“You’re doing real good. Just take out the big organs; we’ll do everything else tomorrow.”
I pulled the last peacock over to the opposite end of the metal counter, away from where Bastien hacked at his bird with lumberjack enthusiasm. The final one was the prettiest. Its feathers were wide and painted in rings of gold, green, indigo. It was a beautiful animal and probably very expensive.
“Are we gonna get in trouble for this?” I cut into the long line of its neck, working around the joints and smaller bones. “I mean, were there security cameras at that place?”
“Isn’t that something you should’ve asked earlier?”
“Probably. Are we going to jail? Me, you, your little sister here in an orange jumpsuit?”
Bastien laughed and then coughed, a smoker’s hack that lodged in his chest and stayed there rattling, wet and deep. “Nah. A guy owes me a favor. They’ve got like twenty of these birds. They won’t miss three.”
While that was probably true, it didn’t make it any less illegal. The last thing our family needed was more stress. The art show, the illegal animals. Art show, animals. The coin, flipping between my fingers. It would be so easy to make a call. I was always looking for an out.
Nudging the gut bucket with my foot, I dumped out a large portion of the peacock’s stomach and bowels, trying not to split anything open in the process. I scraped the interior using my favorite knife, the one with the long wooden handle, smoothed from years of use. It had been my grandfather’s. My father had given it to me one afternoon when we finished cleaning eight deer in a row. I was so exhausted that the muscles in my forearms wouldn’t stop twitching. When he handed me that knife, he told me I’d earned it. It glistened shiny silver in the light, and I wanted to gut another, just to prove I could. My father had skinned two more than I had. He was strong. When he talked about my grandfather, it was always to reference that kind of strength.
He never talked to me about anything, my father said one afternoon, the two of us drinking beer on the front porch as the sun set, sinking blood red in the Florida heat. Not like you and me. Not like how we talk.
“Would you ever do this with Mom?” Lolee asked, face hidden behind a long swoop of hair. It was nearly trailing down into the bird, and I tucked it back quick behind her ear so it wouldn’t collect any debris. “Did she do this kind of stuff?”
Lolee hardly ever asked about Brynn. She didn’t have a lot of concrete memories. Bastien was the one old enough to remember and hurt, the way I did. I shot him a look. He was concentrating very hard on his knife work, pretending not to listen.
That was the thing about Bastien. He might run down some peacocks in the middle of a golf course, but at the end of the day he had too much love in him to deal with how shitty human beings were to each other.
“Not really.” I slowed down, homing in on the tough meat near the back of the bird. It would be so easy for the blade to slip right through, to pierce the other side and ruin the shiny plumage. “Sometimes she’d come hang out in the front of the shop. She wasn’t really into all the blood and guts.”
“Not like you and Dad?” Lolee’s eyes were big in her pale face. They were wide-set like her mother’s, but the color was all Milo. Such a deep brown they bordered on black.
“Your dad doesn’t really like it either.” That was an understatement. If Milo thought too much about skinning, he got queasy. Once he’d accidentally cut himself slicing tomatoes for a sandwich, and when he saw the blood pooling in his palm, he’d passed out cold, right there on the floor. My mother walked into the kitchen, saw the knife and the spatter, and thought he’d been murdered. Brynn called me later to tell me about it and used the voice we always did for my mother, a kind of nasal-mucusy shriek.
You should have seen him, Brynn said, nearly cackling. Classic Morton moment.
I’d laughed along with her and thought about them there, at my parents’: Milo and Brynn, my mother and father, the kids. Everyone spending time together, doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Living lives perfectly engineered to bring them happiness. What made a Morton moment classic? Couldn’t it be that way only when I was there to be part of it? There was something in that image that made me feel I’d never understand it. That my family had absorbed Brynn, that it was whole without me. Jokes, personal stories, dumb shit that meant nothing to them and everything to me. It was a bad feeling, knowing my family could exist without me as an active participant. I’d gotten blackout drunk in my apartment afterward, thinking about that phrase and understanding I wasn’t included in it: classic Morton moment.
“Only you?” Lolee pushed down on the back leg, trying for a better angle. It bounced back up again and knocked into her chest. “And Grandpa, I guess. I thought this was a family business. Why doesn’t everybody work here?”
It was a question I’d asked before too, years ago. My father and I’d been closing the shop. It was quiet, and I was balancing the register while we had some Cokes. Lemme tell you something, he said, adjusting a mounted crow on the shelf behind the counter. I love your mother, but if I had to see her at work all day and then at home we’d be divorced by now. People need space so they don’t wind up killing each other. We drank our Cokes in silence for a couple of minutes. It would be better for your brother if he spent less time at home too. Brynn’s got him by the short hairs. He looked hard at me when he said this. It was one of the only times I felt an acknowledgment of the role I played in Milo’s marriage.
But how to put it to Lolee, who wouldn’t understand that explanation? “It takes a certain kind of person to do this work.” I set my blade down and went over to where she was tearing at the back of the peacock, guiding her knife through a knot of bird flesh. “By the time I was your age, I’d mounted at least five deer. I’d learned tanning techniques too.”
“Did Grandpa even like working here? I mean he killed himself, so that maybe shows how shitty this place is.” Bastien hacked so hard through a tendon that the leg severed completely from the torso. He swore and threw it and the scalpel across the metal table. The leg slid across the floor and landed next to me. When I picked it up, there was a residue of thin spatter left behind on the concrete. Didn’t that tell me everything I needed to know about this young man? Too much feeling in his body to handle anything appropriately.
“Don’t be dumb, Grandpa loved this place.” I handed him back the leg. Careful. “You shouldn’t use a large-grade utility knife. This is finesse work; you need a smaller blade.”
I understood why my father chose the shop. He was always happiest surrounded by his tools and the animals he’d pieced together. There was nothing he loved more than making a first incision. He once told me that cut was one of life’s perfect moments. When you still have that animal’s future mapped out in front of you. Complete freedom to play God; to turn a creature into anything you choose.
Watching his blood cool on that metal counter, I’d thought about fate and choice. He’d taken that power into his own hands, but in leaving his body behind, he’d forced me along with him. The letter, a thing that should’ve provided answers, was nothing but a load of unanswerable questions. I trust you, he’d written. I trust that you’ll do the right thing. Duties, responsibilities. How could I choose my own fate when it was always assigned to me?