Strange Trades (48 page)

“Where have you been?” asked Charley’s mother first thing. Her voice, while somewhat stern, was also shot through with a kind of maternal concern the likes of which Charley had never quite heard before. Was this change, too, connected with his upcoming transformation?

“Oh, for a walk,” Charley said. “I didn’t feel like being with the other boys today.”

Charley’s mother said nothing, but continued to weave her fingers among Floy’s rich hair. Charley grabbed a waterwheat biscuit, sat and munched and watched until the task was done.

“All right, Florence,” said her mother. “You may go out now if you wish. But be back in before the bell tolls three, since I need you to baste the roast.”

Floy stood, her head with its coiled grandeur held high, and Charley grabbed her hand. Alan got to his feet and tried to follow them, but before Charley could deny him, their mother caught up the younger boy, saying, “And you come with me, mister, for there’re peas to be shelled.”

Charley and Floy left the house, heedless of Alan’s shrill protests.

Outside they meandered down the narrow, close-graveled streets. Odors of cooking drifted from each open window, along with household noises: the clatter of pewterware, the clink of glasses.

Holding his sister’s hand as he always did on their walks, Charley felt an unlooked-for estrangement in place of the comfort he had expected. Floy looked somehow older and different to him today, inexplicably more mature than her fifteen years. Her starched white ruffled shirtfront seemed more like his mother’s bosom than the flat expanse of linen he remembered from yesterday. Could so much have changed in a single day, or was it just his senses playing tricks? The changes left Charley feeling tongue-tied. Finally, he ventured an observation on the matter closest to his heart.

“Tomorrow I enter the Mill, Floy.”

“I know,” said Floy rather blandly. She seemed distant from Charley today, more intent on casting her gaze about as if for witnesses to her coiffed glory.

Charley was discomfited. “Well, will you miss me?”

Floy favored her brother with a look of impatience. “I’ll still be seeing you each night, won’t I? You’ll hardly be getting married yet, I think.”

Charley felt frustrated. “No, of course I shan’t. You know I don’t mean any such thing. But I will be gone all day with Da, and we won’t be able to talk and play for hours as we used to, nor take our lessons together. Will you still think of me, when I’m in the Mill? What will you do all day with yourself? That baby Alan can’t take my place, can he?”

“No,” said Floy in a somewhat absent-minded manner, as her attention was distracted by the sight of showoff Hal Blackburn chinning himself on the branch of a pear tree. Blackburn was inordinately large for his age, and his biceps bulged as he pumped himself up and down. Charley found his leering expression distasteful.

“I don’t know quite what I’ll do,” continued Floy. She released her brother’s hand and primped at her hair. Blackburn switched to a one-handed grip and began to hoot and scratch at himself like a purple vervet. Floy turned away from him in a huff. “I suppose I’ll find something, though.”

This was not the protestation of undying grief that Charley had been longing for and, in truth, half expecting to hear from Floy (he had even, he admitted, pictured tears), but he supposed it would have to do, and he sought to find some solace in it.

They promenaded among the houses in silence for the rest of their final afternoon together, each preoccupied with his or her own thoughts. When it was time for Floy to help with supper, Charley went and sat on their stoop, awaiting his father. The man returned at last after six. He had been gone since seven that morning. He looked utterly vanquished, and barely noticed Charley as he brushed past him.

After supper, his father sat on the wainwalkerhide chair (still owed for at the Company Store) that was reserved for him alone and silently smoked his pipe. The children played quietly, and their mother darned clothing. Buttery light from the oil lamps flowed over forms and faces, furniture and floor.

After a time, their father spoke. “That blasted Otterness was on my back all day. Claimed I wrongfully mixed two incompatible luminances on my machine. Ever since he made Master Luminary he’s been unbearable. At forty he’s the youngest ever, and if you imagine hell once let you forget it, then you’d believe the Lux Jackets could take the championship.”

Charley’s mother said nothing, realizing that attentive silent agreement was all that her husband wanted at the moment. The man smoked in silence for a full two minutes before speaking again.

“I tried telling them today what I believed, Eliza, and they did naught but laugh.”

Charley’s mother put down her work. “You know no one likes to hear bad things said about the Factor, Rog. I don’t know why you even bother.”

Charley’s father slapped the arm of his chair. “Damn it, it’s not even as if I’m proposing anything other than that the Factor leave us alone. If he won’t share the knowledge of his starways with us, at least he should take his superior self away, and let us try to find our own path again. As it stands now, he’s like a dam across the stream of our progress. There’s been naught new done since the Factor came all those centuries ago. Things were different then, and could be once more. We were picking ourselves up from the Dark Times, learning what we could do again. Then came the Factor, and knocked the spirit right out of us. Since then we’ve stagnated. It’s not healthy, I say. No more than if the Swolebourne were motionless and covered with pond scum.”

Shaking her head, Charley’s mother said only, “I don’t know, Rog. I can’t say. Life seems good.”

Charley’s father puffed furiously on his pipe, but said no more.

As Charley lay in bed that night he puzzled over his father’s words, but could make no sense of them before he fell deeply asleep. That night he had no dreams, not of his triumph atop the brick heap, nor of the day to come.

And in the morning he got up and had a breakfast of porridge with his father and he saw his lunchpail sitting beside his father’s on the shelf and he realized he had forgotten to cut his initials into it and would have to do so later and he set out into the dewy morning beside his Da down a familiar path that looked utterly strange and soon he was across the oily waste and among the clot of men and boys, some mingling and joking and some silent, and intricate odors were wafting out of the open Mill doors at him and the line of men was moving forward and beyond the doors his light-adjusted eyes could not penetrate the darkness and as each man or boy entered—save Charley alone—his clothing sparked with lux and before Charley knew it he had stepped over the threshold inside.

2.

The pale gray leaves of the dusty-miller tree diffused a scent like minty talcum. The branches of the dusty were long and slender, withes useful in basketry, and arced and drooped to form a secret bower around the bole. From some distance off, fatwood torches spiked into the turf on the sidelines of the playing field cast their wavering illumination over the ghostly foliage, sending shadows skittering over the tapestry of leaves without penetrating the deeper darkness of the arboreal shelter. The shouts of the spectators clustered around the sides of the game field rose and fell in linkage with the action of the players, the one an enthusiastic reciprocal of the other. Panting and grunting accompanied the fervent play, intermixed with the solid thump of shoe leather making contact with a scarred leather ball. The game was in its final quarter, and the Blue Devils were battling to maintain their one- point lead over the Landfish.

Inside the canopy of leaves Florence Cairncross leaned in a swoon against the rough trunk of the dusty. The familiar odor of its leaves filled her head with a piquant strangeness. Everything was so much altered.… The excited voices of her friends and neighbors and family sounded like the inhuman cries of birds or animals. The light of the torches seemed to issue from watery depths, as if drowned beneath the Swolebourne. An exclamation from one of the players reached through the tangle of leaves. “Pass it, pass it!” Was that her brother, Charley, calling? Perhaps … It was so hard to tell; his voice had changed over the last year, maturing into a novel male roughness. And under present circumstances.…

Florence felt a tugging at the laces of her camisole. Her starched outer shirtfront already gaped apart, one bone button missing, lost amidst the dead leaves of past seasons which bestrewed the ground at her feet. The fingers at her laces suddenly found the simple knot that secured the top of her undergarment, found its trailing end, pulled and undid it. Those same fingers poked through the crisscrossed laces halfway down her midriff and tugged. The lace-ends slid through the double-stitched eyelets as easily as water through a sieve.

She could see nothing in the tenebrous enclosure, but closed her eyes anyway.

Those fingers.… How was it possible for a grown man to have such skin, unscarred by machinery, untainted by the stink of lux and oil? Despite his maturity, they were still so smooth and uncallused, almost as smooth as a girl’s. That had been one of the first things she had noticed about Samuel.…

The game that Layday had been scheduled for noon, to allow time for morning services. A night game during the workweek would have involved too much travel for the Blue Devils, who had promised to give their fledgling opponents the advantage of their home field. Although the actinic sun was high, the game had not yet begun, for heavy rains the previous day had washed away the chalk lines of the playing field, and the men were still busy demarcating the borders of their eventual struggle. Under a spreading horsetail tree there was the usual broad trestle table set up with food and drink. Big stone jugs of pear-apple cider, both hard and soft; pies and loaves; cheeses and hams. People crowded around the refreshments, chattering. A bit more than half the faces were familiar. The new village was still underpopulated, all its houses and outbuildings still raw-looking, and the visitors, although representing only a portion of Florence’s community, actually outnumbered their hosts. This was the first engagement between the Devils and the Tarcats, as the newest mill had denominated their team, the first time the two villages—one long-established, the other barely settled—had had a chance to mingle.

Beyond the village the Valley mouth opened out onto misty blue-green horizons, the hills on either side sloping away into the flat plains like tendons disappearing into the torso of the earth. It was the closest Florence had ever been to the Valley’s embouchure, and its nearness made her giddy.

Talking with her best friend, Mabel Tench, one of the few village girls her own age, Florence reached for the handle of a cider jug at the same time the stranger did. His soft palm fell atop hers, engulfing it in a strong yet velvet grip. Florence felt the blood rush to her cheeks.

She turned her face to the stranger, who had yet to release her hand. His eyes were as blue as gillyflowers, his smooth jaw as strong as the rocks from which the Swolebourne tumbled. He was dressed in a ball-playing outfit: a jersey striped with his team’s colors—green and gold—and leather shorts. His legs were well muscled and very hairy. Florence felt her flush deepen.

“Please excuse me, Miss,” said the man, his words accented strangely. “Mere thirst is no excuse for inconveniencing such a beauty as yourself. Allow me to fill your mug for you.”

Finally he released her captive hand. Hooking the big jug’s handle with his forefinger, he somehow swung it neatly up into the crook of his arm without spilling a drop. Relieving Florence of her mug, he poured a golden stream of tart juice into it, then handed it back. At that moment one of the man’s teammates called him. “Snooker, the game’s about to start!”

The man set the jug down, made a little mock bow, then trotted off to join his team on the field.

Florence winced a little at the name. Could such an elegant fellow really answer to “Snooker?” She felt a twinge of proprietary anger, then caught herself. What connection existed between them that could give her the right to even worry about such things? Quite obviously, nothing. Nor would there ever be. Most likely.…

Through innocent questioning Florence discovered that the stranger was named Samuel Spurwink. Along with several other villagers he had relocated from distant, cosmopolitan Tarrytown. She found one of his townsmen standing on the sidelines, a short older man with a brown beard thick as thatch.

“That fellow who just scored a moment ago. He plays quite well.”

“Snooker Spurwink? Aye, I suppose so. If you fancy a style where you dart about like a drunken hummingbird, stopping to ogle every petticoat on the marge. Oh, he’s a sly one, that Spurwink. More used to indoor sports, if you take my meaning. Bending an elbow, letting fly a dart.”

Florence felt irked at the man’s denigration of Spurwink. “If he’s such an idle tosspot, then what made him come to the Valley? Although our work is noble and much esteemed, as bringing honor from the Factor to our humble world, we don’t have an easy life here, turning raw lux to fine cloth. I can’t see a figure such as you paint voluntarily abandoning all the pleasures of town for our strictured Mill life.”

“Well, you see, young Sammy had quite a surfeit of working in his Da’s butcher shop. Blood-covered aprons clashed with his finery, it seems. And then there was talk about Sammy and the Mayor’s wife— Say, young lady, just how old are you?”

Florence huffed. “Old enough to know not to listen to idle gossip.” She moved off, leaving the man chuckling to himself.