Pink lights a tallow candle in the fireplace and dully leads the way to the stairs. She gives a quick glance over her shoulder to Mrs. Eyeball, just to make sure she is doing the right thing taking this charity lady up to see Fos. The Eye watches them mount the stairs but does not stir from beneath the dress.
Twelve creaking steps take them up to the low room where the boarders sleep, a room in far worse shape than Audrey might have imagined judging by the fairly tidy first floor. It is noon outside, but midnight here, or 4 A.M. or 6 for all she can tell. The windows are boarded up, allowing in no light or fresh air. The walls are grimed brown and scattershot with the blood of crushed bugs. When she moves, Audrey’s neat boots crunch infested hay underfoot, the mattresses of Whilky Robinson’s thirty boarders, though some, unable to afford the 4 d. he charges per pitchforkful, sleep only on their spread-out coats. From experience Audrey knows that men and women lie indiscriminately up here, head to foot and back to back. The pregnancy rate among female lodgers tells you what sort of night’s sleep they get.
“You can see her better without this,” says Pink. With a quick puff, the little girl blows out the candle. An oppressive darkness swallows the room, hot and close and reeking of fish-infused urine. Something scurries over Audrey’s foot and she stifles a scream.
“Over there,” says Pink.
In the far corner of the room, low to the ground, Audrey can make out a faint glow. At first she thinks she is imagining it, but no, there is a green tinge to the darkness in the corner, like the faraway lights of the aurora borealis.
“That’s Fos,” Pink tells her proudly. “She glows in the dark.”
Audrey quickly makes her way over to the effulgent creature in the corner, and reaches into her pocket for the packet of friction matches she keeps there. By the light of the match, she sees lying upon a bale of straw a narrow-faced woman, breathing shallowly, her eyes screwed up against the pain of even that dim flame. The right side of her face around her mouth is strangely sunken, as if she had just sucked the sourest lemon and couldn’t quite release the pucker.
“Fos paints phosphorus on matchsticks,” Pink explains. “Now she’s got the Fossy Jaw. Da says soon it will be eaten clean away.”
My God, thinks Audrey. And they call this poor woman by the disease that is killing her? She takes a blanket from her stack and lays it over the suffering matchstick painter.
“Friend,” says Audrey, refusing to use the horrid name. “Friend, can you hear me?”
Matchstick painter, dear friend from Saturday night, are you truly so sick you cannot answer this helpful lady? We would never have deserted you to your solitary chats savants had we known you were so gravely ill. Yes, we had a story to tell, yes, an engagement to keep, but we are not heartless. We might have seen you home and safely tucked into your bed of hay. Might have sent around the corner for a hot lemon gin to settle the burning pain in your stomach. How were we to know, dear matchstick painter, dear friend Fos, when we chose to follow Gustine’s gaudy blue thread that your dun brown one was near to being severed?
“I don’t think she hears you,” says Pink.
Rouse yourself, Fos. Give a word of comfort to this lady who seeks to comfort you. Give comfort to us who are shocked at this sudden and frightening change in you.
“We should send for a doctor,” says Audrey grimly. “My fiancé will come.”
Audrey tucks the edges of the blanket under the poor woman’s legs to keep them off the scratchy hay, rises, and leads Pink back down the stairs. The stale air of the first floor is a welcome relief from the thoroughly fetid atmosphere above. How do they live? Audrey wonders for perhaps the thousandth time in her charitable career.
“I am going to send for Dr. Chiver,” Audrey announces, making herself ready to go. She has said good-bye to Pink and left her with a cheerless olive wool blanket, when without warning, the woman in the corner suddenly starts up. She has her one gray eye fixed on something in the corner, piercing it to the ground like a pin through a butterfly. As if raised by her gaze, a tremendous squall issues from the coal bin.
“Oh no,” gasps Pink. “The baby!”
The baby cries like Pink wants to at always being such a miserable failure. She can’t believe she went and forgot the baby, left it over behind the coal bin, and now when she runs over, pushing Eye out of the way, she sees, though she remembered not to set it on its chest, though she did everything else right, a frog sitting on the one place you should never ever jokingly poke!
“Bloody shit!” shrieks Pink.
Audrey rushes over and Eye steps back. Pink is pointing to the frog hunkering on the baby’s chest and mutely screaming. Mike would never have let this happen. He would have dragged the baby to safety or bit the frog into a million pieces or some smarter combination, but he would never let Gustine’s baby die. The lady plucks the frog off with two long fingers and flings it into the fireplace, where it sizzles and then in a second pops. She is picking the baby off the floor with her hands not her teeth and walking with it over to the table. Support the head and bum, Pink finds the voice to say.
Eye sits back down on her stool beneath the dress.
“Whose baby is this?” Audrey demands, color stinging her cheeks. These people, she swears, these people are simply not fit to have children.
“Gustine’s,” Pink whispers.
“Where is this Gustine?” she asks coldly.
“At work.”
Poor baby, coos Audrey over the little mite. It is swathed head to foot in woolen blankets and having been left by the fire, its face is scalding to the touch. She calls the baby “it.” Is it a boy or a girl? Audrey unwraps the blankets to take a look.
“Oh my God.”
Pink throws out her arms to catch the baby, for surely this lady is going to drop it. She doesn’t, though; she recovers much faster than Pink would have, and then Pink notices how everything changes—she holds the baby out from her so very carefully, like it is going to break. Like Gustine holds it.
Audrey manages to speak. “Its chest. Was it born that way?”
Pink nods.
“What is its name?”
“Da said Don’t give it a name, it’s going to be dead soon. But it’s been alive since summer.”
Audrey has never seen anything like it. Never in her years of visiting. Nor in her hospital work. Not even in Henry’s textbooks. She is holding a perfectly formed baby in her lap, possessor of wide blue eyes, a cap of super-fine black hair, plump, smiling, wagging its arms and legs. But where the frog had sat, there at the very center of this child’s otherwise perfectly normal chest, is an enlarged bruise. A raised blue bruise shimmering under nearly transparent skin. But a bruise cannot beat, a bruise has no pulse, ribs would not recede and give way before a bruise. Audrey can barely comprehend what she holds in her lap. What she sees, what she could press down upon with her finger and still for all time is this baby’s working heart, beating on the outside of its chest.
Poor matchstick painter, you are once more forgotten. You lie upstairs in your manger of hay, tossing and turning, fighting back the stomach cramps that have plagued you since Saturday night. Yes, your jaw is killing you, but something else may be killing you faster. Life is unfair, is it not, Fos? You lead such a brown constricted existence, moving between the match-stick factory and this boardinghouse, stopping every third night or so for your one glass of beer. We did not begrudge you your Saturday night’s entertainment. No, we wanted nothing more than for you to be cheered a bit by those clowning cats. But it seems God in His Heaven was not so benevolent. For His entertainment, He sat you down next to a dirty old keelman by the name of William Sproat, the one who slapped his leg and laughed through his teeth, the one who even now is expiring down on the Low Quay, blue and shriveled and biting the bedsheets in agony.
And Audrey Place, the doctor’s fiancée, though she means to do good is a woman in love. She knows how interested her Henry is in the human heart, knows that he studied it obsessively
in school, that he slept with it over his bed in boyhood. Henry has poured out his heart to his intended and in return when she looks at Gustine’s baby, dandling on her knee, her first thought is not, Poor baby, how your mother will weep when you are gone. No, poor forgotten matchstick painter. Audrey’s first thought is strangely similar to Gustine’s on the riverbank. Look what I have found, thinks devoted Audrey. I must tell Henry.
V
EMPLOYMENT
Across town, something is wrong at the Garrison Pottery Factory. It’s a subtle thing, a matter of ten idle minutes, no more than that; barely the time it takes for Audrey to bid Pink farewell, take up her blankets, and lose herself in the next needy family. Certainly, to a girl whose day is circumscribed only by millinery appointments and piano lessons, ten minutes would not seem to be a great deal of time, but to Gustine working at Garrison, ten minutes is an eternity. A break of ten minutes is time enough to relieve oneself, to eat dinner, to fall asleep and have ten different dreams before being awakened by the crack of the foreman’s strop. Ten minutes idle in the middle of the day, though, ten unanticipated minutes with nothing to do—well, any well-oiled factory worker will tell you, that is nothing short of a disaster.
Gustine is contemplating this disaster in the doorway between the grinding room and the blunging room, her muddy skirts moulded to every curve of her body, her face and arms stiff with drying porcelain. Over the years, she has developed a straight-backed, bowlegged run with her clay, like a woman might whose job consisted of rescuing cats from a house fire, but no matter how careful she is, the creamy gray slip rolls down her cheeks from the clay she balances on her head, oozes down her stomach and between her legs from the sixty-pound wedge she hugs to her chest. She spends her day creakily running between the slip house and her potter’s lathe, slicing her sixty-pound wedges into two dozen identical lumps that with a ladleful of slip she feeds to her potter; and when she has run the finished pots to the center of the room and climbed the stepping stool to place each one on the high shelf unit dusted with sand to keep the pots from sticking, and her potter looks up at her with his hands shaking and empty and strangling nothing but air, she runs back to the slip house to begin it all over again.
But today, for the first time in her nine years at the factory, Gustine finds herself with nothing to do.
The ceilings of the slip house are uniformly low and braced with dry-rotting beams bought cheap in 1753; the knobby walls have raised a stucco from their yearly whitewashing over splattered clay; the windows, likewise, have been splashed and crusted over, leaving the rooms in perpetual twilight. In the dimly lit room next door men grind flint underwater to keep the dust down. They wear damp handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses as they shovel red-hot stones from the oven into a grinding trough of cool rainwater. The old grindstone is wearing out, Gustine overhears one say, his forehead pinkening in the steam. Don’t call it to the foreman’s attention, muffles an older, more experienced grinder. It happened once before that a replacement grindstone contained the tiniest trace of calcium carbonate that mixed into and undermined the flint. The only thing worse than grinding sixteen hours a day, Gustine learns, is to grind sixteen hours and not be paid because the pots exploded.
Leaning in the doorway, she is conscious of loitering; can feel, like bits of flying stone, the sharp glances the grinders chip at her. No one at the Garrison has time to lean against anything, much less watch what the others are doing. They know who she is and they know she should be upstairs right now, collecting her two heavy wedges of finished clay from the slappers, then getting along with her lazy self. What they don’t know is that Gustine has already been upstairs and found a single man where there have always been four, beating the clay with his one wooden mallet to expel the air bubbles, slicing off wedges and slapping them back into the clay with a frustration born out of screaming shoulder muscles and a rising panic. He was crying when she surprised him, surrounded by oozing clay and idle mallets; said to her gruffly, It’s not ready yet. Come back in ten minutes.
Ten minutes. Here she is again, and she still doesn’t know what to do with them.
Reluctantly, Gustine gives up her spot in the doorway and wanders stiffly through the slip house, past pairs of Garrison blungers who with great bladed instruments scythe clay and rainwater in coffin-length troughs, passing it through increasingly finer sieves until it comes out the consistency of cream. Behind them, the factory’s only steam engine combines this creamy clay and ground flint into a single vat, and with its pistons and pugilist vanes, pounds it so violently the entire shoddy building shakes upon its foundation. The men plug their ears with twists of cotton and go about their business as if there were not a raging beast in their midst, but Gustine marvels at how it grunts and bellows; she is pleased to learn this creature is working as hard as any of them and is just as upset about it. Behind the engine, the previous batch of slip is boiling away in a long firebrick enclosure heated below by twenty fireplaces. Two toothless, shirtless old men stir the bubbling stuff with boat oars to make sure it evaporates evenly. When most of the water has boiled off, it goes upstairs to have prodigious farts worked out of it by Gustine’s slappers, but today it will have to wait with the last batch. One man cannot slap an entire day’s worth of clay by himself.
Gustine sighs and steps into the dark courtyard. Thick white clouds have lowered the sky to the height of the ceilings inside, making a girl instinctively duck beneath them. Snow clouds, they look to be, but October is so early in the season, maybe she is mistaken. It is strangely exhilarating to be alone at work, to go about without her burdens in the open air; as unimaginable as stepping outside in the dress without the shadow weight of an Eye behind her. It is difficult to smile after a day in the pottery—a rind of clay has stiffened her face to impassivity—but if she could smile, she would now, aware as she is of being very, very bad, as only the idle might be.
When was the last time she was alone? She can barely remember. Certainly never before at the potters’ house, where she shares a room with fifteen other people, nor at Whilky’s, where thirty sleep upstairs tangled together like stray cats. The closest she comes to solitude is on her Sundays off, when she works neither encased in mud nor laced into the dress; when she might walk her baby to the town moor for an airing. She doesn’t mind its weight at all—the baby is far lighter than the wedges of clay she carries, and warmer and certainly drier. She wants the baby to experience Nature, because she knows poets say it has a civilizing effect, and though most of the trees have been cut down and the grazing cows and sheep have gnawed away a good portion of the grass, there is still enough green to impress a child. On the town moor, Gustine spreads out her shawl and lays the tightly wrapped bundle carefully in the center. She wishes she could just strip off the blankets and jumpers, let the naked thing grip the grass in its tiny fists and root it mightily from the earth, but she doesn’t dare. If she let her baby crawl bare-bottomed across the town moor like the other children, a draft might whip by or a miasma well up from the damp ground and extinguish the little blue light in its chest forever.
But, Christ, now she is truly alone and for ten minutes responsible for nothing. She has barely ever stepped outside the circuit of potters’ house, slip house, and slapping room; now, with something like a purpose, she skirts the great courtyard mountains of chert and flint and coal and crosses to the high wall that separates the Garrison Pottery from its eponymous neighbor, the barracks of His Majesty’s 82nd Infantry Division. Away from the blungers blunging and the grinders grinding, she can hear jangling spurs rebound off taut horseflesh, swords in unison slick out of metal scabbards and chunk back in. So they are still here. Gustine has not seen a soldier on the streets for over a week, and was beginning to wonder if they had shipped out. Her landlord had heard that their chief surgeon was in Jessore during the 1817 cholera outbreak and ordered the barrack gates locked and bolted to keep his men free of contagion. It has been harder on the streets without the welcome sight of
a red coat; harder on the shop girls and lace-makers than on Gustine, whose dress might allow her entrance into better neighborhoods. She presses her cheek against the rough brick wall and closes her eyes. What a shame to lock all that commissioned male-flesh behind a wall. How clearly she sees the shiny patches made by woolen breeches rubbing the hair away from their muscular thighs; how often was she expected to ooh and aahh as their soldierly nipples sprang forth from their tightly buttoned coats. A soldier cannot wait to throw off his confining uniform, but once he is naked—she shakes her head—has no more imagination than to drop upon a girl stiff and straight as a salute.
Only seven minutes left—surely three have passed. Gustine looks down at her hands, tingling with shiftlessness. She has the whole complex at her disposal, but where to go first? The hot kilns look inviting. She could walk over and watch the seggars, stripped down from working in equatorial heat yet pale as new-hatched termites. They are loading the green-stage pots they’ve taken from her lodge into thick, lidded ceramic seggars for the first biscuit firing. When all the encased ware is stacked as high as it might go, they’ll brick up the kiln walls and set the fires alight, raising the temperature inside gradually, over forty-eight hours, to twelve hundred degrees. Over another twenty-four hours, the temperature slowly drops, and when it reaches about one thirty, the seggars climb inside to disinter the pots. It is cold outside and her muddy shift is freezing to her bare legs. She might take her naughty, indolent self over to the kilns where it is warm, but for some reason she does not turn that way. Let me go where there are no people, she thinks, even if only for six minutes more.
To her left, Garrison’s storehouse stands away from the complex, built at the end of a short track used for running carts of pots from the kilns. It too is low, but longer by half than the other buildings, and blissfully dark. Gustine’s muddy boots crunch broken pottery underfoot as they take her slowly toward it, the only building in the pottery free of workers. Its clean black windows reflect the jack-o’-lantern slip and potters’ houses, give back the orange-glowing cone-shaped kilns. I make these, thinks Gustine, raising up on tiptoe to peer into the dim, whitewashed room. For six years she has worked among the dizzying wheels of the potters’ room helping to make these wares, worked for the same potter, a man she has watched go from young to middle-aged, growing his beard longer and longer like a mud wasp’s nest. At first, when her potter had no child old enough of his own, she turned the wheel that worked the belt that via a crank spun his lathe. Four years she spent hitched to that wheel, walking inside a hypnotic wonderland of circles, horizontal and vertical shadow wheels thrown by candlelight, dreamy revolutions of time. Like a dog chasing her own tail, Gustine would lose herself for hours; the foreman would call twenty minutes for dinner and the ham she mechanically put in her mouth satisfied like a solid wagging muscle. When the potter’s son grew old enough to take over the wheel, his wife conveniently died, and for the past two years, beginning when she was thirteen, Gustine has worked as his assistant, ferrying clay atop her head like a Russian bottle dancer, shrinking a few inches every day beneath its weight. I make these, she thinks proudly, looking down the long rows of stacked pots, rows of pink and purple Sailor’s Tears and Keep Me Cleans, waiting to be packed with straw and transported out. Gustine recites softly the aching poetry painted on Garrison’s most popular item, The Sailor’s Tear.