Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan Read Free Book Online Page A

Raisa said, ‘Any advice, and when I can spare aught from my garden, I will bring it by.’
    Then they were gone rather swiftly, and Liga sensed from their swiftness that they had discussed her when they left the day before. It was improper for her to stay here alone, but Jans’s house was not big enough, especially with Jans there—that would be even less proper. And the other two women, they must have other reasons not to want to take her in. It was not that Liga wanted to go to any one of them; still, there was a kind of shame in not being welcomed anywhere, in being offered nothing. But what had she expected? Da had made enemies of everybody; no one wanted dealings with that daughter of his, who hadn’t a word to say for herself, only those sliding eyes and that creeping demeanour.
    And how could she make herself useful? Did you see that pitiful shirt? Doubtless her cooking is just as poor. I would not want to have to teach that one, so far behind, she is virtually a gypsy-girl
. That was the sort of thing she imagined them saying, as she closed herself into the cottage and regarded the table’s emptiness.
    Right through the autumn she managed to keep herself, without once having to trip to the town. Da had taught her, with his bossings and his beatings, to provide for him, and now that she was alone, she could provide—not too badly, either—for herself and her little wants. She laid up wood dutifully; there was the garden and the goat; there was the forest all around her, and the stream beside; and she had all the time in the world, and his remembered voice to guide her with its nagging, and his silence when she was busy and certain of herself. Every morning she woke in the truckle and sat up, and his wide bed was still empty and made neat, and she rejoiced that he was not in it.

    ‘What have we here, then?’
    She straightened from setting the snare, suddenly awkward about it.
    There he was, watching, one of the boys who had helped carry Da home. He had gone from big boy to near-man in those few months. He was much larger now, and his face was bonier and had a nap on it of a blond beard beginning. He quite spoiled that thin spread of bright leaves, where the breeze fiddled and the sun considered this and that. ‘This is town land,’ he said.
    The soft, heavy cords for the snares hung from Liga’s hand.
    ‘My father and I, we’ve got rights to cut here,’ he went on. ‘Have you rights to snare?’
    She glanced down at the snare she had just arranged, which might deceive a coney but was all too obvious to a human eye. ‘These are my father’s snares, in my father’s places.’ Her voice, after his deep one, floated feather-light and ineffectual from her lips.
Chock
. . .
chock
, an axe said nearby, but not near enough.
    ‘Ah, yes, your father,’ said the boy, half smiling. ‘May he rest easy. He had the right or maybe he didn’t. What I’m asking is:
You
. Do
you
have dispensations?’ The young man stood looking clever. Such a bulwark was a man with folded arms!
    ‘I have to eat, same as him,’ she said.
    ‘Then buy your own chicks and seeds and kits and raise them. That’s what we all have to do—we can’t just come and take what we want from town forest.’
    Blood-beats and confusion seeped up into her head.
    ‘Anyway, you are eating plenty, by how you look,’ he said. ‘Look how fat you are, on the town’s game. On ill-got game. Fat as yellow butter.’
    Her hand placed itself to her rounded-out middle.
    The woodchopper’s son saw it, saw the specific curve of her, and now her pinking face. Her wedding hand had shouted,
Look at my nakedness! I wear no ring!
and he had heard it clear as sneezing. His eyes came alight and he quickly doused that light. If she had had a ring—even of iron; even of carved wood, as some women wore whose men could not afford iron—all would have been different. She and the baby would have belonged to someone, someone who would protect them, and he would