Fish Tails by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page A

precisely it was that the Midsummer Day rule allowed. She prayed, actually prayed, that the second night of the festival would allow their departure as well as the first would have done.
    Trudis, however, now that she was a woman, had actually, for the first time in her life, planned to do something. She got up early, baked griddle cakes (very badly, one side drippy, one side black), ate all but one of them with copious amounts of the honey that her mother allowed her only sparingly (it came from elsewhere, and it could not be readily replaced). She then took the saved griddle cake with her to the meadow hoping to find Gralf Garn, a man-­sized boy she’d been looking at and sharing some fleshly amusements with for some time. Gralf Garn had taken a bite of cake, though he’d spit it out as he had followed her home, and after a lengthy interval in the one bed in the house, by early midmorning he was ensconced in Lillis’s kitchen.
    Lillis, weary past belief, came through her door at noon that day, saw Gralf Garn drinking beer in the kitchen while Trudis squirmed in drunken and lubricious pleasure on his lap. Lillis, silent more from exhaustion than prudence, thereupon received Gralf Garn’s greeting: a few rude words, several of them the same word used as noun, adjective, verb, and expletive, and in that single moment of absolute weariness let all resistance go. The inevitable fell into place around her, splitting off determination and hope and mere stubborn will. Her long battle had ended in defeat.
    Honorable defeat, she whispered to herself. At least that!
    Lillis had known Gralf Garn from birth. He was the only child she had ever delivered who came from the womb with teeth that bit the hand that drew him forth. She knew him far better than Trudis ever would, and she was saddened thereby. Trudis was no longer a girl, and would undoubtedly soon be a Ma. It was no longer worth the battle it would take to get her away. She might save the girl from Hench Valley, but for what? Trudis would make a Hench Valley around her wherever she was.
    She left the two of them drinking, and weary though she was, she recollected that she was still considered an attractive woman even after all her childbearing. Accordingly, she shoved a wedge beneath her door. In no other house in Tuckwhip would a wedge have held, but Lillis’s house had been built by Joshua, not merely thrown together. She was already prepared to leave; she needed only to sleep a few hours first. Her few treasures and necessities were already packed, waiting for her in the woods. She would pick them up when she left that night. She further assured her safe departure by dosing Gralf’s bottle when he left it briefly to go outside and relieve himself against the front wall of the house. All the men in Hench Valley did it, marking territory, like dogs. Well, he would have a good nap that would extend into a good night’s sleep. A nice long sleep!
    As a final drop of the bitterness Tuckwhip had held for her, she mused on the fact that Trudis and Gralf were undoubtedly well mated. As river stone to river stone, they were mated: each unyielding as stone, each mind shaped as river stone is shaped, worn, rounded, hard, unusable for any constructive purpose, shaped by long, aimless tumbling in careless waters so it would twist beneath your foot and break an ankle for you, only good for throwing, if one wished to hurt or kill. There were piles of such stones here and there throughout the villages. They were pointed out to women. Those were what would be flung at a woman “fer tawkin’ back ’r not havin’ supper ready.” There was less stoning of women now than in the past. One did not destroy what one could not replace, though when drunk, the men sometimes forgot that. Men who lost their temper ended up with no woman at all, and most men in Hench Valley were already in that category.
    At about midnight she left Hench Valley by the safe