The Dress Lodger (32 page)

Sheri Holman

nel again, you pounce, hurling yourself at the creature, catching him behind his tricorn skull, while his tail lashes and he struggles to bite. He draws a bit of blood from your hand, but in gnashing, drops the candy. And that’s all you wanted. What is rightfully yours. You fling the rat away and he bolts up the tunnel, raising a gray cloud of dust that makes you cough. Nasty rat, you think, kneeling down to retrieve the little square of horehound.

But what if from where you kneel, shoving that piece of rat-spit candy into your mouth, you suddenly hear the most mangled crunch you have ever heard in your young life, followed by the clamour a boy makes dragging a metal pipe the length of an iron fence, but a hundred times louder and a hundred times faster, and at the end, a double crash like a cage smashing to bits and a steam engine falling on top of it? You race back to the hole to see that the whole thing is red now, inflamed with screams of agony and, worse, dead no-screams at all, and your jaw trembles so that piece of horehound candy slips through and skitters off the wall of the hole, landing God knows where. If all that happened when you were nine, wouldn’t that teach you the power of concentration?

“Mike! Stop!”

Eye is jarred out of the cave and back to Mill Street just in time to see a blur of white leap from the pink rat’s shoulders and streak through the doorway, out into the chaotic snow, leaving a skid of paw prints in the direction of High Street.

“Come back!”Pmk shrieks in high-pitched terror, and tears off after him. “Mike! Come back!”

The door stands open, and—like that—they are gone: white weasel and pink rat racing after him. In their place, filthy vagabond snow shambles into the house. Yes, it is the most dangerous time of day, thinks Eye, this quiet time. A time to look down and see the crushed and contorted bodies of pitmen, like limp red leaves littering the bottom of a well. The pink rat needs to be taught to concentrate. Eye’s attention slithers over to where the softly cooing heart rat has slipped too close to the fire. That was her responsibility, and she’s left it. Who knows what could happen to a rat left all alone?

Gustine raises the latch and steps into the potting house. She has only been gone forty minutes, but someone let the fire die down and the room has quickly reverted to frigid twilight. Wooden-handled awls and stray bits of brass wire litter one of the tables; on another, a half-formed figurine of a lion, a roar without a body, lies toppled and forgotten.

“James?” She calls the name of her potter. “Phillip?” His son.

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 her. 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.