Eutopia Read Online Free Page B

exhaustion, turned back to the cabin.
    With that picture in his head, he knew there was no question.
    No matter how he loved her, Jason Thistledown could no longer live under the same roof as his mama—reduced as she was to nothing but soured meat.
    When he composed himself, he found a shovel and began digging a path from the cabin. The sun was as high as it would get, casting a shortening shadow to the north by the time he’d made it to the side where the woodshed stood. There was a good half-cord of wood stacked within. But Jason looked to the braces. They were six feet from the ground, and spaced adequately for the task.
    Against the wall in the shed was a stack of pine planks, bought by him and his mama that autumn past in hopes of setting down a proper floor in the cabin. He lifted two of those planks into the rafters, making a high platform that he reckoned would keep her safe from predation and wolves until the thaw.
    “I am sorry, Mama,” he said as he hefted her sheet-wrapped body over his shoulder and put a foot on the ladder. She was wearing the same sheet she’d died in, and he had not washed her, and even in the sharp February cold she gave a stink like a shallow privy.
    “I guess,” he said as he rolled her onto the makeshift platform and settled her on her back, “sayin’ sorry’s one thing I can do fine.”
    §
    The winter finished hard, one storm after another hitting the Thistledown homestead in a succession of punishing smacks that blanketed the snow in thick layers. Jason fought back dully—each day clearing a path between the door of the house and the woodshed, and halfway along cutting off another path to the sty. He waited a few days but finally succumbed and became diligent in throwing feed to the cannibal swine, creatures he was coming to hate but could not bring himself to kill.
    He told himself that when the thaw came, he would trade the sty of them for the finest of coffins, and the churchyard plot nearest to Jesus, a tombstone carved with his mama’s saintly visage and words from the most eloquent preacher in Montana to send her Heaven-ward.
    Toward such an end, the pigs would have to be fed daily, lest they ate one another to extinction before winter’s finish.
    Aside from the daily feedings, however, Jason did not spend much time tending the pigs.
    Most times, he sat bundled in the woodshed, the Winchester in his lap. As the days grew longer, Jason grew more certain that his mama’s frozen resting place was not so secure. Three years ago, during a winter not so harsh as this one, his mama had bent down and showed him tracks in the snow.
    Dogs? Jason guessed, and his mama had corrected him: Not dogs, Jason. Wolves. A pack of them. That’s what the gun’s for.
    Jason had not seen wolf tracks around the homestead this winter, but he was on the lookout for them all the same—particularly as the snow climbed higher, nearer the height of the braces, and his mama’s frozen body.
    He only felt truly safe for his mama when another blizzard blew, and the cold came so strong that nothing—he hoped—could live outside shelter.
    Otherwise, he guarded and he patrolled, to make sure no strange tracks came near. He thought of how he would kill a wolf if it came. He counted his ammunition and thought how he would kill five of them. He began to think how he might kill a man if it came to that.
    He grew thinner. He felt a hardness come over his face, and when he looked at it in the glass, he thought he looked like someone else. It was worse when he tried to smile, so he didn’t.
    Instead, he guarded. And he waited—for the weather to break, so he could get moving, begin the business of trading the lives of his swine for a funeral for his mama.
    §
    The sun grew brighter and the smell of old leaves and pine needles came up from the ground. The crackling sound of icicles breaking could be heard, and when in the early morning he stepped onto the stoop, Jason felt a near thing to joy.
    Soon, he