CHAPTER 3:
Bella died on a cold afternoon in late November. She had led a rather good life as far sheep go and I didn’t feel particularly bad about her death. I found her on my daily rounds, flat on her back in the grain room, her four spindly legs splayed up into the air. The other sheep were keeping their distance from her, not out of respect or even really out of fear but out of some mindless and deeply rooted instinct to not disturb the dead in case whatever killed them was still around, and perhaps communicable.
Already her belly was swelling with what was, most certainly, her death fart: that collection of latent gases in the intestines created from the bacteria actually beginning to break down and devour the cells of the corpse itself . This was going to be a two person job at least so I went and told my father.
He sighed when I told him. “Too bad,” he said, “She was always my favorite,”
“Mine too,” I said.
He checked his watch; it was 4:15. Late November. The sun was already setting. “Is Guthrie home?” He asked.
“No,” I said. Guthrie the farmhand was in town attending a concert. He would not be back until late.
My father fell silent in thought, sucking air over his teeth. “Let’s do it tomorrow then,” he said finally. “We’ll just get rid of her tomorrow.”
That night it snowed three feet. The next day the entire world was blanketed in smooth, candy white and nothing could be seen of Bella but two tell tale points jutting out from the snow like pieces of coal: her front hooves. The ground was frozen solid.
Once more I consulted my father.
“Well,” he said, looking out at the snow. “The thing is, it’s gonna be really hard to get her out in this weather, we’ll just wait until the snow thaws. Then we’ll move her, give her a nice burial. She really was a good sheep.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “My absolute favorite.”
I went over to Candace and Guthrie’s later that night to smoke cigarettes and I told them what had happened. When I told them we had decided to postpone the burial until after the snow melted Guthrie shook his head and said:.
“I don’t like where this is headed.”
The snow remained for nearly a week before finally melting away sometime in December. By the time the snow disappeared completely Bella was looking very bad indeed. As she thawed, whatever bacterial metabolism was still at work inside of her kicked into over drive and she swelled and swelled until she was comically round, her four legs rising into the air so that she resembled a fully inflated set of bagpipes.
“The ground’s still frozen,” my father said, “we’re going to have to wait a week or so for it to thaw.”
Three days later it snowed again and once more Bella’s corpse was covered up completely.
“Hell of a thing,” my father said, “I don’t think it’s snowed like this in years.”
For the next two months or so we experienced a winter like we never had before. The snow eventually grew to a depth of nearly six feet and, lacking snowshoes, my family and I were forced to perform our chores by walking on all fours across the top of the snow drifts in order to displace our weight enough to keep from sinking through.
It was a comical sight watching my father a wizened and respected University professor, scrambling on all fours across the snow drifts like some muddled werewolf, bucket in hand, the pale moon rising, ghostly and bone colored behind him.
Christmas came and went without a thaw and nobody mentioned Bella, lying frozen beneath lord knew how many feet of snow and ice, but the thought was always there along with the knowledge of the horror that would await us come the first thaw of spring.
In the month of January the weather turned truly ugly. During a brief and deceptive thaw, most of the snow melted away. This was followed by a week of terrible, cold rain and then another deep freeze, this one drier and far, far colder than before. All the rain turned to ice and the wind blew in at a skin freezing negative 30 degrees. The radio advised people not to leave their homes and that if they did, to rub Crisco shortening on their exposed skin to keep it from freezing in the bitter wind.
The animals had it worst of all and we were all kept busy around the clock carrying hot water to the animals and using giant iron mauls to break the ice in their water troughs. At one point the plumbing went out and we were forced to endure the medieval horror of using a toilet that did not flush. Finally, after power outages, fallen trees, hypothermia and an appalling lack of general hygiene, the weather warmed and the ice began to melt.
As the sun came out and the first green buds of spring pushed their way through the soaking, broken earth, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief…until the ice and hardened snow melted sufficiently to reveal what had lain hidden all winter long, frozen, thawed and refrozen perhaps half a dozen times.
By now Bella was so comically swollen that her belly had actually begun to swell past her knees, swallowing her legs at the ankles. Her wool had turned a pea-soup yellow with mold. A smell that was unlike anything I had ever encountered before emanated from her.
We all avoided discussing Bella for a good week or so in hopes that maybe she would become a little less disgusting, but no such luck.
On the Saturday following the great thaw, we were all gathered around eating lunch. My father was very quiet as he chewed. Finally he slammed his fist down on the table and said “This is ridiculous. We’re taking care of this right now.”
He didn’t have to specify what “this” was. We all knew. We had been dreading this moment all winter long.
“Ten minutes,” he said, picking up the phone to call Guthrie. “Prepare yourselves however you need to.”
Ten minutes later my brother Jori and I were standing outside, just out of nose shot of the Sheep barn. The other sheep had begun living on the other side of the pen and I had begun feeding and watering them there. The sheep barn with the remains of Bella had become a tainted place, a barnyard Chernobyl and we were going to venture inside.
Just then Guthrie the farmhand appeared wearing a real working World War II gas mask he had purchased in a moment of prescience years earlier from an army surplus store. His breathing came out hosey, moist and loud, like Darth Vader’s.
The visor had already begun fogging up and beading with moisture and I could barely see his face behind the plastic. Still he looked far better prepared for the task ahead than did Jori or I who had both worn only gloves and heavy jackets.
Finally my father appeared around the corner driving his beat up blue and red tractor “Henry.” Henry’s enormous front-mounted digging shovel was raised up in the air like the arms of some great, mechanical preying mantis. The word “SUPERBIN” was written in giant white letters across the front. He passed us and we followed solemnly behind towards the pen and whatever horrors awaited us there.
Stepping within forty feet of Bella was like walking into a dump on a hot day. The smell was incredible and vast, a veritable aural symphony: countless minute variations on the same hideous melody, all caustic, all absolutely revolting. Yet, we could tell that this was only the beginning. Like all grand symphonies, these opening notes were merely the barest introduction to the themes that would eventually reach crescendos and more potent variations, the likes of which we couldn’t even begin to grasp.
Grim faced, steel jawed, my father positioned Henry and lowered the Superbin to within several feet of Bella’s corpse. Physically, it would be a simple task, quite easy with four able bodied men. We would merely have to pick Bella up and place her in the Superbin. Then my father would drive her away into the forest and bury her. That was it.
We positioned ourselves. Already the smell was unendurable. Jori gagged slightly and my father tossed him a glare.
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “Come on, everybody grab a leg.”
With shaking hands we all reached out and each wrapped our fingers around a cold, bony hoof.
“Alright,” said my father, “On the count of three we lift.” He looked around at the three of us. We all nodded. My father smiled grimly. “ One.” He said. I let out my breath and stuck my head into the comparative safety of my jacket to take another. “Two.” Guthrie’s breath was now coming out in short, gurgling gasps from inside his mask. Jori looked like he was going to cry. “Three!”
And on the count of three all four of us pulled. And on what would have been the count of four, all four of us fell backwards, each of us now holding a disembodied sheep’s leg.
And out came the death fart.
Before our eyes, Bella deflated like a bad balloon and the smell went off the charts.
Jori vomited instantly and noisily as if he had been awaiting a particular cue to do so. Guthrie threw his leg away and scrambled backwards on his hands, eyes wide through his cloudy visor. I screamed again and again and threw my hands up into the air. The leg went with them. My father tossed his away in disgust, said “Jeeeeeeesus Christ” and with his other hand furiously fanned the air around his nose.
“Alright! Alright!” Yelled my father, trying to regain some semblance of order. “Come on, let’s just get this done. Grab her by the wool and turn her over.”
Somehow we managed to overcome our revulsion and comply. We grabbed her by the greenish, matted wool and turned her corpse onto it’s stomach.
“Alright, now lift her by the wool and put her in the superbin!” Growled my father.
We lifted by the wool and, miraculously, the wool held. However, as we moved her, her pronounced sack of udders scraped a hardened hillock of mud, and her entire stomach came off and sat like an apothecarian’s mortar filled with some greenish paste.
“Oh my God!!!” yelled Guthrie, his voice wet and tinny from within the mask.
“Don’t let her go!” Yelled my father.
With a sopping “thud” we managed to place Bella’s corpse into the super bin. She sat there limply and I as I watched her, narrating the events in my head, I realized how the pronoun “she” had lost all meaning. Somewhere between November and now Bella had ceased to be a “she” and had become an “it.” I guess death does that to you. Her status as an entity had been revoked. She was now a thing.
The three of us scattered as soon as our work was done. My father however simply glared at us like we were cowards, secured Bella to the bin with a bungee cord, and, taking a deep breath and steeling himself, knelt to retrieve Bella’s wayward stomach and udder. After securing these he leapt into the driver’s saddle.
There was a roar of the engine and a burst of blue smoke. Normally this smoke was a noxious bother but here, in contrast to the infernal reek of Bella’s death fart, it was like the very breath of god.
My father pushed a lever and the super bin lifted Bella’s remains up into the air. The three of us stood there and watched him drive off into the forest. We watched for a good minute until the trees swallowed him up and they were gone.
When we were out of nose shot of the barn Guthrie took off his gas mask. His face was sopping wet. His hair was damp and plastered to his face. He took a deep breath.
“God, that was horrible,” he said and lit a cigarette.
We both nodded. There was a pause.
“I’m gonna go take a shower,” he said and he left.
Jori and I continued to stand there for a while. Finally Jori shivered violently as if he was being assailed by rats, said he was going to go take a shower too and went inside. I stood there alone for a few more minutes. Cold wind blew and washed away the ambient stink, replaced it with the smell of old snow and melting earth . Spring smells.
The other sheep were now returning, cautiously, to the barn. When they saw me, they stared blankly for a moment and then started bleating for food. I took this as my cue to go inside too but as I turned to leave I saw Bessie, one of the current batch of Newfoundland dogs, lying near the sheep barn. She was chewing contentedly on something. Something long and slender.
“Hey Bessie,” I said, walking towards her.
She began wagging her tail as I approached. “Whatchu got there girl?” I asked. But no sooner had I asked this than I saw what it was. It was one of Bella’s legs. Bessie had no doubt retrieved the horrid thing when I had thrown it, shrieking, several minutes earlier.
As I neared, Bessie stopped chewing and grinned up at me -the sort of conspiratorial grin one might flash to a fellow gourmet at a posh restaurant. The sort of grin that says “yes, it is as good as it looks and no, you can’t have any.”
Obviously there was a cultural rift between she and I. I left her to what had the terrible potential of becoming a four course meal.
As I walked back to the house, reeking with the foulness of death, as the first organic smells of spring blew in from somewhere, I mused over the possible philosophical ramifications of the whole ordeal. I thought of grand themes: life and death, winter and spring, the whole cyclical nature of existence.
After casting about intently for some coherent message or grain of truth that I could salvage from the experience, I realized, to my relief, that there actually weren’t any. Any at all. Bella’s death and subsequent removal had been completely and absolutely meaningless.
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