Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  From the cottage, from the lovely cradle, came Branza’s tiny whimpering and shifting. Liga stepped across the cold grass to the house, sick at heart. But Branza, after all, was no monster; why, she was the prettiest bab that ever Sukie Taylor had seen, and plenty other people besides! The monstrousness of her begetting did not show in her. Certainly, it was never referred to in St Olafred’s—it was as if Liga’s father had been scrubbed from people’s memories, just as all her other enemies had been banished from the town. Perhaps it would be the same for this second child, seeing as all the fathers, all their houses, were gone? What was there for people to remember?

  She looked from the red-leafed bush by the doorstep to the green. Both had thickened and flourished in the short time since she had planted them, and now several buds were swelling, of red blooms on the red bush, of white ones on the green. She inspected these now, as she did every day, impatient for them to burst into some bloom she could recognise.

  There will be need, though, the moon-baby had said, for a name, to distinguish the one from the other. Liga had thought it was talking about those others, the dead babies, but it must have known; it must have seen the very first glimmer of this new baby happening, arising from that afternoon’s ordeal.

  And then, in disgust and disappointment at her own condition, she clicked her tongue and went inside, and rescued Branza from the complexities of bed-linen that had fallen across the little one’s head. She lifted her out of the cradle and kissed the baby’s pearly-skinned face, which fretted and squinted and sucked a fist and looked smokily about—they were going to be blue, those eyes, like Liga’s own and her da’s and her own long-lost mam’s.

  ‘Another one of you!’ she said severely, startling Branza’s fist from her face, which stared, then creased to cry. Liga laughed and put her to the breast. ‘There you go, you poor sook-a-bed.’

  She went to the shutter to let more light in. She gazed out at the forest as her milk began to ache and tingle and flow, as the cold air trickled in over her from the window. She stroked the round white cheek next to the round white breast, and marvelled at the firm connection between the two, and the goodness that flowed from one to the other.

  That happy summer mellowed to a rich, bright autumn, and Liga made many visits to the town, to market and to visit Goodwife Taylor to learn seamstressing and finer needlework. Wife Taylor was kinder and more patient than Liga remembered her from previous days—indeed, she barely remembered the goodwife at all, it had been so long since she had been in that house with Mam and played with Sukie.

  The baby grew inside Liga, and as with Branza, it was as if everyone knew, but nobody minded, or held against Liga, the manner of the baby’s getting. Wife Taylor put Liga to hemming little linens for the cradle and showed her how to cut the cloth of small nightgowns and bonnets. ‘These is perfect for learning on,’ she said. ‘No great long seams to labour up, and if you go awry, it’s little enough bother to unstitch them.’ And the goodwife worked on the yoke of one shift a perfect little rose of red silk. ‘I will learn you how to do this too,’ she said, filling in a cushiony crimson petal, ‘so as you can have pretty things around you, spring blooms all through the wintertime, and leaves, and life.’

  Whatever Liga did seemed acceptable, and people smiled on her and were polite and kind to her, whether she behaved quietly and shyly or, on brighter days, ventured conversation herself.

  She never invited any person to the cottage, nor did anyone visit unasked; it had never been a welcoming place, and now that it was all repaired and presentable, Liga was content to have it welcome only her and Branza while she accustomed herself to her new existence. Besides, she never quite lost, through all the pleasantness and convenience, the sense that the real holder of her house—maybe the happy-kind-patient Liga who belonged in this happy place, who deserved to belong here in place of this chance arrival, with her sullied body and clumsy mind—might knock at her door at any moment and claim the cottage back, and send her on her way. Look, she would say, you have only made a wrong turning; that is your cot along there, see? Through the trees. Look, your da is there, hands on hips, wondering where you have been all this time! Run along and take your punishment, girl. With your girl-bab and your big belly, you’ve many a night’s shouting and slapping coming to you.

  Months passed, and the nights began to nip in, and harvest-time came and went and left Liga her winter’s grain and nuts and preserves, and the leaves began their changing, and still no town-man came and ousted her, and still no one asked her to justify herself, or put any question to her for the purpose of shaming her. She kept herself busy, her head down always at some task when she was not feeding Branza or sleeping. If there was no way left to manage the house or garden or pantry, she applied herself most diligently to her needle and whatever piece Wife Taylor had her working. However long this good fortune lasted, she must prove to whoever had given it, to whoever might be watching her, that she was worthy of it, that she would make the best use of her time here that could possibly be made.

  When first the new baby was born, Liga thought the eyes were only a little bruised from birthing, perhaps; she thought the skin might clear and lighten with a few days’ life, as Branza’s rashes had come and gone. They changed so fast, babies. They coughed and their lips turned blue, but they ceased and smiled pink as hedge-roses the next moment. They were like shrews or wrens that rushed through life on a different scheme of time; a person could only stand, in her huge body with its slow heart, and watch in amazement.

  And in amusement too, for this child, unlike the first, was easily stirred to rages. The slightest discomfort set her asquirm, and if it was not remedied, off she would go, inconsolable, outraged. Sometimes it was as if some scandalous situation reminded itself to her as she fed, and she would detach herself from the breast, and look up at Liga in horror, and redden. If not very quickly replaced on the nipple, she would begin to wail, and she protested herself to exhaustion then, her limbs stiff and straining, her little sense unreachable through soothing words or the close embrace of her mother.

  ‘What kind of creature are you?’ said Liga one of the early nights, when some owl or dream had woken the baby in this way. ‘You would think you had all the world’s sorrows in you!’ She had made a light to see if something was perhaps gnawing on the child, some rodent or insect—she could not think what. But nothing could she find and still her daughter lay, angrily crimson against the bedclothes, shuddering the breaths into herself between screams that tore the sleep from Liga’s mind in ragged strips. Branza slept on, undisturbed, in her bed. Such a difference between that one’s peaceful, pearly slumber and this one’s red rage! She scooped up the child and kissed the hot face; the clenched-closed eyes that still leaked tears; the tiny mouth, with its leaf of tongue, from which such noise emerged! ‘I think you should be Urdda—little red one. Look at you—you are quite the wrong colour.’ And she kissed the mottled stomach, a squall deafening one ear. ‘Shush, child! Shush, Urdda, before you start to bleed out of your skin!’

  Her rages aside, if anything Urdda grew darker with time. It happened so day-to-day that Liga did not notice; it was only when Branza crawled to the bab as it lay there on a cloth on the grass and Liga looked up from the little night-shift she was sewing and saw them side by side that she realised, no, it was not the fall of any shadow on the littler one, it was the cast of her skin.

  And the young men came down the path in Liga’s memory, and the foreign man’s son was among them. How unconnected this seemed with the two tiny maids on the cloth there! They seemed to bear no relation whatever, the two events, the two small playacts, one to the other, despite their being clearly both parts of the same story.

  Or if there was a connection it was not one that mattered, not here in this house and this place. Here things were just as they were; they were not made something else by the work of fathers and gossips. Branza gave Liga only joy that Da was dead and his daughters living. And in the same way, Urdda, wi
th no man nearby claiming or denying her, remarking either way on her, was her own darkening self alone, her gleaming eyes awakening, more and more thought and life growing behind them. It might have been different had she been a boy-child and had Liga to handle his little spout and be reminded of those others, those weapons such spouts could become. But instead, here they were, the three of them, each with her parts that could hurt no one, that could force themselves on no woman, folded neat away between her thighs.

  Four years passed, and not without incident, for the infancy and childhood of two girls, making a mother out of their mam and sisters out of each other, is one incident after another, each as momentous as the last.

  The two bushes grown from the jewels attained the height of Liga herself, and then stood and thickened there on either side of the cottage door, tended by Liga, and as they grew capable by Branza and Urdda also, and flowering each spring: the northern bush with large, waxy-petalled flowers so white they almost burned the eye, the southern with red blooms of the same shape, and equally dazzling. In spring and summer Liga was always anxious that some person would happen by the cottage, for the flowers were so conspicuous and yet she did not know the name of them, having never seen their like on her walks with Mam as a child. She felt sure any visitor would want to know their identity and origin, and though she was confident as time went on that she would be able to answer, Oh, I don’t know—aren’t they strange? They have always been here, that is all I know, she was uneasy that the very question would attract the wrong attention, and lead to some power realising, Oh no, she is too happy, Liga Longfield. How have we let her languish here so many moons? And the bushes would puff away like blown dandelion clocks, and the house would lean and sag, and fill with her father’s thumping and shouting.

  Though she tended the bushes dutifully and a little fearfully, to all her other occupations she brought the kind of joy that other women, in that other world, might reserve for Bear Day or the dance on Midsummer Night, or for a daughter’s making a good marriage. Her girls she watched in wonder: their growth and increasing sureness of movement; the world’s pouring of itself into their gradually, constantly, confidently realising minds; their readiness to smile and laugh and draw Liga’s own smiles and laughter out from the deep place where they had run away and hidden in the years since Mam. The girls were two flames at which she warmed herself to humanness, having long been something else—stone, perhaps; dried-out wood. Their perfect trust that the happy times would continue—she watched it and she sipped it as some small birds sip nectar, and she began, if not to perfectly trust it herself, at least to hope more strongly, at least to look beyond the beauties of the immediate season to the plans and practicalities demanded by the next—or the next several years, maybe? Maybe.

  Branza and Urdda themselves—she could not have asked for finer children, or for two more different from each other. Even the contrast in their appearance amused her: Branza all white-golden tranquillity, standing straight and observant; Urdda always moving, bent to run or spring, her black hair flying; her words, her nonsense words, her songs, unreeling from her mouth like strings of coloured pennants. ‘Angel girl’ was Liga’s fondname for Branza, while Urdda was ‘my little wild animal’. Branza was the sort to crouch by a stream for all the time it took the fish and waterbirds and other creatures to forget her; Urdda was the kind to run up and fling her dress to the shore and her self into the water, shouting. They maddened each other, as all sisters do, yet neither would have known what to do in a world without the other. Liga fed them, bathed and clothed them, told them stories, sang them to sleep and learned their songs, kissed them and accepted their kisses, held them and was held by them and soothed by their hands’ touch. Sometimes she cried from it, and sometimes she thought she would die of it, of the luck and the joy of having been given these two little animals to grow and to love, and to be grown by, and to be loved by.

  ‘Come help me, Urdda!’ Branza shook her sleeping sister’s shoulder. ‘There is something I want to try.’

  Urdda curled tighter away from her and grunted.

  ‘I need you.’ Her sister poked her with all the authority of a five-year-old over a sister of four. ‘I need a person with two arms.’

  ‘Use Mam’s,’ said Urdda indistinctly.

  ‘Mam is busy sewing. Come on, you will like it.’

  At last Urdda crawled out of the bed, and they dressed and sat to their sopmilk, and then Branza took two stale bread-ends and off they went. It was not far, only to a clearing a little way from the house where Branza came to see deer sometimes.

  ‘Now, stand,’ Branza instructed, ‘like this.’ And she stood with her arms stretched out from her sides.

  Crossly, still not properly awake, Urdda did as she was told.

  ‘No, here, in the sunshine. Keep very still. Put your hands flatter. Yes.’ She broke off a piece of bread crust and put it on the back of Urdda’s hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Shh. They will not come if they hear us squabbling.’

  Patiently she moved up Urdda’s arm, laying crumbs all the way. Then, to the great amusement of both of them, she placed crumbs on top of Urdda’s head, and then moved on to the other shoulder and along the other arm. A finch flew down and landed on the first hand. ‘Do not move,’ Branza whispered. ‘I want to see you quite covered.’ And she withdrew into the forest shadows in sight of Urdda, and stood there and watched, pale and excited.

  Already several birds had come—they must know this place; Branza must have fed them here before. The air began to fill with the light, dusty sound of their wings, and the pips and peeps of their calls. They landed and landed, and Urdda’s arms rocked at each landing. When the first bird arrived on her head, she managed not to cry out, but she made such faces at the catching of their claws in her hair, at the small blows of their pecking on her scalp, that she saw Branza cover her mouth to keep the laughter in, off there among the trees.

  The birds were bright in the sun, and the busyness of them flaunted and flapped the sunlight so that Urdda felt radiant with them, as if they were a kind of fire flaming across the top of her. What a grand idea this was! She could see why Branza had needed her; on her own she could only have organised bread along one arm. Of course it was better to have a whole person given over to birds this way, for them to perch on and feed off.

  At the same time, Urdda wanted more than anything to laugh aloud, to shake herself and explode the birds away and run. She would not, but the desire to do so itched in her bones and made her stretched arms wobble under the combined weight of the birds.

  She stood straight and still, not frightening a single bird away, and Branza, hands clasped, watched her from the wood-edge until the birds had pecked up all the crumbs from Urdda’s person, and all the spilled crumbs and pieces from the grass around her feet, and one by one had flown off, leaving widening breaks in the flaring line of sunlight. Two sparrows must sit and preen awhile once they had fed, but when they were done they, too, darted away, and then Branza ran out of the trees in delight and satisfaction, waving the other bread-end. ‘Now me!’ she said. ‘That was quite wonderful!’

  4

  Once I left St Onion’s, life were both kind and cruel to me. First chance I had, I grew myself a fine beard, for very early I tired of being mistook for a child, however much advantage I could get from it in terms of irresponsibilities, and I never shaved nor trimmed it, but grew it until it was well longer than myself eventually, and my head-hairs to match it, right down to the ground. Luxuriant they were to begin with, and dark, and I tell you the ladies could not keep their hands off them for a time there, however slight and warped were the body they hid.

  I never managed a trade or profession, but I had some luck at cards, and in fine company, due to the oddity of my small stature and the inscrutability of my features to most men’s eyes. There were a certain type of rich feller liked to use me much as a doll is used, to dress me up in tiny clothes and have me pop up ar
ound his house, spreading scandal and scampery. And many a year passed in this merry type of employment.

  But I put all of my eggs in one basket with one lord, and off he went and died, didn’t he? And what I thought I had coming to me through him, his family felt I ought not to gain—for certainly I had done as he said very well, and their names were all muddied about the place most satisfactory. I got barely a worm-squidge out of them. By dint of being inscrutable, though, I built and built that squidge up, to the point where it all exploded around me in a mess of thieves and cheaters—myself included, I don’t deny that—and bills for liquors I and my fellows had drunk but not paid for, meals unremunerated that we had long since shat out.

  I took myself to the country very quietly upon this disaster. I had heard a while before that Hotty Annie were doing her worst out of some hedge nearby St Olafred’s somewhere, and now that I were so downcast about my fortunes, I aimed for there.

  And a cheerful town I found it, though a little overdecorated with flags and shields of rampant black bears. The guard were not nearly so toothful and clawsome, though, and on the way up the street I were teased and flirted with by some most robustious young women of the laundry trade; they slapped their work very promising on the slabs along that lane. Should my fortunes turn, there will be good pickings along that lane, I thought. Heavens, I might find a lass so amiable, so amused by me, she would turn me her tuffet gratis, out of no more than curiosity. One never knew one’s luck in a strange town, I had found.

  ‘Annie Awmblow?’ said the wool-hag in Olafred’s market, and chewed the inside of her cheeks awhile. ‘I non’t know that name.’

  ‘She were a bit touched, as I remember,’ I says. ‘Had something of a talent as a charmer.’

  ‘Ah!’ Her friend, who had several more teeth but was none the prettier for it—oh, I was spoiled from my time of fine living, when pretty women were provided me as natural as bed and board—her friend leaned over and said, ‘A charmer called Annie? That will be Muddy Annie Bywell and no other, roun this districk.’