Free The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

tend to them both without having to take that slippery hill every time, leaving me at home with doddering Dad trapped in his bed unable to speak, or possibly even to think. Then only, with the larder as full as it could be and no reason to venture from the house and be seen, out popped my belly, and for a few days I was clear as clear a mam-to-be. And no one came, and Dad did not care. And then, one afternoon while he slept, in my own room I paced back and forth, and held to the bedpost and exclaimed myself through the pains, and after not very long a labor, I brought forth the being that had swum and somersaulted in me these last months.
    I wrapped it and lifted it and held it against my own heat.It was corded to me still; I crouched over the chamber pot and waited for the followings to follow when they would. I stared at the bab’s face in a wondrous terror, as it pinched and frowned and then gasped up a breath. The shock of that, of having a life of its own, woke it, and it opened sticky eyelids. I thought it must be blind; I had never seen eyes of that smoky, stormy blue.
    I unwrapped it to see if it was well formed, to count its fingers and toes, and I discovered that I held a boy child. There now, I thought. There’s two good men in your life. I covered him quickly, to stop any more of his warmth escaping.
    I gasped and rocked there and held him fast against me; if I could have, I would have taken him back in through my bosom, and carried him about there warm and next to my heart. This was not the child I had planned, as separate from me as a badge or a brooch. I wanted to hide him, to keep him from harm; no one yet was aware of him, and I wished that no one ever need be. Must I let Potshead at him, as they’d gone at me? Must Mam pass her judgments on his tiny head, and my sisters gape and prod at him, weigh him in their practiced arms, hope aloud that he would grow up handsomer than I had? Could he not grow entirely himself, unharassed and unshaped by their scorn? How could I watch as they pressed and pummeled him, as he shrank under their blows, and grew extra flesh, as I had, thinking to protect himself but only offering them an easier mark? How could I engineer for him to find his own shape—small, slender and fragile as it might be, or wild and fierce and rude? Already I could feel his purposeful working inside the cloth, his feet bracing against my arm. His face knew nothing and yet he was discovering already how to breathe,how to yawn—and sneeze!—how to surrender to sleep, one hand resting its little warmth against his cheek.
    Dad made his noises in the other room, needing me. I woke from the spell of the bab, rose and laid him in the hollow of the bed. I pinned cloths around myself and dropped my skirts to cover my drizzled legs. And I went out to Dad; it was toileting he wanted, and my new body went slowly about the tasks of that. I was glad to care for him, and to have tended him so long; now no one was better equipped than I to serve that bright tiny being in the other room, so helpless, so entirely mine to help.

    If it had not been winter, and if I’d not been so ugly and friendless, I would not have been able to keep the bab hidden. But no one visited, except Mam once or twice, to fetch more sewing things and to leave me laundry that she could not manage up at Grassy’s in such volume. She only cared whether Dad was clean and quiet and taking food, and the house in good order; whatever else I did was my own business. And my boy, while Mam visited, was whisper-quiet, or the squeak he uttered was straightaway followed by a cat’s outside the window, and my secret stayed close.
    My son did not flourish, though. I could not think where the milk went in him. I fed and fed him and he 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