caillot de sang.

j. everett
Sep 6, 2018 · 18 min read

A huge hog hunkered down by a tree — they first thought they were seeing things, a sort of folie à trois, an appropriate diagnosis considering they were somewhere in southwest France. You should’ve seen what happened: their plane blew up right on top of them, right as they were ’chuting out into the sky. The fire almost burned their parachutes. Two died before they hit the ground — Nazi bullets shot their guts out. Another died when the ground came too fast: he thought he had more time. The three who lived were fucked by the wind, blown off course and into thick woods. Back when the world was lit only by fire, packs of wolves stalked human prey in this forest; their howls still lingered in the spaces between the trees and in the ears of leery passers-through, especially at night.

And it was always night in these woods, where low-slung fog draped off the gnarled tree branches like spiderwebs and the wet, curdled air tasted like moss and felt like pine needles. The three American paratroopers — John, from Georgia; Charles, from Michigan; Robert, from Vermont — were seized by a gun-gripping panic whenever they heard a wolf’s howl. The howls, they swore, were getting closer.

Nine days of this, of stretching out their canned-bread and chocolate rations as thin as they could, of eating tree bark and leaves and bugs and the occasional squirrel, and they come across a pig, so fat it’s gorgeous, digging at the base of a tree, squealing with an almost sexual ferocity. It paid no attention to the three men behind it, staring with an almost sexual ferocity, and anyway, at this point they were too chewed up by hunger to make heavy steps.

They looked at each other, then back at the pig, then back at each other. Robert nodded. John lifted his handgun to eye level: he had to focus very hard not to miss. His hand shook. He clasped the gun with both hands. His hands shook. The pig turned around, a dark brown, maybe black, lump in its mouth. John concentrated his face into a tight, pallid grimace as he squeezed the trigger.

The noise of the gunshot was a damp crack; the recoil almost snapped John’s bone-thin wrists. The bullet tore through the pig’s head and into the tree. A cloud of tangy red mist burst out from the pig’s skull and sparkled in the air. The pig dropped to the ground instantly, and despite the trickly red gouge between the eyes, its face was a mask of an almost contemplative serenity — well, contemplative for a pig.

With a reborn vigor, John the Georgian lunged at the pig, turned it on its side, and pulled out a Bowie knife from his satchel, in an exuberant, singular movement that surprised his drained compatriots. “You boys take care of the fire, I’ll take care-a the pig,” he said, his voice a raspy drawl. John squatted next to the carcass, grabbed ahold of the snout and tilted back the head, and sliced the pig’s throat; still-hot blood poured onto mossy tree roots. He pushed his fingers into the slash and clutched one of the pig’s hind legs with his other hand. With great effort, he hoisted the pig in the air and placed it belly-up on flat ground.

Robert and Charles had built a small teepee out of torn branches and log splinters, covered it with what dry leaves they could find, and set upon it with their Army-issued Zippo lighters. After a couple minutes, the teepee caught fire.

John stabbed the pig right below its sternum and pushed hard — blood gurgled around the blade. Both feet on either side of the pig, knees bent, he grabbed the knife with both hands and yanked toward himself with great effort. The pig split open from sternum to groin; cold air made the guts and blood steam. A fetid musk wafted from the swine’s innards.

“Ooh, boy!” exclaimed John. “As you can see, this pig’s a boy pig…ain’t been snipped either. So he’ll smell and taste a little funkier than the ham you’re used to back home. But if you can handle the peculiar odor, bon appetit!”

The three men spent the next two or so hours happily chomping on burnt pig viscera. The meat was tough to chew on and there was that peculiar odor John’d warned about, but after spending nine days in the forest with nothing to eat but canned bread and tree bark, charred cochon colon tasted like a Michelin-approved delicacy.

As they gnawed on hog offal, John and Robert and Charles barely spoke, except to argue who saw the animal first. Charles insisted he did, but Robert countered that he heard it before Charles saw it. Then John interjected with, “Well, I shot the fuckin’ thing, and now we’re eatin’ it. So it don’t really matter who saw it or heard it or smelt it first,” which seemed to settle the matter.

“It’s getting brighter,” Charles said, looking around. “Fog’s clearing.”

“Yes, it does appear you’re right,” Robert said. “Amazing how a semi-decent meal can raise your spirits.”

Charles: “That’s true. I don’t even think the smell’s as bad as you were saying it was, John.”

“Fair enough,” John said. “Perhaps you’ve got a more tolerant nose than me, or perhaps if you burn somethin’ long enough, you burn out any offending odors as well.”

“Any taste, also — offensive or otherwise,” Robert quipped.

“I’m just grateful to be alive,” Charles reflected. “We’ve been in the woods for — I lost track of how many days. I was starving and losing hope. Now my belly’s full…and I’m full of hope.”

“Well said,” Robert offered.

“Yeah,” John agreed.

Just then, a voice: a man’s, a hoarse yell sharp with agitation. It repeated one word — a name? — over and over, and though the voice sounded French, the word did not. The voice, and the man who owned it, was getting closer.

“Moccus!…Moccus!…Moccus!…”

The three Americans scrambled to their feet in a startled fit. “The hell was that?” John exclaimed.

“Sounded like someone shouting…‘Mock us,’” Robert said.

“‘Mock us’?” Mocking us?”

“It sounded like one word, not two,” Charles said. “Like, ‘mock-us.’ One word.”

“Moccus!…”

“There it is again!”

“Yep, sounds like one word to me.”

“What does it mean? Rob, you’ve got that French dictionary on you?”

“No…damn it. I used it for the fire.”

“Charles, you have your copy?”

“I must’ve forgotten to pack mine,” Charles concluded after pulling out every thing from his pockets and satchel.

“Okay, Chuck, that’s fine. Now go ahead and put all that stuff away before Monsieur ‘Mock-us’ gets here.”

“Damn, I made a mess, didn’t I?”

“It’s okay, Chuck.”

“Moccus!…Moccus!…”

Victor had been stumbling through the forest — his and his family’s unruly backyard, and centuries before any of them were born, the favorite hunting spot of Charlemagne — for the better part of two hours after losing sight of his prized truffle hog, Moccus. Victor was a farmer who grew a number of fruits and vegetables that he sold, along with jars of honey, at a nearby market, but his primary source of income were black truffles, which he sold to the great kitchens of Europe and North America for a hefty price. Moccus had guided the farmer through nineteen truffle seasons, and the old boar’s value to Victor had skyrocketed after his other two hogs had been shot for sport by the Nazis two-and-a-half years previous.

If Moccus was lost, all was lost. Victor needed to find Moccus.

So he ran through the woods, shouting the pig’s name until the word scraped against his throat. As he ran, the orange aura ahead of him refocused — a campfire. Fuzzy, indistinct murmuring separated into two, probably three, male voices; he couldn’t pick up everything they were saying, but Victor knew they were speaking English. “Damn, I made a mess, didn’t I?” one of them asked. Another said, “It’s okay, Chuck.”

Victor shouted, “Moccus!…Moccus!…” He barged through coarse bramble and almost tripped over Moccus’s carcass, almost stepped in Moccus’s split-open belly. That peculiar odor John’d warned about and the sight of his hog’s exenterated remains forced a strange noise out from Victor, halfway between a gag and a scream. Victor lay next to Moccus, the ground viscid with drying pig blood.

He looked up at the three Americans, drying pig blood all over their hands and faces. One of them looked at the chunk of Moccus he was holding and dropped it. Another kneeled in front of Victor and said, “Look, Mister — uh, Monsieur — we’re real sorry but, uh — do you understand English? Nod if you do. Okay. Look, we’re real sorry that we…that we ate your pig, apparently. Obviously he was very important to you, but — uh — you got to understand, we were starving, dying out here, starving to death…and, well, your pig saved our lives.”

This Frenchman who’d emerged from the woods spent a while on the blood-coated earth, sobbing for the gutted pig next to him, or rather, sobbing in anticipation of his and his family’s misfortunes.

After some several minutes, the Frenchman got up (his backside stained a rusty color) and introduced himself as Victor to John and Robert and Charles.

“Nice to meet you, Victor,” the three said.

“Despite the circumstances,” Robert added.

At this, Victor nodded and scrunched up his face to keep from sobbing again. He then offered to take the three Americans — considering they were there in the woodlands of southwest France as liberators — to his farm, where he, his wife, three daughters, and three sons would serve as hosts and give them food and shelter for as long as they needed. John said, “Hell, better than fightin’ in this fucking war.”

The four men reached Victor’s farm, a clearing in the middle of the forest, just as the sun was slipping behind the horizon, a slick of orange light trailing it. Victor, who held Moccus’s body in his arms, said, “This is the place.”

Once neatly divided into square patches of fruits and vegetables, the farmland long ago gave way to overgrowth, an unkempt green tangle that bore strawberries, grapes, apples, tomatoes, and carrots. Behind this wild verdant pile was the apiary: three white (originally at least; the paint now peeling away and covered with grime by the weather) boxes on stilts that functioned as beehives. Rarely tended to, the boxes were caked with globs of overflowing honeycomb.

The farmhouse didn’t fare much better than the farmland, looking as though it had been built by a right-handed carpenter using his left hand. It was unpainted, or maybe it had been painted a long time ago and never touched up since, and the bare windows were shielded by slats of wood peppered with rusted nails. Next to the house was a ditch full of emetic rainwater. Between the wars, Victor carved out a pond and filled it with fish, and after the fish died, the pond became a miasmic pool of rancid sludge.

John and Robert and Charles, with Victor about a step in front of them, stopped on the muddy pathway leading up to the house.

“Looks, uh, cozy,” Robert said.

“Yes, Victor,” said Charles. “Thank you for bringing us to your lovely home.”

Victor set Moccus, turgid and purplish, on the ground. “Non, it is shit. We spent most of our time in Paris before the Germans came. They stole our apartment from us and use it for card games and prostitutes, no doubt.”

John said, “If a bunch of foreign men came into my home and kicked me and my family out and used it for gamblin’ and fuckin’ whores…I would kill those men.”

Victor looked at him. “No, no, this is our home,” he said, taking in the jungle of strawberry bushes and grape vines, the ramshackle farmhouse, the putrid puddle. “For better or for worse, this place is our home. Each of us came from this soil, and someday, each of us will return to it.”

Charles glanced at the ground. Robert said, “Well put, Victor.”

“Yeah, Victor. Great point,” John said. “My home is and always will be Georgia — Savannah, Georgia, to be entirely accurate — and we take our dirt very seriously there too.”

Charles traced a semicircle in the crusty mud with his foot. “What’s the big deal about dirt?”

Victor and John looked at each other. Robert was over by the sludgy ditch, poking at it with a stick. “I thought I saw something move,” he said.

John asked Charles, “Where’re you from again, Chuck?”

“Detroit, Michigan.”

“Well, there you go. See, Victor, a city boy like Chuck here’s not going to have the same respect for the dirt the way we do. You can’t have a bond with asphalt the way you can with the dirt.”

“I too can. And Detroit has parks and the like. I’m not a stranger to dirt or soil.”

Robert walked back over to the three men. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’ve got something alive in that shit-smear you call a pond. Like, some sort of highly tenacious bullfrog or something of that nature. Maybe later, we three can catch it for you and you could fry up some frog legs for us.”

Victor laughed. “Ah! Oui, oui, Monsieur. Cuisses de grenouille for the American liberators!”

As though he’d triggered some dormant reflex, the three Americans began laughing along with Victor, the first time any of the men had done so in quite a while. Stirred by this chorus of hearty belly-laughs, a woman roughly Victor’s age, three younger girls, and three younger boys (though one was arguably a young man) streamed out of the farmhouse, squealing with joy at the sight of Victor, then howling with horror at the sight of bloated, eviscerated Moccus. The older woman, Victor’s wife, threw herself to the ground, wailed at the mud. The six children stood back, crying softly, tear-streaks showing just how dirty their faces were.

Victor looked down at his wife, picked her up on her feet, held her to his chest, kissed her forehead, and whispered something. Her shrill bleating calmed to a low, burbling sob. He looked at each of his children, then at the three Americans. He spoke a few hoarse words of French to his children, who, after he was finished, retreated back to the house.

Victor let go of his wife, who followed their children into the house. Once they were all inside, Victor turned to John and Robert and Charles. “Madeline cared very deeply about Moccus,” Victor said. “Not simply as a…beast of burden or work animal or whatever you want to call it, but as a pet. And not simply as a pet either, but as a member of our family. I believe Madeline believed Moccus was — and this is quite possibly embarrassing for her so please don’t repeat what I’m telling you once we get indoors — but I think she believed Moccus was her late, very dear grandfather reborn as a pig.”

“Huh,” John said. “Well, I suppose that explains it.”

“Yes. Anyway, before we go inside, let’s take care of Moccus.”

Victor dragged Moccus to the edge of the pond, then led the three Americans to a pile of rocks on the other side of the house, next to the forest. The four men each grabbed two rocks, which were perfectly smooth and sphere-shaped and far heavier than any natural thing seemingly could be. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Robert barked. “Victor, what the hell kind of rocks are these?”

Victor didn’t answer. He grunted and clenched his jaw as he waddled back to the pond. John and Robert and Charles took longer getting back. Once they did, they dropped the stones, and almost fell to the ground themselves. Victor collected the rocks, unbothered by their heaviness, and shoved them as deep as they could go into the pig’s carcass; he removed a small hatchet from his belt and chopped the pig’s head off. Victor lifted Moccus by the feet and heaved him into the quagmire. The headless hog sank into the greasy sludge, returning to whatever existed below the soil.

Victor picked up the pig’s head by the ear and said to the three Americans, “Let’s go inside and have some brandy while my wife and the children prepare dinner,” and they did.

While Victor and the three Americans sat, on stacks of books, in the study and took turns gulping brandy from a dust-encrusted bottle — “We don’t have the proper glassware for brandy, I’m afraid,” Victor warned — Victor’s family made supper.

The three daughters went out and plucked strawberries and apples and tomatoes while the three sons went out to the apiary. The eldest and the youngest each carried a bee smoker — a long-ish tin can with a spout and a bellows — and the middle son carried a cloth sack. The eldest and youngest sons set their bee smokers on the ground, opened the lids, and filled the smokers about halfway with dried grass and pig shit. They each lit a match and dropped it in with the dried grass and pig shit and screwed their smokers shut. They waited for two-thirds of a minute while the dried grass and pig shit smoldered inside the tin cans. Then they lifted the smokers, pointing the spouts at one of the three beehives, and squeezed the bellows as rapidly as they could. Wispy strands of stone-gray smoke unspooled from the tin spouts and knotted around the hive. They did this two more times, and when the three ashy fists of smoke unclenched their grip, the middle son with the cloth sack went to each hive, unlatched its door open, and scooped the entire colony of bees — stupefied by the smoke and reduced to a mirthful, writhing pile on the floor of hive — into the sack. He tied the sack shut, the bees softly buzzing. He turned to his brothers and they walked back to the house.

John and Charles and Robert stood in the kitchen and watched as Victor’s wife roasted the still-living bees in a large stone pot. The three Americans appreciated the hospitality but after spending nine days in the forest, scavenging for whatever parody of food they could find, the last thing they wanted to eat was a mouthful of bees.

Robert asked Madeline, “So, uh, we’re eating those?”

She nodded, keeping her eye on the pot of bees as she stirred it with a wooden ladle.

“With the stingers and everything, huh?”

One bee lazily zig-zagged out of the pot; Madeline gently swatted it back into the pot with the ladle. She nodded at Robert’s second question.

“Well, I’ve never had anything like this back home, so it’ll be an experience. I suppose that’s the romance of war in faraway places: the opportunity to try new things.”

“I’ven’t had any bugs for dinner either,” John said.

“I ate a bug once,” Charles contributed. “It was just a potato bug though, and it was because of a dare, not for dinner.”

“See,” Robert said, arms outstretched. “We three are bold, fearless navigators of an untrammeled terrain. Just wait ’til the guys back home hear about this!”

“You’re drunk, Robert,” accused Charles.

Robert laughed, drunkenly it must be admitted, his face red from brandy warmth. “Allegations of behavior unbecoming of a soldier in the U.S. Army, you say? Well, I suppose they’re unfalse. In true Hemingway fashion, I am drunk and in uniform!”

An irrepressible eruption of drunken guffaws from the three men filled the silent corners of the kitchen. They laughed to stifle a sensation that was trying to slither out of the deep slime-slick pit where dark thoughts waited. It was fear, they knew, but this was a many-tentacled fear, an Old Testament kind of fear. Fear was the first emotion felt by Man, according to Genesis; “I was afraid because I was naked,” confessed Adam to God. The three men weren’t naked, but they were vulnerable, and though they didn’t know it, they felt it.

John and Charles and Robert might’ve tried for the door under normal circumstances, but there was an empty brandy bottle in the other room, and the three had done most if not all of the damage. As each man’s laughter shrank to wheeze, he contemplated the possibility that what they’d drunk with Victor was not, in fact, brandy. Charles began to sob.

“We’re going to die,” he squeaked. “I mean, who eats bees?!”

“WE DO!” The three sons and three daughters of Victor stood in the kitchen, by the pot. They each grabbed a handful of roasted bees, shoved it in their mouths, and chewed. Every bite produced a wince as stingers jabbed, tore, and rejabbed in their mouths. The younger children held back tears; so did the older children.

Robert, sufficiently appetized, proclaimed, “If this is what they’re feeding, then this is what I’m eating,” and plucked the smallest bee he could find out from the pot. He slowly set it in his mouth; once he was convinced that it wasn’t going to come back to life and fly down his throat, he began to chew. The barbed stinger lanced his tongue, then it was dislodged by chewing, then it speared the inside of his cheek. One bite found the venom sac and it burst; the toxin trickled down his throat. A warm, needling euphoria followed the venom down into his belly, where it radiated outwards to his fingertips.

With only the whites of his eyes showing, Robert burrowed his hands into the cauldron, scooping out bees like a bear dredging honey out of a jar and stuffing them into his mouth, chewing only long enough to get stung. “Jesus Christ, Robert,” John said. “Better save some for us.” He and Charles leaned into the pot, shoveling handfuls of bees into their chomping mouths. It was rhythmic, repetitive: shovel and chomp, shovel and chomp.

The three Americans crowded out Victor and his family. His wife tried to tell the men that the bees would taste a lot better if drizzled with their own honey and mixed with chopped strawberries and tomatoes, but they ignored her. They’d eaten almost a whole hive of bees each when they fell back onto the kitchen floor, their fingers dancing spastically on their chests. Their cheeks were purple and swollen, their lips blistered and bleeding. Their tongues, plump with poison and abraded by dozens of stingers, stuck out of their mouths and quivered with nervous ecstasy.

Starved for oxygen, John and Robert and Charles passed out in Victor’s kitchen. Had the story ended here, or back on page one in the exploding plane or shortly after in the forest, they would have been considered lucky.

Instead, they awoke some time later to the warmth of a nearby fire and the discomfort of shackles. They were hogtied and lying belly down in the mud, and their heads dangled into a rusted trough that reeked of pig shit and dried blood. The edge of the trough pressed against their throats and, along with the smell, made them gag a little. Something was covering their faces — a mask of a sort — and by looking at the other with great difficulty, John and Robert and Charles saw that they wore the faces of Victor’s truffle hogs.

John wore Moccus.

They turned in the direction of the warmth, and saw Victor, his wife, and six children gathered around a bonfire. The family wore wolf masks, made from grass and straw. Victor’s eldest son held a stone dagger. Just pulled from the fire, the dagger rippled with orange heat.

Victor and his family chanted in the language of these woodlands, a language far more ancient than French. As they chanted, the eldest son kissed the dagger’s blade, and passed it to the eldest daughter, who kissed the dagger’s blade and passed it to the middle son, who kissed the dagger’s blade and passed it to the middle daughter, who kissed the dagger’s blade and passed it to the youngest son, who kissed the dagger’s blade and passed it to the youngest daughter, who kissed the dagger’s blade and passed it to Victor’s wife. She whispered to the dagger, as though confiding in an old friend, kissed the blade sweetly, and passed it to Victor. He kissed the blade in a somewhat sheepish way, and walked to the three Americans; his wife and children stayed by the fire, chanting the ancient words.

Standing over the men and holding the dagger, still flickering orange, Victor told them he was sorry for what he was about to do. John screamed, truly screamed, “Fuck apologies! Let us go and cut it out with that occult shit! We’re the good guys!”

“Yes, you’re very good,” Victor said. “Me and my family are tremendously grateful for your sacrifice, and we will be in your debt.”

“You can pay that debt by letting us go,” Robert pleaded.

“That’s not a choice I can make. I’m sorry.”

The men kept begging, but Victor ignored them, muttering the incantations he’d practiced since first learned to speak. It took supreme focus to surrender himself to the primordial tongue, and he was never the brightest student of his family’s craft. A wrong phrase here, a mispronounced hex there, and he could accidentally gift these men with immortality.

Confident he got the chant right, Victor started with Robert, lifting his neck off the edge of the trough and slicing it with the dagger in a clean, right-to-left swoop. Victor held Robert’s head back to better let the blood out. Splashing onto the trough, the blood looked dark in the moonlight.

Victor dropped Robert and pushed him to the side. John was next, whose yells sounded like a pig’s shrieks. Victor pulled him up by his hair and stabbed him twice on either side of his windpipe. Blood sprayed out and into the trough until there was none left. Victor dropped John and pushed him to the side.

Charles was next, but he had passed out from the shock of it all, and strangled himself against the trough’s edge. Victor improvised: he untied Charles, tore off his shirt with the dagger, then made deep cuts down the length of his arms. Victor massaged the blood out of the cuts and into the trough, then dropped Charles and pushed him to the side.

The ritual complete until morning, Victor and his family went back into the house and rested.

The punctured membrane of the rising sun loosed a redness across the sky. Up early, Victor and his wife and six children dug a hole for the three Americans. The youngest children rolled the bodies into the grave. The middle children refilled the trench with dirt, and once they’d finished, the eldest children carried the trough to the mound of soil.

The blood inside had curdled, thick and brownish, overnight and Victor and his wife had to use their hands to pour it over the gravesite. After this, there was nothing more to do.

The next truffle season — and every one thereafter — beautifully bulbous black truffles grew on the gravesite, as though they’d oozed from the very core of a dark planet. Victor and his family became prosperous again as they sold the truffles to the great kitchens of Europe and North America, where they were known to chefs and gourmands as caillot de sang truffles, due to their resemblance to clots of human blood.

The Junction

The Junction is a digital crossroads devoted to stories, culture, and ideas. Our interests are legion.

j. everett

Written by

Writer in Cascadia. Sleep paralysis enthusiast.

The Junction

The Junction is a digital crossroads devoted to stories, culture, and ideas. Our interests are legion.

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