MULBERRY BOYS
Margo Lanagan
So night comes on. I make my own fire, because why would I want to sit at Phillips’s, next to that pinned-down mulberry?
Pan-flaps, can you make pan-flaps? Phillips plopped down a bag of fine town flour and gave me a look that said, Bet you can’t. And I’m certainly too important to make them. So pan-flaps I make in his little pan, and some of them I put hot meat-slice on, and some cheese, and some jam, and that will fill us, for a bit. There’s been no time to hunt today, just as Ma said, while she packed and packed all sorts of these treats into a sack for me—to impress Phillips, perhaps, more than to show me favour, although that too. She doesn’t mind me being chosen to track and hunt with the fellow, now that I’m past the age where he can choose me for the other thing.
We are stuck out here the night, us and our catch. If I were alone I would go back; I can feel and smell my way, if no stars and moon will show me. But once we spread this mulberry wide on the ground and fixed him, and Phillips lit his fire and started his fiddling and feeding him leaves, I knew we were to camp. I did not ask; I dislike his sneering manner of replying to me. I only waited and saw.
He’s boiled the water I brought up from the torrent, and filled it with clanking, shining things—little tools, it looks like, as far as I can see out of the corner of my eye. I would not gratify him with looking directly. I stare into my own fire, the forest blank black beyond it and only fire-lit smoke above, no sky though the clouds were clearing last I looked. I get out my flask and have a pull of fire-bug, to settle my discontentments. It’s been a long day and a weird, and I wish I was home, instead of out here with a half-man, and the boss of us all watching my every step.
“Here, boy,” he says. He calls me boy the way you call a dog. He doesn’t even look up at me to say it.
I cross from my fire to his. I don’t like to look at those creatures, mulberries, so I fix instead on Phillips, his shining hair-waves and his sharp nose, the floret of silk in his pocket that I know is a green-blue bright as a stout-pigeon’s throat, but now is just a different orange in the fire’s glow. His white, weak hands, long-fingered, big-knuckled—oh, they give me a shudder, just as bad as a mulberry would.
“Do you know what a loblolly boy is?”
He knows I don’t. I hate him and his words. “Some kind of insulting thing, no doubt,” I say.
“No, no!” He looks up surprised from examining the brace, which is pulled tight to the mulberry’s puffed-up belly, just below the navel, when it should dangle on an end of silk. “It’s a perfectly legitimate thing. Boy on a ship, usually. Works for the surgeon.”
And what is a surgeon? I am not going to ask him. I stare down at him, wanting another pull from my flask.
“Never mind,” he says crossly. “Sit.” And he waves where; right by the mulberry, opposite himself.
Must I? I have already chased the creature five ways wild today; I’ve already treed him and climbed that tree and lowered him on a rope. I’m sick of the sight of him, his round stary face, his froggy body, his feeble conversation, trying to be friendly.
But I sit. I wonder sometimes if I’m weak-minded, that even one person makes such a difference to me, what I see, what I do. When I come to the forest alone, I can see the forest clear, and feel it, and everything in it. If I bring Tray or Connar, it becomes the ongoing game of us as big men in this world—with the real men left behind in the village, so they don’t show us up. When I come with Frida Birch it is all about the inside of her mysterious mind, what she can be thinking, what has she noticed that I haven’t about some person, some question she has that would never occur to me. It’s as if I cannot hold to my own self, to my own forest, if another person is with me.
“Feed him some more,” says Phillips, and points to the sack beside me. “As many as he can take. We might avoid a breakage yet if we can stuff enough into him.”
I untie the sack, and put aside the first layer, dark leaves that have been keeping the lower, paler ones moist. I roll a leaf-pill—the neater I make it, the less I risk being bitten, or having to touch lip or tongue. I wave it under his nose, touch it to his lips, and he opens and takes it in, good mulberry.
Phillips does this and that. Between us the mulberry’s stomach grumbles and tinkles with the foreign food he’s kept down. Between leaf-rollings, I have another pull. “God, the smell of that!” says Phillips, and spares a hand from his preparations to wave it away from his face.
“It’s good,” I say. “It’s the best. It’s Nat Culloden’s.”
“How old are you anyway?” He cannot read it off me. Perhaps he deals only with other men—I know people like that, impatient of the young. Does he have children? I’d hate to be his son.
“Coming up fifteen,” I say.
He mutters something. I can’t hear, but I’m sure it is not flattering to me.
Now there’s some bustle about him. He pulls on a pair of very thin-stretching gloves, paler even than his skin; now his hands are even more loathsome. “Right,” he says. “You will hold him down when I tell you. That is your job.”
“He’s down.” Look at the spread cross of him; he couldn’t be any flatter.
“You will hold him still,” says Phillips. “For the work. When I say.”
He pulls the brace gently; the skein comes forth as it should, but—”Hold him,” says Phillips, and I hook one leg over the mulberry’s thigh and spread a hand on his chest. He makes a kind of warning moan. Phillips pulls on, slowly and steadily like a mother. “Hold him,” as the moaning rises, buzzes under my hand. “Christ above, if he makes this much of a fuss now.”
He pulls and pulls, but in a little while no more silk will come. He winds what he has on a spindle and clamps it, tests the skein once more. “No? Well. Now I will cut. Boy, I have nothing for his pain.” He looks at me as if I forgot to bring it. “And I need him utterly still, so as not to cut the silk or his innards. Here.” He hands me a smooth white stick, of some kind of bone. “Put that crosswise between his teeth, give him something to bite on.”
I do so; the teeth are all clagged with leaf-scraps, black in this light. Mulberries’ faces are the worst thing about them, little round old-children’s faces, neither man nor woman. And everything they are thinking shows clear as water, and this one is afraid; he doesn’t know what’s happening, what’s about to be done to him. Well, I’m no wiser. I turn back to Phillips.
“Now get a good weight on him, both ends.”
Gingerly I arrange myself. He may be neither man nor woman, but still the creature is naked, and clammy as a frog in the night air.
“Come on,” says Phillips. He’s holding his white hands up, as if the mulberry is too hot to touch. “You’re plenty big enough. Spread yourself out there, above and below. You will need to press here, too, with your hand.” He points, and points again. “And this foot will have some work to do on this far leg. Whatever is loose will fight against what I’m doing, understand?”
So he says, to a boy who’s wrestled tree-snakes so long that his father near fainted to see them, who has jumped a shot stag and ridden it and killed it riding. Those are different, though; those are wild, they have some dignity. What’s to be gained subduing a mulberry, that is gelded and a fool already? Where’s the challenge in that, and the pride upon having done it?
“Shouldn’t you be down there?” I nod legs-wards.