Mike Mullin - Ashfall

I found Mrs. Edmunds in the living room feeding the fire. “Darla asked me to bring you this rabbit meat,” I said, holding up the bucket.

“Lovely, it’ll be so nice to have some meat for a change. But I didn’t think she was planning to butcher any of them for a while.”

“It was sick. She didn’t seem too happy about it.”

“Oh dear. The Lord provides-maybe we were meant to eat rabbit tonight.”

“You don’t suppose it could hurt us, could it? Eating meat from a sick rabbit?”

“We’re not sure why the rabbits are sick. Probably not if we cook it really well. I guess we’ll find out. Tell Darla I need at least an hour to let it stew. Two would be better.”

“Okay.” I handed the bucket to Mrs. Edmunds and left the house. I figured it might be hard to find my way back to the barn since it was getting so dark, but it turned out to be easy. Darla had flung the big sliding door fully open and lit a makeshift torch on the end of a bamboo pole. She was visible from clear across the farmyard, bent over a bench near the sink, working on something.

As I approached, I called out, “Your mom says an hour or two on the rabbit stew she’s making.”

“Good,” Darla replied. “That should be enough time to take care of this pelt. Would you bury the stuff in the offal bucket? Over where we put our crap.”

I glanced into the bucket. The intestines had been covered with a mass of jumbled rabbit bones. On top of it all was the rabbit’s skull. It had been violently crushed and wrenched apart, so it sat in two halves, like a discarded eggshell.

“Yipes, what happened to that?”

“What?”

“The skull.”

“Oh, I smashed it with a hammer and scooped the brains out with a spoon.”

“You what?”

“We need the brains to tan its pelt. I’ll show you when you get back.”

Dismissed, I picked up the offal bucket and a shovel. What kind of girl cuddles with a cute rabbit she named Buck one minute and the next smashes its skull with a hammer to scoop out its brains? I shivered-and only partly because of the cold night air.

I stumbled around in the dark, looking for the latrine area. I thought I had found it-it was impossible to be sure with everything covered in a featureless blanket of ash and no light except the faraway glint of the torch through the barn door. I buried the rabbit’s remains in a shallow hole and rejoined Darla in the barn.

She had tied the pelt into a small frame built of lumber; two-by-twos, she said. A dozen or so small cords, shoelaces maybe, stretched the pelt tightly in the center of the frame. Darla was scraping the skin with a rounded piece of metal.

“The brains are in there,” Darla said, gesturing at a bowl on the workbench beside her. “Pour a little water in with them-we want about half brains and half water. Then stir it up really well. It should look about like a strawberry milkshake when you’re done.”

“What?” Something about brains and milkshakes didn’t compute. Had I wandered into a bad zombie movie?

“We need a brain-and-water mixture about like a strawberry milkshake,” Darla repeated, talking very slowly, as if she were explaining to a preschooler.

“Why?”

“We’re supposed to use the mixture to tan the skin. After I get it scraped, we’ll rub the brains on it.”

“That’s kind of disgusting.”

“I guess. But it’s the traditional way to tan hides. There’s some kind of oil in the brain that soaks into the pelt and keeps it soft.”

“You do this a lot?”

“Nope, first time. Thought about trying it before, but never found the time. Some of the rabbit breeders I know do some tanning, and I’ve read up on it.”

I poured a little water in the bowl with the brains. They were gray, with little red streaks here and there. Blood vessels, I guessed. I found a spoon in the sink and used it to mash them up. It took a bit of stirring to get the mixture to the texture Darla wanted. When I finished, it looked almost exactly like a strawberry milkshake. Not that I was going to take a sip or anything.

Darla worked on the hide for almost an hour, scraping the inside clean. Then she put the frame flat on the workbench, the fur side of the pelt facing down. She poured some of the brain mixture onto the skin and rubbed it in with her hands.

I shuddered. She must have seen me, because she said, “It’s not bad. Feels a little oily. Like mayonnaise, sort of.”

I couldn’t let a girl show me up, especially not Darla, so I reached over and rubbed the hide as well. She was right; the brain mixture didn’t feel as gross I’d imagined it would. We rubbed it for ten minutes or so, trying to work the brain into every bit of the skin. It wasn’t a big pelt; our hands were constantly touching, sliding against and over each other, slick with rabbit brain.

Finally, Darla pronounced it done. We rinsed off our hands, pouring water for each other. Darla propped the frame against the wall and extinguished the torch, plunging us into darkness. I stood still, trying to let my eyes adjust, until I felt Darla’s hand in mine. She gave my hand a squeeze and then tugged on it, leading me out of the barn.

The warmth of her hand sent an ironic shiver racing up my arm. I knew that she didn’t like me much, that she saw me as a freeloader. I knew I should stay cool and detached. But I couldn’t help myself. No matter how much I told myself to chill out, it didn’t help. I wished we’d met before the eruption, when things were normal. Maybe then she would have seen me as something more than a helpless kid.

Darla dropped my hand, and I opened the kitchen door for her. It smelled intoxicating inside. Mrs. Edmunds ladled huge bowls of soup-she called it rabbit corn chowder-out of a pot bubbling on the stove. Darla began shoveling the soup into her mouth the moment the bowl touched the table in front of her.

“Darla!” Mrs. Edmunds exclaimed. “Manners.”

“Hurmm,” Darla replied, her mouth full of soup. But she quit eating.

Mrs. Edmunds put a cloth napkin and a glass of water at each place setting and took her seat at the head of the table. “Let us pray.” She laced her hands in her lap and looked down. “Lord, bless this food and those who eat it. Hold us safe in your loving hands as we struggle to meet the test you put before us. And remember especially those less fortunate than us, who don’t have enough to eat or the support of family and friends in this time of trial. Amen.”

Finally, I could eat. I’d never had rabbit, and before I had walked into the kitchen, I wasn’t sure how I felt about eating an animal that had been squirming in my hands only two hours before. But the heady aroma drifting out of the bowl drove all doubt from my mind. I dug in. It tasted even better than it smelled-a bit like chicken.

I wolfed down two huge bowls of stew. After dinner, we sat around the table talking for a while-mainly about plans for the next few days. I stifled the first few yawns that pushed up from my exhausted body, but eventually one escaped. Mrs. Edmunds shooed me off to my bed on the living room couch.

I was exhausted from the day’s work, my side hurt, and I’d overstuffed myself on chowder. I fell asleep almost before my head touched the pillow. I vaguely remembered someone checking my bandages that night, but that may have been a dream.

The next two weeks passed in much the same way: work, work, and more work. I was anxious to get moving, to continue my quest to find my family. But I was still weak-it wouldn’t do me any good to start out again before I’d completely recovered. I knew I’d regret leaving Darla, but my family mattered more than some girl I’d just met and barely knew. And anyway, she seemed anxious for me to leave, too.