Knife Fight and Other Struggles (36 page)

Not much had changed here in five years. The wallpaper was the same geometric pattern, unlovely three decades ago. It smelled sweet, of pastry and cabbage. I let the door shut behind me, and the smell intensified.

“Hello, Ingrid.”

“Hello, Gudrun.” She was in the doorway to the kitchen where sunlight silhouetted her. She was sitting, slumped a bit. “Wheelchair now?” I asked.

She coughed, but not in a worrying way. “Wheelchair now. Yes. What’s that?”

“Gelatin,” I said, and she said, “Bring it here to me.”

Gudrun was as fat as one would expect, living her days here at the Perch. Fat was what put her in the wheelchair as much as the years. She held her hands out for the gelatin. I helped her bring it down to her lap, jiggling with its bugs and its meats and its petals. She oohed at it like it was a newborn.

“Oh, this is
lovely.
Who made it?”

“I don’t truly know. I didn’t see who set it there.”

She sniffed at it. “Well it’s very creative. It will do fine, I think. Better than the chicken.”

“Nothing wrong with the chicken,” I said, and she smiled so her lips drew back under her teeth, and squinted down at the offering.

“I suspect Rainer’s daughter. Always partial to the insectile. But it will all sort out. We’ll take it all up to the Perch later,” she said, meaning, of course, I would take it. I lifted the gelatin away and the wheels on the front of her chair squeaked as she turned around, leading me back into the kitchen.

It was not much changed—or to put it another way, what changes there might be were too small for me to be certain of. For years, we had all but lived here—hauling firewood, cleaning floor and countertop, doing the work of the young. . . . But I had not been by for five years now, then five years before that, then five again and again and again. Did the ceiling always warp down so, over the refrigerator? Were there so many flyspecks in the bowl of the lights? Did the wood stove gleam so brightly, as the light struck it from the high windows on the west wall? Had the shelves that covered three walls been painted, again?

And as to the smell of it. . . .

Did the larder always smell so?

“Now,” Gudrun said, taking her place in the middle of the floor, where the sun always hit this time in the afternoon of a hootenanny, “it’s time to work, little sister.” She clapped her hands, and grunted. “Find your apron. Fetch the knives. There are mouths to feed.”

Gudrun surprised me then. For I was hoping for her to sit there in the warm sun, reminding me where things were, correcting my kitchen chants, demanding spoonfuls of broth for inspection, watching me sweat and bleed and cry, from her wheeled throne.

But no. That had not been our way for many years. And so—

She tilted her head, and drew a long and sore breath. . . .

 . . . and up she got, swaying and tottering on her thick, inadequate legs. Her grin was fierce as ever as she stumbled to the counter, caught and steadied herself. Huffing, Gudrun held out her hand, and I pulled a long steel flensing knife from the block, passed it to her.

“More and more mouths,” she said when she caught her breath, “every time.”

Carcasses were first. They were stacked on the counter between the sink and the stove, on long platters: goose and pig and sheep, venison and rabbit. The beasts had been skinned and gutted, but not very much butchered. We set at them fast and hard, Gudrun with knife, I with cleaver. There was a technique to it—we had been rending the carcasses for the better part of a century, Gudrun and I, and we knew our way around a butcher block—but it was not a mindful thing. If blood and gristle splattered—well, that is why we wore aprons, and tied our hair high. We were deft enough that the blades didn’t slip, and none of the blood would be ours. In the end, the meat would be ready, stacked in glistening piles of fowl and swine and vermin, ready for flame.

There were vegetables to prepare—a bushel of potatoes mingled with other roots as we required—long stalks of rhubarb and a bucket filled with water, where leeks floated like the pale fingers of children. But we stopped a moment, to rest. I pushed the wheelchair closer so Gudrun could sit in it, but she swatted it away.

“Embarrassing.” She looked at the hallway, the windows. Like someone might be watching. Someone might be, I thought, considering it.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll sit in it myself.” And I plunked myself down in the chair. Gudrun turned so she leaned against the counter. Her face was as slick as the meat; she was sweating like a farmhand.

“It suits you,” she said, “better than me.”

I laughed, but dutifully.

“You might learn a thing or two,” she went on. “Be a better person for it.”

I shook my head and smiled. Gudrun could try all she wanted; she wouldn’t draw me out.

Still she tried. She ran water in the sink and filled two glasses for us, and wondered how it would have gone with Sam, my first husband, if my spine had stayed bent. I sweetly suggested he might have gone with Gudrun. “He wouldn’t have found comfort in
my
bed,” she sniffed as she handed me my water in an old jelly glass. “Not my sort.”

We set to work on the vegetables then, peeling and chopping with fresh knives, and Gudrun set about reminiscing, with an eye to enumerating all the ways Sam wasn’t her sort. He drove like an old woman, she said; he was too thin, and couldn’t dance well, nor could he play an instrument. “I don’t trust a fellow who’s not at least musical. I don’t see the sense of one,” she said. “It’s uncomely.”

“He’s gone now,” I said.

“Yes. We didn’t chant
him
well, did we?”

I took a breath, and bore down on the potato. It split like a stump under the weight of the knife, and me.

I might have returned fire. I might have wondered at Gudrun’s own marriage, and the way her life had been warped around it. We had never properly shared Sam; he was mine. But for a time—for quite a time—we’d both shared a bed with the master of Gudrun’s house.

Of course, pointing that out . . . well, that would be too cruel. So I kept my peace.

The flames had lived in the stove since dawn. But I threw in another log after we put the meat in the ovens—before we started work on the sauce.

We had branches of rosemary—garlic cloves, peeled and ready to crush under a stone mortar; pink runoff from the carcasses, collected in narrow grooves on the butcher block’s edges; and in a tall glass jar, salt, grains as thick as pebbles. . . .

Sauce always being improved with salt.

Gudrun stopped goading me now that we put down our knives and stood before the fire. I set one of my pans over the firebox then, and we added parts, taking turns, and calling back chants at one another, stirring and stoking. It was work now, and tricky work at that. Everything could be undone if we missed a note, a beat. . . .

We got on best at moments like these.

The sun crossed the kitchen as it filled with smoke and fume, and we sang and chanted the usual storm: begged for health and well-being for the assembled families—good pay, light work for the fathers  . . . for dire circumstances to fall on those who might stand against them. We put our heads together and got nearly all the names right, and Gudrun had a list of them tacked onto the refrigerator so we’d be sure. We poured off the sauce, tar thick, the colour of beets, into an urn, and I slid it into the warming oven next to the first platter of meat.

“They’ll be getting hungry,” said Gudrun. “It’s nearly eight.”

I nodded. “Later than usual, but not much.”

Gudrun wiped her arm across her forehead, and motioned for the wheelchair. I brought it, and helped her back into it. She was sweaty and slow, and her breathing was shallow.

“You watch the roasts,” I said. “You can do that from the chair.”

“Not if I have to haul them out I can’t.”

“There’s time on them yet.” I looked out the door to the hall, the stairs. “But you’re right. They will be getting hungry. I’d best get up there.”

She didn’t argue this time. Just settled back, folded her hands and drew in the scent of the cookery.

“Don’t forget the Jell-O,” she said, and pointed to the table where I’d put it, hours ago. The evening light refracted around the wieners and insects, and made it glow.

Three trips up and down two flights of stairs and a ladder, and I was ready. At the north corner of the widow’s walk, I set the Jell-O. The southern corner, underneath the rooster weather vane, was where I left the blood sausage. I uncovered the casserole dish, and set it in the east.

And William’s chicken—that I carefully unwrapped, and took it to the western corner—where I set, cross-legged, with the bird in the lap of my apron.

The sun was low enough that the flat spot on the roof was actually in shadow, though no tree drew this high. Peering over the edge, I could see the entire world it seemed, to the far horizons; green farmers’ fields nearest, dotted with woodlots and finally stretching far to clots of housing. Houses such as that were the due of the families—Gunnar kept his family in one such as that. From the Perch, those modest homes did not seem so much to ask.

Stars began to appear. From below, I heard the families, their murmured conversations, some laughter. It was hard to make out precisely what was being said, from so high. But I knew my progeny. They were hungry, they were. Hungry for life; for wealth; for one another, finally.

These offerings they had made—they weren’t offerings, not really. They were demands.

The air was sweet up on the Perch. An evening breeze blew across the treetops, light as a young boy’s touch on my cheek. I lifted the chicken William—William and I—had made, into the breeze. The hour was about right now—soon, they would come.

The first lighted on the rooster. Its wings were wide, like rumpled paper. They were maybe wide as my hand. Thick antennae turned toward me, sniffing the offering. I stretched as high as I could without standing. And the moth took off, and circled overhead.

I felt the second on my hand, like the brushing of a curtain.

More would come soon.

When Gudrun and I were young, so many came—Gudrun claimed she near to suffocated under their weight, as they made a blanket over us. It was all I could do not to leap off the Perch, tumble down the steep roof. Oh, such terror—such terror as grows on the flesh of the young. It seemed then that death might have been preferable to the wings of the moth.