by Aaron Dries
But they would have to wait. It was five thirty, and every day at that time he fed his wife. Joe had farmed all his life; routine was paramount. It was what got him through the day. He lived his life by the clock. It ruled over him, it woke him in the morning and its chimes sent him to bed at night. In many ways he was more married to time than he was to her.
Marline Burnett was a vegetable—a term that Joe had once found harsh and incriminating. As though it were a sort of insult, one more directed at him than at her.
There goes pig-farmer Joe. Got a vegetable for a wife.
But Joe had relented to the word. In many ways it was appropriate. Marline sat there, alive, but only in very limited way. Like a vegetable, she absorbed up nutrients through food matter, drinking water via straws and drips. He could see her chest moving up and down, could hear the rasp of her lungs suckling air from the respirator—so yes, she still functioned like a human. But like a vegetable, she seemed to have no brain. Her mental activity was almost nil. There were brief moments of clarity, in which she could manage a moan that somehow expressed that she wanted to sit up, or move from the bed to her rocker near the window. Those occasions were few and far between.
Joe dropped the spoon into the empty bowl, his shoulders slumping. He felt tired. Tired in every bone of his body. His aches were getting worse, day by day. He was in his mid-fifties but he felt far older than that. His hands hurt in the night—a sharp, burning pain that bloomed in his wrists and crept up into his knuckles. It made sleeping almost impossible. Soaking his hands in warm water helped a little, that and the summer air. But behind every summer was a fall just waiting to happen. He didn’t like to think about it.
He assumed it was The Arthritis, a bitching complaint he’d half-expected all his life. The Arthritis had taken a hold on his father’s mitts too, back when he was alive, back when Joe was young enough to think he’d never grow old. But no, the bitch had started creeping up on his father in the middle of the night and within ten years, old Saul Burnett’s farming hands were as withered up as knotted brambles.
Joe expected to go the same way. It was a farmer’s lot to be fed such a fate, and it was a farmer’s duty to take it in his stride. The way Joe had it figured, if you tended crops with the same scythe for fifty years, you could expect the blade to rust and yield. By that rationale, a farmer’s hands were his primary tool, and it would only be a matter of time before those hands rusted away to nothing, too.
But not yet. He could grit his teeth and bear the pain for the time being, just so long as he had his routine and kept the kitchen cupboards stocked full of Aspirin. Joe couldn’t afford to give into the bitch just yet, not whilst his wife kept on living and whilst he still had the pigs. The chickens and the hydro set up he could do without, but the pigs were his bread and butter.
And he had to fight to keep them going. Hog operations were bigger than ever—there was a huge demand for free-range meat—but house-tethered farms on minuscule acreages such as his were a dying breed. It was a struggle to break even, especially considering his additional costs. He had strong small-scale competition in every direction—and that wasn’t even including the bacon and pork steaks lining the shelves of every regional Walmart.
He had no hired help for the pigs. Funds were threadbare. He supplemented his income through Carer’s Allowance payouts, Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefits, assets accrued by his wife against the value of the house she still owned and her Social Security. When the funds lagged, he made money through niche markets—eggs, seasonal fruit and marijuana. It was hard, never-ending work. But just as he had relented to the concept of changing his wife’s diapers twice a day—instead of walking with her down to Tweeds Cafe for a plate of home fries—he’d become accustomed to it. He was no longer intimidated by the bureaucratic ins and outs, which helped. After all, the insurance loopholes and his wife’s current state had been a part of his life for the past nine years. He had a nurse come by three times a week to offer relief. It was cheap labor, part deductible.
“Stone the crows,” he said to Marline, who only stared back at him—or was it through him? Joe couldn’t tell. “Nine years. Heavens. I’ll you what, though, the days may drag and sometimes it seems like they just won’t end, but I’ll be damned if the years haven’t just blinked by. Whaddaya say, Marline?”
She didn’t answer.
Nine years ago she had been driving back from Seattle after going to a farmer’s market in the city. It had been a Sunday. The bed of her pickup was full of plants and flower seeds. Marline had been wearing a red Sears blouse that Joe had bought for her the Christmas before and a pair of waist-high jeans.
These were the small snapshots that came back to haunt him. Fragments that didn’t seem to add up to much of a whole, to much of an answer.
Nobody could tell him why she had lost control of the car. It had been raining the night before, so that may have had some part to play, but Joe knew that Marline always had good control over the vehicles she drove. It just didn’t sound right to him. In the end, what did or didn’t sound right didn’t add up to diddly-squat. It didn’t help him sleep any better at night and it didn’t change the fact that her car had sped off the road leading into North Bend and collided with a telephone pole.
Her wristwatch was shattered at four twenty-three in the afternoon, the time of impact. The very second. Just another fragment.
Coming to terms with the challenges and heartache of caring for his disabled wife was the great challenge of his life. It went beyond the fact that he would never hear her say that she loved him again. Beyond the reality that they would never make love again. It drove deeper, invading every facet of his life—financial, emotional and physical. When Marline had hit that tree, multiple lives had been torn apart.
It was true, God had dealt him a tough hand, but Joe knew from day one that he had no choice but to play the game regardless. But that didn’t stop him from playing on the side, either.
When Joe gambled, he gambled big.
The Forgiveness.
Joe climbed out of his chair and stretched. His shadow fell across the far wall—a squat, rotund blemish against the photographs. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and they came away covered in a thin layer of dandruff. “Oh geeze. Look at that, Marline. I use all the soaps and the shampoos and still I got the flakes.” He sighed and picked up the empty bowl off the floor, the spoon rattling like knuckles in a jar.
Days like this he wished he’d never quit smoking. What he’d give for a pack of Camels right now—
Joe looked down at his wife. She’d been beautiful once. Long ago. Now her face was threaded with liver spots, but they were nothing compared to the ones along her back and legs. Those were some doozies. When they had first met back in ’72 at his cousin’s birthday luncheon in Snoqualmie, the first thing Joe had noticed about Marline was her legs. Long and tanned—just the way he liked them.
Now they were bones wrapped in loose skin. Covered in spots so big they made those once beautiful legs look like a map of the world.
Joe was born and raised in North Bend. His first house had been on Uplands Way South East on the far side of town; he had lived there until his father moved them to West Park Street near the now-abandoned railway tracks. But at the rear of that first house on Uplands Way, there had been a field in which he’d loved to play. A field full of flowers, alive with bees and small hummingbirds. One afternoon, after walking home from school, his mother had greeted him at the end of the driveway in a gas mask that her own father had purchased for her during The Second World War. It sent a quiver through his body, seeing the mask strapped to her face, listening to the way it changed her voice.
His mother rushed him inside, locked the door and informed Joe that he couldn’t go outside to play for two days and even after that, only with the mask on.
“A farmer’s plane has crashed in the field,” she said, clutching her chest. “Pesticide all over the place. Now, I’ve set this rule and you�
�ll abide by it, you hear me, Joe? You cross your father and I on this one and we’ll tan your hide.”
Joe had listened, and on the fourth day he ventured outside. In the mask.
The flowers and grass had died and mulched away, leaving behind empty, lifeless earth. He saw the corpses of dead garter snakes. Insects crushed under his feet, exploding into dust. There was a bluebird on its side near the crash zone, still alive, but both wings broken, its body bloated by chemicals. One eye stared up at him, reflecting the sunlight. Every so often its beak parted and the bluebird gasped for air. Joe stomped it to death with tears in his eyes, his gasps fogging up the mask.
No life grew in the field ever again.
Marline’s legs were the same.
It was as though her flesh was poisoned. He saw his mother in the gas mask every time he was forced to look at her skeletal lower half..
Her eyes wide beneath the glass.
Her voice rasping under the rubber.
Joe dropped the bowl in the sink and looked out the back window. There were two sheds. One was a small slaughter shack that he didn’t use as much as he once did, as he generally outsourced his butchering to a larger farm in Seattle. Inside, suspended hooks twinkled against each other. Knives.
The second shed housed the chickens. Tomorrow morning he’d sift through their pens in search for eggs—and expected many. He had a good batch this year, much better than the prior season. The money would come in handy.
Behind the sheds was the open-air pig pen, rich with shit and churned mud. Within its confines were seventeen hogs; a lot of work for a single man with other priorities.
It was to these priorities that Joe now turned.
His house was two stories high, though his wife was almost permanently confined to the upper half. There, he could control the mess. Downstairs was often trodden thick with mud and reeked of soil—that was the last thing he wanted his wife breathing in.
There was a spare room just off the kitchen. Upon inheriting the house from Marline’s mother, they had contemplated putting a nursery upstairs near their ensuite, and to use the downstairs room as a rumpus. It caught afternoon light, which in the end, would never be appreciated by children. Seven years before the accident, Marline learned that she was barren. The downstairs room just off the kitchen was converted into a storage space for their business and insurance files.
Until The Forgiveness.
Once Joe had accepted his part to play, he ripped up the carpet and laid down tiles. Tiles were easy to clean. He installed a bath and basin, with all drainage leading outside into an external, above-ground guttering system. At the back of the room there was a door, triple bolted, that opened onto a paved path. He installed a small refrigeration unit against the far wall.
Joe entered the room.
There was girl in the bathtub. She may have been twenty years old, maybe younger. In the end, the specifics didn’t matter—only that they were young.
The most important thing was that the victim be innocent. Joe knew that the older you got the more sin you accrued, no matter how hard you attempted to do otherwise.
God saw everything.
Or so Joe hoped.
The girl was dead. One arm had already been cut off, but he’d had nothing to do with that. It sat beside her in the tub, blue and fake-looking. Her face had been removed and her breasts were gone—although those three particulars had not been delivered to him.
After their first murder—the female architect with the decent tits—Joe had nothing more to do with the rites of The Forgiveness, outside of aiding in capture and eventual disposal of the corpse. He just didn’t have the stomach for it—he struggled to slay his own pigs, let alone this. Fooling around with dead meat was one thing, but watching the life drain away, observer to their squirming, their torture—
No. He just couldn’t do it.
There was sin enough in his duties.
Further wounds covered every inch of her body, but he didn’t stop to take note. He could spend hours looking at the fine punctures, studying the nail through her remaining wrist, the scars above her eyebrows—but he knew better than to dwell on such things.
Joe pulled the girl out of the tub but lost his grip. She slapped against the floor, splashing blood and green shit. She had been delivered to him six hours ago.
Underneath the refrigeration unit was a metal table covered in saws, both manual and electronic. He felt tired today, so he decided not to put his back into it. Better to plug the machine in and let the blade do the work. All he had to do was apply sufficient pressure, which required little effort. He had really stacked on the pounds over the past year, and he had been overweight to start with.
Joe stripped off his clothes and left them crumpled in the kitchen, where they sat and warmed in the last of the afternoon light. Back in the tiled room he rolled the girl onto her stomach so he wouldn’t have to look at the place where her face used to be.
Joe withdrew from himself, growing more distant and removed with every step. It was always the same. Over and over. This was victim three. Two girls and one boy. The sex became irrelevant; they were all cold flesh. He attached the saw to the extension cord and began cutting the girl into sections. Blood streaked his face.
He used to wear his mother’s gas mask, but not anymore.
Getting through the bones was the hardest part. He could only whittle through so far before he had to chock the limb between two cinder blocks and use a rubber sledgehammer to snap the rest.
Darkness fell.
Joe switched off the fluorescents and pulled the first of two wheelbarrows to the door. In the dim moonlight he loaded them up, the heavy chunks of flesh and bone thumping against the metal. He returned inside, opened up the cabinet above the sink and took out a disposable, one-size-fits-all paper jumpsuit. Joe stepped into it after toweling off most of the blood with old sheets of newspaper. The suit buttoned up at the neck and he could already feel some of the gore he’d missed bleeding through, covering his body in sticky smiles. It didn’t matter. He wore the suit to keep himself warm. Joe had grown tired of having to burn his clothes after each dismemberment. He could do the whole process naked if he so wished—he lived on a property surrounded by woods and no neighbors for two miles in any direction. But he just didn’t like the idea of being naked outside near the pigs.
He sprinkled the remains with cooking salt before closing the door. It landed in the divots of the girl’s cheeks and stuck to her shattered teeth.
Joe wheeled the remains to the pen, the squeals making his ears ring. They were high-pitched, nasal sounds that would later make his sinuses ache. He fed the flesh and bone to the pigs, tossing the chunks over the fence and into the troughs. They devoured it all, having not been fed for two-and-a-half days. Any longer without food was just cruel.
The following day he would sift through the mud in search for leftovers, sometimes coming away with enough to fill a bucket or two. This, he would mix with generic pig feed—slops and vegetables—and give it to the piglets the following morning. After this he would drive to the North Bend Animal Clinic on Bendigo Boulevard North and refill his injectable acepromazine prescription, a drug generally used to sedate horses and domestic animals, but which he often used on the hogs he entered into prize shows, or on those being transported for live sale. It was cheap and very effective.
They also used it to anesthetize their victims. A jab to the neck and down they went. Easy as pie.
Joe went inside and cleaned the tiled room. It took two hours. Afterwards, he burned the suit, the newspapers he had used to clean himself with, and any other loose remains in the outdoor furnace.
Dark smoke drifted through an even darker sky.
Joe showered and the water ran pink between his toes. Later, he sat in the kitchen and ate some defrosted soup he’d cooked three days before. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed, telling him that it was time to put his wife to bed.
Part Two: Canada
Cha
pter Twenty
Vancouver, Canada
October Twenty Sixth, 2012
Wet maple leaves blanketed the windshields of parked cars and the city lights were reflected in the low-hanging clouds. Marshall’s fourth Vancouver winter was just beginning.
It was the Friday before Halloween and he’d forgotten his umbrella, resigned to the reality that he’d be coming home soaking. October wind rattled the plastic skeletons in cafe doorways and sent the litter into swirls at his feet. He saw carved pumpkins wherever he turned. Marshall was walking down Main Street with his collar turned up. He avoided the pleas of homeless men wearing newspaper hats.
Marshall was semi-drunk and the street swayed before him. After-work drinks at the Granville Speakeasy, his coworkers blurring into a solid, boring mass. When he announced his premature departure he’d been greeted with exaggerated noooos and bribes of more alcohol. He refused. Polite. They were nice enough people, but the crowd was making him anxious. He wasn’t hearing their conversations, just noise. He was working for a post-production company in West Van—wedding videos, high-brow corporate videos whilst freelancing on the side.
Halloween was a foreign concept to him. The season wasn’t celebrated in Australia—or at least it wasn’t when he left, despite the country growing more North Americanized by the day. He associated Halloween with knife-wielding psychopaths, the horror franchises he’d always had a soft spot for. Main Street was a theme park: store-front masks, all teeth and hair, echoed the faces of the homeless people passing him by.
It was sobering. Halloween, like the city itself, seethed. Behind the witches’ masks was a history most didn’t know and just past the beautiful city center was Hastings Street—full of hundreds of destitute nomads who’d been forced from the surrounding areas. They congregated there, trading found goods like stocks, ignored by those who were fortunate enough to have a roof over their heads. Vancouver: the most livable city in the world—that’s what the brochures said.
