"Gregory Feeley - Fancy Bread" - читать интересную книгу автора (Feeley Gregory)

Hungry with no market-day bun, Jack had yearned for fancy bread, sticky
with sugar and finer than cake, something he had tasted one Whitsunday. Later he
wondered whether the player’s question meant that fancy bread might exist only in
the head, never to be tasted in the stomach. Bread with dough smooth as milk, bread
so soft the toothless could eat it without sopping first. Had such yearnings led him in
time to the hedge of the ogre’s castle?

Replete and belching, the ogre nods at table like a swaying oak, knocks his
spoon to the floor, and soon is snoring deeply. Fearful beyond measure—the
goodwife does not come to aid him—Jack slowly pushes open the grate and creeps
from the oven’s belly, leaving ashy footprints even an ogre could follow.

It seems greatly daring that in his flight Jack could pause to pick up the spoon,
but even in his terror he realizes that no man can be eaten twice. It is as long as his
arm and heavier than any Jack has held, so he clutches it the harder and sneaks past,
breaking into a run at the door.

Later he would try to recall whether he had heard a roar as he burst into
sunlight. He had not looked back, and ran half a mile before slowing. The spoon is
crusted with porridge, and when Jack finishes gasping he sniffs, then tastes it. The
oats are merely greasy, but the tip of his tongue thrills at the metal’s touch. It is
silver, and he later sells it for six shillings. A shard of crust lodged in his pocket he
discards with a shudder.

He never again tried to rob an ogre’s fastness, a lesson learned if not
remembered. (Once he saw a widow lay her dough on a bed of coals then sprinkle it
with hot ashes, and shivered with sourceless dread.) Curled under a pew that night,
cold and still hungry, Jack worries the experience for what else he can take. The day
is already falling from memory like a cinder from burnt fingers, but as Jack nestles
into the rug of sleep a shard presses hard against him, sharp so he feels every word:
Bread made with men’s bones never rise.

****
Starvelings bedded under hedges never rise, either, but rather turn coldly stiff,
in glorious reversal of the Devil’s fell offer to change stones into bread. Jack feels
hardened to petrifaction, but his limbs yield, if complainingly, as he crawls forth,
brushing crumbs of dirt from his coat, to blink at the morning’s pale glare. Gazing
across the fields in the breath-steaming chill, he recognizes barley and, farther on,
what looks to be rye, but nothing that nods like wheat-stalks. Nor pasturage for miles
now: it’s crusts and tubers Jack has to look forward to, assuming he is not offered a
hail of rocks.

The rutted path is muddy, but Jack is glad enough to see no lace of frost upon
the standing water. Frozen roads traverse better and stink less, but it’s a thin coat
Jack wears this early March day, a hungry season with the winter stores dwindling
and naught but peason planted. The wheel ruts are not deep, so the land is not yet
too soft for fellers’ carts; but Jack can see that felling time is over early here. The
woods, like a sexton’s hair, have receded steadily over the years, and the open fields
show few stands of any size.