Northern Borders by Howard Frank Mosher

Author:Howard Frank Mosher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Everything came to a head on the day before Thanksgiving. It was a gray morning, very cold, with a yellowish cast in the sky over the Canadian mountains to the north that usually meant a storm was approaching. As usual on Wednesdays, my grandfather took me to school on his way to the cheese factory with his milk. The day before, he had shot two big snow geese and hung them in the woodshed. One was for our Thanksgiving meal and the other he intended to drop off for the LaFlammes on his way back from the village. Of course he did not tell my grandmother this.

Oddly enough, Sis was waiting for us that morning at the foot of his lane. I thought he wanted a ride to school. But he began to wave his arms frantically, and he was shouting even before we stopped. Gesticulating wildly, he shouted something about the red-and-white he-cow my grandfather had given him, the chain he’d staked it with. Shouting mal, mal, he pointed up the lane and jumped onto the back of the truck, as he had that rainy afternoon two months ago when we first took him home from school. My grandfather cursed viciously as we jounced up the lane in the lumber truck. He had already begun to figure out what had happened though I was still in the dark. Mal was the word Sis used to describe his mother’s condition. Had Mrs. LaFlamme somehow been accidentally trampled by the steer? I imagined the worst.

We skidded to a stop in the dooryard, which hadn’t changed since the last time we’d been here. There were the sunken-in house and barn, the milk house with dark smoke coming out of its jury-rigged chimney. Descending the knoll above the house were Sis’s mother and the angular black-and-white cow, just where we’d first seen them, dragging the makeshift stoneboat.

On the stoneboat was something reddish-colored, with patches of white. Even before I jumped out of the truck, I recognized it. It was the Ayrshire steer my grandfather had given Sis, and it was as dead as a doornail.

The steer’s head was twisted off at an unnatural angle to its body, and one of its horns had dug a little groove partway down the hillside behind the stoneboat. As we drew near, Madame LaFlamme broke into a torrent of French. Although I did not understand a word, I gathered that somehow the steer had broken its neck.

Sis and his mother wanted my grandfather to butcher the animal on the spot, but as he angrily pointed out, it had already started to bloat. The meat was spoiled, he said. All he could do was send Bumper Stevens up with his rending truck. The dead steer was good only for dog food.

“By da Jimminy Joe!” Sis kept exclaiming. “By da Jimminy Joe!”

“By the Jimminy Joe, what do you people intend to eat this winter?” my grandfather said. “How are you going to pay your rent? This is a fine morning’s work.

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