Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan Read Free Book Online

not one she had ever conceived of before.
    ‘And very well, too,’ said Jans’s mother to Bosom. ‘Give a girl time to grieve.’
    They contained Da into his clothes, and combed out his herb-washed hair. Hmm, Liga thought, he is better gentled by their hands than he has been for many a year; how odd that he must be dead for it.
    It was a relief when they lit the vigil-lamps and went. They embraced her confidently on the doorstep before leaving. They were proper women, from real families, and they knew how to behave; she wished she knew how to be daughterly, instead of baffled and envious as she was.
    When they had disappeared up the path, Liga stepped back inside. Her father lay in the candlelight, cleaned and dignified by their arrangements. He could not harm her now; he never could again. She might crow and dance around the table; she might cover his body with filth or flowers, or knock him clean off onto the floor, drag him outside, and chop him to bits with his own axe. She might kick the pieces about like pig-bladders—he would never rage at her or strike her again. He would never give her those nights’ peculiar sufferings again, where she could not tell what he meant as consolation and what as punishment; what he intended and what he was doing in sleep or madness; what indeed she herself endured or nightmared—or
enjoyed
, yes, because apart from him, there was no one to hold or touch her, and sometimes her lonely skin would stubbornly respond, though her muscles and bones were tightly resistant to him, all fastened gates and barricades. He had pressed and forced and pleaded, and in his frustration threatened her harm if she would not let him in.
    She stood at his mended, misshapen head, all mix-feelinged and waiting, for the women’s murmurings to clear from the room, for belief in the sight of his deadness to rise within her, for knowledge—of how to
be
, now, of what to do next—to arrive. He had run the world for her; it was a vast, unnavigable mystery without him.

    In the end, she did none of the desecrations she had imagined. She decided she would not spend another night in the cottage with him, and she shut him up alone in there and took herself out through the cold rain, which was gentle now, not driving down as it had been that morning. There was an oak she knew, broad and bent and barely alive, that had made a little house of itself, as if just for a fifteen-year-old girl like Liga. She had spent other nights there when a morning’s being shouted at felt like a fair price to pay to avoid a night’s being fumbled by Da. She slept there tranquilly now, waking occasionally to the knowledge that the universe had changed shape for the better, although sometimes she could not recall exactly how.
    Jans’s mother came back the next day early, and the two younger men brought spades—she heard them jolly on the road and then subduing themselves as they neared the house and the body. Liga went out to greet them and to approve the grave-place they proposed, among the first trees behind the house, away from the dung-place.
    Midmorning, Jans and his father came, having finished the milking, and Bosom and Raisa came too, and the men buried Da and the women watched silently, and then they sat and ate the foods that Bosom and Raisa had brought, and the visitors talked to each other quite easily so that nothing was expected of Liga. She sat, and ate soft cake, and had a sip of watered apple brandy, and wondered whether she ought to try to cry. When Mam had died, she had spouted tears like the town fountain and made noise and thrown herself about. But now it was as if she had no heart at alland no feelings, as if she were no more connected to Da than she was to that bottle there, or to Jans’s father showing chewed cake as he talked cattle and weather with the man Seb.
    ‘You must come to us if there is anything you need,’ said Jans’s mother as they left, and Raisa and Bosom nodded too, very vigorously, and