Free Fish Tails by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

well, fairly often. He enjoyed it some, but—­though he was incapable of expressing it in those terms—­ surfeit had been sure death to appetite.
    Though Lillis well knew Gralf and the way his mind worked, he had one idea so ridiculous that she had never suspected it for a moment. On that long-­ago Midsummer Day when Gralf came home with Lillis’s daughter, one of his reasons, not the least one, had concerned Lillis herself more than it had her daughter. Lillis was known to be a midwife, a healer, she knew herbs; the ­people she helped probably paid her something for doing it. Certainly no Hench Valley man did anything for anyone without being paid. So, Gralf figured, since she was making all those pennies with the herbs and the healing and the midwife thing, those pennies could just as well add up in his pocket as in hers. A house always belonged to the eldest woman in it, which had never seemed right to Gralf, but that house was the man’s to rule! If he ruled, then nothing said he couldn’t take whatever pennies she got. Those theoretical pennies—­in theoretically improbable aggregate—­had figured large in Gralf’s decision to accept the utterly inedible cake Trudis offered him before he followed her home.
    Gralf had fully intended to get rid of Needly by selling her, but no boy with any pride would do girl’s work, and if Needly was gone, Grandma likely wouldn’t stay. So there’d be three men in the house and nobody to do for them but Trudis, and she wouldn’t!
    Unless! Unless he could buy a girl for Grudge or Slap, and that brought him back to Grandma Healer’s pennies. Grandma, now she was back, would still be doing what she used to do, and he could probably lay hands on what ­people paid her, so he’d let her get into the habit of doin’ it all again. Though Grandma could read what passed for thought in Gralf’s mind as though it were printed on his forehead, the last thing she would have suspected to find there was money that she, Lillis, was supposed to have. Until, that is, one day when the pennies loomed so large in Gralf’s mind that he told her he’d be taking what she was paid in future.
    She could not keep the laughter inside her. So that’s what the fool had been thinking of. “Well, Gralf,” she said. “You’re welcome to everything I get, but you’ll have to come along with me each time to get it. The most I get from anybody is a mug of tea, and some days I almost drown in it! But I can’t carry it home; you’ll have to be right there to get any.”
    Grandma said Gralf never let Trudis have any money. Why would he think any other man would let a woman have money to pay for a healer? Gralf heard her say it. He went around hitting things for several frustrated days. He would have preferred to hit the old woman, but there was that jitchus thing! Kill an old woman who might be a witch, and it’d jitchus !
    Needly herself remained blessedly ignorant of either Gralf or Grandma’s thoughts. Thus far she was merely wary, as all Hench Valley females were when any of the men, including any supposed father, was involved.
    Those were Grandma’s words. Supposed father. When Needly had been about nine, she had considered those words. What, after all, Needly puzzled, did she know about Grandma? Only what Grandma had told her. Grandma’s name had been Lillis; Lillis had birthed twin daughters, then four other children, then Trudis in this house. All but Trudis had been taken away while they were quite young.
    Lillis had been told originally that they would all live well, elsewhere. Far elsewhere. Lillis had been told the several fathers of those children had been selected for Lillis by ­people from elsewhere: selected because children from those couplings would be born with certain attributes that fit long-­planned purposes of those ­people. Lillis was told those