The Lost Landscape Read Online Free PDF

they would not reveal what they had been saying.
    The little girl ran away to hide, sometimes. When the adults were speaking sharply to one another. When the Grandfather cursed at the Grandmother in Hungarian, and the Grandmother wept angrily and hid her flushed face in her hands.
    The little girl had several times seen the Grandmother’s long coarse gray-black hair straggling down her back like something alive and livid. The little girl shut her eyes not wanting to see as she shrank from seeing the Grandmother’s large soft melon-breasts loose inside a camisole, that was wrong to see for there were things, the little girl realized, that it was wrong to see and you would be sorry if you saw.
    On a farm, there are many such things. Wild creatures that have crawled beneath a storage shed to die, or the bones of a chicken or a rabbit all but plucked clean by a rampaging owl in the night.
    â€œJoyce Carol! Come here .”
    With a nervous little laugh like a cough the Mother would shield the little girl’s eyes from something she should not see. Between the Mother’s eyebrows, faint lines of vexation and alarm.
    â€œSweetie, I said come here . We’re going inside now.”
    SOMETIMES THE LITTLE GIRL was breathless and frightened but why, the little girl would not afterward recall.
    The little girl often took me with her to a special hiding place. Happy Chicken in the little girl’s arms, held tight.
    My quivering body. My quick-beating heart. Smooth warm beautiful chicken-feathers! The little girl held me and whispered to me where we were hiding in the old silo beside the barn, that wasn’tused so much any longer now that the farm didn’t have cows or pigs or horses. Smells were strong inside the silo, like something that has fermented, or rotted. The little girl’s mother warned her never to play in the silo, it was dangerous inside the silo. The smells can choke you. If corncobs fall onto you, you might suffocate. But the little girl brought me with her to hide in the silo for the little girl did not believe that anything bad could happen to her.
    Except the little girl began more frequently to observe that if a chicken weakened, or fell sick, or had lost feathers, other chickens turned on her. So quickly—who could understand why? Even Happy Chicken sometimes pecked at another, weaker chicken—the little girl scolded, and carried me away.
    No no Happy Chicken—that is bad.
    We did not know why we did this. Happy Chicken did not know.
    It was like laying eggs . Like releasing a hot little dollop of excrement from the anus, something that happened.
    Hearing a commotion in the barnyard, the little girl ran to see what was happening always anxious that the wounded hen might be me —but this did not happen.
    Though sometimes my beak was glistening with blood, and when the little girl called me, I did not seem to hear. Peck peck peck is the action of the beak, like a great wave that sweeps over you, and cannot be resisted.
    THE LITTLE GIRL GREW up, and grew away, but never forgot her Happy Chicken.
    The little girl forgot much else, but not Happy Chicken.
    The little girl became an adult woman, and at the sight of even just pictures of chickens she felt an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, sharp as pain. Especially red-feathered hens. And roosters! Her eyesmist over, her heart beats quick enough to hurt. So happy then. So long ago . . .
    Still, she would claim she’d never seen a chicken slaughtered. Never seen a single one of the Rhode Island Reds seized by the legs, struggling fiercely, more fiercely than any human being might struggle, thrown down onto the chopping block to be decapitated with a single swift blow of the bloodstained ax, wielded by a muscled arm.
    It was the Grandmother’s arm, usually. For the Grandmother was the chicken-slaughterer.
    Which the girl had not seen. The girl had not seen.
    The girl did recall a time when Grandfather was not so