Several kilometers from the cave, the woods opened up to a large farmer’s field. I climbed a horse-gnawed fence post, crossed the boundary stones, and walked through a field with clods of tedded hay to the stable. I peeked through the slats in the wood and knotholes. When I was sure no one was inside, I snuck around to the front door and eased it back, making sure no one in the nearby farmhouse could hear. The inside of the barn smelled like animal breath, wet fur, alfalfa, and urine. I swept my flashlight past two workhorses and a starving old cow. A three-way tipcart full of cut hay and a plow were in one corner, and in the other was a pig pen with four piglets. I scaled the mildew-darkened wall of the pen and grabbed one of the piglets. It kicked and made a deep squealing sound that originated from the tip of its corkscrewed tail and increased in volume as it squeezed out. I tucked the thrashing animal against my chest, closed my fingers under its chin to keep it from biting me, and ran to the barn door. I shut the door behind me so whomever I stole from wouldn’t lose anything else to the cold, and then ran back to the tracks. The animal struggled under my jacket, and its split feet pushed into my side.
In the woods the pig still thrashed against my chest. I didn’t dare loosen my grip as I wouldn’t be able to catch it if it got free. With the piglet pinned to my body, I pulled my dagger out of my pocket and slipped it under its throat. The animal gurgled out a last breath, loud enough that I knew I was right to not have killed it in the barn or taken more than one. Warm blood leaked out over my hand onto the ground, and it fought for a moment until it went limp in my arms. The smeared blood was thick and warm as I laid it out to see what to do with it next. I’d never killed an animal before. With the piglet laid out on its back, I used my dagger to carve an incision down from the slashed throat to and then a circle around its anus. From that cut I scooped the viscera out of the body cavity. The purple liver, the maroon heart, and crimson coil of intestines and organs flopped onto the wet ground. The blade tore loose the attached tissue, and when the animal was emptied, I picked it up by its hind leg and let it dangle at my side on my way back to the cave.
The piglet would feed us sparsely for a few days. With grilled meat in their stomachs, Janna and Mevi would get the color back in their faces. Mevi would talk. I would find us a safe place to go together. But I knew the meat wouldn’t last. Closer to the cave, the night got even darker.
A few feet inside the mouth of the cave, two open and watchful sets of eyes looked at me from beyond the fire. Those eyes glowed like fiery animals in that darkness. I looked at them for a moment, strangers really, the woman who took such a miraculous jump and the child who hadn’t spoken since. I stopped moving. I laid the piglet on the ground and saw how insufficient it was. How insufficient I was to the task of these two lives. I knew I could go back to get another piglet for myself before continuing west along the tracks. It would be so easy to place a stack of thirty, no, a hundred marks under the piglet’s foot. An offering to Janna and Mevi and turn to leave. Turn from them.
My mouth had gone dry. I tongued the inside of my cheeks. My skin tasted like acrid pig blood. I rubbed my tongue there for a moment and wondered what sweetness was left in life to buoy me against such bitter, bitter disappointment.
I let the fantasy of leaving them play out. The pig would be eaten. Only the marrow-sucked bones would remain. Janna and Mevi would have enough strength to push on into the forest, to find some better safety. But hidden in my fantasy lay a terrible truth about myself, a deficiency of courage, or an inability to care for others. Leaving them when I could take them with me seemed like the gravest crime, one I would never be able to rectify. Leaving them, I realized, would have brought a deep ice floe of hurt like what I felt seeing my father drop to his knees and slither away.
No.
That would not do.
“I have something for you,” I called to them.
In the cave I busied myself trying to cook the piglet. Being busy felt important to hold off that fear of tending to these two. I built a spit out of sticks and twine to roast the pig on and then cut pieces of it for both Janna and Mevi. I held out the meat for them and to my surprise felt life pushing upward in me. I wanted to feed them all this meat, then reach into those starving fantasies of food I’d been having and feed them for the rest of their lives. I wanted to save them, and that was like a switch for me. I could hide in a cave the rest of my life, but these two could not. These two needed better than that.
So, after we tasted the pig, and then kept eating it, devouring it whole to push back a hunger that felt like it was trying to rip out of us, we gathered our things and walked out into the darkness.
“I’ll find somewhere safe for you,” I said to the little girl as we left the cave. “I will.”
I imagined the wind curling around like a banner floating in space. As I exited the cave’s mouth and turned up the ravine, they followed, and I allowed myself a small, transcendent moment of feeling alive again. As I watched them, I had a deep and swelling love of trees, their sway and dance, and thought how goddamn beautiful this world would be if we’d never been allowed to touch it.
I led Janna and Mevi back to the farm I’d stolen the piglet from. It was the only place I was certain there’d be food, and it was away from the cave. It was all I knew to do. From deep in the trees we waited a whole day, trying to blend into the shadows Edwin was so adept at creating, watching for any life on the farm. Only once, in the evening, an old woman with a shotgun and a metal bucket walked into the barn. When she left without the bucket, and latched the door shut, we snuck into the barn and hid in an empty stall.
“You sleep first,” Janna said.
Curled on the ground with the scent of hay and horse sweat working up the memory of Hilda, I fell asleep, but not for long. The pig meat in my stomach was churning. I shot up.
“What is it?” Janna asked. Mevi slept cradled in her lap.
“Nothing,” I said, but I crawled from our stall and only made it to the next before I had to pull my pants down and let the awful puddle of my shit splatter all over the barn floor.
It took everything in me not to moan in pain, and the sound of my body was as animal and foul as the swine.
I crawled back into our stall as embarrassed by my own body as if I’d crapped like the dog at my mother’s dinner table.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“It was the meat,” Janna said. “Fat after nothing will make us all shit like that.”
She’d done me a kindness by being coarse. Easy.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded and smiled at me. Not smiled. I do not think in our time together I ever saw her smile, but her face performed a small softening. A gift to me.
“Your turn to sleep,” I said.
She nodded, then shifted her body to ease Mevi onto the hay and curled around her.
In the morning, at the first sign of light, I sent Janna and Mevi running into the woods as I snatched another piglet and ran after them like all the purpose and drive had been renewed in me.
22
As we walked, Mevi reached her hand up to hold mine. Her skin was cold and clammy and I tried to cup all of it in my fist. I ran my thumb over her tiny knuckles and it felt like the simplest version of love. Language was still stunted deep in her throat by fear. But here was the truest form of communication to ever exist. This was all I needed.
A large pine unzipped by a lightning strike oozed sap over its charred trunk. We sucked on the sap. It made my mouth water, and I swallowed the sweet spittle while watching Mevi lap at the bark like a malnourished bear.