4.15.18 (Ferin)

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.

            It was almost over. Braz had not regained consciousness in over three days and as Ferin stood beside her, the sunlight cutting into to illuminate the bed, she thought of the last words Braz had said to her. Ferin had been using a damp rag against Braz’s forehead when unexpectedly her eyes had opened. It was not the sleepy, slow opening of eyes like when one awakes from a dream but as if Braz had been jolted awake. Her eyes were wild and panicked. Braz half rolled and lunged at Ferin, the grip she took on Ferin’s forearm surprised her, she would not have thought that she would have been able to muster such strength. Braz said only one word, ‘Run.’

            Ferin loved her even more in that moment, that she had somehow summoned herself back from death’s gates to try and save her. Ferin had never lied to Braz before but she could not bring herself to tell her the truth, that it was already too late. Instead she nodded mutely to Braz and her grip lessened, she slipped back into indention her body had made over the weeks in the straw mattress. Her eyes seemed calmed, and once more before they closed for the last time, she summoned the strength to repeat the word. Ferin responded without thinking, ‘I will.’

            Standing there in the morning sun though she was not sure she could. She had never ventured far from the stead, only to the village and that would not be nearly far enough. It was not some sense of responsibility towards her brothers, at twelve and nine they were usually to busy working in the rows often enough that they did not need much looking after, that made her hesitate. It was not even the practical concern that outside of a little bit of weaving and trapping she had no real skills in order to gain work.

            It was fear. Not that she would be caught and dragged back- but unexplicable fear of a world of which, as she considered keeping her promise to her sister, she knew nothing about.

*                      *                      *

            It was the way they laid her in the ground that decided it for her. Her brothers had dug the hole the next morning with an indifference that did not for some reason surprise her. When Ferin suggest that they bury her on the ridge where Braz used to go to watch the Kethin birds, she was met with blank stares. They dug the hole out behind the house.

            Ferin made her brother carry Braz out wrapped in a blanket. Even at twelve he was tall and strong enough to carry her, though not strong enough to lower her into the hole. He placed her on the ground next to it, where Braz waited for her father to say some last words. He did not. He peered and Ferin and shook his head, knelt and unrolled Braz from the blanket. Ferin realized then that he would not ‘waste’ a good blanket on his dead daughter.

            And that is when she knew she was leaving. They buried her without ceremony, but after they left Ferin sang to the All-Mother for her, pulled a wooden carved horse from her skirt pocket and pushed it deep, to the elbow, into the  wet, cool dirt that now entombed her sister.

            She prepared her roll while her father and the boys ate dinner. The flint she had stolen from the kitchen, she had wrapped her mother’s treasured coins in a scarf and then placed them in a small bag where she hoped they would make no noise. The hardest part of the preparation was stealing a pair of her brother’s pants, they each had only one pair but the youngest had not yet grown into these, they were stored in a chest in the main room of the house, she had snatched them when she sent them away to gather water. She took Braz’s clothes and a copper bracelet a man had once given Braz during a fair after dancing with her. She lowered these things in a blanket, quietly out the window where she hoped it would lay undiscovered until that evening.

            She was almost caught in the final stage of her rushedly conceived plan.

            

4.6.2018 (Ferin)

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.