Ghostheart by Ananda Braxton-Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

them. In his corner, Pa cuddled the jug like a newborn and jumped every time Moo shifted in her corner. Now and then he almost said something, but right at the point of it he always backed off.
    He was frighted of her.
    Moo was white-faced now. She looked to be just about bleached, the heart-ague weathering into her like salt into driftwood. All the blazy whiteness of her face made her eyes pool in her head like dew-gems. Apart from her Dead-duties, for two days she’d sat wrapped in fogs with her slow breath the liveliest part of her.
    With one rag less gumption my parents would both fold up and slide to the earth. We needed the market but they didn’t think of such things as food anymore. Outside the sun filled up the sky. Even shady parts were flushed and when I went down into the heat-wavy plots it was like having a thick pottage poured right into my head. The crops drooped under grey-leaf and meal-bug. That morning I’d found Gilpin picking the bugs off and eating them like they were currants. That inclined me to determination. I went back into the snug.
    ‘Pa!’ I said, poking him.
    ‘Yes, Birdie.’ He looked up at me with his moony-eyes and whistled like it might be comical. It wasn’t.
    ‘When will we bury him?’ I asked.
    He took a long, sucking swig on the jug. ‘When your mother shrouds him,’ he said. He made a stab at the song of the curlew but his lips wouldn’t pucker and he just spat instead.
    I looked at my mother. It didn’t seem very likely that she would ever move again.
    ‘Moo!’ I said, sharp-like. She just sat hangdog.
    ‘Moo!’ I said, louder. You could’ve drawn blood with my voice. Once it would have had her banging on at me about talking to others like you’d be talked to yourself.
    Nothing.
    It was no good. She was stone, and Pa was soused.
    I set myself to work then, starting with the cow. She couldn’t wait to be settled, while Boson could. Leaving milk in the churn and Gilpin with a dipper, I fetched the baskets Mrs Slevin had brought that were filled with Dead-cloths. She’d probably blessed them at her wicked old altar.
    ‘More than likely she’s just
soaked
them in devilishness, Mother,’ I said ringingly.
    Moo didn’t stir.
    Not even a sigh.
    So alone I spread the Dead-cloths, and I shrouded my brother. I started at his feet that were just grey lumps at the end of his paling legs. Wrapping the clean, sweet-smelling cloth up and up the log of his body, lifting and turning him as I needed — in spite of the grumblings inside him that looked to be working up to some type of skin-bust. I tried not to look. I tried not to know.
    I wrapped up and up, binding his scabbed shanks and his knees gravelled to the bone. I wrapped up his white thighs bruised with old bruises, yellowing, and new black ones, too. I looked away while I wrapped up his hips and so forth. His belly had bladdered-up from the gases, but after a struggle I got it wrapped down tidy. At last he lay swaddled like a sleeping newborn with only his head free. I touched his hair.
    It was as soft as when he lived.
    The back of my throat filled with an aching clot.
    I swallowed it.
    The last cloths went on easy enough. He looked untroubled by all the fuss. The cloths went over the scar on his neck where I’d hooked him instead of the salmon that time at the Blackwater, up and over his split lobe where Mungo had bit him snapping for a bee and then licked and licked at the wound in sorryness until he looked to lick the ear right off — and at the last the cloths went over the rough-razored skull he’d brought back from his stay among the Little Brothers.
    At last it was done and I went out to the plots. If we didn’t do something before winter the planting ground would just sink back to moaney again and be no good to anybody. I couldn’t find the hoe so I started up pulling at the weeds, feverish-like, by hand. I was sick of putting out my hand to a tool and finding it gone.
    Since early summer our house-hoard