Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Twelve
Another month would come and go after that oddly honest communication before Felecia found herself regarding anyone in the village beyond their or her immediate needs. Phillip came by her still weather secure hovel in the tree line and pointed out at the increasingly dark woods beyond. “I need to secure enough boar or deer meat for the larder before the weather changes. My boy says he’s sick and that leaves me needing a pair of hands, are you up to the challenge?”
Felecia didn’t need to wonder or think on it, she nodded and began gathering what she had, mostly the clothes given to her by Phillip in the first place and the bow he had offered to her since besides. “What’s wrong with him, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Phillip scoffed as he watched Felecia gather her things. “A significant defect of character, as well as anatomy. My boy, the second one, was born without most things needed for manhood. I guess that lack tends to eat at a soul. Perhaps that is the foil of all parents, coming to know that your progeny may never measure up.”
They didn’t speak of the youth again after that for the whole trip, five days Felecia followed and soaked up what Phillip was willing to teach her about tracking and hunting game. She laid underneath a thick blanket next to the coals of their cook fire and watched the stars overhead wondering why she still didn’t know Phillip’s son’s name. She saw the sullen boy nearly every day as he went about his chores but they rarely if ever spoke. Phillip seemed to come by every day with a list of chores for Felecia to do, whether they be around his property, the village where she was still treated largely as a curiosity, or the grounds of Rotary house where she was still thoroughly shunned. On the sabbath Phillip even came to offer common yet badly needed items that Felecia still required for her primitive shelter, but never his son, the youth always seemed to go out of his way to avoid her. Why?
I would have kept them so as to remember my brother by.
The youth was so angry about the old clothes she now wore day in and day out. Maybe the remembering of them was too hard, maybe seeing them used by Felecia was too much for the youth who still seemed very much affected by the loss of his older brother. Felecia made a mental note of trying to find someone in the village who had knowledge and the tools to sew new garments, or someone able and willing to take what money she had and mail it to the Sears and Roebuck catalogue for a set of new clothing. Those thoughts were soon vanquished by the length of the hunting expedition and the exploits of it all.
Felecia killed her first deer on that trip, a young, lean buck that added precious little in the way of the overall take for the trip but still something to make note of and add to the journey. Phillip had taken a quiet sort of pride in showing Felecia how to stalk and mark a kill. He seemed nearly beside himself when she didn’t faint or even balk at cleaning and dressing the animal she killed.
The deer wasn’t the first animal she had ever seen be born or die, or slaughtered, and although it was the first animal she had ever killed, she instantly understood the relative need of that action. She didn’t waste time thinking about the animal or her actions involving its death. Felecia was far more concerned with the larger goal of meeting Philip’s goal for pounds of usable meat met for the season.
All those days spent out and about and it all came light of Phillip’s hopes. They found a few deer, all young and lean males, as well as an old sickly sow that yielded just as sickly-looking meat. Beyond that there was only the handful of rabbits that cut up and tossed together would barely make a stew for the village.
“This is going to be another hard fall for everyone in the village, and an even harder winter.” Phillip hadn’t said more than five words strung together at a time since they woke up on that fifth day until he pointed at their collection of meat slowly being dried and smoked over a few small fires he had built up that morning for the day longs purpose.
Felecia didn’t grin or shrug and assume. She waved at the meat drying over the fires and then pointed out at the ocean over the eastern horizon. “We dry this and go back we have something and if we spend a few mores weeks seeing to what the sea has to offer and we might have enough before the weather turns again.”
Phillip narrowed his eyes over the fires working away around them and grimaced. “Cockles and oysters aside, after I give the big house its share…we’re going to watch babies starve this winter just like we did the last one.”
“So, don’t give them what we caught. We caught it, they didn’t.”
Felecia dared to say those words and she waited for the old groundskeeper to fell her feeling with some new bit of sage words or advice, some hidden natural rule about how the haves just had to take most of it and first before anyone else because, well, they were the fucking haves.
No new knowledge came raining down as Phillip chose to keep staring at their small cook fire. Felecia even considered speaking more on what she really thought of how life seemed to work for the villagers before Phillip interjected. “Five falls and winters and counting we’ve lived like this. Ever since your father’s last voyage. Five falls and winters I’ve thought of your poor mother and you while I made others do without. What could I possibly tell them now?”
The lie and the truth married and came easy for Felecia as she looked over the meat slowing curing over the smoke and flames. “Be honest about a new and true boon, without needing to secure or beg for excess. You set out to hunt and you did, we did. We have a good amount and I think the sea can make more still, but the people who didn’t work for any of that, deserve none of it. Their forebearers may have secured the land and the tools for the work but without our labor, their purchase is meaningless.”