Read Tender Morsels for Free Online Page A

weather.’ Jans’s mother pushed past Liga at the door, a look on her face as if this were all Liga’s fault.
    Four men carried Da in, in a cloth. Jans’s father and the man Seb gave Liga the proper sober nod; the boys avoided her eye and affected to strain with the weight.
    Jans came up after them, importantly. Behind him bustled two more women, one with a white-covered basket—that was Rosa, or Raisa, Liga knew—the other with such a bosom, it seemed to be what she must carry in her arms instead of a basket, her main burden. Liga could not remember that one’s name.
    ‘Little Liga!’ The basket woman’s feelings drove her forward. ‘Since your dear mother, Agnata! . . . Well—’ Her embrace ended. ‘They’re together now, the two lovebirds.’ And she adjusted her cap and looked away from Liga’s puzzlement to Da’s worn bootsoles. His feet had crossed themselves with the carrying, but now that Seb man put them side by side and he lay neatly on the cloth.
    The visitors stood silent, but their selves filled the cottage air just as Liga had anticipated, bumping each other off-kilter withglance and shift and footscrape. The room was loud with unsaid things and awkwardness.
    ‘Well, thank you,’ said Liga. ‘Very much,’ she added, but nobody heard it among the sighs and turnings of the relieved men.
    ‘A good man lost to us, Gerten Longfield,’ said Jans’s father to her on the way out.
    Liga lowered her head in confusion—had Da been good, and she’d just not seen it? Could he have been good despite all of the—all of those twisted feelings he gave her? What did she know of goodness, of what constituted it?
    ‘Shall I go for the God-man?’ said Jans.
    His mother shook her head and tutted. She might as well have said it aloud:
These is too poor to afford such burial, can you not see, boy?
    ‘Here, I have brought—’ Raisa blumped her basket on the bench-end there and swept its cloth back from pots and rags.
    ‘Oh, good,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘I have plenty of practice laying out, but none of the makings any more.’ For she had buried baby after baby—Jans was her only survivor.
    ‘Has he another shirt?’ said Goodwife Bosom, all solicitous.
    ‘He has,’ Liga said, and she brought out the shirt she had sewn, and by the light of their silence she saw it for the slip-shouldered, cobbled-together thing it was. ‘Or there is the one—’ And she brought out the pieces of the better one, which were worn through in places, patched to confusion in others, as transparent as spider-web in yet others.
    ‘Oh, that will do better,’ said Raisa. ‘One of us can sew that up.’
    ‘It is very ragged,’ said Bosom.
    ‘Still, he is only going into the ground in it, isn’t he?’
    They all looked at the man on the table. The shirt he had died in was the best of the three.
    ‘What say we wash that one and dry it ’fore the fire? It needn’t take long,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘Here, Nance, you help me. Oh, his poor head.’
    ‘Liga, fill a bowl of clean water. I will put the bobs in it, and you can help wash him.’ Raisa was busy-busy, thinking and sighing and putting out pots and little sacks for the work.
    Liga went out for a brief time into the day, which was so muchlike any other and yet quite, quite unlike. She breathed its clarity and its coolness as she dipped the bowl in the water-bucket and put the lid back; she admired the sodden brightness of the leaves. Then she returned to the fusty house, which now smelled of death-herbs she remembered from her mother’s laying out, as Raisa unstoppered things and muttered to herself what they were.
    ‘Liga, you shall wash his legs and feet,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘You should not have to see this head too closely.’
    ‘Very well.’ Liga was glad to be directed.
    ‘Oo-er, he have something—’ Bosom was loosening his trousers. She drew from the belt-pocket two small, soggy bundles of filth.
    ‘They are amulets for something?’