Читать книгу The Green Age of Asher Witherow - M Allen Cunningham - Страница 14

THE LONG DAYS IN THE BREAKER WORE ON. I DEVELOPED A wordless language with Thomas Motion as our lessons evolved. Everything could be made for discourse, everything a code. The fixing of a stare on a joint in the chutes. The altering rhythm of hand and slate. Left hand to ear: a warning. Thumb to knee: a signal for readiness. A tug at your cap: a request for more tobacco.

Our lessons were like this: As Boggs passed on Thomas’s side, I leaned and spat a thick splodge of brown at the boss’s back. He whirled round and yanked Thomas down off the slat and flailed his quirt across the boy’s chest.

“Dirty little puke! I’ll not take it, boy!”

I hunkered at my work while Thomas sprawled in the chute and grunted under the sharp whacks—one two three four five six—and then he would not bear more. At the seventh, he shot out his hand and snatched the quirt from Boggs, jabbed it hard into the boss’s gut, then scrambled up and turned it fast on me.

“You stupid fucking Irish!” he screamed as the quirt ripped over my neck. “It was Witherow!”

With two great mitts at Motion’s jacket, Boggs tore him clean out of the chute and jostled him to the wall. There Thomas took a number of hard blows across the ass, sobbing and holding his tongue with all his strength. Finally Boggs spun him around and prodded him back to his place beside me.

“I’ll be damned if this will continue, boys!” barked the foreman, to be heard by all above the clamor. He stood near us for a time, angrily straightening his coat as we bent to our work. At last he took up his supervisory pacing again.

Thomas looked long at me, red-faced and grim. He snorted through wet nostrils and returned to his work without a word.

I allowed a few days to pass. Then I lit a fire again.

I gave Thomas the signal that all was clear, so he sat back from the chute and stretched out his stiff spine and neck.

“Boss!” I shouted, and Boggs turned to find him so.

The boss pounded off two blows of the rod and Thomas bit his tongue till it bled. He showed me that night at school.

“You see!” he said. Neat tooth marks ran like hyphens across the bluish tongue. “I did this but I didn’t make a squeak. I’m doing good, huh? Not a squeak!”

“Better, Thomas, yes.”

“Better, for damn sure, than beating you with the boss’s quirt!” He heeled back and socked me so hard at the shoulder that I stumbled away from him.

“Yes, Thomas. Better.”

As for me and my lessons—I was getting nowhere. I stood in the tall grass of our hills like a castaway, distracted by the dark rustlings about me.

I went forward in tiny jerks, all my weight tilted onto the balls of my feet, half-fearing I would come to the edge of the world with each step. I struck my head on low branches. And always Thomas would come ripping out of the dark to knock me down and pummel me. Blackness and nothing more fronted me at every try, inscrutable blackness through which Thomas would lead me sprinting in terror. I had blindness and terror, while Thomas simply bit his tongue and every day grew calmer under Boggs’s rage.

THAT WINTER MRS. PRICE, THE BRAKEMAN’S WIFE, LOST HER SECOND son in ten months’ time to the Black Diamond Company. The first boy, Charles, had been bucked from a runaway rail-car on a rainy morning as the coal train screeched down slick rails to New York Landing. Now Samuel—a spragger of ten—shattered his skull against an outcropping in the Clayton Tunnel gangway while hustling alongside the cars.

Samuel was buried beside his brother on Rose Hill. Practicing a superstitious piety like most good Congregationalists in our town, Mrs. Price arranged for the burial to be carried out at night, by the light of a few lamps. Any goblins of ill luck would find harder trafficking this way.

Mother and I were there among a crowd of workmen and their wives. Near to us stood Reverend Parry, head bowed and eyes squeezed shut, lips twitching in silent prayer. Josiah Lyte stood bleached by lamplight at the head of the grave, reading aloud from the little book in his white hands. He bent and scattered dirt over the coffin and his lean face broke into a notchy smile.

I stood there in that thick congregation of black coats and skirts and listened to the words of the death rite and suddenly—instantaneously—everything around me was illumined. Darkness shuddered and went pale. Shadows slunk back and I saw the verdant green grass, the blue crystalline flakes in the quartz headstones lining the graveyard. I wished at once that Thomas were there. I could have bolted through the deep night without fear. All was vivid, as in sunlight. The earth shifted and bulged warm under my feet.

But promptly the lamp-rays quavered through filing shadows. The mourners were parting, dark again, and my mind’s sunlight was snuffed. The earth at my feet sank and settled, as if with a silent belch. Mother stepped away to greet some ladies. The unfilled grave was left to the few men—Mr. Price among them—who stayed to seal it.

I turned and started down the hill through the headstones. I was seeking mother in the dark when someone behind me spoke my name. Squinting back into the lamplight, I saw Josiah Lyte hastening toward me. His waxen face and hands gleamed against the blackness. One of those weird hands flashed and gripped my shoulder and he began chattering with low voice.

“Asher Witherow, I saw you! I kept my eyes on you, you see. I knew you for a remarkable young man all the time! The rare soul will glow, without fail, of course it will! And strange that I should see it, but I have and that is that—” He stopped and seemed to still his tongue with considerable effort, then chewed his lips eagerly and stared at me as though I might speak a language not his own, which he knew a little of and was trying to recall. He clenched my shoulder as if worried I might run from him. “Asher, I have seen. I’ve seen the manner in which you stand on the earth. I’ve watched your face at funerals, in the company of the dead.”

I sputtered that I meant no offense, that I knew the solemn thing death was. Mother said I was young still and intended no harm in things I couldn’t yet understand. I told him this.

Lyte shook his head. His mouth curved in a scalloped smile. “You’ve made no offense,” he said. “I mean to tell you that—that I’ve seen. I noticed you first at Edward Leam’s burial. I saw it then in you, only I couldn’t speak of it surely enough. But I marked you.”

I saw now that his eyes were almost transparently green, the skin beneath them streaked with pallid rings. And his dark eyebrows were very thin, two tiny crescents like gills slitting his brow. He pulled me closer. “I saw the earth filling up beneath you,” he whispered. “I saw the flowers at your feet!”

Mother appeared at my side.

“Asher—Oh! Good evening, Mr. Lyte.”

“Mrs. Witherow, good evening.” Lyte released me and stood straight again. “I was just speaking to your boy here—about the funeral. A sad event no doubt, but the Lord has his designs.”

Mother cast her eyes at Lyte’s feet, submerged in shadow though they were. “Yes he does, Mr. Lyte, that is sure.”

“Your Asher’s a remarkable lad, Mrs. Witherow.”

Mother took my hand. She turned away. “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Lyte. Good evening.”

“—And he does well in school I’m told. Mr. Evans says Asher has an aptitude for his lessons that’s rare among boys his age.”

Though I never knew her to shy from anyone, mother balked and stammered before Josiah Lyte. It makes me shudder to remember. She pulled me down the hill after her. “Yes. Well really, Mr. Lyte, we must go.”

Lyte waved a waifish hand. “Good evening, then. Good evening, Asher.”

“Good evening, sir.”

And then I was walking through the darkness with mother. We picked our way down the graveyard path to the Somersville Road, then turned and moved up the saddled ridge. A soft fog hovered in the hills around us. Just beyond the crest of the road a cloud of it rose and churned like steam against the blackness.

Mother’s fingers were frigid. With her free hand she clutched the weighty shawl at her breast. “Does Josiah Lyte speak often to you, Asher?”

“Sometimes at school he stops me with a word or two.”

“What does he say to you?”

“He’s eager about my learning. Asks me how school agrees with me.”

Mother said nothing. Her skirts chafed softly in the dirt of the road. She had a way of drawing up into silence, exempting herself from what surrounded her, sometimes nurturing in this manner a terrible disapproval that would later be unpent. I always feared her quietness.

While we walked I began to read the texture of her palm against my hand. It was thick and fleshy, but the surface skin was callused and cold, ribbed like unstained maple. I pressed it and felt a slow heat seep up from its depths.

We crested the ridge and descended through the fog toward town, the Congregational church windows hazing yellow ahead of us. Mother sighed and dropped my hand to pull her shawl up. She spoke again and her voice was low and pointed.

“There are things that should not condescend to us, Asher—things that ask of us and are strong in how they stand. It’s not our place to find them fitting or not fitting, because they’re older than us, or worthier or holier. Do you see? Don’t ask how school agrees with you and don’t let anyone else ask you such things. Fit yourself to school and learn to agree with it. That’s the best way.”

“Yes, mama. I understand. I’ll keep my head at my books.”

“The grave,” she said, “is no place for mirth!” The words jutted against the clouded night. It was clear she had not addressed them to me but to something inward with which her soul grappled.

At home we found father in the rocker by the stove, smoking his ivory pipe in a daze.

“Did someone walk you home?” he asked.

“Asher escorted me,” said mother. She swept across the room to the stove, rubbing her hands.

“Yes, but you two fumbled through the dark no doubt.”

“We made out. We’re here after all. Our son’s a fine chaperone.”

“I just wish you’d take a lamp.”

The kettle clattered from mother’s hands to the burner. “But the oil, David. We needn’t burn it if we can see well enough.”

“Ah, my wife—who won’t bear the escort of any good fellow with a lamp. And Maggie Hopkins having broken her neck in the dark just last year!”

“Let it be, David. We’re safe and sound.” Mother tapped at the tea leaves in a jar. She brought a parcel down from the cupboard, parted the paper, and squared out a yellow cake for cutting. “Mrs. Dolan asked after you tonight. I hardly knew what to tell her.”

Father held his pipe at his lap. It turned to and fro like a tiny boat between his fingers. A thread of smoke zigged and staggered from the bowl. “Mmm. Yes. I reckon I just was not suited this evening.” He spoke lowly down the length of his beard, which lay to his waist as he sat. “To bathe, scrub clean, then to stand at the lip of the grave, washed and smelling of soap. It didn’t suit me tonight.”

Mother sheared three slices of cake onto a plate and slid it into the warmer. “Josiah Lyte talked to Asher again this evening.”

“Did he?”

“That young man takes a peculiar interest in our son. Asher says Lyte speaks to him often at school, asks him how school suits him.”

“Hmm. Well, that’s well enough I reckon.” Father’s eyes darted toward me, a speculative sideways glance.

“Lyte smiled at the grave again tonight,” said mother.

“Did he?”

“Once was curious but twice is just queer.”

“Yes,” said father. His brow blenched in a quick wash of anger. “Tis queer. I wonder, has Reverend Parry noted it?”

“He’s silent if he has. But I’m not the only parishioner to see it, that’s sure. Mrs. Dolan, Mrs. Griggs, Mrs. Aitken have all seen it. We can only mistrust the man—the lot of us. And for him to speak like he did this last Sunday—Jonah swallowed by an angel and not a whale, Pilate as God’s helpmate!—Better that Reverend Parry not compromise his pulpit.”

Father got up. “Well,” he said, hinging open the stove door to knock the ash from his pipe, “man and man’ll clash sometimes. I guess it’s more troubling when it’s man and man of God—or woman and man of God for that! But it’s all one, isn’t it, not to see eye to eye sometimes?”

“Of course, but to have Josiah Lyte drawing out questions in our boy. Asking how school suits him. As though school ought to bend to his tastes. There’s trouble waiting there.”

Father slumped into the rocker again. He shot me a narrow grin, as though making me partner to the grain of salt with which he sometimes took mother. “But we can hardly forbid Ash to speak to him. Or him to Ash.”

“Can’t we! Why not?”

“Abicca, no! We’ll not stir dust in this town. Lyte means no harm.”

“But there’s a long valley between meaning and doing—”

“If Reverend Parry isn’t alarmed then should we be, Abicca? A man of God like him knows best.”

Mother huffed. A bitter silence, sharp as a meat knife, halved the room while she poured the steaming tea into three cups and lifted the warm cake down. At last she made a little grunting noise, like a slight cough.

“I only wonder how long we’ll bear it, David, before we see the cracks it makes in our lives. Such queerness on the part of a minister—”

“Abicca,” said father. One soothing hand stroked the air as it would stroke a dog. “Enough now.“

She brought us the tea and the cake and we sipped in silence. Father’s smoke still lingered fragrant in the house. The stove settled with quiet metallic crackles.

After some time father spoke again, cake crumbling between his teeth. “After all Abicca, you said it yourself. We shouldn’t ask how the clergy suits us. We ought to honor our ministers.”

Mother’s snapping voice was edged on all sides: “Then we shouldn’t ask how funerals suit us either. We should honor our dead by attending, don’t you think?”

Father blushed. He dipped the cake in his tea cautiously, as though it were a precarious labor. His eyes clouded up and he seemed to shrivel in the rocking chair, to shrink and double over as though some massive hand had deigned to fold him up and put him away in its huge pocket. For a long moment he sat there nibbling his wet cake. Finally he said: “The Lord forgive us.”

“The Lord forgive us,” said mother.