Jan go.

  Pim’s mom and dad had spent most of their lives working the fields to grow corn, grass and grain just to feed these animals. If they wanted to go on selling milk, they had to keep these cows alive even after Jan was dead. As long as they kept feeding them, they would keep on shitting, and that shit would be used to fertilize the fields so they could keep on growing enough corn, grain and grass to feed them.

  His parents had no choice. I would have done the same thing—give the cows just enough food to survive but not more.

  A few days after that first Saturday in January, Laurens called. He was back from his grandma’s and had something to tell me: Pim’s mom had left the farm with a big suitcase full of clothes. She’d gone to live with her sister’s family in Lier. They had a guestroom for exactly these types of situations.

  This was good news for the butcher shop. The story about Jan’s accident had been told and retold too many times. They needed some new gossip. Farmers getting divorced, now that was a big deal—who would run the business?

  One day, Pim’s aunt stopped by the butcher shop. She ordered a few slices of cheese, and as she was paying, she dropped a few details in an attempt to find out for herself what kind of rumors were going around about her sister.

  “No one said anything about a divorce,” she said. “Pim’s mother just needs a different environment so she can grieve. She’s not going to leave Pim or Pim’s father, she just needs to get away for a while.”

  It wasn’t until later that all the juicy details came to light: Pim’s parents had gotten into an argument in bed one night. His father swore he’d never leave the farm, said they owed it to their son, together, that Jan took care of those animals with all his h
eart. How could they just give it all up?

  Pim’s mom got out of bed and left the room. What happened next must have been fully witnessed by Pim’s father from the bed. Pim’s mother appeared on the screen. She grabbed the shovel, which had been leaning against the wall of the barn since the day they found it, and stabbed it into the belly of a pregnant cow.

  7:00 p.m.

  I LOOKED IT up on wikiHow. At the top of the article was a disclaimer: “To be used as a scary Halloween decoration or for fishing or boating. If using for decoration, make sure to check your local laws first. In some areas, displaying a noose is regarded as a threat, and thus illegal. Never tie a noose around your neck, not even as a joke.”

  I didn’t try it out step-by-step at home. It seemed insulting, but to who I wasn’t sure. I read the instructions on the screen out loud until I was certain I wouldn’t forget them.

  I tied the knot right. When I let myself hang on it for a second, my breath is instantly cut off.

  It’s getting dark, but the night still hasn’t settled in yet. The children playing in the barn are gone now. I miss their voices. Actually, I’m surprised how quiet it is. The only sound is coming from the party next door. After years of living in the city, I guess I forgot: cows get tired too.

  People are starting to leave. Cars drive away, voices die out, the sound of motorbikes fades into the distance.

  If I stand on my tiptoes, I can see which cars are still out there through the window.

  Laurens’s is still there. Jolan’s is gone. I saw him walk out. I could tell by the way he opened the door that he was hoping to disappear unnoticed, but Pim’s mom came running out after him. They chatted for a minute. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Jolan got in the car and started the engine, but he didn’t leave right away. My phone’s going to ring, I thought, he’s going to call me. Slowly the snow started to melt off the hood of his car. I watched him fumbling around with something under the reading light. It was a waffle. He wrestled it out of the wrapper and took a bite.