Tender Morsels Read online

  There she was, with the stream around her like mirrors begging to be broken, like sumptuous silks and linens longing to be rolled in and creased and besmirched by kings and queens. And before I knew it, I had plunged in and was wallowing, biting fish of foam, tackling them to the round-stoned stream-bottom, leaping up with them and tossing the heavy water out of my head of fur.

  And her song was gone, the mother’s, and she was laughing at me. ‘That’s the way of it, Bear!’ she cried. ‘Show the water who is lord here!’ Which I did, great clumsy me, beating it with my paws and plungings and quite wettening the woman with my splashes.

  When I saw that I had done this, I came to her quietly, trying not to huff and splutter so. I nosed her elbow, which I hoped she would take for apology. Then I went up onto the bank and found myself a stretch of sunny grass. I lay down where I could doze to the sound of her singing and slapping, and wake to the sight of her.

  When I was all but dry, she was done with her washing; she had spread all the cloths and garments on the grass and the bushes nearby. But I did not want her to go, and I sat up and said so.

  She stood hands on hips and smiled. ‘Oh, you are awake now,’ she said, ‘now that all the hard work is done?’

  I went to her and stood on all fours, my forehead against her front very lightly so as not to overbalance her. She was nothing; she was a wisp of beauty, her muscles fine as tassels of silk. I could destroy her with a swipe of my paw.

  She dug her hands into my head-fur and scrumbled around my ears the way she knew I liked—they all knew. She laughed when I told her not to stop, and she did not stop, not for a long while. And then she did, and I sat back with such satisfaction that she had to laugh again. Our heads were at the same height. She stepped up to me, and at the sight of her little nude face so beloved I lifted my paw, which was bigger than that face and that whole head behind it, and I touched her cheek with what would have been my palm, had I been a man and sensitive, but on a bear was thick pads rough as sawn wood-ends, and I could feel nothing through it, not even the warmth of her.

  I tried—I tried as I had with the daughters, tried to dredge up the person-ness in myself, to see into the person of her. She was not like anyone I could remember—any woman, any man. She searched my eyes all the while. I hoped she saw in them, inside this confident, clumsy bear, that vestigial man and his confusions.

  She put her hands to my face, light and cool against my sun-warmed skin, and she explored it all over right out to my mane, as if she were thinking to model me in clay and needed to memorise my shape exactly. Her breath was a sweet cloud around my head, and I, who was heavier than six of her, almost fainted from breathing it.

  I closed my eyes. She is a wife, I told myself. Or she has been a wife. Is she missing him? Has he died, or has he simply gone to seek his fortune? My paw had long fallen from her face; she stood between my hind limbs and I did not touch or look at her—the slip of her, the damp, clothe-wrinkled tininess—only felt her delicate searching of my strange features, my wild face. Bring out the man of me, I pleaded with her in my vague bear-mind. Reach in and bring him out of this head. Let him talk to you.

  She scratched and scratched me under my chin. ‘You big soft thing,’ she whispered. ‘Feel the size of your head. I could not lift even that.’

  I licked her forehead. She tasted salty, and the simpler bear-part of me told me she would be good to eat. She laughed and stood back a little, touching the lick, her hands so finely made with all those fingers, manoeuvrable each one, her face—how would someone carve such a thing, catch all those live surfaces bending and folding and breathing, the movement in that mouth, those eyelashes soft as feathered moth-horns?

  ‘Come, then,’ she said, and started up the slope. ‘Can you chop wood? Then you can help me.’

  I can, I can, I said to her in my mind. I could remember the feel of it, stretching up, bringing down the axe; I could remember the rhythm of it, and the sweat. But I was useless to her in this body; I was a strayed-in wild thing, that she could walk away from me like this, back to her kind and their separate life. I followed her, sad at heart, but still I must follow her, and so I followed.

  And still they must follow me, her daughters, when they were rested and the evening had cooled and freshened their energies. ‘Shoo with you, you bouncers!’ their mother had said when they’d eaten their suppers. ‘Run and play with Bear, and let me settle things here.’

  So we had run, and we were running still. Quite a way we had gone—they would have to climb aboard me and ride home at the end of this; I was right out beyond their borders, though those were not near as extensive as my own.

  ‘Come back, beauteous bear!’ cried Urdda. I could scarcely credit that in my lumbering I moved faster through the forest than those darting, fine-limbed girls could move. ‘You will fill your coat with burrs and thorns and there’ll be such brushing to do, bad thing!’

  How sweet it was to be scolded by such a tiny. I turned and I could glimpse her, or at least the shakings of leaves that marked her, and Branza coming after her, below me on the hill. Just a little farther and I will turn, I thought, and I will let them catch me, and then carry them back to their cottage, and their mother will welcome us all.

  But then I ran out across a brief clearer part of land, and the grassy ground gave under my feet, and I was turning and tumbling. A painful snap sounded through my head, through my body. I saw, each so fast upon the last that I had no time to register the separate sights: a mass of twiggy forest hazed with near-spring green; the blocks and laneways of a town rushing upward; tiny Fuller in his bear-suit chasing screaming, laughing girls; and finally, an Eelsister in a sunny cloister—flying over her, I saw that she was embroidering a dandelion clock upon her linen. Then the slate smacked up at me and I was running out the end of the twitten, and Stow was there among the laundry-slabs, shouting, ‘Where did they go, the sneaky witches!’

  I had turned to warn Urdda and Branza before I realised he was speaking of town girls. ‘I did not see them,’ I said.

  But I did remember them: the girls’ blue-white heels; the skirts above and the set of the body that was Washerwife Bean’s daughter fleeing, the last of them; her happy screams of moments, of months, ago.

  ‘This way!’ cried Stow, and I followed him at a run. My body was thin and fleet, and the loose, hard costume rubbed at me. ‘Quick, Ramstrong!’ he called back over his shoulder—and cannoned into just the whirl of washergirls he was after as they took the corner, faces all vivid with surprise and the glee of being girls and free today, powerful together.

  They knocked us down, there were so many of them. Stow cried out in ecstasy and welcome, I in fear, these great ruddy girls kissing me when I was already so dishevelled in my mind. The Bean girl wiped my face with hers, cheek and cheek both sides, to get the most black onto herself. Another took my charcoaled hand and put it into her blouse, to her damp hot breast with its unmistakable nipple, and it was the first time I had touched such a thing since I was too young to care about anything more than the milk in it. Who was it, that I might avoid her hereafter, her and her bold ways? They bussed and buffeted and rolled us, and then they leaped off, screaming:

  ‘It’s the bakers, the bakers!’

  ‘Here is your comeuppance, beast!’

  I rolled to my feet. At the end of the laneway, four pink faces jostled, white caps above and white smocks below.

  ‘For your life, Ramstrong!’ Stow caught my furred sleeve and hauled me up.

  I ran hard. I was not as tired as I ought to be. I was strong from those months’ rest; I was fresh, and full of honey and milk and grass and pigeon and pine-bark and all the berries yesterday, and from carrying about the bulk of a bear. I led Stow and the flour-men both a merry dance, down along the wall and up through the mills, ducking the wheels, jumping the courses, kissing the millwives and brushing the cheeks of their babbies all the way.

  I tried to lose Stow, but he kept up for a while, and he found, curse
him, a moment where there were no maids about, to tell me, ‘I went orf like a fountain back there.’

  I affected to be busy calculating the best way on from Spring-water Cross.

  ‘Among those laundry-girls,’ he insisted. ‘I tell you, I have right messed the insides of my bear-pants. Thank heaven they are not of cloth and show the dampness through.’

  ‘Into the Thatchlanes,’ I said. ‘The ways are good and tangled there. We can dodge and confuse them.’

  ‘Good man,’ he puffed.

  I ran from him, from the state of his trousers. I led him fast and complicated and I lost him well enough that he called after me, piteously, ‘Ramstrong, don’t leave me to them!’

  When I turned next he’d been overtaken, swallowed into the bakers’ white bodies and a cloud of flour going up, the whole gang of them so intent on him that I could run on.

  That Bear Day made me: that chase, my strength, and the tricks I played, the feints I ran. I ran near to sundown, and half the town gave up on me because they wanted to begin the drinking-and-dancing part of the day, and when I finally gave myself up to the bakers—I had to walk out and find them, mind you; they never caught up with me—as many mouths cursed me as admired me. My fellow Bears could not believe that I was still upright in my skins. I was a new man in their eyes; they did not understand how I had kept on. They were somewhat afraid of me, I think.

  But more important, as I was ambling, now quite tired, up the shining cobbles of the Rise—there where the cloth merchants begin, though they were all shuttered up for the day—there was leaning in a doorway of the silent street a serious girl, that I did not see until I was almost in kissing distance of her. Whereupon she saw in my eyes, which had had no chance to cover themselves, my true self, tired and frightened, and I saw her in hers, thoughtful and alone.

  ‘You look thirsty,’ she said without a smile or a flirt or a change in her look, as if every day a bear walked up her street that needed tending. ‘Come inside,’ she said, ‘and I will give you a cup.’

  And this was Todda Threadgould, the girl that became the woman that became my wife, and bore me my three children.

  But that gets ahead of the story, for that first time I hardly saw her. I followed her in and I sat, itching and trickling sweat and glum, in her shadowed kitchen. I gulped two cups of water and sipped another, knowing that I was back in the world, the world where I was man and orphan. Todda did not bother me with questions or conversations, but only watched me. I think you were far gone, she said to me later. I think I caught you just in time, and brang you back from the brink.

  I could feel it: Branza and Urdda, peeping and piping in the woods behind me, turning to shreds of imagination, and their mother invisible beyond them, busy about her house. Clearly I had not been there; clearly some kind of brain-spasm had given me that time and that place; clearly Todda was right and I had had some kind of insanity, and had nearly been lost to normal life.

  But with the shock of my recovery, and the grime and the skin-scraping, and the squealing and the laundress-breast and the chasing and confusion, it seemed to me to have been a much stronger pleasure to be mad, to be bear and solitary in the wild, than it was to be man and celebrated in the town. I could not see why I had been ejected from that existence, and I wanted nothing more than to fly back to it, and leave this place of gab and gossip and ale and embarrassment forever.

  Well, I tried. Before I despaired and decided to notice Todda putting herself in my way, and to woo and wed her that high summer of my nineteenth year, many a time I went to the twitten and lingered there, hoping. I walked down it; tried running; tried to get up the same sweated panic that had drove me the first time; tried to discern, as I ran, the exact point where it had happened, where my feet had left the ground and I had taken flight.

  Taken flight, I would end up thinking, standing out on Laundry Lane, heavy with my own weight and my disappointment. You are daft as Inge Minsoll under the Square Ash, with the birds that flitter around her face that only she can see, that she talks to. Taken flight! Tell it to Stow or Fuller and see how they look at you. Tell it even to Uncle and see how he worries for your senses.

  And I’d search back up the sunny lane and—there was something, wasn’t there? Why did I feel like this if there was nothing—like the rope of a tuggawar pulled one way by one gang and another by another? The sunny lane—there’d be bees there in the hedge-blossom, or a bird would fuss and squawk, and dart across to the top of Hogback’s wall. Once a young rat ran from a wall-corner to under Eelsisters’ hedge. And there’d be the slapping sounds of laundry up and down the lane, and laughter from those bold girls; it would turn your ears blue if you listened hard enough, which I did not.

  The last time I went to the twitten, I examined it closer, trying to find some clue, some magic piece in the hedge or the paving or the cracks of Hogback’s wall. What I was looking for, I didn’t know—some mark or soft bit or smell of the other place—but I spent a good while at it, the sunny stone soothing me and the dapply leaf-light laying its patterns across my mind.

  Until somewhere through my puzzlement I heard cloth and breath, and up I looked and there was the Eelmother in her grey gown, neckless like that seal that was brought on a cart from Broad-harbour last winter, her face bunched up and whiskery.

  ‘Get along with you,’ she says.

  ‘Pardon, mum?’ I scrambled to my feet.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing with your lurking?’

  ‘I was looking for something.’

  ‘And I know what it was. I have seen enough of lads like you. How are my women to go about their devotions with such as you sniffing and fumbling themselves in the lane outside?’

  My face filled up hot, bang, in an instant. ‘There were none of that!’

  ‘What is it you were looking for, then?’ She put her seal-head to one side. Through the hedge, I could see she was standing on a little ladder, the ladder the gardener must use when cutting the hedge-top flat.

  And even as I stood there, unable to answer, I remembered, clearly, running up into the sky in my bear-suit. It was too strange to put into words and be believed. The Mother would think I was even madder than she already did.

  ‘Scat,’ she said, disgusted. ‘Take yourself off. We’ve enough on our platters without your likes loitering on our borders. Go find some unholy woman to give your sly eye to. Go down the laundries, why don’t you? There’s bosoms and buttocks pushing out all over there, for your gratification.’

  I’d been about to head that way indeed, not for the girls, of course, but only because it were the closest end of the twitten, but when she said that, I couldn’t, of course; I must instead walk right under her whiskery scorn, uphill. At the top I turned and she was still looking, with something in the lean of her that said, I have all the day, Mister Filthy Mind, to see you off; if you want to take your time, I can match you.

  And I walked out of her sight quickly, feeling sick that I was so misread when I only was looking for something that had been there before—it had! I could feel the lift of it; I could see the town shrinking below. I had not been doing anything smutty or sly. Just the thought of her conceiving that—or the Sister conceiving it that first saw me and went and fetched her—and the blood was in my face again, throbbing shame.

  7

  ‘Come back! Come back!’ Urdda broke from the trees and ran helter-skelter after Bear.

  ‘Wait, Urdda! Don’t leave me behind!’ cried Branza.

  Bear stumbled, he tumbled; he was gone from Urdda’s sight. And then there was a flash, like lightning, but lightning that did not end, and Urdda fell back, and Branza ran up behind her, exclaiming, and pulled her out of the light and away from an edge of thin grass, beyond which was nothing for a long way down to treetops, which seethed and swelled like shineless water there.

  The sisters clutched each other. ‘You nearly fell, Urdda! You would be dead!’ Branza’s teeth chattered with the surprise of it.

  ‘Wh
at has happened to Bear?’ Urdda tried to see through the glaring light to its source. It churned and bulged; its edges confused themselves among sunset-lit clouds. Was it a thing, or a hole with light pouring out?

  ‘Look, ears and a—oh, I cannot see it properly,’ said Urdda. ‘I thought for a bit it was Bear-shaped.’

  ‘I too! But no, it is much too big, don’t you think? And more ferocious-looking.’

  The hovering presence, as well as light, shed a kind of sound, almost too high-pitched to hear, and a kind of mood, genial and strange.

  ‘Let us just go in among the trees a little way,’ said Urdda, still trying to see the creature’s full shape.

  ‘Yes, this way.’

  Branza led, which was most unlike her. Surefooted, she hurried along the path, and then, as Urdda followed, she stepped to one side, pushed her way into the undergrowth, and dropped out of sight, straight down.

  ‘Branza!’

  Had she fallen in a rabbit hole? Or off another cliff, a hidden one? Frightened, Urdda scrambled after her. The moon-thing came too, as if it were joined to her with a ribbon or cord.

  By its light she found Branza curled up on the ground, as deeply asleep as if it were midnight and she were snug in their own bed.

  Urdda knelt by her. The ground was softest moss, thick and deep; it caught the warmth of her knees and held it around them. ‘Oh my.’ She sank upon it, next to her sister. ‘How did you see this, in this dimness? Did you know all the time where we were, and not tell me?’

  Branza did not answer. If she had, Urdda would not have heard her, for sleep came up from the moss like spores, and she breathed it in, and it drew her down into its warm heart and held her there.