What is going on? There are still three hours in the workday, and Gustine has brought fresh clay. She turns round and round looking for someone. Anyone to ask what has happened.
The wheel to which she used to hitch herself—where her potter’s son usually walks—offers a small clue. It has been wrenched from its cylinder and the harness torn away, like someone fell hard to the ground and broke it. A puddle of some fluid (it has mixed too well with gray-blue clay dust to be recognizable) pools nearby, next to a log, abandoned apparently in the act of being placed on the fire. Even if her potter’s son had fallen and hurt himself, why would the others be gone?
She sets her clay next to her potter’s silent, motionless wheel. Without the boy to turn it, the lathe is but another dead thing, more disturbing to her even than dead Fos or Harry Hopps. A person’s body may or may not be contagious, but the death of a machine is always epidemic; Gustine and her baby, along with half the pottery, will slowly starve if this wheel is not restored to life.
“James?”
What is she to do? She leans against her potter’s rickety stool, lashed with lamb’s wool to help ease his worsening sciatica, and fights her rising tears. Gustine has worked at the pottery since she was nine years old, turning the wheel, ferrying clay, watching; and it is this lathe and this room, not the back streets of Sunderland, that have shaped her. She could not take the nightly obliteration of dress lodging if, the following morning, she could not come here and watch things be built back up again. Objects beautiful and useful are every day coaxed from the lowliest mud; chamber pots and Sailor’s Tears—her brothers and sisters—rise triumphant, colorful, ready to be put to use. She lets her fingers explore the beveled edges of the clay-silk circle until they fall off the end of their world into the gap between cylinder and table. We are ruined, thinks Gustine darkly, easing off the stool and giving the disk a good hard spin with her hand. The larger wheel, broken and still attached by belt, won’t let it budge. Wearily, she reaches for a length of wire and sets about cutting her wedge into pieces. It is a fruitless activity, but all she can think to do.
“Yer back.”
She looks up to find her potter leaning in the doorway, his beard muddily parted down the middle into two long spades. His fixed, dead eyes tell her that whatever happened most definitely involved his son.
“Where is everyone?” she asks.
“They ran away,” says he.
“Why would they do that?”
“Because the cholera morbus has come to the potting house.”
Cholera has come here? Gustine starts to say no, it cannot be, but her potter is still talking, dully explaining as if he’d read the events in a newspaper. His son collapsed with the spasms, and the others were so frightened, they ran away. He passed off his boy to an old woman on the street who promised to take him home, for he knew if he dared leave the gate, he wouldn’t have a job to return to the next day. Her potter is supporting his son and three-year-old daughter, along with his dead wife’s mother and father; he cannot be put out of employment.
“We must work hard,” he says grimly. “We’re all that’s left.”
Why bother? thinks Gustine fleetingly. We can never work hard enough to make up for the other six—faithless cowards that they are. But then she looks into her potter’s sagging face and reads desperation there, along with sick fear on behalf of his boy. And doesn’t his expression mirror her own?
“We’d better get started, then,” she answers.
Gustine rekindles the fire while her potter repairs the broken wheel. It is a reversion for her, to take up her childhood job once more, and she feels awkward and little again just strapping the harness around her waist. Her hands move instinctively to the shallow trough in the crank, worn smooth by years of pushing, but when she leans forward the old familiar weight of the wheel gives easily before her. Together they have resuscitated the machine, are back on the endless band of revolution. The syncopated rhythm of her potter’s whirring disk falls in with the beating of her heart, guiding her smoothly back into their old groove of timelessness, that hypnotic circle world where hours get pinched in the gears and pulled back on themselves. She is ten years old again and pushing with all her might against the wheel, happy when gravity takes over and rushes it to the ground, struggling when she has to pull the crank up to her chest and push it over her head. It takes a few revolutions, but the wheel finds its own momentum and then she merely guides it, resting until her potter is done hollowing out his clay and cupping it into shape, until the chamber pot is completed and she must stop so that he can begin another. As she turns, she remembers, almost viscerally, the full-bladdered panic she used to have as a girl. Then as now, the little children who turned the wheel were only allowed to go to the privy twice a day, and she fainted once from trying to hold it in. She remembers waking up in a warm puddle, her potter slapping her hard across the cheek. Tell me next time, he growled. I’ll smuggle you outside.
He has always treated her, his slave, as kindly as someone who is himself a slave possibly could. Yes, he has struck her, but to spare her harsher punishment. He has never cheated her; and when she was absent three days for her baby’s delivery, he found a replacement to save her job. Even as she tries to frame a way to thank him, to let him know that somehow, together, they will get through this, the tension changes on the wheel; she feels the flyaway lightness of hands no longer pressing down. Gustine looks up sharply.
“James,” she says, pitching her voice louder to be heard over the spinning.
Her potter is not at his wheel. As she watches in horror, ten fingers reach for the table ledge and strain to pull their body upright. She throws off her harness and runs around to help, but her potter’s strength is already failing and he slithers back to the ground.
“James, get up,” Gustine urges, bending over the contorted man. “We have too much work to do.”
But he has turned in on himself like a warped pot fisted back down to clay. The spasm is horrible to behold; a racking, spastic implosion of the human body. No, please. No, please, he moans, though his lips are being swallowed by his eclamptic mouth. I have a family.
“Stand up, James,” Gustine commands, growing more terrified by the second. “I need you.” She tugs hard, trying to pull him upright, but he is dead weight. Damn it! What is her puny strength against the crushing insistence of this disease?
She releases her potter and he falls heavily back to the floor. This is the end, thinks she. He will die and I will be out of work. I will have only the dress with which to feed my baby. Her potter is dying and Dr. Chiver wants to take her child away. Everything is coming to an end, and she is powerless to stop it.
“I will send for a doctor, James,” she says, backing out of the cottage and running toward the front gate. It is snowing harder now and she slips painfully, cutting her knees on the slick oyster shells.
“Call a doctor to the potting house,” she shouts, pushing past the sentry, who has given up trying to stop the employees from fleeing. “I am going home.”
It blinks in the heat of the hearth, slowly roasting like a suckling pig. Its bright round eyes and coarse gray fur; its sharp teeth for clamping down; and the obscene hairless tail she knows he hides under that blanket. She has never been left alone with the heart rat; everyone says Eye, keep away. Blue says I will kill you, Eye, if you ever touch it. But it is rolling closer to the fire, sliding closer to the coals, and soon the whole room will smell of scorched rat.
Eye cocks her head at the blinking lump that disfigured the dress for six months and kept the laces from pulling tight. She remembers watching the night it gnawed its way out; staring at the hole between Blue’s legs, thinking how awful to have a rat inside you, scratching and biting to be born. And now it will sizzle and pop in the fire unless she does something about it. But what can she do? A black-edged blister melts the edge of its blanket, but everyone says Eye, don’t touch.
Plunge it in the hole. The idea breathes within h
er. Yes. Yes, that’s it. Cool it in the hole.
It was the same the night she staggered home after the accident, disfigured and bruised from her beating, unable to see from her bloody left eye. She had knelt to cool her face in the stream when she saw her water-slick old enemy cleaning his paws on the bank beside her. With a cry, she seized that rat and thrust him underwater, oblivious to his squeals and bites, screwing his face into the streambed, punishing him for what he did. She would kill all of them. They were all her enemy. She sees an old woman’s hand now (funny how it should be at the end of her nine-year-old arm) reach out to the fire to grasp that same rat’s skull. Slowly. Don’t startle it or it will run away. She sees the old woman’s hand grab him by the back of the head, immobilizing him, making him cry; weakly at first and then in real pain. Pluck the rat from the fire. Plunge him in the deep blue hole, Eye breathes, yanking back and instantly pushing him facedown into the stream. Drown squirming rat.
Gustine’s infant struggles under the Eye’s thick fingers, instinctually fighting for air, coughing and growling far back in his tiny throat like a hedgehog. He has nothing to breathe but fabric; he is taking blue into his lungs, swallowing great gulps of briny silk. He thrashes and mewls, but the shadow is resolute. Back on her stool, she pushes his head deeper into her dress-filled lap. She never understood why that weasel who rid the house of all the other rats left this one to live. She has hated it for months, watching its mother pretend to love it. But now she has ended its reign of terror. The creature goes soft in her lap and Eye flips it over to see if it breathes. It must be dead by now, she thinks. So long underwater.
But the rat is not dead. With the last of its strength, it reaches up for mercy.
Naturalists tell stories of female orangutans in darkest Africa, how the most hulking and violent of beasts, creatures who would think nothing of stealing a rival’s infant and dashing out its brains, are sometimes turned from murder by the innocent face of a human babe. What sense memory slips through, one has to wonder, to turn the tide of feeling? Is it mere substitution, a human baby for a lost ape child; or does it bore deeper into the ape’s thick skull to touch some half-forgotten memory of being small? What would a naturalist make then of apelike Eye suddenly rearing back from the rat in her lap, as if rather than staring, it had bitten her? Could he not fill notebooks on the look of utter confusion suffusing her face as she realizes this tiny creature has not a snout, but a human nose? As she runs her flat thumbs through his silken hair and taxes her atrophied olfactory glands to take in the tiniest hesitant sniff of him? Lecture halls could be filled analyzing the wonderment illuminating her single watery eye; papers might be presented on the musculature of a heretofore unseen smile weakly extending itself across her slack face. This is a baby, thinks she. There is no fur. No sharp teeth and naked tail. Eye has never held a baby. It is soft.
She takes him up from her lap of blue like Moses from the bulrushes, and the child, no longer fighting for air, instinctively reaches out for comfort. He clasps the thin hanks of hair that slither from her bun, and though it hurts at the roots, she does not stop him. Since the day of the accident, through the remainder of her whole long life, Eye has never been touched without anger or fear. First it was the fury of the owners, beating her into unconsciousness, more for the loss of their engine than for thirty miners’ lives. Then, as she grew more silent and further into herself, anyone who accidentally brushed against her pulled back in horror. Even blue rat’s skin involuntarily shrinks from her fingers as she laces up the dress. But here is a baby, patting her cheek, twining his fingers in her hair as if to pull her close and whisper a secret. Eye presses the child to her heart. Blue rat’s baby loves her.
“What are you doing?”
The door bangs wide and Eye jumps, so lost in the baby she missed the telltale raising of the latch. Gustine trembles in the doorway, streaked with wet clay like a statue wept to life.
“What in bloody hell are you doing?” she shrieks.
“I found him.” Pink bursts through the door behind Gustine, her small chest heaving from having chased the ferret down High Street until he made a dead-end turn onto Stamps Lane. “He almost got away, but I trapped him against a wall and—NO!” she screams, following Gustine’s horrified stare to where her responsibility rests in the crook of Eye’s arm. “Oh God! Give me that!”
Pink flings aside the guilty, shivering ferret and rushes the old woman. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she sobs, tugging on the Eye’s arm but begging Gustine’s forgiveness. “Mike ran away and I—I only left for a minute.”
But Gustine does not even hear. It’s over. The worst has happened. She stands transfixed in the doorway while Pink bites the Eye’s fleshy arm, pulling with all her might to release the baby. The Shadow of Death has fallen upon my child, thinks Gustine numbly. I am too late.
Pink tugs with all her strength, but the Eye, pressing the baby possessively to her breast, will not let it go. She shakes her head as hot tears drop from her single gray eye, though she scarcely knows what this water means. Don’t take it away. Don’t take the heart baby. Eye love it.
But Gustine has recovered herself and flies to the fireplace. She will not stand back and let the Eye destroy her child. She will not give up without a fight. She lunges for the hot poker and wheels it around at the old woman’s head, feeling the shock of connection and the satisfying sizzle of burnt flesh and hair. In her moment of surprise, Eye loosens her hold on the baby and Pink quickly snatches it away.
“I will not let you finish what you started!” Gustine screams, her sobs finally getting the best of her. “You could not kill him then and you will not now. I am taking this baby away. You will never see either of us again!” She pulls the baby from Pink’s arms and rips his blanket from the swaying clothesline overhead. Her child already seems different to her, strangely cold and faintly trembling. She quickly wraps him tight.
“Where are you going?” Pink begs. “What do I tell Da?”
“Tell your Da I’ve broken out of his bloody jail.” Gustine throws her shawl over her head and, pressing the baby close to her body, darts out into the snow. She has nowhere to go, but she will not stay here. Not anymore.
The door slams behind her, and Pink watches a comet’s tail of snow slowly melt into the floorboards. She might as well melt with it, for Miss Audrey will never want her now that she’s lost the baby. The pressure in her chest is greater than anything she’s ever felt; worse even than last Christmas when gin-lit Da stumbled home and stepped on the straw birdhouse she made him. Over by the fireplace, Mike shakes his wet fur and contentedly settles down to sleep.
And what does Eye—numb to the poker welt even now blistering on her right temple—feel? Stunned and bleeding, she has only a conception of a thought. In her new confused haze of black and red, she wonders who let the rat into her heart, to gnaw at the place Gustine’s baby used to be?
XIII
QUARANTINE
Someone is pounding loudly on the door downstairs, but Henry is too involved to answer.
He squints through his microscope, set at its highest magnifying power, one eighth of an inch, puzzled by what he sees. The slide under the microscope, a culture taken from the cadaver Fos’s soiled winding sheet before he burned it, teems with strange annular bodies, what look to be corpuscles, the same size as blood globules, but whose walls refract light powerfully. What are these parasites? he wonders. Are they important? He has never seen such creatures in healthy human dejecta, and as a comparison, he takes a few drops from his own chamber pot and examines them. No. Perfectly normal. On the table beside him lies Bell’s just published Cholera Asphyxia; but if what Henry sees has any validity, Bell’s latest theory will go the way of so many others. Cholera may not breed along the sympathetic nervous system, as Bell theorizes; no, it could very well be the work of a parasite, some creature smaller than anything Henry sees with his microscope. He knows his uncle Clanny is even now at home penning a monograph on the atmospheric
causes of cholera, based on his weather charts and his hunch that excess carbon is the culprit. Henry wants to invite him over to observe what breeds on the slide, but he doesn’t want to get into how he came by the patient.
More rapping from below. And more insistent this time. Henry storms over to the window and throws open the sash. “Leave me alone!” he shouts.
“Dr. Chiver, it’s me,” a high, frightened voice calls up. “Gustine. I need to speak with you.”
Gustine? He peers around the drapes and sees her standing unprotected in the snow, carrying a bundle in her arms. She’s come around at last, he sighs. She’s brought the baby. Quickly, he washes his hands, races down the stairs, and yanks open the door.
“Come inside,” he says. “And quickly, before someone sees you.”
She steps into the foyer, sloughing off a skin of mud and snow. What on earth has happened to so alter her? he wonders. Filthy and wet, she shivers around the baby, whose cheeks are waxen with cold. But there is something more. He sniffs the air uncertainly. Gustine stinks of alcohol.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says, unsteady on her feet. “I had to leave Mill Street.”
“Is that whiskey on your breath, Gustine?” Henry chides. “I thought you didn’t drink.”
“I didn’t before tonight.”
“Let’s get you dry,” he says, realizing that the only lit fire is in his anatomical study. Well, she helped him procure the bodies, she might as well know what he does with them. He opens the door that only days before he shut on Audrey, seeing through Gustine’s eyes the scummy specimen jars of eyes and hearts, the cabinet of saws, microscope, brown-jointed skeletons suspended from silk. She looks dully around, unimpressed by his collection, and Henry feels vaguely disappointed.
“Here is our handiwork,” he says, striding across the room and pulling away the cloth covering Fos’s naked body. Why am I doing this? he asks himself when she winces. Why am I punishing her for helping me? She turns away from the body of her fellow lodger and absently takes a seat on the raised hearth, rubbing the baby’s hands and feet, trying to warm him. Glassy-eyed and sluggish, the child looks unwell to Henry. She should have known better than to bring him out in this storm.