Disaster

Mother is crying again. That has been the soundtrack of Renard’s life for the past week, confined inside the family house, too scared to leave or to flee, lest anybody see him and lest anybody accuse him, of being the one responsible for the death of Isen.

Nobody can prove that Renard stole the summer lamb or put it in the tree. Still, Renard knows that he did it — and fears the guilt and shame oozing from his soul will be obvious the second a critical eye even glances upon him. But here, in his home, it is safe, and there is no need to fear accusations. His father has been silent, and his mother has been crying.

Renard cannot help but think: what under the good grace of the sky is she crying for.

Isen barely visited anyway. What’s so goddamn different for her? She wasn’t even there. Renard was the one who had to see it. Who had to learn the unthinkable weight of a lifeless body. Who had to watch his brother’s corpse sink and disappear into the muck. Who couldn’t even find the soul! Why is it all tears for Isen? Where the hell are the tears for Renard?

While his mother cries in her room, Renard sits with his father for dinner. Cutlery scrapes across the plates in silence, doing nothing to drown out the sobs wafting from the room over. Renard’s grip tightens into a fist around his fork, but stabbing the meat and clattering the plate still will not make the crying shut up.

“Does she fancy to be a bugle," Renard voices out loud, “whining long as the wind blows."

His father’s knife scrapes over his plate.

“Breathe’d thence by a little cat, miaowing for supper," Renard laughs, pantomiming playing a trombone.

A sharp peal rises from the plate.

“Miaow!" Renard goes, extending the invisible trombone. “Miaow!" He does it again.

The cutlery goes still.

“Not a morsel goes thereby. Ho, but what vitual is silence to our starv’d minstrel?" Renard says, waiting to align his irreverent punchline with a truly horrible wail. Sensing one coming, “—his mouth round of gusty breath, his lips press to her bottom…"

“Renard!" snaps his father, slamming his fist on the table. The plates and cutlery clatter, and Renard jolts as if slapped. All the confidence he had to be saying such things crumbles, flooded out by the terror of a shrew before a lion.

His father loudly scolds him and threatens to belt him bloody if he ever again says such things about his mother in this house. Renard would like to puff out his chest and mock, ‘very well, I’ll do it outside the house! Hoho!’ but his strength to do so is utterly gone. He cries, with his father seeming disgusted by it. Recognising he can’t stay at the table, and rather too scared to be near his father right now, he takes his plate to finish his dinner outside, alone, and sobbing.

He finishes his food and recognises that his father won’t be coming to comfort him. Steeling himself, he returns to the house. It’s quieter now — his mother has calmed in the interim, and his father waits silently for him at the table. He acknowledges Renard’s return with a slow nod.

Aware that his father is angry with him, and that he must have messed up, Renard weakly apologises, though he can’t say exactly what for.

It satisfies his father, whose stern air slumps into another nod, more exhausted and accepting this time. Seeing the change, Renard chances to hug him. His father accepts it and with surprising weakness requests that Renard do the dishes. Renard is fine with this — his father pats him on the shoulder. Good lad.

After dishes, his father returns to talk. He gently advises Renard that his mother’s not in a good way and Renard needs to be more gentle about her. Though Renard feels impelled to explain that he didn’t mean to say or do anything harmful — that he just wanted to lighten to mood — he simultaneously knows he cannot say these things without it sounding horrible, and without again angering his father. Instead of negotiate another fight, he quickly turns off his brain and agrees to obey. His father squeezes his shoulder and repeats: good boy. There’s a good lad.

The subtext of his father’s advisory, which Renard does subconsciously grasp, is that Renard should spend more time outside and less cooped in the house.

Instead of listen to that, he does the exact opposite. Still too intimidated by the thought of being in public, and scared to divulge these thoughts to his father, Renard decides to interpret his father’s words literally. He focuses on earnestly tending to his mother, doing housework, and asking almost incessantly if there’s any more chores for him.

But when his father requests that Renard go shopping, or deliver some hares into town, Renard refuses with excuses upon excuses. ‘There’s other work here I must do first’, or ‘oho, are you incapable?’, or ‘sorry, dear mother needs me.’

Seeing that Renard is becoming stubborn and dependant, and that he’s not going to leave, his father again goes quiet.