Free Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan Page A

took and took of me, but the work of breathing, and of filling breech-cloths and of grasping the air and his own face and my finger, seemed to consume all that he drained from me, and leave none for growing. He slept well, he cried little, he grew to see me and to smile and make movements of joy when I came to him. He learned to lift his head on his narrow stalk of a neck, and catch my eye and laugh at my congratulations. I bathed and wrapped and carried him about and sang to him; I encouraged his every little move or murmur. But he stayed small. First he shrank a little, then he grew back to what he had been at his birth, but he did not grow much beyond that. He would be round-bellied with milk when I put him down to sleep, and slender as ever when next I picked him up.
    One day I dared the hill myself, leaving my boy sleeping milk-sodden in the house, and Dad, the other great bab, full of dinner in the next room. I visited both sisters, and neither was pleased to see me, and Mam bristled when I walked into Bee’s.
    ‘You have shrunk to nothing, girl! Have you forgotten how to cook? I hope your dad’s in better flesh, or I’ll have something to say, I will.’
    I saw both babs, Bee’s girl and Grassy’s boy. Great pale lumps they were, flushing with rage and distress. Their hands could tear your ear off, or your lip, or whatever they took a hold of, they were so strong. But mostly their weight impressed me; my arms ached after only a few minutes holding them.
    I tottered and slithered back down the hill, my ears ringing with the racket of those houses, the older children fighting to be heard and the sisters and Mam hectoring, and the cries of those two monstrous babs.
    I went past sleeping Dad to my room. My little one lay there small and saintly, with his ghost of black hair on his pale brow, mauve shadows painted around his eyes with the kindest and most delicate brush. He was nothing on the bed compared to the babs I had just seen and held. Even awake, even laughing to see me, he was not half as alive as they, and he was not half their size.
    ‘Fairy child!’ I crouched beside the bed, and watched him sleep. Everything about him was delicate, and very nearly transparent, where Gladys and — what was his name? — Horace, where Gladys and Horace had been solid as clay. Like cream forced into sausage-skins, they were. My boy was finely made, far and away finer than them. I stood and picked him up, and sat with him on the bed, searching his lax lovely face, the creases of his tiny mauve hands. He was fine, and foreign, and he did not belong here. I held him close, not crushing, not waking him, letting him sleep, and I suffered. I had never felt such feelings before. I would do anything for him; I would do anything. Anything that was asked of me, that would increase his happiness or health, I would do, and willingly. So I told myself, rocking him, the winter sky white at the window.

    The spring thaw began. Mam stayed away uphill. My little one — I called him Little Prince, and sometimes Ean, hardly a name at all, not much more than a smear of sound — grew older, but no larger, and now he seemed to be in pain, squirming and struggling in his wrappings. He began to cry, not lustily like Horace and babs of that make, but softly, as if each bleat were forced out and he were apologising for this little noise he made.
    Some nights I was sure people in other houses must hear him crying, though his voice was so soft. I took him out and away, and round about the cold country we would go, the sog of it and the snow-patches, the black earth splashed with the white of the moon, the sea turning in its sleep. Always by the time I reached Crescent Corner he was stiller, and one night as I walked back and forth with him at peace in my arms, on the very rocks where we had made him that summer night, I wondered if there were a way to take something of the Crescent back with us to the house, to put by him, to ease him when we could