blood is blood

While her brother's foot was being blown off, Julia's happened to be grinding the life out of a mole cricket she had unearthed some number of rows away at the other end of the field. "Thank God I couldn't keep up with him -- he was such a good worker," she would say whenever the subject came up, even to her grandchildren 60 years removed from the event. She always focused on the positive, certainly never mentioning --never to anyone-- the sensation of holding her brother in her arms as he died, his blood mixing with the soil to create an ochre mud that reminded her instinctively of the aftermath of a pig slaughter. Certainly she never mentioned that.