by Jo Treggiari
CHAPTER EIGHT
I’m thinking back to the piglets. The lessons I learned then, at nine and a half years old.
Those piglets are my most personal attempt. And yet I make mistakes, mistakes that still sting my soul even now.
Three months after the chicken debacle, I slaughter all three remaining piglets—Ferdinand’s brothers and sister—in a sort of frenzy, not pausing to savor the deaths, wanting so badly to recapture the excitement I felt when I killed Ferdinand. My knife-work is clumsy and rough. I hack at them to get the guts and organs out. I neglect to catch the blood in buckets. Not that we have enough buckets for such a massive quantity. I get a ringing backhand across the head for this, which rocks me back on my heels. Pa loves his fried black sausage with a couple of runny eggs and cornmeal mush in the morning.
He stares at the row of dead piglets hanging by the hind legs in a gently swaying curtain of flesh, the heaps of viscera, the thick pools on the dusty floor below their throats, my arms and torso spattered red. I scratch at some dried blood. It itches like crazy.
“How’d you get them all up there together?” he asks, his voice quieter now. I shoot him a quick look, tensed for another blow. Sometimes Pa shouts when he’s about to lash out, and sometimes his voice drops to a murmur just before the blow falls. It keeps me unbalanced. And always aware of where he is in relation to my body.
There will be a reckoning as always, but for now he is curious.
I show him the knots I tied, the pulleys hanging from the eaves: a complex web of support. My shoulders ache and my arm muscles throb with deep pain. Each piglet was hoisted into the air separately, but once they witnessed what happened to the first of them, they knew what was coming and they fought me. Later, I discover my shins are covered in bruises shaped like small cloven footprints. They remind me of purple cabbages.
“I took each one out of the pen separate,” I tell Pa, with my eyes fixed on the ground. “Hung it up. Slipknot around the hind leg.” I make a slashing gesture with the edge of my hand. “Knife.”
“Your ma won’t be pleased.” He eyes the carcasses. “Not to say you weren’t neat about it. Apart from wasting all that blood.”
“We can salt them.”
“It’s more meat than we need right now.” He points to the biggest of the piglets, Glinda (after the good witch). “Had plans for that one around Thanksgiving. Already spoke to Hank and James about helping out with raising the new barn, and hosting a pig roast in return.” He gestures at the next biggest, Wilbur, who swings slowly in a big circle, gore still dripping from the scarlet slash in his throat. “Promised ’em a couple of hams too, off of that one.”
Skilled hired hands were hard to come by, and often, for a big job, the local farmers got together and traded and bartered for help. Meat was as good as or better than money around here.
He sighs.
“Got nothing for them now. You’ll have to help with the barn. Salted meat ain’t nothing like good, fresh pork.”
I straighten my back and try not to wince as sore muscles protest.
“I can do it.” I thrust out my scrawny chest and lift my chin.
“You’re gonna have to. Can’t see any other way.”
He reaches out and places his hand on the nearest piglet. Its eyes are closed tight, fringed in white lashes. It looks touched by frost.
“Need to scald them still.”
Scalding takes the tough bristles off the pig skin. “I started the big pot boiling.”
“Those ropes you got hung, they gonna help you swing them all the way over there?”
I nod, showing him the special knots I’d come up with. They hold but they are also pretty easy to release and re-tie in a different way. As long as I have some leverage, like a strong support beam, I can manage the weight of each pig by myself.
Pa contemplates the ropes and then spits tobacco juice on the floor. “You’re not stupid,” he says finally. Though the expression on his face looks nothing like pride or approval.
I shift from foot to foot, and then freeze as he looks at me.
“Got to take care of this first.”
He unbuckles his belt and slowly pulls it from the loops. It’s good, thick leather with a big brass buckle in the shape of a horseshoe. He weighs it in his hand. I keep my spine straight as I can, though it threatens to bow under the pressure of dread. I know that buckle intimately, the snap and the whistle as it cuts through the air and then the sound of impact, a few seconds before the pain bites bone-deep. He’ll use the buckle first, chewing up the muscle beneath the skin, often leaving no visible marks, and then the strap against my buttocks, and for the next couple of weeks at school I’ll sit on the edge of my chair, and I’ll raise my hand for every question whether I know the answer or not. Just to get the chance to stand up off the hard wooden seat and go to the blackboard.
CHAPTER NINE
Down in the well, Ari saw impossible things coming out of the deep pockets of shadow. Tallulah, skinned and glistening; a cat dragging its entrails behind it. Closing her eyes made no difference; begging her mind to stop replaying the horror changed nothing. She was right back there in the grove.
Lynn hadn’t vomited, but she’d gone as white as a sheet and she’d tilted so far over that Ari had thought she was going to swoon. When Ari thrust out a supportive arm, Lynn’s entire weight sagged against it. Together they’d staggered a few yards away from the animals and called the police on Ari’s phone.
The immediate area was taped off now, shrouded by dense plastic sheeting, but the rest of the space was filled with people: two or three cops, but mostly the kids from the swimming hole, and various townspeople who had shown up by osmosis. She recognized employees from the convenience store, wait-staff from the restaurants, and a handful of others from her daily life. Even her creepy biology teacher was there. Jesse Caldwell paced the shadows along the perimeter, observing everyone with an intense expression, as if he wanted to join the group but knew he wouldn’t be welcome.
Ari and Lynn sat on a fallen log, staring determinedly at the distant road, a winding gray ribbon.
“The smell,” Lynn said.
Ari nodded. It had been familiar to her too. “Try not to think about it,” she said, attempting to block it from her own mind as well.
“Just like the cats in biology class.”
They’d started on cat dissection three weeks ago. Lynn had mounted an impassioned campaign extolling the virtues of computer models rather than dissection. But it had been ignored, and so she had dropped the class a few days in, adding AP Trig to her course load. Sadly, Ari needed the science credit, and Biology had rapidly become her most dreaded class. Each time Ari opened her plastic garbage bag, she steeled herself, but unfailingly the odor and the sight of that stiff, unnatural-looking body inside made her stomach twist. Their teacher, Dr. McNamara, didn’t help. She favored grossout humor mixed with science, as if she could desensitize the class by saying “gunk” and “ooze” and “kitty.”
“Who would do such a thing?” Lynn said.
“Oh, honey. I don’t know.”
“My poor Tallulah, my sweet girl.”
Lynn was quiet for a few minutes, knotting her fingers together. Ari took her hand. It was icy.
“Are you sure you want to talk to the cops?” Ari said. “You could do it later at home.”
“It’ll be worse then,” Lynn said.
Behind them, they could hear the sounds of plastic sheeting being unrolled, the grunts of physical effort. Ari was having a hard time processing the pictures whirling around in her head. It had been so vivid. Almost painterly, like the abstract art exhibition her mom had taken her to in Bedford a couple of years ago.
Eight animals—dogs and cats, the officer had told her—though at that point they hadn’t matched all the skins together with the internal organs yet. “There could well be more,” he’d said with a touch of barely contained glee. Criminal violence didn’t come to Dempsey Hollow often. This was a big d
ay for the force.
“They’re acting like it was a prank,” Lynn said bitterly. The background noise had gotten louder.
Ari’s eyes went to where Stroud was standing in his swim shorts and bright-red team jacket. The group around him had swelled. There was the sound of high-five slapping and bursts of hesitant laughter intermingled with the babble of conversation. If not for all the cops and the plastic-sheeted lumps on the ground, it could have been a casual party.
Her friend turned toward her and Ari was shocked by her expression.
Lynn’s face was splotchy and flushed, her eyes hard as coal, glittering with tears and rage. “My dog was butchered,” she said, forcing each word past clenched teeth.
Butchered. That was the word Ari hadn’t let herself speak, not even silently in her mind, but that’s what the pets had reminded her of—the deer in the back of Sourmash’s truck.
Lynn swallowed hard, and then waved her arm, encompassing all the people standing in the grove. “Look at them! It’s like they’re not even capable of compassion.”
“People deal with things in different ways,” Ari said lamely. “Some people kid around when they’re nervous or scared.”
“How the hell did you get to be so naïve, Ari?”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“Saying something stupid is not helping.”
“That police officer said it was probably a transient,” Ari said, not liking the desperate look in Lynn’s eyes.
“Because they know no one wants to believe something really bad—that it’s closer to home. And it’s not just that.” Her eyes welled up with angry tears. “Tallulah. Sourmash. All the racist and homophobic jerks at school like Jack Rourke and his posse. If you start scratching the surface it just gets worse.”
An image of a rotting log popped into Ari’s mind. Under the bark, a writhing mass of pill bugs and centipedes. Her stomach squeezed. If only they could leave. The officer who’d wanted to speak to Lynn was still busy patrolling the periphery.
Ari wished she could whisk Lynn away, seal her up in a protective bubble. “What about two years back, when Jack Rourke Photoshoppped my face onto all those pornographic pictures and glued them on the outside of my locker?” Lynn said, jumping to her feet.
“You’re all fucking assholes,” she screamed at the group of teenagers. Their laughter cut off suddenly. Some of the adults muttered disapprovingly, as if such language was inappropriate; the piano teacher was open-mouthed and the local library assistant stared at Lynn like she’d never seen her before.
“Crazy dyke,” someone said.
Then, quite suddenly, Lynn slumped and curled in on herself, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, as if the weight of their gazes were too much.
“Everything will be okay, I promise,” Ari said helplessly, moving to shield her friend with her body. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Some things are worth fighting about. Sometimes you have to take a stand, Ari. Someone killed my dog, skinned and gutted her. Fucking monsters!”
Ari hugged her and couldn’t help noticing how stiffly her friend held herself. “Most people are good, Lynn.”
Lynn detached herself and stood up. “I really don’t think so.” She stood with her back to Ari for a moment and then she wheeled around, her face a mask of stone. “You’d better wake the fuck up, Ari.”
* * *
Ari tasted vomit in the back of her throat. Lynn had been right. There were monsters in the world. Oh God, how she wished Lynn was in front of her right now so she could tell her so and beg her forgiveness. The fight would be forgotten like their squabbles always were.
Something had slipped open in her brain, a tiny door unlatched. She felt as if she were choking on memories, each one triggered by the one before. The shadowed figure had spoken to her. She couldn’t remember what had been said, but she was sure she had recognized the voice. It was someone she knew.
A trickle of sweat ran down her back, but her feet and hands were still freezing. She crammed her hands into her pockets and danced around, trying to keep warm. She’d stuffed armfuls of leaves in between her T-shirt and hoodie in an attempt to insulate herself against the creeping dampness, but it didn’t seem to be working. She could see better now. The moon must have risen. A few hours ago she had screamed pathetically against the black, but now that she could see her surroundings a little better, she almost wished for blindness again. The cistern was at least twenty feet deep, made of mortared bricks painted white. There was nothing at the bottom of it besides the dead leaves, the remains of a deer—she’d found the skull now and it was unmistakable—and the barely alive Ari. It felt like a tomb.
The reality that she might die down here, with or without Sourmash’s help, was very real. And there was absolutely nothing she could do about it; she was just counting the seconds.
How many hours had she been trapped? How many more until she was so weak she wouldn’t be able to move and she gave up like that drowning rat? With an effort that felt physical, she forced the hysteria back down. At the bottom of her pocket, her fingers touched a piece of paper. She drew it out, unfolded it.
Four words in her own handwriting: Dahmer, Gacy, Bundy, Gein.
Ari made lists. Usually it was to-dos or items her mother wanted her to pick up at the store on her way home from school, but she also jotted down anything that interested her so that she could look it up later, either online or at the library. The library was just somewhere she naturally went. She liked doing her homework and research surrounded by other people. The low buzz of conversation, the rustle of pages, even the tapping of keypads helped her to concentrate, and the Internet connection was faster and less glitchy than at home.
The words blurred and then sharpened before her eyes. These were the names of infamous serial murderers—monsters of men. She thought back to the dead animals at the grove, the ritualistic way they had been arranged, and recollected that many killers start off by torturing pets. The whole picture was still incomplete, but she was gradually filling it in, frame by frame.
As far as she could piece it all together, the Sourmash incident had happened on Friday, the discovery of the killing grove on Tuesday, and then—she remembered!—that following Friday she’d gone to the town library to find out everything she could about serial killers. She couldn’t recall if it was a hunch or if something else had set her on this path, but whatever she’d discovered then must have precipitated the events that put her at the bottom of this hole.
Sliding down onto the ground with her back against the bricks, she let muscle memory take her back to the library: its warm honeyed lighting, long tables and round-backed chairs. Cloaking everything was the musty, woodsy smell of books. God, how she loved that smell! It was even better than the pool chlorine.
On that particular day, however, it offered no comfort.
“The late charge on Anna Karenina comes to $1.80,” Miss Byroade, the librarian’s assistant, said in her soft voice, “so your change back is twenty cents.” She pushed the money across the counter. “Did you enjoy it?”
“I got about halfway before I gave up,” Ari said. “All those Russian names confused me.”
“It was a serial, you know,” Miss Byroade said, adjusting her glasses and blinking rapidly. “Not meant to be read in one big gulp.” Ari half-admired the way today’s outfit combined paisley with plaid. Miss Byroade always looked like she got dressed in the dark, and some of her color combinations were a little startling, but Ari dug it in a thrift-store-chic kind of way. Ari felt sorry for the woman without quite knowing why. Maybe it was because she was one of those young people who seemed to have been born old. Ari and Lynn had tried to guess her age once. Lynn had thought she was in her mid-twenties; Ari, closer to thirty.
“Chocolate?” Miss Byroade said, pushing an open box toward Ari. “Handmade truffles.”
Ari took one. It was so good she licked her fingers afterward. Miss Byroade smiled at her.
“Tolstoy
was like Dickens,” the assistant librarian continued. “That’s why it’s quite wordy. Because they were getting paid to drag it out for as long as possible. But if you just submerge yourself in the story, it will transport you. Do you still have the Bacigalupi?”
“Am I late on that one too?”
Miss Byroade nodded. “The price we pay for our addiction. No school today?”
“No, it’s a professional development day for the teachers.”
“A holiday for you then,” Miss Byroade said, with another smile. “And yet here you are among the books.”
Ari glanced over her shoulder and surveyed the room. The library was almost empty. Most people were enjoying the gorgeous weather outside. At least those people not mourning their pets. Lynn was still inconsolable. She was positive she was to blame for Tallulah’s death, and was completely wrapped up in the guilt. Not only that but she was still mad at Ari, even though she said she wasn’t. “I just feel exhausted,” she had said on the phone, in a small wooden voice that freaked Ari out. It was as if she’d reached her tipping point. They still walked to school together, but Lynn wasn’t talking much. Ari wondered if a gallon of her favorite chocolate-chunk hazelnut ice cream would help matters.
Then suddenly she noticed Jesse Caldwell hunched over a book in the corner, one leg under the table bouncing while he read. As if he sensed her presence, he raised his head and stared at her. She gazed back at him with a heat that made him scoot his chair backward a few inches before he collected himself and arranged his features into that blank, frozen look she found so unsettling. She wondered if he really hated the world as much as he appeared to.
For a second she looked at his hands. They were broad and long-fingered. Strong. He was too far away to determine whether they were covered in scratches or bite marks.
He’d been so close to the…what should she call it? The killing zone. It seemed unlikely that the foul odor hadn’t alerted him, and who knew what kind of a view he’d had from the top of the tree.
