Their father crouched over the horse and with both hands pulled the hide back away from his ribs. Then Dick Sherman began to cut through the ribs with the tree trimmer, one rib at a time, making a crack each time like a dry stick breaking; he was exposing the chest cavity. The boys understood then that the horse was dead completely. He couldn’t live through that. Watching it, their eyes grew round in their heads and their faces paled. They sat utterly still on the fence.
When enough of the ribs had been cut through, their father pulled the loose flap of the chest wall back so that Dick Sherman could examine the heart and lungs. He lifted them in his hands, turning them, poking and exploring with the knife. There was nothing wrong with the heart. Nor with the lungs. He probed with the knife into the aorta and large veins to look for scar tissue from worms but there wasn’t any; the horse had been thoroughly wormed. So he moved back again to the gut and raised the entrails, reaching into the stomach and lifting out more of the moist yellow intestines. He was straining hard now, wrenching the heavy insides out of the horse, and apparently more of it was coming than he wanted because he was discarding some of it, searching and lifting at it while it squirmed and tried to fill in, and then he had some of the bowel and it was too big and too dark entirely and he stopped.
There, he said. See that? That big dark part, kind of bluish-black?
Guthrie nodded.
He had a twisted gut. That’s what killed him. Sherman held it up in his hands, displaying it. Below here where it twisted, the gut died. That’s why it’s so black and bloated and off-color. He released the dead intestine and it folded into place among the rest as though it were alive. Poor bastard, he suffered enough.
The two men stood up. Dick Sherman bent and stretched, unkinked his legs and reached his arms over his head, while Tom Guthrie stood behind the gutted horse, looking at the two boys. They were still sitting as before, on the top board of the fence. You boys all right? he said.
They didn’t say anything but merely nodded.
You sure? Maybe you’ve seen enough.
They shook their heads.
All right. The worst part’s over anyway. We’re almost through.
It was past midmorning now. The bright sunlight of a Sunday morning toward the end of April. And Dick Sherman was saying, We need some baling wire, Tom. Or twine. Twine’d be better.
So their father left the corral to enter the barn once more and returned again, with twine this time, two or three long yellow strands of it. Sherman took the twine and began to close Elko’s stomach. Starting under the chest he knifed a hole into the hide and drew the twine through the hole, knotted it, carved another hole opposite the first and pulled the two flaps of hide together, then moved back six inches and did the same, again and again, moving backward, pulling it tight each time, while their father helped to push the rich organs and slick intestines into place, holding them there until the twine was tight. Soon his hands were as red and slippery as Sherman’s. When they had closed Elko’s stomach as well as they could they wound the twine around the top back leg and drew it down again, so it no longer stood up above the horse’s body, and secured it to his other back leg, then they tied some knots and called it good.