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The Tallow Feast

By Damien Kelly

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Years ago, a woman – reputed to be crafty – berated Alma’s mother in the market square for rendering her tallow with salt and water.

Your oil will lose all goodness that way, she said, and it will spoil. She said it idly, half-smiling, as if sharing advice, but she meant it as an augury and a curse and every wife within hearing knew it. Because she was a witch.

“She’s no witch,” Alma’s mother told her later. “She just fancies herself.”

And as she added salt to the beef fat and water, Alma’s mother educated her daughter on the realities of rendering tallow. And curses.

“You can skim the oil, without touching the water. Know your depth. Control your heat. Else you can cool and rewarm the solid tallow cake any number of times, to ensure the salt and water alike have sunk below. Take the time. Take care. Because it is a fact, daughter mine – and no witch can change this – that neither salt nor water dissolve in oil.

“So, if it’s there, it’s because you let it in.”

Her tallow was always white as snow. Never smelly or salty. And it never spoiled.

---

Tonight, Alma has set her table with a supper made with time and care. And tallow.

There are crispy fried potatoes, a few fried hens, and a soup of onions and barley. She has baked bread and furnished bottles of beer. There is cheese, honey, cob nuts and hard-boiled eggs on a bed of salt.

On a second table by the door is a bowl of water and a fragrant soap; this, too, was made with Alma’s own tallow. The floor is freshly-washed and the fire is roaring. If any visitor can play a tune, there’s a whistle on the shelf and a guitar on the wall.

Alma fills the kitchen with hospitality and lights candles all around the room. Then she opens the door.

There’s a wind that would take the breath from you. The door clatters, so Alma puts a stone to it. Then she retires to her seat at the table, facing out into the night. She has a wool skirt and a jumper on, against the elements, but she’s in her flat shoes rather than her boots. She doesn’t intend to go out.

The fire in the hearth flattens as the air blows in, but it blazes away determinedly. The candles gutter, but they don’t blow out.

Alma’s mother has been dead almost a year. Peacefully and in her own time, she went with the Lord, happy and sanctified. But tonight, there are no crosses on the walls. Neither wreaths, garlands, nor iron nailed in place. Alma has removed them all. She took the bible to the chapel and left it there. She pulled up every practical plant from the little garden and burned them.

She doesn’t know anything about craft; not the natural arts or the secret work of women. She thinks she’s met a few more witches since the woman in the market square, but that might just be a lack of generosity on her part. Regardless, she herself has no idea how else to achieve what she wants. How to bid something welcome in any other way than this. Whoever they may be.

Because no particular power is being invited into Alma’s house. But none are barred. The door is open and they can make of it what they will.

“Good evening, Alma.”

“James. Good evening,” she calls out to him.

James Rodgers is her neighbour and his almost immediate appearance is of no surprise. Never married, his parents also dead, he walks the roads like a stray goat for want of company. He’s more nosy than randy, though. He smiles broadly and stoops to wave in, though the door isn’t low in any way.

“This wind is fierce. Are you having a crowd in?” He’s inside the front gate now, and points at the food on the table. “I haven’t seen a soul on the road.”

He’s dressed for weather, but smartly; wool suit and an overcoat, brimmed hat and his neck tied. He’s always open to invitation.

“I don’t know who I’m having.” Alma pours herself a glass of beer. “Maybe just yourself.”

His face is a picture: his smile fixed but his brow furrowed, eyes squinting against the breeze. But the smell of the food is undeniable and the warmth of the kitchen goes round his shoulders like a friendly arm.

“Me?”

“Will you come in?” she asks him. “Can I offer you something?”

“Um—” But he’s already over the threshold, hands clasped as if in supplication.

“You can wash your hands, there, before you take a plate.”

He touches the soap with his index finger, but stops.

“I’m surely intruding, no? You must be expecting someone.”

“I am, James. Someone or something. I genuinely haven’t the foggiest. But you’re as welcome as any.”

His hand pulls back from the soap, one round indent left in it from where his finger rested. Something?

“I don’t understand.” His hands meet again, but he’s wringing them now, rubbing the soap residue away. His eyes squint again, but it’s not the wind.

She sighs. “It really isn’t any more complicated than I’ve said. The door is open, the food is ready. My offer is literally on the table.”

Alma herself knows how uncanny this must appear, but there’s really no other way to explain. If she asks James Rodgers for what she wants, she’ll get nothing more than what she asks for. And she wants more. More than James Rodgers can offer.

He seems to sense the depth he’s waded into, all unwitting, and begins to back out again.

Hadn’t his mother said something about old Missus Dawson and food? A warning.

“Actually, do you know? I can’t stay at all. I was actually on my way to, um… But, goodnight to you, Alma.”

“Goodnight so, James.”

He slinks down the path, but stops at the gate.

“Are you sure I can’t pull that door behind me, Alma?”

His concern is a greater kindness than he knows, but it’s not what she’s after.

“No, James. I want it open.”

---

As James passes the bend and the lights from Hatton’s Bar come into sight, he finally sees someone else on the road.

The woman is only half dressed, her grey blouse open at the neck and nothing on her head. Her shawl is bundled in her hand and her hair is flying.

“Hello,” he says to her, and she turns briefly to acknowledge the greeting, though she doesn’t return it.

Her eyes are gold.

James knows where she’s going. He knows, too, that it would be both the Christian thing and his own soul’s peril to try and stop her getting there.

He runs for the bar, where there might be souls braver than he.

---

When the woman with the gold eyes reaches the open door, Alma is putting the soup pot back on the stove to reheat.

“This isn’t craft,” she says, and Alma starts, almost spilling the soup.

“God help us!” Alma sputters, unintentionally.

The woman’s voice is husky and older than her face. She laughs at Alma’s outburst and it’s the sound of a crow clacking.

“Indeed! Put your cross back up, stupid woman, and don’t mock the likes of me again.”

Alma steadies her legs by holding onto the chair.

“Will you have something to eat, miss?” she asks the woman with the gold eyes.

“None of that, Alma Dawson! I told you, there is no craft in this. Where is your dignity? This is nothing more than begging.”

“It is nothing of the sort,” Alma maintains, and comes round to sit again. “I’m offering hospitality. Beyond that… I don’t know. I’d have to hear what else was on the table. What do you offer me?”

Gold Eyes’ hand has been inside the bundled shawl until now. She draws it out with a knot of herbs and feathers between her fingers, which she raises to toss into the house. Alma really hasn’t known what to expect this evening, but this at least she’s prepared for.

“If that comes in here, it’s mine. In my own home, I will treat it as a gift, freely given. I will claim its power, its utility and its purpose. If it enters my house, it is mine to use, though I vow not to use it against you. It’ll harm neither of us, I promise you, if it comes inside.”

The woman with the gold eyes stops, mouth bent like a taut bow, her tongue an arrowhead poised to loose. Fury makes her eyes bulge and tears bud at the corners. But the knot stays in her shaking hand.

“How dare you…”

“Because I know how curses like that work, miss. How the meaning is negotiated. A witch cursed my mother once, you see.”

Alma holds her hand up, asking the woman with gold eyes to listen. Her tone is not imperious, however; she speaks gently, face still. Know your depth. Control your heat.

“It didn’t work, though, her curse – least, not how she expected it to. She fancied herself, you see, this witch. That’s the phrase my mother used. Prideful. But she couldn’t render tallow from wet.”

Gold Eyes, pursing her lips but lowering her eyelids from their heights of indignation, puts the knot back in her shawl bundle. She sets the whole thing down on the ground and squats to sit upon it.

Alma reaches and takes a portion of chicken and a handful of potatoes from their platters, while she continues her story.

“She had done so well, convincing the rest of us she was craftier than anything, this witch started believing her own myth. So, when she couldn’t make the wet rendering work as well as dry, she decided it must be because it just wasn’t possible. She told my mother as much, just telling the truth as she saw it, but she was clever enough to tell it at a time and place when that truth would eventually sound like a prediction and look like a curse.”

Alma rises and takes the plate to the doorway.

“Eat, please. Without obligation.”

Gold Eyes accepts the plate and eats.

“My mother never made bad tallow, though. She was careful, attentive. Clever. She taught me with patience and kindness and I make grand tallow, too. My mother was a wonderful, generous woman, who would have done anything for anyone. She’d have shared her tallow with them and they’d never have had a day’s trouble with it.”

Alma finally sits back down at her table.

“But nobody would accept tallow from my mother. Nobody came to eat here who knew anything about her. She gave lodging to men and woman hired for the seasons and they, down at the bar, would praise the great food they enjoyed in this house. But for her own people to accept her hospitality? No, that woman’s tallow is cursed.

“That’s how it began. But it grew. They went from avoiding the food she made to avoiding the house itself, until they were avoiding us both, everywhere. It didn’t matter that the curse didn’t do what the witch wanted it to. It still worked. But, as you would say, there wasn’t any craft in it. She didn’t plan it. Some power, separate to her, took the start she made and gave the curse a life of its own.

“Miss, I would like to make contact with such a power.”

“Your woman was no witch, I agree,” Gold Eyes says, setting her plate down inside the doorway while she stays seated without. “But you’re wrong about her curse. It had no life of its own. She mightn’t have had any craft, your witch, but she had intention. That’s enough for power.”

She stands.

“Intention, after all, is what has brought me to your door. I felt it from miles away. And I won’t be the only one. There are powers such as you describe, only too eager to latch onto an intention like yours. You’re just damned lucky I found you first.”

“You weren’t, as it goes.”

The clacking laughter comes again and Gold Eyes lifts her bundle.

“Aye, I met your gentleman caller on the road. I think he left here unsatisfied, though, for he reeked of hunger still.” The laughter leaves her gold eyes as quick as it came. “But there are things hungrier than him that would readily answer such artless intention as you have shown this night. Things that would demand more sacrifice than your fine dinner.”

“I’m quite ready for sacrifice, I assure you.”

“What do you know about sacrifice, stupid woman?”

“As much as you do about hunger, miss. Lick your lips.”

Gold Eyes experiences a moment of confusion, but her arrowhead tongue does as it is bid. Quite suddenly, the gold eyes bulge in fresh indignation.

“You bitch!” And she backs away from the open door in horror.

“No obligation!” Alma cries out. “Peace! I beg you. I promised you, no obligation. I meant only to show you that I was serious.”

“Who is this?!” Gold eyes screams and retches on the path, as her fists go white with rage.

“My mother,” Alma tells her.

Gold Eyes freezes, stares at Alma in terrified awe.

“You couldn’t—”

“Rendered as sweetly as any jar of tallow made in this house. Even the undertakers avoided us, you see. So, I prepared her, laid her out. Did everything but bury her myself. And I kept that much of her, for just this purpose. Such was my intention. Such was my sacrifice. Such is my hunger.”

“I should— I’ll kill you!”

“Do worse. Introduce me, miss, to one of these hungrier things.”

---

Gold Eyes crosses the road, walks into a field on the other side.

She tramps the grass for a moment or two until her foot finds a creeping thistle. She pushes her fingers deep and plucks the weed from the ground, leaf and root. It is the roots she wants and, ripping them free, she bends to wrap the tendrils around and between her toes. Then she digs her toes into the earth again, reburying the roots and herself with them; bound to the spot, safe from whatever blows through the house of Alma Dawson.

This far into the field, she can see the bar and the small crowd of men coming out of it. The hungry little man from the road has raised the alarm. Alma won’t have long to make her bargain.

Gold Eyes has purged all she can from her stomach, but the flavour of Alma’s mother’s fat is still in her mouth. She, quite rightly, fears that whatever bargain the daughter might make with her mother’s tallow might end up including Gold Eyes as well, however inadvertently.

That’s why Gold Eyes has summoned something that won’t settle for carrion.

Take the flesh of Alma Dawson, she intones, toes rooted against the wind.

Her fat is what you want.

---

The potatoes and chicken are cold.

Alma waits at the kitchen table. She can see the figure of Gold Eyes in the field, standing still despite the wind.

Help me, Mother, she asks in silence.

“Surely, your mother has helped enough?”

The stone stopping the door is dislodged by the shaking of the wind. It slams shut.

The woman seated opposite Alma is white as milk: hair, skin, eyes. She looks young, but smells sour. When she speaks—

“Is this your offering, Alma Dawson?”

—Alma can see she has no teeth, and as she reaches out to grab from the plate of potatoes, there are no nails on her long fingers.

“W-Wait,” Alma says.

Sour Milk waits and her blind eyes narrow.

“There is a wash bowl and soap over there, if you want them.”

Sour Milk smiles and stands. She is dressed in white ribbons, bound and braided and so tight about her neck that she looks to be choked by them. She crosses to the bowl of water and dips her fingers in daintily. Then she reaches for the soap and mashes it in her fists. Dropping the crushed bar on the floor, she plunges her hands violently into the bowl again and scrubs at her hands until the ribbons at her wrists are hanging in sopping shreds, the bowl is empty, and the floor awash with white water.

Then the bowl falls and breaks. Alma wants to cry. Her voice breaks, too, despite her best intentions.

“Please… eat. No ob— no obligations.”

“Oh, but I am very much interested in the obligations. You’ve gone to so much trouble. Intention. Sacrifice. Put your own mother on the table.”

“Only her tallow. Her soul is beyond bargaining.”

Sour Milk closes the space between them, white feet slapping in the foul wash water.

“Pah! What is a soul? We are creatures of this world; the soul is no currency to us. The cleanest tallow has more flavour than any soul.”

“Then… eat.”

Sour Milk puts her hand to the platter of potatoes and flips it over, its contents rolling from the table to the floor.

“Your mother’s tallow is cursed. It has lost its goodness. It is spoiled.”

“That’s not true.”

“What is it you want, Alma?”

Alma rights the upended platter.

“What would you give me for the supper I’ve made, lady?”

“Nothing.”

With the white figure leaning over her, Alma has to bend to ease herself sideways off the chair. Sour Milk does nothing to detain her, but turns to follow her as Alma crosses to the door and opens it again.

“I am sorry to have wasted your time, then,” she tells the woman in white.

But Sour Milk makes no move to leave. “Offer me something else.”

“You mean offer myself.”

“Yes.”

“My own tallow.”

“Yes. Offer me that.”

“In return for what?”

“What is it you want, Alma?”

Alma lets go of the door and stoops instead to lift the pieces of her broken washbowl and the lumps of ruined soap. She takes them to the table and sets them beside the cold supper. Again, Sour Milk follows her closely.

“Will you not leave, lady? I have nothing to offer.”

“You have something to offer.”

“And if I offered that, what would you grant me?”

“What is it you want?”

Alma leans on the table to steady herself, her hand on the broken crockery.

“I want the curse lifted from my mother’s tallow.”

Sour Milk steps back, her blind eyes wide and her mouth loose. She takes a long time responding.

“Is that all?”

“It is no small thing,” Alma declares, her voice straining. “So, if I offered you my own tallow, would you do that?”

“And will you render it yourself or would you let me do it?”

“Answer what I asked, please.”

“Yes. If you offered me your tallow, I would end the curse.”

“Good. End it, so.”

Sour Milk lifts her hands, still wet from the washbowl, and cups them in front of Alma’s face.

“When I have you, the fat of you, here in my hands.”

The reek of her breath burns Alma’s throat and she almost coughs in reply.

“Yes. End the curse, then. Please.”

Sour Milk closes her round fingers into fists.

“Not until then, sweet Alma. Not until I have rendered you so.”

“You have had all you’re getting. Now, meet your obligation.”

The white abomination opens her mouth to taunt again, but something seems to catch at her throat. It’s like the ribbons around her already constricted neck pull even tighter, close to cutting the skin itself.

Her blind gaze is directed downwards, to the broken bowl, the lumpen mash of soap. White, fragrant soap.

“No!”

Lashing out, she grabs Alma’s throat with one hand, choking her as surely as Sour Milk herself is being choked. The other hand pulls up the jumper from Alma’s waist, exposing her belly. And the half-healed scars across it.

Alma forces breath out in spit-laden gasps—

“Meet… your… obligation!”

She is thrown backwards. The chair behind her goes flying as she hits it, but Alma stays on her feet.

White ribbons whirl around the room, smashing everything they catch upon. The guitar explodes as it hits the floor. But the ribbons at Sour Milk’s throat continue to cinch, until her sole focus is on pulling them loose.

“Meet your obligation, lady,” Alma shouts. “You had my tallow, offered and accepted. And you washed it away, rejected my sacrifice – you have no more claim! But your obligation remains.”

“You get nothing!” Sour Milk screeches back. “It’s a trick!”

“This is not a trick! This is craft.”

Sour Milk screams like a hurricane. The wind enters the house completely, pulling the breath from Alma’s lungs.

Help me, Mother, she prays again.

You let it in.

Staggering, Alma heads for the door. She can still see Gold Eyes, standing in the field. The witch is pointing down the road and Alma catches men’s voices on the wind. She puts her shoulder to the door and forces it closed.

There is a pop of silence.

Sour Milk is at the centre of the silence. The stricture at her neck has eased.

“The curse I will place instead,” she hisses, “will make you ache for rancid tallow.”

“I have been faithful to every part of our—”

“Fuck your faith!” Sour Milk’s toothless maw is wide and howling. “I will have your tallow. You can play tricks and call it craft, but you were told where the power lies. Intention. Sacrifice. Hunger. And none of that has changed. You have raised power this night, and I intend to make you pay the price of it.”

---

On the road, James Rodgers has led his brave souls to Alma Dawson’s gate.

None of the other men (merry as they are at the prospect of a grand story) have noticed the witch with the gold eyes in the field beside them. James is unsure what to make of that.

They’re all waiting for him to bang on Alma’s door. He just needs a moment for his frozen fingers to work up to it. He rubs his hands together to warm them, feeling a stickiness there that he’s forgotten the source of.

---

A curse, Alma has learned, is wet rendered.

Salted with hunger, boiled in sacrifice. But if it is your intention to purify it, then that’s where the craft comes in. You can try skimming the surface, attempting to avoid what’s bubbling underneath. But more often, you have to accept that the cake still has impurities in it, melt it all down and start again, sacrificing more and more for something that, at the end, will be clean. That will not spoil.

“I have another offer,” Alma tells the woman in white. “A tallow debt.”

Sour Milk stays silent, but cups her hands as she did before. To be filled.

“There is a man outside the door, he also took tallow from me tonight. He offered nothing in return that I could accept. He has my tallow still. My hunger marks him. I would offer you his debt, to settle what remains between us.”

There comes a rap on the door; short, and a little timid.

Alma gives the witch a moment to consider, then she turns to open the door.

The wind blows out this time, rather than blowing in.

James Rodgers feels it go through him like a blade and he stumbles back. One of the men coming behind him has to catch him from falling on his arse completely.

“Woah,” the man exclaims. “Has the Devil struck already, James?”

James straightens for a moment, but he’s clearly still reeling from the prospect of what he expected on the other side of the door.

“I think, begging your pardon Miss Dawson, that Rodgers here might need a seat. Can we come in?”

“Of… of course. Please.”

The crowd crosses the threshold of Alma Dawson’s house, probably for the first time in their lives. Whatever rumours they grew up hearing about the place, the wreckage in front of them now wasn’t a part of them.

“I’m sorry,” Alma begins, “the wind—”

“Not the Devil?” And they all laugh.

“Sorry?”

“James was convinced we were coming to save you from the host of Hell. Witches, Old Nick himself.”

“God, no.”

Someone rights a toppled chair and they settle James Rodgers in it. Then the whole assembly sets to tidying Alma’s kitchen.

“Thank you,” she tells them. “I’ll get poor James a cup of something.”

She pauses, then says, “I have a whole supper made, actually, if any of you would like something to eat?”

If they once knew a reason not to accept food in this house, they don’t remember it now.

“I’ll just need to fetch a clean bowl of water for your hands,” Alma tells them.

“And I have more soap.”

---

Host Commentary

Alma is the picture of courtesy, hospitality, and sensibleness. But it’s just a picture. Underneath, she is seething with rage. Now, her rage is pretty justified. One catty comment from a woman and it snowballed into a complete shunning from her village. Who wouldn’t be angry? She does, in her own way, use that rage constructively. Instead of seething in inaction or indulging in indiscriminate violence, she plans with patience and skill with the rage as her fuel. That rage though is so great it is fueling her journey into places no mortal should go, committing acts that even the dread creatures she deals with are shocked and horrified by. Rendering your own mother’s corpse for fat, taking fat from your own body, these actions are definitely fueled by rage.

Here’s the problem though. Rage can burn so brightly, it can blind you. Alma has always assumed that magic is the cause of her problems, therefore magic should solve them.  She learns, however, that her isolation is just happenstance and the need for an in group to have an out group.  An example of what happens when you don’t prepare your fat ‘correctly’ or otherwise you step out of line. Unfortunately all too common. But Alma doesn’t consider herself common. Her skill is masterful, her determination is indomitable, her wit sharp as a knife.  She does get the best deal out of her visitors. That’s just the beginning. Starting with her pitiable suitor and continuing with the men of the village, their sacrifice, their debt, their souls is what she believes she is owed after all. She falls into the trap so many do, merely commandeering the system instead of fixing it.