Mike Mullin - Ashfall

We dragged three sacks of corn to the barn at lunchtime. Mrs. Edmunds made cornmeal mush for lunch-for variety, she said, laughing. And after lunch we did it all again, shoveling ash and picking corn until I was so stiff and sore that I could barely move.

By late afternoon we’d filled three more feed stacks. After we took them to the barn, Mrs. Edmunds returned to the house. Darla walked through an interior doorway, to a part of the barn I hadn’t been in yet. I hesitated a moment, unsure which way to go, then followed Darla.

Darla led me into a room filled with rabbit hutches, wire-mesh cages suspended from the ceiling by wires. The cages were linked together in two long rows, with eight cages per row. Two or three rabbits lay in most of the cages, just one in a few of them: maybe twenty or twenty-five rabbits in all.

I’d get teased mercilessly if any of the guys at Cedar Falls High heard me say this, but they were cute. Floppy gray ears and gray noses topped their white bodies. They were big, too, at least twice the size of the rabbits I used to see in pet shops.

Darla moved along the row of cages, pulling water bottles out of the little rings of wire that held them suspended beside each cage. I helped her gather up the bottles and then held them as she refilled them, pouring water out of a five-gallon bucket.

“They’re all sick,” Darla said.

“They look okay to me. Kind of cute, actually.”

Darla glared at me. “They’re meat rabbits.”

“Oh.”

“Look at this.” She reached into a cage and pulled a rabbit out of a stainless steel bowl. It had been flopped across the bowl, panting a little. “They started running a temperature and drinking way more water not long after the ashfall. I put extra water bowls in their pens, but they just lie there in the water.”

“Um-”

“I guess it’s not a big deal; we’d have to butcher them soon anyway. I’m almost out of rabbit feed, and I can’t get the dumb bunnies to eat corn.”

“Weird.”

“Can’t say I blame them much, I’m getting sick of corn, too.”

“So if you’re going to kill them all anyway, what’s the problem?”

“It’s just… I don’t know what it is.” She spoke in a softer voice than I’d yet heard her use. “It must be something related to the ashfall… What if it gets us, too?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. The same thought had occurred to me, that the ashfall might be killing me, especially every time I coughed up blood. But I didn’t want to tell Darla that. I didn’t want to admit to her that I was afraid.

“This guy, I named him Buck.” Darla looked at me. “You get it? Buck and he’s a buck…”

I must have had a blank look on my face. I had no clue what she was talking about. And I was still wondering if the ashfall was somehow poisoning us.

“City people,” she said, scowling. “Hold him for me, would you? No, by his haunches, upside down. Hold him tight, okay?”

I held the rabbit as she directed me, upside down in front of me. He waved his front legs feebly. Darla grabbed his head and pulled down sharply, twisting it. There was a soft pop, and he went limp in my hands. I was so startled, I dropped him.

Darla picked up the dead rabbit and said, “Bring the water, would you?”

I followed her into the main room of the barn, carrying the five-gallon bucket. A plastic double-bowl sink was built against one wall, with a couple loops of twine dangling from a beam above one of the basins. Darla slipped the dead rabbit’s back legs into the twine loops so it hung upside down over the sink. Then she pulled a four-inch knife out of a block on the workbench beside the sink and began sharpening it on a rectangular stone.

I put down the bucket and watched. I wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, but I had an idea it wouldn’t be entirely pleasant.

Darla reached up and ran her knife around each of the rabbit’s hind legs, right below where the strings held it suspended above the sink. Then she cut a slit along its inner thighs on each side. She grabbed the skin and peeled it down the hind legs, turning it inside out as she went.

It wasn’t nearly as gross as I imagined it would be. For one thing, there wasn’t much blood. The skin peeled smoothly off the legs, although I could see Darla was pulling hard on it. Beneath it I saw the rabbit’s muscles, pink and gleaming in the dim light.

It was uncomfortable to watch. I wondered what I would look like, dangling by my legs, skin slowly peeled back from the ankles down. I told Darla, “I’m going to go see if your mother needs any help.”

She looked over her shoulder at me. “Grossed you out, huh?” She smiled-in victory, I imagined.

“Uh, no, it’s not-”

“So you’re a vegan or something?”

“No, I like meat.”

“You just don’t want to see where it comes from?”

“I know where it comes from: nice plastic-wrapped containers in the supermarket…” I smirked and then shut up so I didn’t sound like a wimp.

Darla was quiet for a few seconds. “Not anymore.”

“Yeah. Look, you’re right. I should learn how to do this.”

“Fine. Watch, then.” She made a couple quick cuts around the tail and pulled on the skin, tugging it down over the rabbit’s hindquarters.

“I’ll learn it better if you let me try.”

Darla shrugged and handed me the knife. “Cut straight down the middle of the belly, from the tail to the neck. Try not to cut too deep. We only want to slit the skin now. We’ll gut it next.”

I tried sliding the knife gently over the skin. I wasn’t cutting anything. Darla put one hand over mine and pushed down, forcing the knife firmly into the skin right below the tail. Together we drew the knife downward, and the pelt opened up like a bathrobe, exposing the pink muscle beneath.

“Okay, now grab the skin and pull down. Hard.”

I did, and the skin peeled off the carcass like a sock, all the way down to the rabbit’s forelegs.

“This part is kind of difficult; let me have the knife.” Darla cut the rabbit’s front paws off with a pair of garden shears and tugged the skin off its forelegs. Then she pulled the skin down over the rabbit’s head, making tiny cuts here and there with the knife as she went. In less than a minute we had one very naked-looking rabbit carcass and an inside-out skin.

“What now?”

“Now we have to gut it.” Darla made a deeper cut down the belly of the rabbit and pulled the muscle aside, exposing a gray, wormy mass of intestines and organs. She reached into the rabbit and pulled out its guts with her hand. It was so disgusting I had to look away.

“I’m going to pull out the liver, kidneys, and heart now,” Darla said. “Pour a little water over them, would you? They’re good eating.”

I sloshed water over her hands while she pulled the dark red organs out of the rabbit’s chest. She dropped them into one of two buckets in the other basin of the sink. The second bucket held the nasty, gray, spaghetti-like intestines.

I kept pouring water for her as she washed the inside of the carcass. She jammed her finger through the hole where its tail had been. “To clean out any last bit of lower intestine,” she said.

Once Darla was satisfied that the carcass was clean, she taught me how to butcher it. She deftly cut off each piece of meat, naming it as she did: hindquarters, loins, etc. Pretty soon we’d filled the clean bucket with rabbit meat, ready for cooking.

“Will you take the meat in to Mom? I want to try tanning this skin. We might need it.”

“Okay.” I picked up the bucket of meat and shuffled out of the barn. It was getting more difficult to see as real twilight replaced the fake yellow version we suffered with during the day.