“Pay attention, girl!”
Celina’s new assistant, Zula, tore her eyes from the field where a group of children assembled for the hunt. She had a more important job now.
Celina held out the bowl of dye Zula had helped make, ground-up walnut shells steeped seven days. “You may have to do this alone next year. Recite the markings.”
Zula nodded. “Dots for Glodziks, stripes for Borawskis, …” she reeled off the twenty families in town.
Father Pieski came to lean over the wall. “Why don’t you just keep a tally board? It doesn’t matter who gets which eggs. Don’t most of them wind up in the common pickling jar anyway?”
Celina bit back a remark. He was young, he would learn. “It’s tradition.” After sixty-eight years of living, she knew offering reasons only invited argument. She shoved more wood under the cauldron.
Elder Helbig whistled, and the children cheered, fanning out amid the dried stalks of last year’s wheat.
Father Pieski had arrived late last spring from somewhere down south, fresh from whatever schooling the Church provided. His first task was burying old Father Milinski, who’d succumbed to catarrh over the winter and had lain in the ice house, alongside the widow Gratz, until they could both be properly interred. This was Pieski’s first year to see Pasque flowers break through the melting snow, his first rabbit laying season. He’d preached his first ever Easter sermon that morning. Not the best Celina had heard, but far from the worst.
He watched the children crouch through rows, shove vegetation aside. “It’s strange,” he said. “Before I came here, I’d never heard of egg-laying rabbits. It’s a wonder.”
Celina scoffed. “It’s a scourge. They have five times the kits as a normal rabbit. In my grand-granna’s time it was like locusts. If we didn’t hunt them and collect eggs, they’d eat every field to stubble.”
“It’s a shame. The creatures are such pretty colors.”
“Which means we make more selling the pelts. No mistake, Father, these are the enemy.”
“Hm.” He stood, brushed his elbows, and wandered off to interfere with someone else. Soon, the first children started coming back. Tiny Anna Kordula proudly held out her basket of six eggs – yellow, pink, blue, and green.
The girl Zula picked them out to set carefully on a bed of straw on the table. She reached for her paintbrush. “Zigzag for Kordula.”
Celina nodded. Zula painted careful lines, hunched over, tongue sticking out.
Celina itched to pick up a brush herself, for the child was painfully slow. But she would learn. “They need not be perfect.”
Zula nodded, squinted, and painted faster. Some older children picked up brushes to paint their own eggs.
Celina counted. There seemed fewer eggs than last year. Pray God that continued. Some years they increased, but overall there had been many more Easter rabbits when she was young. Zula might even live to see the pests eliminated.
Some eggs had dried long enough – she placed them in a scoop and lowered them into the boiling water, watching them dance.
What would the town do, once there were no more? Another thing she’d learned – people hated to let a tradition die, even if the reason for it was past. Well, it wasn’t her problem – she would be long gone. They’d come up with something.