Free Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee Page B

nothing to use but the penknife. He slit the belly and pushed his arm into the slit; he expected blood-heat but inside the goat encountered again the clammy wetness of marsh-mud. He wrenched and the organs came tumbling out at his feet, blue and purple and pink; he had to drag the carcase a distance away before he could continue. He peeled back as much of the skin as he was able but could not cut off the feet and head until, searching in the shed, he found a bow-saw, In the end the flayed carcase that he hung from the pantry ceiling seemed diminutive by comparison withthe mound of remains that he rolled in a sack and buried in the top tier of the rockery. His hands and sleeves were full of gore; there was no water nearby; he scoured himself with sand but was still followed by flies when he returned to the house.
    He brushed the stove clean and made a fire. There was nothing to cook in. He cut off a haunch and held it over the open flame till it was charred on the outside and juices dripped. He ate without pleasure, thinking only: What will I do when the goat is consumed?
    He was sure he had caught a cold. His skin felt hot and dry, his head ached, he swallowed with difficulty. He took glass jars to the dam to fill with water. On the way back his strength suddenly deserted him and he had to sit down. Sitting in the bare veld with his head between his knees he allowed himself to imagine lying in a clean bed between crisp white sheets. He coughed, and gave a little hoot like an owl, and heard the sound depart from him without trace of an echo. Though his throat hurt, he made the sound again. It was the first time he had heard his own voice since Prince Albert. He thought: Here I can make any sound I like.
    By nightfall he was feverish. He dragged his bed of sacks into the front room and slept there. He had a dream in which he lay in pitch darkness in the dormitory of Huis Norenius. When he stretched out his hand he touched the head of the iron bedstead; from the coir mattress came the smell of old urine. Afraid to move lest he wake the boys sleeping all about him, he lay with his eyes open so that he would not lapse back into the perils of sleep. It is four o’clock, he said to himself, by six o’clock it will be light. No matter how wide he opened his eyes he could not make out the position of the window. His eyelids grew heavy. I am falling, he thought.
    In the morning he felt stronger. He put on his shoes and wandered about the house. On top of a wardrobe he found a suitcase; but it contained only broken toys and pieces of jigsaw puzzle.There was nothing in the house of use to him, nor anything that gave a clue to why the Visagies who had lived here before him had departed.
    The kitchen and pantry were noisy with the buzzing of flies. Though he had no appetite, he lit a fire and boiled a little of the goat-meat in water in a jam tin. He found tealeaves in a jar in the pantry; he made tea and went back to bed. He had begun to cough.
    The box of ashes waited in a corner of the living-room. He hoped that his mother, who was in some sense in the box and in some sense not, being released, a spirit released into the air, was more at peace now that she was nearer her natal earth.
    There was a pleasure in abandoning himself to sickness. He opened all the windows and lay listening to the doves, or to the stillness. He dozed and woke throughout the day. When the afternoon sun shone straight in on him he closed the shutters.
    In the evening he was delirious again. He was trying to cross an arid landscape that tilted and threatened to tip him over its edge. He lay flat, dug his fingers into the earth, and felt himself swooping through darkness.
    After two days the hot and cold fits ended; after another day he began to recover. The goat in the pantry was stinking. The lesson, if there was a lesson, if there were lessons embedded in events, seemed to be not to kill such large animals. He cut himself a Y-shaped stick and, with the tongue