Read Tender Morsels for Free Online

into her corner and keep her there.
    She found him in the ditch by the road, face down. The water all around him was thick with floating autumn leaves, and several were scattered on him, as if the forest were moving as quick as it could to conceal him. He had not drowned—his head was all caved in on one side, and when she turned him over she found an unmistakable hoofmark on his soft front.
    She stood and she stared at him. What was she to do? She had not the strength to carry him. And where would she carry him
to?
What was the point of taking him anywhere? She must dig a grave for him. Right next to the ditch there—she could roll him into that. But to leave him, to fetch the spade—now that she had found him, could she walk away from him again, she wondered? Was that permitted? And so she stood undecided, taking in again and again the signs of the violence that had killed him, unable to trust her eyes.
    Clack-
hoik
. Clack-
hoik
. Here came Lame Jans, who was a bit simple too. ‘What have you there, Liga Longfield?’
    ‘It’s my dad,’ she said. ‘Someone has run him down and left him.’
    ‘He don’t look too good.’
    ‘Oh, he’s gone.’ Da lay there, embarrassing with his head spilling along the drain-water, his face as if asleep where it was not smashed, one eye the littlest bit open, leaves in his hair like a girl dressed for a festival, a red leaf adhered to his head wound.
    ‘Looks like he have been stompled by a horse.’
    ‘I would reckon.’ Something threatened to rise from Liga’s insides. She squashed it down. What, you would
cry
for the old bugger? You would
mourn?
    But another part of her was all confusion. Without his voice and body to shape her, did she even exist? She had not the vaguest notion how to live on, alone. No, not alone—with this baby, this baby!
    Jans shifted his stick on the road. ‘You’ll be wanting him on your kitchen table,’ he said.
    ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she snapped.
    ‘For the washing. You know. To wash him all down for burying.’
    ‘Oh,’ she said, freshly mortified. She had thought she must smell of Da’s handling somehow, or betray it in the way she moved, inher face; it must leak out of her eyes. That was why, she thought, Da had kept her from the town lately, because she could not be discreet. She would announce by her very presence what no one must find out.
    ‘I will fetch Seb and Da to bring him to you,’ said Jans.
    ‘That’s very kind.’
    The rain hissed all around them, and dripped among the trees its many different notes.
    Off Jans swung. When he was a flat, pale shadow behind several screens of rain, he turned. ‘You gorn home. They will bring him to you.’
    ‘I can’t leave him—’
    ‘You will just soak here. You will chill to your very bones.’
    He left her doubtful in the grey. And then, because he had said it, because it was instructions from someone else and not her own swinging will, she put the sack over her dad’s face and made off home, without its weight and warmth, the rain driving cold into her back as her punishment for not fetching him earlier, for being so uselessly alive, for everything.
    All she did when she got home was move the cheese-pot off the table, sweep the breadcrumbs into her hand, throw them to sog in the grass outside. Then she roused the fire and sat in the corner chair, wondering at the changed shape of things. Such a weight had lifted off her, she was surprised not to be up there, floating among those rafters, breaking apart as steam does, or smoke. And people would come soon and make this house a different place, look upon it and see how neatly she had kept it, look at the marriage bed and the truckle and not know, not for certain, the dreadfulnesses that had happened there. Certainly they would not speak of that possibility, not while she was there, whatever they suspected. Other people knew how to be discreet, even if Liga didn’t.

2
    ‘You are lucky with the cool