A stocky boy wielded the tool; its handle was slick with blood. As the eldest son, he was supposed to be careful enough to be trusted with it. A maniac smile sat upon his lips and he laughed at Red’s gross jokes. Under his striped t-shirt, his stomach felt cold. At least this time he was doing it out under the sun, in the open where it all could disperse afterwards. In winter, he had to do it alone, in the straw-shed, lit by a single bulb turned on with a pull string. No matter how he swept the floor afterwards, there was always the wash of dark blood across the old boards, the stray wet feather caught in the cracks in the floor or snagged around a loosened nail. It was never warm in there, even on the hottest days. In winter it was a dark and comfortless place, feeling more like a dank cave than a wooden shed. He did not like to go into the straw-shed, even in summer. He always left the wide door open, and hurried in and out again, fleeing with the heavy bale thumping against his legs.
Once he had tried to confide in his cousins. ‘Don’t you feel it in there?’ he had whispered to Red one night. ‘Like clusters of little spirits, little feathery ghosts wanting to know why you fed them and cared for them and then smacked their heads off one day? Can’t you feel them?’
‘Chicken ghosts?’ his cousin had hooted, and must have spread the joke to the neighbour kids, for the next night he awoke to drawn-out moans outside his bedroom window: ‘Cluh-uh-uh-uh-cluck! Cluh-uh-uck!’ But the mockery could not quell the fear or the guilt. He chopped their heads off because his dad was busy and he was old enough and his mom said that if she could do the dressing out, he could do the chopping and the plucking. Go free, Rooster Spirit, he thought, go up into the blue sky and spread out across the pasture. After he had finished killing this batch of chickens, he would split up the chopping stump into firewood and stack it to be burned. The rain would wash the blood down into the soil, the wind and wild birds would carry off the stray feathers. Nothing would be left for the forlorn little souls to congeal around. He lined up his hatchet carefully and brought it down so hard that it wedged firmly into the chopping stump, trapping a few bright feathers with it.
One of them was you, Mir accused, but Wizard still refused to answer. He had been trapped that way before. Past guilt was better forgotten, lest it be savoured. He blinked his eyes and was three places at once.
The eldest son had just finished all the plucking. The bright blue sky of early afternoon had waned into a greyness that promised rain. He pulled the black plastic garbage sack full of feathers free of the plastic trash bin and dragged it around the chopping block. Kneeling, he searched through the grass for the discarded heads. Blood had smeared and spoiled the bright plumage. Some had eyes or beaks open; others were closed. He did not flinch from them, but he picked them up as delicately as sleeping butterflies and dropped them in the sack. Rural trash pick-up would take away the heads and the feathers. The rest could be cleaned by sun and rain. But he found only twelve heads. Scour as he might the grass, two heads were missing. He cursed softly to himself. If his little sister found one and screamed, there would be hell to pay. If the dog ate one and got sick, he would get a licking for it. A few stray drops of rain spattered on his back. He gave it up. He knotted the plastic sack tightly shut and toted it over to the grey metal cans.
The dark-haired boy slipped silently out of the kitchen. Deep in his denim jacket pocket were the bright tail feathers that Red had snatched from the dead rooster’s body. In his other pocket was the rooster’s head, wrapped in a paper napkin. He hurried from the yard before Red could notice the theft of the tail feathers. He’d have to hurry; it was going to rain soon. He crossed the pasture, avoiding the moist brown cow flops, slipped through a barbed wire fence, crossed a survey cut, and fled into the woods. He followed a rabbit trail that wound beneath the trees until he came to a stand of spruce trees. Dropping to his knees, he crawled under the low swoop of outer branches until he came to a place in the centre of the thicket. He could see the sky, and a tiny patch of sunlight reached the ground. This was his best place, his sitting and thinking place. He used a stick to brush away a year’s layer of spruce needles. He dug down into the rich humus, the ripe smell of summer earth rising past him. He dug until he could thrust his entire hand and wrist into the hole. That was deep enough. He took the head from his pocket and unwrapped it to look a last time into the golden-orange eyes. But death had spoiled their colour; he could not bring himself to try and close the lids. Instead he rewrapped it carefully in the paper napkin and placed it in the bottom of the hole. He buried it, squishing the earth down firmly with a clenched fist. When the hole was packed full, he sprinkled a layer of spruce needles across the scar. The tail feathers he stuck up in a small circle around the tiny grave. They kept falling over, but he patiently stood them up again and again, until the circle was complete. He never spoke as he did it; he made no sound at all. He bowed his head gravely to the circle of feathers and backed out of the grove, the trailing branches scratching his back and neck. He never went there again.
Red got in trouble. The school suspended him for three days after it became known that he had wrapped a chicken head in tinfoil and slipped it into a girl’s lunch bag. His father claimed the chicken feathers for tying flies, and his mother bleached the blood stains out of his sneakers. His whole weekend at the farm, flushed! He wished he lived on the farm and killed chickens every day. He imagined setting their heads up on a little row of stakes by the driveway, or giving foil-wrapped chicken heads to trick-or-treaters, or stringing heads and feet on thread and trimming the Christmas tree with them. Some kids had all the luck.
You were one of them, Mir insisted. Which one were you?
Wizard would not answer. He would not wonder if it were true. He made himself as hard and solid as a macadamia nut. He made his soul so dense that it could not be compressed any further. He huddled within, knowing that it could not hold him prisoner forever. A pang echoed through his heart as he thought of Black Thomas, but he stilled it quickly. No avenue of vulnerability could be left unguarded.
Come, it demanded and seduced. Look some more.
Wizard refused; he would not look. But he could not stop feeling, and he felt the damp, clinging walls of the tunnel. He wanted to howl. It had put him back in the tunnel. He was not a big man, but he was too big for the tunnel. It had been made for ones smaller than he. It gripped him like a child’s sticky fist grips a bar of candy. He was wedged in it, with blackness and danger before him, and no way to wriggle backward. He worked his toes in his heavy boots, but they were laced too tightly. His ankles cramped with the effort.
He tried not to think that the tunnel might have to end, that there might not be a path back to the hot sunlight. He steeled himself. He could not go back, so he would go on. He felt for his hands and arms. They were trapped under him. His arms were stretched flat under him, his full weight pressing them against the damp floor of the tunnel. He had no idea how it could have happened. He flexed his fingers of his hands helplessly, felt the tunnel soil grate into the rawness of knuckles and joints and wrists. His neck was cramped from the exertion of holding his head up. But if he relaxed, he knew that his face would go into the mud floor of the tunnel. He’d suffocate. Panic swelled inside him like a balloon being blown up inside his rib cage. He couldn’t breathe; his inflated chest was too big for the tunnel, but his lungs weren’t getting any air. He couldn’t get his breath.
Wizard surrendered. He opened his eyes, but nothing changed. Blackness before him and the grip of the tunnel around him. He had no breath left to scream, but he wept, his tears choking his throat and his nose swelling shut with mucus. No air. This had never happened, he told himself, and it wasn’t happening now. It was just a sham and a cheat, a corruption of all he had struggled to become. He couldn’t let it drag him back to a past he had never had. He wouldn’t. He would not. With an effort of will, he ceased to struggle against it. He let his neck go limp and his face fell into the mud of the tunnel floor.
Wizard’s forehead hit the floor with a resounding thump. As suddenly as it had possessed him, it had left him. He remained motionless, savouring the mildewy smell of the peeling linoleum. His face felt stiff as a mask