Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

Jans shifted his stick on the road. ‘You’ll be wanting him on your kitchen table,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she snapped.

  ‘For the washing. You know. To wash him all down for burying.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, freshly mortified. She had thought she must smell of Da’s handling somehow, or betray it in the way she moved, in her face; it must leak out of her eyes. That was why, she thought, Da had kept her from the town lately, because she could not be discreet. She would announce by her very presence what no one must find out.

  ‘I will fetch Seb and Da to bring him to you,’ said Jans.

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  The rain hissed all around them, and dripped among the trees its many different notes.

  Off Jans swung. When he was a flat, pale shadow behind several screens of rain, he turned. ‘You gorn home. They will bring him to you.’

  ‘I can’t leave him—’

  ‘You will just soak here. You will chill to your very bones.’

  He left her doubtful in the grey. And then, because he had said it, because it was instructions from someone else and not her own swinging will, she put the sack over her dad’s face and made off home, without its weight and warmth, the rain driving cold into her back as her punishment for not fetching him earlier, for being so uselessly alive, for everything.

  All she did when she got home was move the cheese-pot off the table, sweep the breadcrumbs into her hand, throw them to sog in the grass outside. Then she roused the fire and sat in the corner chair, wondering at the changed shape of things. Such a weight had lifted off her, she was surprised not to be up there, floating among those rafters, breaking apart as steam does, or smoke. And people would come soon and make this house a different place, look upon it and see how neatly she had kept it, look at the marriage bed and the truckle and not know, not for certain, the dreadfulnesses that had happened there. Certainly they would not speak of that possibility, not while she was there, whatever they suspected. Other people knew how to be discreet, even if Liga didn’t.

  2

  ‘You are lucky with the cool weather.’ Jans’s mother pushed past Liga at the door, a look on her face as if this were all Liga’s fault.

  Four men carried Da in, in a cloth. Jans’s father and the man Seb gave Liga the proper sober nod; the boys avoided her eye and affected to strain with the weight.

  Jans came up after them, importantly. Behind him bustled two more women, one with a white-covered basket—that was Rosa, or Raisa, Liga knew—the other with such a bosom, it seemed to be what she must carry in her arms instead of a basket, her main burden. Liga could not remember that one’s name.

  ‘Little Liga!’ The basket woman’s feelings drove her forward. ‘Since your dear mother, Agnata! . . . Well—’ Her embrace ended. ‘They’re together now, the two lovebirds.’ And she adjusted her cap and looked away from Liga’s puzzlement to Da’s worn bootsoles. His feet had crossed themselves with the carrying, but now that Seb man put them side by side and he lay neatly on the cloth.

  The visitors stood silent, but their selves filled the cottage air just as Liga had anticipated, bumping each other off-kilter with glance and shift and footscrape. The room was loud with unsaid things and awkwardness.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ said Liga. ‘Very much,’ she added, but nobody heard it among the sighs and turnings of the relieved men.

  ‘A good man lost to us, Gerten Longfield,’ said Jans’s father to her on the way out.

  Liga lowered her head in confusion—had Da been good, and she’d just not seen it? Could he have been good despite all of the—all of those twisted feelings he gave her? What did she know of goodness, of what constituted it?

  ‘Shall I go for the God-man?’ said Jans.

  His mother shook her head and tutted. She might as well have said it aloud: These is too poor to afford such burial, can you not see, boy?

  ‘Here, I have brought—’ Raisa blumped her basket on the bench-end there and swept its cloth back from pots and rags.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘I have plenty of practice laying out, but none of the makings any more.’ For she had buried baby after baby—Jans was her only survivor.

  ‘Has he another shirt?’ said Goodwife Bosom, all solicitous.

  ‘He has,’ Liga said, and she brought out the shirt she had sewn, and by the light of their silence she saw it for the slip-shouldered, cobbled-together thing it was. ‘Or there is the one—’ And she brought out the pieces of the better one, which were worn through in places, patched to confusion in others, as transparent as spider-web in yet others.

  ‘Oh, that will do better,’ said Raisa. ‘One of us can sew that up.’

  ‘It is very ragged,’ said Bosom.

  ‘Still, he is only going into the ground in it, isn’t he?’

  They all looked at the man on the table. The shirt he had died in was the best of the three.

  ‘What say we wash that one and dry it ’fore the fire? It needn’t take long,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘Here, Nance, you help me. Oh, his poor head.’

  ‘Liga, fill a bowl of clean water. I will put the bobs in it, and you can help wash him.’ Raisa was busy-busy, thinking and sighing and putting out pots and little sacks for the work.

  Liga went out for a brief time into the day, which was so much like any other and yet quite, quite unlike. She breathed its clarity and its coolness as she dipped the bowl in the water-bucket and put the lid back; she admired the sodden brightness of the leaves. Then she returned to the fusty house, which now smelled of death-herbs she remembered from her mother’s laying out, as Raisa unstoppered things and muttered to herself what they were.

  ‘Liga, you shall wash his legs and feet,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘You should not have to see this head too closely.’

  ‘Very well.’ Liga was glad to be directed.

  ‘Oo-er, he have something—’ Bosom was loosening his trousers. She drew from the belt-pocket two small, soggy bundles of filth.

  ‘They are amulets for something?’ Raisa darted to Bosom’s side, restrained herself from taking the objects from her. Jans’s mother leaned over Da’s head to peer at them. Liga’s scalp crept, and then the rest of her skin. The baby was in her like a third bag of mudwifery, invisible to these women.

  Bosom laid the things wet on the table like two dead mice, and timidly tweaked their folds apart.

  ‘That,’ said Jans’s mother heavily, ‘is the way Mud Annie wraps her devilments. I ought to know. I went to her often enough for help getting babbies.’

  ‘Erw,’ said Bosom at the wet black crumbs in one of the bundles. She sniffed them and made a face. ‘Some furrin spice.’

  ‘Oh, she puts all everything in it,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘Some that’s supposed to work and some that’s just for dazzlement. I rekkernise that smell.’

  ‘It was not of good times for you,’ said Raisa, her head on one side in a sympathy that was just a touch pleased with itself.

  ‘It was not.’

  ‘Did he have some ailment, Liga?’ said Bosom.

  Liga started. She had been scrubbing busily at Da’s toes, which were all wood and black crevices and kicked yellow toenails. ‘I—No. Not that I know about.’

  ‘Might not have been such a thing as he would tell his daughter,’ said Raisa, and Bosom nodded to show she knew the kind of thing that might be.

  Well, Liga also knew it, didn’t she? Yes, there was some ailment, all right. I cannot help myself, he had groaned often enough in her ear. A man must do it or he will go mad. And then he would perform that madness on her.

  It was then—and only Liga noticed it, she thought, because she was the youngest one and the unmarried one—that Jans’s mother lifted the cloth off her father’s marriage parts and washed them, with exactly the correct degree of detachment and efficiency. Look at it, Liga thought—not exactly looking, herself—so small and nothing, crinkled up there, and the bags below. How could I hav
e ever felt him harmful, with just that shrunken flop to hurt me with? Now that his mind is taken out of it, now that he’s not directing it, it is all such scrags, such as you might trim from a plucked bird, nothing fearsome at all.

  As for the rest of him, now that he had no will to move himself, no mind or voice, he was just so much meat, wasn’t he, that they prepared for cooking in the ground, cooking away to nothing. He was just a slab of flesh lit coolly from the unshuttered window, with unpleasant glistens at the head end, of wet hair and wound and teeth.

  ‘What will you do, girl? Who will you go to?’ said Raisa.

  ‘Yes, I have been wondering that,’ said Bosom. ‘It looks dire on your Longfield side, with your uncles gone to gypsies and that aunt of yours—where did she follow the man to? Middle Millet, was it?’

  ‘And Prentices will not have you, I don’t think,’ said Jans’s mother, ‘seeing as they would not take you when your mam went. You might try them, though, now that he is dead, for it was your da they took exception to, mostly.’

  ‘She does have Longfield eyes, though, and the cast to her face,’ said Raisa. ‘They will not like that.’

  ‘If they know he is not alive to bother them for money, maybe . . .’ said Jans’s mother.

  They were all looking at Liga.

  ‘You might try Rordal Prentice. Or his goodwife; she may have a heart for her granddaughter.’ But Bosom sounded doubtful.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Liga. ‘I will have to think.’ And she made a vague movement on Da’s shin with her cloth. The idea of her doing anything, or going anywhere, was entirely new to her. Everything up to now had been constructed on her father’s purposes—her whole life and, she assumed, the world around it. She had had thoughts that were her own, now and then—such as when that carriage had passed, up on the road—but she would never have been so daring as to call them wishes, and the notion of herself pursuing them, pursuing anything in her own name, was not one she had ever conceived of before.

  ‘And very well, too,’ said Jans’s mother to Bosom. ‘Give a girl time to grieve.’

  They contained Da into his clothes, and combed out his herb-washed hair. Hmm, Liga thought, he is better gentled by their hands than he has been for many a year; how odd that he must be dead for it.

  It was a relief when they lit the vigil-lamps and went. They embraced her confidently on the doorstep before leaving. They were proper women, from real families, and they knew how to behave; she wished she knew how to be daughterly, instead of baffled and envious as she was.

  When they had disappeared up the path, Liga stepped back inside. Her father lay in the candlelight, cleaned and dignified by their arrangements. He could not harm her now; he never could again. She might crow and dance around the table; she might cover his body with filth or flowers, or knock him clean off onto the floor, drag him outside, and chop him to bits with his own axe. She might kick the pieces about like pig-bladders—he would never rage at her or strike her again. He would never give her those nights’ peculiar sufferings again, where she could not tell what he meant as consolation and what as punishment; what he intended and what he was doing in sleep or madness; what indeed she herself endured or nightmared—or enjoyed, yes, because apart from him, there was no one to hold or touch her, and sometimes her lonely skin would stubbornly respond, though her muscles and bones were tightly resistant to him, all fastened gates and barricades. He had pressed and forced and pleaded, and in his frustration threatened her harm if she would not let him in.

  She stood at his mended, misshapen head, all mix-feelinged and waiting, for the women’s murmurings to clear from the room, for belief in the sight of his deadness to rise within her, for knowledge—of how to be, now, of what to do next—to arrive. He had run the world for her; it was a vast, unnavigable mystery without him.

  In the end, she did none of the desecrations she had imagined. She decided she would not spend another night in the cottage with him, and she shut him up alone in there and took herself out through the cold rain, which was gentle now, not driving down as it had been that morning. There was an oak she knew, broad and bent and barely alive, that had made a little house of itself, as if just for a fifteen-year-old girl like Liga. She had spent other nights there when a morning’s being shouted at felt like a fair price to pay to avoid a night’s being fumbled by Da. She slept there tranquilly now, waking occasionally to the knowledge that the universe had changed shape for the better, although sometimes she could not recall exactly how.

  Jans’s mother came back the next day early, and the two younger men brought spades—she heard them jolly on the road and then subduing themselves as they neared the house and the body. Liga went out to greet them and to approve the grave-place they proposed, among the first trees behind the house, away from the dung-place.

  Midmorning, Jans and his father came, having finished the milking, and Bosom and Raisa came too, and the men buried Da and the women watched silently, and then they sat and ate the foods that Bosom and Raisa had brought, and the visitors talked to each other quite easily so that nothing was expected of Liga. She sat, and ate soft cake, and had a sip of watered apple brandy, and wondered whether she ought to try to cry. When Mam had died, she had spouted tears like the town fountain and made noise and thrown herself about. But now it was as if she had no heart at all and no feelings, as if she were no more connected to Da than she was to that bottle there, or to Jans’s father showing chewed cake as he talked cattle and weather with the man Seb.

  ‘You must come to us if there is anything you need,’ said Jans’s mother as they left, and Raisa and Bosom nodded too, very vigorously, and Raisa said, ‘Any advice, and when I can spare aught from my garden, I will bring it by.’

  Then they were gone rather swiftly, and Liga sensed from their swiftness that they had discussed her when they left the day before. It was improper for her to stay here alone, but Jans’s house was not big enough, especially with Jans there—that would be even less proper. And the other two women, they must have other reasons not to want to take her in. It was not that Liga wanted to go to any one of them; still, there was a kind of shame in not being welcomed anywhere, in being offered nothing. But what had she expected? Da had made enemies of everybody; no one wanted dealings with that daughter of his, who hadn’t a word to say for herself, only those sliding eyes and that creeping demeanour.

  And how could she make herself useful? Did you see that pitiful shirt? Doubtless her cooking is just as poor. I would not want to have to teach that one, so far behind, she is virtually a gypsy-girl. That was the sort of thing she imagined them saying, as she closed herself into the cottage and regarded the table’s emptiness.

  Right through the autumn she managed to keep herself, without once having to trip to the town. Da had taught her, with his bossings and his beatings, to provide for him, and now that she was alone, she could provide—not too badly, either—for herself and her little wants. She laid up wood dutifully; there was the garden and the goat; there was the forest all around her, and the stream beside; and she had all the time in the world, and his remembered voice to guide her with its nagging, and his silence when she was busy and certain of herself. Every morning she woke in the truckle and sat up, and his wide bed was still empty and made neat, and she rejoiced that he was not in it.

  ‘What have we here, then?’

  She straightened from setting the snare, suddenly awkward about it.

  There he was, watching, one of the boys who had helped carry Da home. He had gone from big boy to near-man in those few months. He was much larger now, and his face was bonier and had a nap on it of a blond beard beginning. He quite spoiled that thin spread of bright leaves, where the breeze fiddled and the sun considered this and that. ‘This is town land,’ he said.

  The soft, heavy cords for the snares hung from Liga’s hand.

  ‘My father and I, we’ve got rights to cut here,’ he went on. ‘Have you rights to snare?’

  She glanced down at th
e snare she had just arranged, which might deceive a coney but was all too obvious to a human eye. ‘These are my father’s snares, in my father’s places.’ Her voice, after his deep one, floated feather-light and ineffectual from her lips. Chock . . . chock, an axe said nearby, but not near enough.

  ‘Ah, yes, your father,’ said the boy, half smiling. ‘May he rest easy. He had the right or maybe he didn’t. What I’m asking is: You. Do you have dispensations?’ The young man stood looking clever. Such a bulwark was a man with folded arms!

  ‘I have to eat, same as him,’ she said.

  ‘Then buy your own chicks and seeds and kits and raise them. That’s what we all have to do—we can’t just come and take what we want from town forest.’

  Blood-beats and confusion seeped up into her head.

  ‘Anyway, you are eating plenty, by how you look,’ he said. ‘Look how fat you are, on the town’s game. On ill-got game. Fat as yellow butter.’

  Her hand placed itself to her rounded-out middle.

  The woodchopper’s son saw it, saw the specific curve of her, and now her pinking face. Her wedding hand had shouted, Look at my nakedness! I wear no ring! and he had heard it clear as sneezing. His eyes came alight and he quickly doused that light. If she had had a ring—even of iron; even of carved wood, as some women wore whose men could not afford iron—all would have been different. She and the baby would have belonged to someone, someone who would protect them, and he would have seen that and not allowed his face to crawl so, with craftiness and disgust.

  He looked her up and down as if she were a beast he was assessing the conformation of, in a market stall. The whole aspect and stance of him changed. He had the coin to buy her, the set of him said. Was she the kind he would buy?

  She hurried away from him. If he followed her, could she still run? She had not run lately; she didn’t know how much of an encumbrance the bab was now. Did she know this part of the wood better than he? Would that save her, if he was a good runner?