Death was not unfamiliar to Ferin. Things died around her
all the time. When she was young the animals on her family’s stead would be
alive one day and then dead the next. By the time she had her sixth name year
her father had decided that she was old enough to watch the piglets she had
named, fed, and played with for the whole year be slain. In the horrible winter
of her fifteenth year she made her way through the snow to the barn and killed her
favourite goat, Hedges, herself. Somewhere between those two firsts her mother
had died by a means never truly revealed to her. And while the losing of these
things pigs and goats and mothers were hard Ferin understood death as a suddenness
and as a finality.
She had opened
the shutters to the window in her sister’s room to let the warm light in. Their
room was the only windowed room in their home, which made winters often times
miserable. But Braz loved the light, and being the elder of the two of them
most often got her way. Ferin could almost taste the pollen on the air. She
could hear the chucking, chop like sound of her younger brothers out in the rows,
already their father had them at the earth with their spades preparing it for a
tilling once he could convince one of the men from town to loan him their ox or
horse. Through the window, dots of green budding adorned every branch or limb.
Spring had come and returned the whole world to life, the whole world except for
her sister.
Ferin had
no idea what illness had befallen Braz at the onset of winter and when she had
asked her father for money to hike to town through the first snow to get a
healer she had been met with a firm rebuke. They had no money for such things
he had said, and Ferin had not argued
for they had never had money for much of anything. By the time Braz had shared
with Ferin the secret of the cache of small coins their mother, and later Braz,
had some how squirreled away, the first heavy snow had fallen and the pass
between their stead in the foothills, and the town that sat quietly against a
small river had been blocked. Once so, it would remain so till the first thaw.
By that time even Ferin, who knew nothing of medicine but enough about death,
knew it was too late.
Ferin and Braz
had their mother’s skin, a warm caramel colour, that set them apart from their
father and brothers, who were more fair. Braz had always been the most
beautiful girl at any fair, the attention she garnered from both men and boys
was proof of it, in those moments Ferin felt she fit quite well invisible in
her shadow. The boys would whistle which neither she nor Braz ever seemed to
find that annoying but there was something about the way the older men licked
their lips and occasionally clicked their tongues that set their nerves on edge.
It was the beautiful shade of brown of Braz’s skin that Ferin was sure drew
their attention when they were young, later when they were older a comment had
been muttered louder than the rest and Ferin became aware that it was more than
her sister’s colour that drew their attention.
The colour
was gone now from Braz. The fever that had possessed her had whittled away her
weight first, and stolen her colour second. She was still brown, but the life
and vibrancy was gone from her. The girl confined to the bed paled and
shriveled was not someone those men and boys from the village would have
recognized.
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