The Lamb

Ruth skins and disembowels the nervous young man, removes her favorite organs, and discards the rest as offal. She cuts his body into pieces, freezing the pieces for later. For Margot’s birthday, she roasts the boy’s rump and serves it with vegetables. Margot thinks this is a great birthday treat, but then she remembers the boy and feels the meat turn tough in her mouth. Ruth goes off to sleep after dinner, as is her practice after a large meal.

Since Margot can remember, she has always lived in their little cottage with Ruth. The sparsely furnished cottage is old and set far back from a quiet road, hidden between trees. Ruth discreetly scatters nails and glass pieces in the areas around the cottage, so someone’s tires may puncture or feet get hurt. Ruth spends her days waiting for such people to turn up at the cottage for help.

The day before Margot’s 11th birthday, two young men knock at the door. A delighted Ruth leads them inside, promising them food. As she settles between the men, Ruth sends Margot to their bedroom. The other bedroom, which Ruth once shared with Margot’s father, now works as the abattoir for the strays, and is called the strays’ room. It smells rotten, and the floorboards are stained with blood. Margot thinks of all the strays the cottage has welcomed and killed. Tonight, she doesn’t hear much noise from outside, suggesting Ruth killed the men quickly.

Margot believes Ruth was recently in love with the local, married gamekeeper. The gamekeeper has a daughter named Abbie, who is Margot’s classmate. The gamekeeper visited Ruth after Abbie got home from school, occupying her mother’s attention. Margot recalls watching Ruth and the gamekeeper make love in the kitchen. In the throes of passion, Ruth and the gamekeeper would swear they loved each other, but Margot knew the gamekeeper was just a passing fancy for her mother. 

One night, after the gamekeeper left, Ruth cuddled Margot and told her to forget about the man. The gamekeeper was a coward, eager to run back to his little family. The only people Margot and Ruth could trust were each other. Since that day, the gamekeeper hardly visits Ruth.

Margot is unable to sleep, the lice in the dirty bedding biting her. Ruth is fast asleep on her iron cot at the other end of the room. Margot tries to lull herself by thinking about her life with her mother. Margot likes her little enclosed world with Ruth. Ruth once told Margot that her daughter was an ammonite fossil, “only hers to unearth” (14). Since then, Margot loves to think of herself as a coiled-up, silent fossil. 

Ruth is beautiful, except for her prominent, yellowing teeth. Since Ruth hates brushing her teeth, they are covered with plaque. Ruth distracts from her teeth by wearing thick, red lipstick, especially when she is entertaining the men she wants to keep or have sex with.

Despite picturing herself as a fossil buried under sleep, Margot stays awake. Finally, she wakes Ruth up for a story. Ruth leads Margot to the living room and tells her the story of her own life. Ruth realized she was different from her parents when she was 11, even though she had her father’s green eyes and mother’s blond hair, which Margot too has inherited. Referring to Margot by her nickname, “Little One” (18), Ruth narrates how she always loved the taste of her own blood, even pulling out her own baby teeth so she could taste and examine them.

When Ruth was 11, she found her first “stray,” a person who is lost or unloved. This stray was an older woman in tattered clothes walking along the back lanes of Ruth’s route to school. Ruth was immediately drawn to the woman, whom she found beautiful, and began to watch her every day. Just shy of her 12th birthday, Ruth went up to the woman and lured her to a pit, claiming a child had fallen there. At the edge of the pit, Ruth hit the unsuspecting woman in the back of the head, killing her. She cut open the woman’s skull with her protractor and ate her brains, feeling full for the first time in her life. At the same time, Ruth realized that she would never be full, always waiting for her next true meal. After she was done with the woman, Ruth floated her body in the river. 

Listening to Ruth’s story, Margot decides that when she independently kills her stray, she will not wait around or play with them like Ruth did. She will give them a quick end.

It has been three days since Margot ate proper food. Having run out of stray-meat, Margot and Ruth are forced to eat “regular” meals. Margot feels weak on the school bus, where she sits in the front, next to the kind driver. The driver affectionately calls Margot “youngen” (23), or young one. The driver invited Margot to sit up with him a while ago, when he noticed how the other children bullied her. Sensing something different about Margot, boys like her classmate Patrick would beat her up or threaten her with a knife. 

Although Margot is happy to sit with the driver, she reflects that she was never in any danger from the boys, whom she thinks of as changelings because they are half-children and half grown-ups, half-human and half-animals. Margot has seen far worse violence at home, with Ruth often hitting her, calling the marks she leaves on Margot “special kisses” (23).

In school, Margot struggles during Math class, unable to solve problems featuring fractions. The teacher is impatient with her, regarding her as the child who refuses to learn. As Margot feels lost, Abbie, the gamekeeper’s daughter, slides close to her to help. Although Margot still cannot grasp the problems, she feels happy that Abbie hates the teacher and Patrick as much as she does. When Abbie tells Margot that she likes her for being weird, Margot feels like she has finally made a friend in school.

On her way home from the bus stop, Margot collects ingredients to make a hex, just like Ruth taught her. She will add them to the box under her bed, in which she hides hex-ingredients like cockleshells, chicken bones, and hemlock root. Hexes can control people, or make wishes come true. Margot knows how to weave hexes, but has yet to give anyone a hex.

A hungry Ruth sobs at the dining table, longing for “The crunch of a small bone and the chip of a nail” (32). Margot stays quiet, knowing any innocent word or action may anger Ruth in her fraught state. 

Margot drifts off into memories: Once she dreamed that Ruth ate Margot’s father’s finger after slipping the wedding ring off it. Margot’s father is not dead though; he abandoned her and Ruth. Margot misses him a lot. Sometimes, Ruth allows Margot to visit the loft where her Papa’s clothes are packed in boxes. Margot smells his jumpers to comfort herself.

Thinking about her father, Margot blurts out that she misses him. Ruth grows enraged and immediately asks Margot to say that her father was a selfish man who never loved her. A chastened Margot repeats the words, after which Ruth dismisses her to bed. Margot curls up in her cold bed, hoping Ruth finds a stray soon.

Ruth thoroughly washes Margot in the yellowing bathtub, since strays are not drawn to dirty children. Margot notes Ruth has already bathed, implying Ruth is making her wash in the water she herself used. Ruth scrubs Margot with a sponge, disdainfully plucking off a hair that has grown in Margot’s armpit. Margit can see a blizzard outside the bathroom window. It is snowing, cutting off the house from the road.

After many days of hunger, Margot finally sees a stray, though the stray turns out to be different than all her predecessors. The stray turns up at their cottage in the middle of a snowstorm. Ruth is delighted and welcomes her in, urging her to go into the bath to warm herself up. However, the stray resists calmly, asking Ruth for a hot drink instead. Her confidence is unnerving. As Ruth goes off to make the stray a drink, the stray tells Margot her name, which is Eden, just like the river.

As Ruth hands Eden hot tea, Margot notices that her mother has never seemed so nervous around a stray. Eden is about to drink the hemlock-hexed tea before Ruth stops her, telling her she will make her something nicer. It becomes clear to Margot that Ruth wants Eden the way she wanted the gamekeeper: not to eat, but to keep. Ruth compliments Eden on her beautiful smile.

Ruth invites Eden to spend the night on the couch. Margot is dispatched to her room. Margot watches Ruth and Eden from the crack in the door. Ruth sits on the edge of the couch and chats with Eden, not daring yet to touch her. Eden is confident, already at home in the cottage. After the women have spoken for a bit, Ruth goes to the bathroom, leaving Margot to stare at Eden in the dark.

Ruth has a restless night, worrying if Eden might escape. She and Margot take turns to keep a watch on the sleeping Eden. One time, Ruth is by Eden’s side, studying her sleeping face, when Margot joins her. 

Without looking at Margot, Ruth tells her that society is unfair to mothers, straitjacketing them in the role. However, no matter how society thinks mothers should behave, mothers are girls and daughters underneath it all. When Margot extends a hand to touch Eden, Ruth tells her not to touch their guest and go back to bed.

Margot wakes up to the sound of Eden singing in the shower. Ruth is busy cooking breakfast. When Margot sees only two portions for breakfast, she asks Ruth what Eden will eat. Ruth tells Margot the food is for Ruth and Eden—Margot is to go out and forage something for herself. Noting to herself that there is nothing to forage in the snow, Margot sees Ruth has applied the lipstick she usually reserves for making herself attractive. Ruth tells Margot that Eden is not a stray.

Eden comes out of the shower in a towel. From where the towel parts around her middle, Margot can see stretch marks on Eden’s belly, as if she once had a baby. Eden tells Ruth that she has heard stories of people getting lost in the area around Ruth’s house. She wonders what happened to the people. When Ruth whispers that they were probably just hikers who lost their way, Eden smiles and touches Ruth’s lips, calling her beautiful.

Margot rides the school bus, forced to sit with the other children since the kind bus driver is home sick. The boys are looking at an obscene video and laughing. When they show Margot the video, she doesn’t laugh, as she has seen people have sex before. Patrick grabs Margot’s head, calling her “an uptight freak” (53). He sinks his teeth in Margot’s lip, making it bleed. An enraged Margot closes her eyes and imagines her mother carving Patrick on her plate. Patrick walks away, grinning.

At the end of the school day, the children rush to the coat room to get their coats. Margot can hear people scream, even as the boys on the bus grin in delight. She sees baby rabbits—kits—hanging from the coat hooks, their throats slit. The smell reminds Margot of her home with Ruth and she begins to weep. Margot gets home and tells Ruth about the incident. Ruth makes up a rhyme about the incident, teasing Margot with it.