“Yeh’ve got the phoss, acushla,” she says. “Had it for a while, I reckon. When were yeh plannin’ to tell me?”
You shrug, saying nothing, then remember that your Nan can’t see you. You open your mouth to talk when she turns and shuffles back to the chair she had been sitting in.
You find your tongue. “You can smell it, eh, Nan?”
She swats at the air. “Can’t smell a damn thing. Haven’t been able to since before you were born. Makes all the mush I eat taste the same. Not that I figure what I eat tastes of anything worth eating anyways.” She shakes her head. “Nah. I just know. Known for a while.”
You wait to see what, if anything, she’ll say next. Her eyelids droop, and before you know what you’re doing, you burst out angrily, “And what about my children and husband and cows and ceilis every weekend? When will I get them, Nan?”
Her eyelids snap up again. She makes a sort of feeble fluttering gesture with her hands, which still look surprisingly youthful. “Never, acushla, my darling. Never for you.”
Your eyelids widen in shock, and for the first time you realize that part of you had been hoping that your wise, witchy Nan would pull an ould Irish trick from up her sleeve, send the phoss packing, and send you away to Ireland, away from Bryant and May.
“I lied to you, my love,” she says. “All those times, for all those years, I lied. I never saw nothing for you. Just a greenish glow where your long life should have been.”
“Why?” you ask, glacial with the loss of hope.
“Ah, darling. Don’t you know yeh’ve always been my favorite?”
You turn abruptly and resume tucking your scarf around your decaying jaw.
After a few seconds, your Nan speaks again, softly. “Darling, don’t be so wretched. The phoss in your jaw is a horror, it’s true, but it’ll soon be over, it won’t be long now.”
You picture yourself coughing up blood, your jaw twisted, black, and falling to pieces, and you take little comfort in the image.
“Worse off by far,” says your Nan, “are those who get the phoss in their souls. They’ll never see paradise at all.”
We’ll hang Old Bryant on the sour apple tree,
We’ll hang Old Bryant on the sour apple tree,
We’ll hang Old Bryant on the sour apple tree,
As we go marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah …
—matchgirl strikers’ marching song, 1888, sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” a song popular among Union soldiers and abolitionists during the U.S. Civil War
* * *
A few days after the walkout, you and Annie Ryan from next door make your way to the Mile End Waste. You don’t say much on the walk. Moving your jaw has become too painful, every slight flex of your facial muscles redoubling the bone-grinding ache, the soreness stretching poisoned tentacles out from your slowly decaying jaw to grip your skull and bore into your brain.
You’ve taken to eating the same soft, gray pap your Nan lives on. It saves you chewing and leaves more hard bread for your brothers and sisters and their kiddies. And since you’re constantly queasy if not worse, you don’t even miss it.
Some days you don’t want the gray mush either, but your Nan won’t eat unless you do. And some days you’ve half a mind to let the ould bitch starve, serve her right for lying to you all these years.
But after all, she is your Nan.
You leave your scarf on inside, even at home, so as not to scare the kiddies, but they avoid you anyway. It’s the smell.
When you were a wee lass yourself, you and the others used to play on the corpses of horses, worked to death and left to putrefy in the street. Nothing still walking around should smell like that.
So you walk in silence toward the rally, even as the men and girls around you break into song. And in a crowd of thousands, your patch of silence isn’t likely to be noticed.
Annie draws your arm through hers. “You’ve a marvelous singing voice, Lucy,” she says, pulling you near, near enough that you can see her nostrils flare as she works to give no sign that she’s noticed the smell. “Don’t you remember when we were only small, and you made up that skipping rhyme about Mrs. Rattigan’s warts? You sounded like an angel, counting off her warts as you skipped.”
You nod, and even that hurts.
“They’ve got to hear us, Lucy. All the way to Mayfair and Parliament. Maybe all the way back to Ireland. That’d make old Parnell proud, wouldn’t it?”
Annie leans in even closer. “You know nobody’d ever put you out, Lucy, don’t you? And even if they did, well, you’d just trot down the block and come stop with me and mine. Take care of you right to the end, we would.”
You nod slightly and she squeezes your hand. “Make the end come a bit sooner, too, if need be.”
She draws away again, and after a moment you find your voice.
You can barely hear your own singing above the noise of your headache, but you see that Annie and the other girls can, and that, you suppose, is what counts.
* * *
When you return home, you finally relax and remove your hat and scarf. Something small, like a pebble, falls to the floor.
It’s a piece of your jaw.
* * *
In 1889, Annie Besant exchanged socialism for theosophy. Despite its esoteric reputation, theosophy reflected conventional Victorian values in at least one way.
According to the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy’s founding mother, each and every person has exactly what he or she deserves in this life. Theosophists believed that sickness, suffering, deformity, and poverty were punishments for sins committed in a past life. This belief can be dressed as God’s will, or as social Darwinism, but it comes to the same thing.
It is a reassuring thought to those whose lives are not thoroughly saturated with such suffering. Sometimes it can be a comfort even as one is led to the guillotine or faces the firing squad.
When Besant traded in socialism for theosophy, she bought spiritual certainty at the price of her compassion.
* * *
Though Annie Besant was by no means a strike leader—indeed, she had written on more than one occasion about the futility of trying to organize unskilled laborers—she’d had enough sympathy with the strikers and care for her good journalistic name to counter management’s claims of innocence by publicizing the working conditions, wages, and abuse that Bryant and May expected the striking matchwomen to accept.
And she had a word with her good friend Charles Bradlaugh, MP.
* * *
As you and the other girls make your way to Parliament, heads turn at the sight of so many tattered dresses, the sound of so many rough accents outside the East End, and not in any uniform, either.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” Lizzie shouts at a group of young ladies who, having forgotten the manners drilled into them by their governesses, stare and gape as you walk past.
The young ladies drop their eyes and turn away quickly. After a few seconds, you hear a shriek of laughter.
By the time you reach Westminster, traffic in the streets has slowed to a crawl as cabs and buses come to a full stop so their drivers and passengers can take a good, long look at the poor women walking en masse toward Parliament, just as if they have a right to.
* * *
Perhaps if you weren’t in so much pain, you tell yourself, you could be as brave as Jenny, old Jenny Rotlegh, forty if she’s a day, and bald as an egg from years of carrying wooden pallets on her head. Jenny sweeps off her bonnet right then and there, in front of the three MPs who had received your delegation.
“Look,” she says. “Look what they done to me! Ain’t that worth more ’n’ four shillings a week, less fines?”
You listen to the gasps from the fine gentlemen and wonder if you should undo your scarf and expose what remains of your blackened jaw, and the line of sores reaching now up to your temples. You come as near as raising your hand to the scarf around your throat and taking
one of the ends in your fingers. You untuck it and pause, thinking of the gentlemen staring at your melting face.
Jenny is an object of pity, an exemplar of abused and mistreated femininity.
But you have become a monster.
There is a difference between shocked pity and horrified disgust. It is human nature to turn away from the latter. You tighten the scarf and retie the knot, more tightly than before.
* * *
Annie Besant wasn’t the only established activist late to the party. There was also the London Trades Council, the last leading bastion of craft unionism, which had previously turned up its nose at unskilled laborers. The council met with a delegation of matchwomen. Perhaps out of the desire to retain its preeminent place as the voice of the urban worker, perhaps out of a paternalistic sense of noblesse oblige, perhaps even out of a genuine sense of fellow feeling and solidarity, the LTC offered to send a delegation of workmen to negotiate a settlement agreeable to both parties.
The firm received the overture genteelly, which must have made it all the more humiliating when that deputation returned empty-handed. The men reported only that Bryant and May were willing to allow most of the strikers to resume their old places, if they returned immediately, while reserving the right to refuse reemployment to the women they termed “the ringleaders.”
The strikers didn’t bother to send a reply.
* * *
The evening after the meeting with the MPs, your Nan asks you to lay your head on her lap. When you do, she rests her hand on your hair.
“You’re angry with me, acushla,” she says.
You say nothing. You watch your words more carefully than your sisters watch their farthings now that you slough off flesh with every motion of your mouth.
“Well, you’ve a right,” she continues. When you remain silent, she sighs and is quiet herself for a while. After some minutes drift by, she draws breath to begin again.
“The strike will end,” she says conversationally. “I seen it.” This time she doesn’t bother to pause for responses you will not give. “But you won’t see it. You’ll die first. I seen that, too.”
Sooner’s better than later, you think dully, and wonder if she’ll tell you how long the strike will last, and if any of you will have jobs by the time it is over. You’d like to know that Annie won’t starve, at least. If your Nan really does have any sight at all, if she hasn’t been lying about everything, all this time. If she isn’t just some crazy ould biddy.
“You won’t see the end of this strike,” she repeats. “Not unless I help you out. And I figure, I figure, I owe you at least that much.”
You gently take her hand from your head and sit up, moving slowly, the way you have been for a while now. You hold her rough hand between two of yours, and you know for sure now, her mind is broken and gone, and she’ll never see Ireland again.
She pulls her hand away from you irritably, as though she can hear your thoughts, and swats at you.
“Not a crazy ould one,” she says. “Not like my own gran, there was madness for you, if that’s what you’re thinking. A life, it’s like a flame, y’see, a candle flame. An’ if I put that flame into a real flame, a real candle, well, you’ll keep right on living as long as that candle keeps burning.
“And a candle held in the left hand of a hanged man, that candle, it can’t go out. You can’t put that out with wind nor water nor snuff it with yer fingers. Only good white milk can put out a Hand o’ Glory.
“I can do that fer you,” she says. “I can do it, if yeh can bring me what I need. It won’t exactly be living, more sort of not dyin’. But I don’t know that what yeh’re doing now is living, so much, either.”
You say nothing once more, but this time more out of shock than deliberately.
“I’ll give you a list,” she says.
“Hand of a dead man?” you manage to slur.
“Hanged,” she corrects you. “Left hand of a hanged man. Or woman’ll do as well, o’ course. Dunno how we’ll get that one. We’re neither of us well enough for grave robbing. But we’ll manage.”
After a doubtful pause, she repeats, “We’ll manage.
“And those pieces of your jawbone that keep fallin’ off. Start saving ’em.”
* * *
Here are some of the reasons given by Bryant and May for fines taken from their workers’ pay packets:
—dirty feet (3d.)
—ground under bench left untidy (3d.)
—putting burnt-out matches on the bench (1s.)
—talking (amount not specified)
—lateness, for which the worker was then shut out for half the day (5d.)
Here are deductions regularly taken from the matchwomen’s pay packets:
—6d. for brushes to clean the machines (every six months)
—3d. to pay for children to fetch packing paper (weekly)
—2d. to pay the packer who books the number of packages (weekly)
—6d. to pay for stamps, to stamp the packages (weekly)
—1d. to pay for children to fetch and carry for the box-fillers (weekly)
Bryant and May employed no children to fetch and carry for the box-fillers. The box-fillers fetched and carried for themselves.
* * *
Nan says that you don’t have the time to make a tallow dip. You wonder how much time you do have, as you collect what she told you to, and if it’s worth living as you do now until the strike is over and broken. Perhaps it would be better to go now, while the girls are still going strong, fueled by high hopes.
But love is a hard habit to break, so you do as she tells you, scavenging strips of paper, a wide-mouth jar, and a length of wire from the trash heaps, and stopping at the butcher’s for what lumps of pork fat he’ll give you for your pennies. You’ve found that shopkeepers give you better prices these days. Perhaps they feel sorry for you.
Perhaps they just want you out of the shop as quickly as possible, so you don’t scare off custom.
Either way is fine by you, as long as you can walk away with all the pork fat you need, which isn’t much. You bring your parcels home to your Nan and lay them at her feet, like offerings.
What you do next isn’t hard; you’ve made paper wicks before, rendered pork fat before, and it stinks, but it doesn’t stink as badly as you do. While you do these things, your Nan takes the pieces of your jawbone that you’ve saved and grinds them into a fine powder, using a mortar and pestle. They crumble so easily.
Dust to dust.
While you stir the melted fat, your Nan leans over from her chair by the fire and tips the dust of your bones into the small pot. Then she slices across the veins of your forearm with an old knife. Straining against her arthritic knuckles, she squeezes and massages your arm to get as much of your blood into the mix as she can.
After you give the pot a few more stirs, the tallow looks no different from any other bit of tallow you’ve ever seen, grubby and nasty, and smells no different either, rank and putrid. You pour it into the glass jar, watching it pool and pile up around the paper wick held stiff by the scavenged wire.
While you scrub out the pot, your Nan mutters some Irish over the makeshift candle and sets it aside to harden.
“It’s a good thing we neither of us eat much,” she says to you. “With neither of us bringing anything in.”
You nod. After a minute, you ask her the same thing you did the previous evening.
“Hand of a hanged man?” you force out.
She seems troubled, but she pats your hand. “Leave that to me,” she says, and then again, more slowly, “leave that to me.”
Before you sleep that night, she whispers in your ear, “I’m goin’ out tonight. You be in the cemetery. The unconsecrated ground, an hour before dawn. Bring the small axe and the candle. And a few matches, o’ course.”
* * *
Your sleep has been unquiet for a long time now, with the effect that you find it harder and harder to rouse yourself. This is probably b
ecause you are dying.
Whatever the reason, by the time you force yourself fully awake, it’s long past when you should have left for Bow Cemetery. On your way, you wonder anxiously if you’ll be there in time. However it is that your Nan plans to find you a hanged man, you want the cover of darkness.
You don’t know the way as well as you do to the churchyard at Saints Michael and Mary on Commercial Road, the Catholic church not yet built when your Nan came over. You’ve been there plenty, standing by the gravesides of the very young, the very old, and all between.
But your Nan wouldn’t dig up a good Catholic.
Surely she didn’t have the strength to dig up anybody else, either, come to that. And she didn’t tell you to bring a shovel.
It’s summer, and small pink flowers dot the ground of the graveyard. They remind you of the morning that an anonymous benefactor sent a cartload of pink roses down to all the girls on the picket, to wear as badges. That morning, the fragrance of roses had blotted out even the stench you did your best to trap in the folds of your scarf. For that one morning, the scent of roses surrounded you, and you let yourself pretend that you weren’t rotting away, like the corpses interred in the ground beneath your feet.
The unconsecrated ground is a newer part of the graveyard, and it holds unbaptized babies, suicides, and those of strange and foreign faiths, or perhaps even no faith at all.
But they all rot in the same way, you figure, ’cause the worms probably don’t know the difference.
Or maybe they do. Maybe they feel a tingle of the divine wind round them as they cross from unconsecrated to holy soil, and the whisper of loss and chilly despair as they pass back the other way.
You spot your Nan’s figure swaying by an oak tree. That’s to be expected, of course, the swaying, but she seems somehow to be taller than you think of her being, and she’s not holding her stick.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 7
