I put down the bucket and watched. I wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, but I had an idea it wouldn’t be entirely pleasant.
Darla reached up and ran her knife around each of the rabbit’s hind legs, right below where the strings held it suspended above the sink. Then she cut a slit along its inner thighs on each side. She grabbed the skin and peeled it down the hind legs, turning it inside out as she went.
It wasn’t nearly as gross as I imagined it would be. For one thing, there wasn’t much blood. The skin peeled smoothly off the legs, although I could see Darla was pulling hard on it. Beneath it I saw the rabbit’s muscles, pink and gleaming in the dim light.
It was uncomfortable to watch. I wondered what I would look like, dangling by my legs, skin slowly peeled back from the ankles down. I told Darla, “I’m going to go see if your mother needs any help.”
She looked over her shoulder at me. “Grossed you out, huh?” She smiled-in victory, I imagined.
“Uh, no, it’s not-”
“So you’re a vegan or something?”
“No, I like meat.”
“You just don’t want to see where it comes from?”
“I know where it comes from: nice plastic-wrapped containers in the supermarket…” I smirked and then shut up so I didn’t sound like a wimp.
Darla was quiet for a few seconds. “Not anymore.”
“Yeah. Look, you’re right. I should learn how to do this.”
“Fine. Watch, then.” She made a couple quick cuts around the tail and pulled on the skin, tugging it down over the rabbit’s hindquarters.
“I’ll learn it better if you let me try.”
Darla shrugged and handed me the knife. “Cut straight down the middle of the belly, from the tail to the neck. Try not to cut too deep. We only want to slit the skin now. We’ll gut it next.”
I tried sliding the knife gently over the skin. I wasn’t cutting anything. Darla put one hand over mine and pushed down, forcing the knife firmly into the skin right below the tail. Together we drew the knife downward, and the pelt opened up like a bathrobe, exposing the pink muscle beneath.
“Okay, now grab the skin and pull down. Hard.”
I did, and the skin peeled off the carcass like a sock, all the way down to the rabbit’s forelegs.
“This part is kind of difficult; let me have the knife.” Darla cut the rabbit’s front paws off with a pair of garden shears and tugged the skin off its forelegs. Then she pulled the skin down over the rabbit’s head, making tiny cuts here and there with the knife as she went. In less than a minute we had one very naked-looking rabbit carcass and an inside-out skin.
“What now?”
“Now we have to gut it.” Darla made a deeper cut down the belly of the rabbit and pulled the muscle aside, exposing a gray, wormy mass of intestines and organs. She reached into the rabbit and pulled out its guts with her hand. It was so disgusting I had to look away.
“I’m going to pull out the liver, kidneys, and heart now,” Darla said. “Pour a little water over them, would you? They’re good eating.”
I sloshed water over her hands while she pulled the dark red organs out of the rabbit’s chest. She dropped them into one of two buckets in the other basin of the sink. The second bucket held the nasty, gray, spaghetti-like intestines.
I kept pouring water for her as she washed the inside of the carcass. She jammed her finger through the hole where its tail had been. “To clean out any last bit of lower intestine,” she said.
Once Darla was satisfied that the carcass was clean, she taught me how to butcher it. She deftly cut off each piece of meat, naming it as she did: hindquarters, loins, etc. Pretty soon we’d filled the clean bucket with rabbit meat, ready for cooking.
“Will you take the meat in to Mom? I want to try tanning this skin. We might need it.”
“Okay.” I picked up the bucket of meat and shuffled out of the barn. It was getting more difficult to see as real twilight replaced the fake yellow version we suffered with during the day.
I found Mrs. Edmunds in the living room feeding the fire. “Darla asked me to bring you this rabbit meat,” I said, holding up the bucket.
“Lovely, it’ll be so nice to have some meat for a change. But I didn’t think she was planning to butcher any of them for a while.”
“It was sick. She didn’t seem too happy about it.”
“Oh dear. The Lord provides-maybe we were meant to eat rabbit tonight.”
“You don’t suppose it could hurt us, could it? Eating meat from a sick rabbit?”
“We’re not sure why the rabbits are sick. Probably not if we cook it really well. I guess we’ll find out. Tell Darla I need at least an hour to let it stew. Two would be better.”
“Okay.” I handed the bucket to Mrs. Edmunds and left the house. I figured it might be hard to find my way back to the barn since it was getting so dark, but it turned out to be easy. Darla had flung the big sliding door fully open and lit a makeshift torch on the end of a bamboo pole. She was visible from clear across the farmyard, bent over a bench near the sink, working on something.
As I approached, I called out, “Your mom says an hour or two on the rabbit stew she’s making.”
“Good,” Darla replied. “That should be enough time to take care of this pelt. Would you bury the stuff in the offal bucket? Over where we put our crap.”
I glanced into the bucket. The intestines had been covered with a mass of jumbled rabbit bones. On top of it all was the rabbit’s skull. It had been violently crushed and wrenched apart, so it sat in two halves, like a discarded eggshell.
“Yipes, what happened to that?”
“What?”
“The skull.”
“Oh, I smashed it with a hammer and scooped the brains out with a spoon.”
“You what?”
“We need the brains to tan its pelt. I’ll show you when you get back.”
Dismissed, I picked up the offal bucket and a shovel. What kind of girl cuddles with a cute rabbit she named Buck one minute and the next smashes its skull with a hammer to scoop out its brains? I shivered-and only partly because of the cold night air.
I stumbled around in the dark, looking for the latrine area. I thought I had found it-it was impossible to be sure with everything covered in a featureless blanket of ash and no light except the faraway glint of the torch through the barn door. I buried the rabbit’s remains in a shallow hole and rejoined Darla in the barn.
She had tied the pelt into a small frame built of lumber; two-by-twos, she said. A dozen or so small cords, shoelaces maybe, stretched the pelt tightly in the center of the frame. Darla was scraping the skin with a rounded piece of metal.
“The brains are in there,” Darla said, gesturing at a bowl on the workbench beside her. “Pour a little water in with them-we want about half brains and half water. Then stir it up really well. It should look about like a strawberry milkshake when you’re done.”
“What?” Something about brains and milkshakes didn’t compute. Had I wandered into a bad zombie movie?
“We need a brain-and-water mixture about like a strawberry milkshake,” Darla repeated, talking very slowly, as if she were explaining to a preschooler.
“Why?”
“We’re supposed to use the mixture to tan the skin. After I get it scraped, we’ll rub the brains on it.”
“That’s kind of disgusting.”
“I guess. But it’s the traditional way to tan hides. There’s some kind of oil in the brain that soaks into the pelt and keeps it soft.”
“You do this a lot?”
“Nope, first time. Thought about trying it before, but never found the time. Some of the rabbit breeders I know do some tanning, and I’ve read up on it.”
I poured a little water in the bowl with the brains. They were gray, with little red streaks here and there. Blood vessels, I guessed. I found a spoon in the sink and used it to mash them up. It took a bit of stirring to get the mixture to the texture Darla wanted. When I finished, it looked almost exactly like a strawberry milkshake. Not that I was going to take a sip or anything.