Tender Morsels (7 page)

Nothing came of the encounter with the woodman’s son, though: not through the remainder of autumn; not into winter, either. Liga kept herself secret, and sometimes, without aid of any village life, she had a thin time, but always at her thinnest, some skinny fish took her bait under the stream’s ice, or she chose the right snow to dig at and found some bit of growth that would boil up flavoursome, or some small hibernating thing sent up a curl of sleep-breath against the sunlight. She all but hibernated herself, eking out her firewood and her squirrel-store of nuts, harbouring her small warmth in the truckle, dragged close to the tiny fire.

Her baby came steaming into the world one deep-winter night. Straight away, Liga saw what had been wrong with the other one—its head too big for its body, its pointed chin. This one had cheeks; it had limbs like baby-limbs, not like an old man’s, all shrunken and delicate. And this, look: it was a girl, like her. He is outnumbered now, she thought deliriously. We will combine against him! We will get what we want!

When she had dealt with the mess of the birthing, she laid the wrapped baby on the table. All stiff and light-bodied and leaky, she sat on bunched rags on the bench and examined it by the candle.

All the expressions that are possible crossed its face, as if its thoughts were wise and limitless one moment, daft and animal the next. And Liga too was pulled towards awe, that this little girl-thing gave off such an air of being entitled, and then towards pity at its abjectness and its frailty and—how soft it was, the surface of it, and so warm! She could not believe the tiny makings of its mouth, or its perfected eyelashes, its ears like uncrumpling buds, all down and tenderness. She was full of the joy of her father being gone—that she could sit like this all night if she wanted, not bothered or harangued, without a remark from any other person, and watch this creature busy with its morsel of
life, its scrap of sleep, its breaths light as moth-wings lifting its narrow red chest.

Sleep nudged at her eyelids before she had looked her fill, and she took up the baby and brought it into the truckle bed with her, for still she did not like to go to the marriage bed. She never would; she had thought several times to break that bed up for fuel, except that her mother had died in it too, hadn’t she? It was all she had of her mam, however loud sounded the snores and creaks of her father’s memory.

The baby squeaked some time in the night, and Liga woke from the darkest, softest sleep, wondering muzzily as she surfaced what kind of rat or vermin had got in and how soon Da would wake too, and crash about, chasing and killing it. And then she realised—oh, he was gone, gone forever! And this, this being tucked against her that clawed the dimness, with its thin throat learning to push out that miniature voice, this was—

She brought out a breast, pleased to employ it for the first time in its proper usage, instead of endure its being fumbled from behind as he muttered her mam’s name in her ear. The baby mouthed and nodded bemused against it awhile, and then its instinct fastened it to the nipple, and after some noises so much like relish and surprise that Liga could not help but laugh—a soundless laugh, through her nose, such as would not frighten a bab—it more or less settled to what it must do.

She lay there in the grainy dark with the little animal at her, its fist on her breast as if holding it steady for the sucking, as if it had organised the world this way and were only taking its due. How charming it was, and how lucky was Liga, to be thus organised by a being so harmless, and so clear in its needs, and those needs calculated so exactly to what she could give!

Spring blew in, not quite expected. Fistfuls of pale leaves spurted from the oak branches; buds like candle-flames glowed along other tree-limbs; snow sagged away, leaving wet black ground; and
bulb-fingers probed up there, all hopeful curiosity. The earth’s lungs, coated in green ooze and thaw, breathed out blossom-scent and sour rot and fungus-must, wet and warm and aware, where before the air had been cold and blind, remote as the moon.

Liga went out and stood in the first surprising morning of that breeze, all milky and with her baby in her arms. Her hair blew out long, hardly tied up any more, she had so neglected it; its dull yellow strands smelled of smoke and bed across her face.

The baby blinked and wondered against her chest, waved its aimless arms, frowned in the sun-dapples. Liga could almost imagine this was her own first time outside too, her first spring, the world was so quiet and light without her father, and there was nothing in it that she was obliged to fear.

The first she heard of the lads was their voices up at the road. There was a burst of rough laughter as they rounded the hill—three of them, maybe more. Then they quietened, suddenly, as if hushed by someone.

She knew that laughter. It was the noise of boys showing off for each other, boys with heavy voices and eyes that didn’t properly look at you. She’d a distant memory of that noise, in the market in town, as she walked with her mother.
Come
, said Mam.
We’ll walk through the cloth hall while they pass
.

‘Come,’ said Liga now, and picked the baby up out of the truckle, and stood listening.

They were coming down the path to the house. They could not keep silent; there were too many of them, and some wanted to show the others that they didn’t care to be hushed; they slapped their feet down and grunted. One of them hawked and spat. Another hissed a remonstration, and was snarled at.

Liga crept to the chimneypiece, fast, silent. She took out the loose stone and the key from behind it, and crossed to the wooden store-chest. She opened it, laid the baby on the cloths inside, closed it, locked it. She hid the key and there they were, clear of the trees—
five of them, all large except for that runtish boy cockily leading. The woodchopper’s son was there. That foreigner’s boy was there. She remembered asking Mam, of his even darker father,
Why has he all sooted up his face?
And Mam had shushed her.

This she saw as she dragged the door closed. On seeing her, they started to run. That little one shot towards her, but she got it done, she dropped the latch just as he banged into the door from the other side. She gasped and jumped back. Coldly she thought, You should have run for the trees.

They threw themselves at the door. Terrible things they were shouting. They were not sensible; they were in a kind of frenzy. Nothing would stop them, not door, not latch, not wall. She understood not to shout back or to cry out in fear—they would enjoy her shouting; it would whip them up worse. She sat silent beside the chest in the corner, trying to disappear.

Their heads came to the window, and shouted there and joked and crooned; their laughter bounded about in what was once her home, which had been cosy and safe until just a little while ago but now was spindly as a birdcage, fragile as a fey-lamp on its dried stalk under a bush. She had never felt the house to be fragile before, not even in the wildest storm, but now it seemed made of leaf-matter or smoke, and the boys’ arms waved in the window like May-ribbons loose from their pole.

They pulled out the windowframe. They started to break pieces off around the window. Liga put her hand on the wooden chest. ‘I will come back for you,’ she said to the child inside, and she climbed up into the chimney. She thought of herself going nimbly up and out the top—she had done it before—dropping off the edge of the soft thatch, running, losing them in the forest, listening to them disperse, disappointed; instead, she found her shoulders wedged, and no way to turn them so as to fit through. She looked up and saw the chimney-cover and a wink of sky.

The boys thudded into her house. Their voices funnelled up to her. She reset a slipping toe and a stone came loose and carried soot down to the dead hearth.

‘She’s up the chimney!’

‘Can you see? Is she out the top?’

A voice came suddenly loud up the chimney. ‘I can see. I can see right up her. Right up the crease of her. Come, sweet one, bring down that little purse to me! I shall count every coin you have in it!’

‘Light a fire! Smoke her out!’

‘She’ll be the stubborn sort; she’ll die up there of smoke rather than tumble down.’

‘We’ll have her then, then.’

‘You want a roast, go and buy your feck-meat from Sweetbread & Sons.’

‘Fox, you go up. You’re littlest.’

‘Yes, Fox! You’re perfect for the job!’

‘Wi’ this new shirt? My mam would kill me.’

‘Take it off, man!’

‘May as well be nekkid now as later, eh?’

‘Must I?’

‘Go on! We’ll let you have first go of her.’

In the silence, Liga pushed her shoulders up against the obstruction, turned, pushed. Soot went dancing down.

‘She have not gotten out the top yet, have she?’

‘Shut up and listen!’

They shut up.

‘Look up there, Fox.’

‘I can hear her in there,’ said Fox. ‘I can hear her breathing. She is trapped.’

Liga took the sleeping baby out of the chest, out of the house. She carried her with care and pain to the stream and laid her on the bank there and waded in, and washed and washed her cringing parts, her torn. She took off her dress and washed herself—all of herself—rinsed out her hair, rubbed the smell of them off her, soaked her clothes and squeezed them out and dressed herself in their limpness.

She carried the baby into the forest. The day was closing, the sun gone from casting its excessive light on everything. But then,
eye after eye, the stars came out. The moon’s fat face rose and hung in the treetops, staring.

Liga only walked, only walked away. Slowly, because to walk was to hurt, she put the distance, step by step, between herself and her father’s house, where all her troubles had happened. No matter now that Mam had died in that bed. At least Da had called on Mam’s memory as he misused it. But that strangers should come, and with no awareness of its sacredness, one by one, have of Liga there, and think that that was the place to do such things—well, Mam must be truly dead and gone, and not watching from anywhere; clearly she was of no help to Liga now.

Liga came to a part of the night where the path ended and the ground dropped away to rocks far below, and a different level of forest. It seemed like the answer to her; it seemed fated, a kindness. She would throw the little one first, and then there would be nothing left for her in this world, and she would be able to cast her own self off.