Tender Morsels (5 page)

She heard a rumbling up on the road. She would not see the carriage pass from here, but she went to the door to listen, to the coachman’s cries and the drumming of the horses’ hooves and the expensive squeaking of the carriage’s underpinnings and the soft crashes and scrapes of leaves and twigs against the body of the thing on that narrow part of the road. She followed these noises with her eyes. Where might it be going? Away, away, that was all she knew; with people in it who never had to sew a shirt but only to wear one; who wore, day and night, clothing of such smooth stuff, made by such fine tailors, that Liga would never be allowed even to pick up the snippings from their workroom floor.

Now evening had come, just while she watched there. She hurried back into the house and built up the fire and began yet again on the shirtfront. She laboured into the night, and achieved one side of the bunching, at least.

She yawned, cracked her knuckles, stood and stretched, and went to the door. ‘When is the old bugger coming, then?’ she said to the goat that lifted its head from its folded forelimbs out there. Look, the moon was up and all, the trees scrambling black across the stars, empty of half their leaves but still concealing bird and road, and Da in his silent striding. Everything felt unlatched, and swung. Was he still in the village, or nearly home, in the trees there? Everything was waiting for him to appear and tell her what she had done wrong, and what she would be doing to make up for the shirt, and the bread not rising so well, and above all, the baby.

She could take the lamp up to the road, maybe, to see if he were coming. But wouldn’t that enrage him too, that she had left the house? If he had drunk enough at Osgood’s, he would be angry whatever she did: leave or stay, sew the shirt well or poorly. He would be enraged by Liga’s very existing, and by her condition, and by his own stupidity for drinking all the mudwife money he had gained with that hare or whatever.

She took herself off to bed. Footfalls and rustlings filled the night outside, and imagined shouts of him coming drunk through the wood, calling out to her from high along the road, or from the path, or, like an owl, from the nearer trees. He walked around and around the house all night, never quite reaching it but always threatening to. In the course of one dream, she decided she would get up and go out and sleep in a forest place where he could not find her, but she did not wake widely enough to follow this good plan.

Morning came, sweet as new milk spilling up the sky, all dew and birdsong and bee-buzz. Up came the sun and beamed through the open window and woke Liga in her truckle bed. Had he come and she not woken? No, the big bed above was flat and untroubled. Had he fallen the other side of it, in his drunken state? She climbed over and no, the floor was empty there. She sat on the bed and stared at the strangeness of it. Maybe some woman? she thought hopefully.
That would set things to rights; it would have to. Maybe he would distract himself enough, and drink enough with that woman, to forget about Liga and allow the baby to happen?

At any rate, she would dress so as not to be too available to him when he came. She washed and clothed herself, and then went out into the sun. The day’s hugeness lay before her. Something was wrong that he had left her alone so free, for so long.

She milked, attended the cheeses, ate a little milked-bread, and tidied after that. She sat to the shirt out in the sun and completed the gather on the second front-piece with such dispatch and neatness, she could not believe she had had so much grief from it yesterday. And then she went gathering greens near the marsh; she would check his snares as well, and maybe find something soup-worthy to please him for his dinner, or roast whatever was roastable, before he had a chance to sell and drink it. He would slap her, but she would eat meat.

But when she came back near sundown, he was still not returned. She was at a loss. She ought to go up to the village and find him, dig him out of Osgood’s before he made a trouble of himself. For her own sake, she ought to locate him, see if he had broken himself somehow, or got himself put in the roundhouse. Before someone came by, smirking and gossiping all the way, to tell her; to say,
You are all he has, then, by way of family?
And to draw their own conclusions.

But instead, she propped the greens in water to keep them from wilting, and cleaned the snared rabbit kit and hung it, and neatened the shirt still further, and dreamed at the fireside.

She went to bed, and slept better that night than she had the previous. She woke to steady rain, though, and her cold duty. He would be so angry with her, that she had not fetched him sooner, before he spent all the coney-money. Or that she had not come and pleaded with whoever held him to release him, because he was all that kept her from starvation.

She put a sack across her shoulders to keep the worst of the rain off, and went up the path towards the world. Two nights without his shouting, two days; she was flying apart, without him to pack her into her corner and keep her there.

She found him in the ditch by the road, face down. The water all around him was thick with floating autumn leaves, and several were scattered on him, as if the forest were moving as quick as it could to conceal him. He had not drowned—his head was all caved in on one side, and when she turned him over she found an unmistakable hoofmark on his soft front.

She stood and she stared at him. What was she to do? She had not the strength to carry him. And where would she carry him
to?
What was the point of taking him anywhere? She must dig a grave for him. Right next to the ditch there—she could roll him into that. But to leave him, to fetch the spade—now that she had found him, could she walk away from him again, she wondered? Was that permitted? And so she stood undecided, taking in again and again the signs of the violence that had killed him, unable to trust her eyes.

Clack-
hoik
. Clack-
hoik
. Here came Lame Jans, who was a bit simple too. ‘What have you there, Liga Longfield?’

‘It’s my dad,’ she said. ‘Someone has run him down and left him.’

‘He don’t look too good.’

‘Oh, he’s gone.’ Da lay there, embarrassing with his head spilling along the drain-water, his face as if asleep where it was not smashed, one eye the littlest bit open, leaves in his hair like a girl dressed for a festival, a red leaf adhered to his head wound.

‘Looks like he have been stompled by a horse.’

‘I would reckon.’ Something threatened to rise from Liga’s insides. She squashed it down. What, you would
cry
for the old bugger? You would
mourn?

But another part of her was all confusion. Without his voice and body to shape her, did she even exist? She had not the vaguest notion how to live on, alone. No, not alone—with this baby, this baby!

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.

‘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.