The World Without Flags by Ben Lyle Bedard

Author:Ben Lyle Bedard [Bedard, Ben Lyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

69

Our second day at the farm is even better than the first. I wake up late in the morning and have a breakfast of fried fish and cold fiddleheads. Even though I still ache for a handful of salt, the breakfast is delicious. I boil a kettle of water and then pour it over the fish bones and trout heads. I boil it for a while and then pour out the broth into the aluminum mug. I add some mashed fiddleheads and stir it up. It doesn’t look too appetizing. Looks like fish guts to me, but there’s not much I can do about that. Besides, Eric doesn’t care.

I get Eric from the stall and bring him to the fire. Then, as the sun gets hotter around us, I feed him three mugs of the fish/fiddleheads soup stuff. I wonder how much of it actually gets in his stomach, he makes such a mess, but I don’t have much control over that. After I wipe him down with his drooly towel, I let him sit out in the sun to dry off. I try not to look at him too much, but I can’t ignore that he isn’t looking good. His face is hardly recognizable, all sharp angles and bones and beard. His whole body looks skeletal, and his clothes hang from him like rags. He attracts a constant cloud of flies. But I try to ignore all that. I read him a few pages from his book before I put him back into the stall and head down to the brook to fish.

The fishing is just as good. Today I have even more time, so I leisurely fish up and down the brook until I have eight, fine brook trout. I’m feeling so rich with luxuries that I throw back a ninth, just because it’s a little too small. I watch its sinuous black body vanish back into the brook. Watching it, I can’t help but get a little sentimental. We’re a lot alike, after all, both survivors. Then I go around a tree and, with my jackknife, I clean the fish who weren’t quite as lucky today.

When I get back to the farmhouse, I decide to bring Bandit down to the brook to drink and get him out of the sun. After checking on Eric, who is sitting stone still in his stall, I grab our backpack and head back to the brook, leading Bandit. When we get there, I watch Bandit drink greedily and feel a little guilty for not bringing him down here sooner. “I’m doing the best I can,” I tell the horse. Bandit ignores me and keeps drinking. Watching him drink the unboiled water, I hope horses can’t get the Worm.

Pulling off the backpack, I dig around for Eric’s papers. I thought earlier, while I was fishing, that maybe some of these papers were letters that he exchanged with Good Prince Billy. For years when Randy the Vandal would return from trading, he’d bring letters to Eric.

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