Far to the east, where Eagle Talon was…

Indians-Singing-Deeds-of-Valor-2Far to the east, where Eagle Talon was deciding whether or not to release his arrow, across a body of water greater than Eagle Talon could imagine, Erik drummed his long, uncommonly delicate fingers against the rough planks of the kitchen table. He pushed back his thick, black spectacles until they were firmly over the bridge of his nose, close enough to his eyes that when he blinked his long eyelashes touched the glass. He looked down at the half-written letter. How do I properly phrase this?

He leaded over the water basin, peering out the wide, multi-paned kitchen window framed by dark oak slab cabinets. The glass faced east towards the farm’s main fields and the church spires of the little village of Villmar, four kilometers down the dirt thoroughfare from the farm gate. The languid waters of the Lahn River drifted lazily past the great white barn. The fields were separated by fences and hedgerows, the cultivated land between those barriers green with late May growth. The grass and row crops near the river where his brothers could get water to the land in the ditches his grandfather had dug, were green and almost ankle high. Two solid, heavily muscled Belgian draft horses were hitched to a plow between the house and the barn. From the corrals drifted the smell of manure and the bawling of sixty weaned calves. In a pen on the other side of the two-track farm road, their mothers bellowed equally anguished protests. They will find tomorrow far more upsetting. Tomorrow they would be branded and castrated. Neighbors from up and down the dirt thoroughfare that led from Villmar past a number of farms like theirs, would be on hand to help, as would Rabbi Bernhard Frank. He would bestow blessings on each procedure and calf, an all-important step to being able to market the meat, or live animals, as kosher.

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One Response to “Far to the east, where Eagle Talon was…”

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