We smelled like the tannery no matter how much we washed. At kirk, people would sooner stand than take the place beside us.
Still. Da never missed a Sunday. Mam had been sick a long while before she died. What little money we had went with her. Afterward, he started putting a little aside again, pennies at a time. For his burial, he said. He wanted no debts left behind, no expense put on me. When his time came, he meant to be laid beside her in the kirk-yard. That was all he wanted. I remember him showing me the place when I was a wee thing. There, hen. That's where I'll go. As though he were showing me some grand estate he'd bought. He should have married again after Mam died. I know that now. At the time, I'd have hated him for it. Of course, I hated him for not doing it, too. There was no one else, you see. No wife, or sons, or gaggle of daughters to share the work between us. There was Da, and there was me. So I worked. I worked the hides. I hauled the water. I kept his house and cooked his meals and scrubbed my hands raw before kirk, though it never did get the smell out. And then, one day, the cooper came. He'd come about the vats. That was the beginning of the end. For my father, and the one thing he'd wanted. And for me.
-The Ravishing
(formerly The Spoils of Heaven / Rowena and Cas sex cult fic)
