The Leper's Companions Read Free

her glistening among the fish he had caught in his nets. He began to travel farther and farther from the shore, searching for her.

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    T he old fisherman stopped mending his nets. His hands were stiff and painful and he laid them side by side on his lap, the fingers bunched together like the feet of dead birds.
    For as long as he kept singing he was cocooned in images: he was out at sea among the rolling waves of a storm, the backs of whales and silver fishes breaking through the surface of the water all around him. A catch of living things was thrashing at his feet in the boat, struggling for breath. But then as soon as his voice was silent, he was only here, frail in the sunshine and thinking about his daughter Sally.
    She was not yet fifteen but already pregnant with her first child. The old fisherman was afraid that the birth might kill her and with that thought he realized he could not bear tolose her. She was what connected him to the village and to the land itself and if she was gone he would be homeless.
    Every night he dreamed of his fear. He saw her as a child giving birth to a child much bigger than she was. He saw her body split open like a ripe seedpod and a mass of maggot babies crawling over her, eating her flesh until there was nothing left but the clean white bones. He told no one of these dreams because that would only make them more solid and more dangerous.
    Sometimes in the morning he would wake to imagine finding her beside his bed, a tiny moonfaced child who had just learned to walk, staring at him with all the tenderness and seriousness of the very young.
    He rarely went out to sea these days, but when he did, Sally was the one who waited for his return. She would stand on the beach pulling at the thread which connected them as if he were a fish on a line.
    Her husband was also uneasy about what was happening to her; the skin of her swollen belly luminous and blue, so that you could see every detail of the vast creature inhabiting her.
    He gave her oily herrings to eat, saying the oil would help the baby slip out. He lay awake at night, watching her in the moonlight, her face flickering with shifting emotions, now peaceful, now in despair.
    The straw of the mattress rustled as she moved and turned. She often talked in her sleep, although he couldnever understand what she was saying. He stroked her damp skin and as he did so she sometimes became the mermaid lying next to him, rough and cold and smiling, with hair that wrapped itself around his fingers.
    On the morning when the waters broke and soaked into the straw they fetched the woman who knew how to deliver babies. She brought a flask of water that had been used to wash the hands of a murderer, ground pepper to help with the contractions, and a greasy salve smelling of rancid butter to rub over the tight belly.
    The yellow sunlight flickered on the walls of the room and the bed creaked when the girl was thrown sideways with the first spasm of pain.
    â€œYou have to let go,” the midwife said. “It will be easier once you have let go.”
    She unplaited Sally’s flat hair and spread it loose across her shoulders. She opened the lid of a wooden chest and took out the few clothes and the sheepskin rug it contained, scattering them over the floor. She opened the door of a cupboard and removed a bundle of knotted ropes that had been left there, carefully undoing the knots and laying the pieces in straight lines. The spasms continued and became more violent than ever.
    Sally’s husband was sitting in the room next door, close to the smoking fire, gutting herrings and rubbing them with salt. When he heard his wife screaming he sharpened his blade and continued with his work.
    Her father was down by the shore but he heard the screams as well. They echoed in his head like the cries of seabirds.
    He rose slowly to his feet and walked to the church. Pushing the door open, he went to stand in front of the painting of Margaret of Antioch, the