by Dan Vyleta
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“It started when I was nine. I had smoked as an infant, though never very much. An easy child they called me, good-humoured and docile, perhaps a little dull. Then the Smoke ceased. I was sick, I remember, German measles, spots up and down my body and a terrible fever. When the sickness went, the Smoke went with it. I’ve never shown since.”
They are still sitting at the dinner table, each on a stool of a different height, their fingers vivid with the smell of crayfish. From time to time, Mrs. Grendel rises and busies herself at the stove, where she is boiling up the empty shells for stock. She is humming something, listening to her husband talk; contentment in the hum, but also worry about these strangers who have burst in upon her life. Grendel, for his part, speaks simply, trustingly, as eager to shed his story as a child is to slip out of its Sunday clothes. Thomas listens to him with the heightened intensity of fever. He sits far from Livia, out of her sight; has picked a fallen crayfish leg from off the floor, black and spindly, spikey at the joints; sits rolling it within his palm, digging its edges into his skin.
“Nobody really noticed it at first. I was placid before and was more placid after. It was my clothes that gave it away, my bed linen. No stains. Not by day and not by night, for weeks on end. But it was more than that. I didn’t fight anymore. Didn’t argue. I would watch my sisters do it, get into a proper scrap, clouds rising out of them like steam from a mangle, and feel left out. It was as though I was watching them walk on their hands, or speak a foreign tongue. As though sin were a knack, and I had lost it.
“Before long the whole village realised something was wrong. The children noticed it first. They started teasing me, trying to get me to lose my temper, get into trouble, smoke. But I couldn’t. It’s not that I didn’t try. I’d go to bed thinking about it, planning out some piece of mischief: how I would take a swing at someone, or steal Granny’s hat and feed it to the pigs. Sometimes I even went through with my plan, hit a boy over the head with a log, or ripped the sleeve on the blouse of an aunt. But my heart wasn’t in it. I did it like I did my chores. The Smoke never rose.
“By the time I was eleven, the children in the village had started avoiding me. The adults too. A rumour got around that I was sick somehow, gone funny in the head. My parents tried to quench it. I was just like a gentleman, they said, an angel, a proper little lord. The village should be proud. It calmed things down for a while, but the suspicion did not cease. I was different. Separate. Not part of the fabric of life. An angel, maybe. But who wants to go fishing with an angel?
“One day, they took me to the vicar. Our village was small and isolated; we had a church but no priest of our own. He came on Sunday mornings to read us our sermon, good and salty, as the villagers liked to say, to last us the week. A thickset man with a marvellous head of curly red hair.
“He examined me in the little shed at the back of the church that served as a sort of office. I have a memory of standing before him, stripped to the waist, and his counting up the moles on my chest. ‘Dost the devil live in thee?’ he asked. I told him I did not know. One of the moles, he told me, looked like a cloven hoof. A witch’s mark, a most evil omen.
“He wrote a report, they say, and even sent it to the bishop. There was no answer. Perhaps he decided against posting it in the end. The vicar was a simple man. He did not want to invite trouble.
“In any case, it got out, the thing about the mole. The whole village took against me then. It was said that I was cursed. The Wandering Jew they started calling me. Bearing the mark of Cain. I did not even know what a Jew was then, but I’d heard about Cain. I left the village the day I turned fourteen.
“I had learned no trade but found work at an inn, some twenty miles from home. Three weeks I lasted, then the innkeeper sent me on my way. ‘You are scaring away the customers,’ he said. ‘One cannot trust a man who does not sin.’ His wife packed me lunch and gave me a pair of socks in parting. When I walked out of their gate, I saw her cross herself against my curse.
“By the time I was twenty, I had learned that it was best to hide my condition. I kept to myself, moved from town to town every few months. The Wandering Jew. Condemned to be good. Though not good, not really. Lukewarm. There is a line in the Bible, in Revelation, about God spitting out the lukewarm. He loves the hot, the cold. I am not welcome at his hearth.”
He frowns, but then his wife is there, resting her hands on Grendel’s shoulders. Her eyes are on Thomas and Livia, daring them to add to her husband’s woes. But this is not the time to be bashful. Grendel is a miracle, or else a man with a crippled soul. It is important to understand which.
“So you don’t feel anything?” Thomas asks.
“Oh, I feel,” Grendel says quietly, mournfully, reaching up to brush his wife’s arm. “I feel sadness and irritation; feel grateful to have steady work and fearful every morning when I set out across the city; relieved when the day is over and my good wife welcomes me at home. But my heart does not boil with it, and I do not forget myself. It’s as though my blood runs thinner than other men’s.”
“Don’t you listen to him,” Mrs. Grendel interjects, her face flushed dark and a hint of a shadow darting from her nostrils. “He is the best man that’s ever lived.”
“I believe you,” Livia says into her anger. She is different now that they are with Grendel, hopeful and composed, the afternoon’s terror banished from her face. “If my father weren’t ill, he would make him famous up and down the land.”
It’s only Thomas who fails to chime in but simply sits there, twirling a crayfish leg, the stump of his ear itchy with fever and sweat.
FARMER
The boy comes to my door. A young man really, ginger fluff on his cheeks. You don’t see many of his colour. Deep copper red, with copper skin. Like a ginger Tartar, but prone to blushes, hale cheeks filling with a darker hue.
Somehow it isn’t a surprise to hear his accent. His clothes are dirty but there is something to his bearing. I’m no friend of toffs but you have to like the way they hold themselves. No slouching, shoulders squared, the eye resting comfortable on yours. And for a rich sod, he’s awfully polite.
“My name is Charlie,” he says. “I am heading to London. Might I beg some food and water?”
“Beg” he says, calling it what it is. A good clear gaze on him. Puts a man in a mind to regret he does not have a son.
“You can have water at any rate.”
I draw him a measure from my well. He drinks straight from the ladle.
“As for food,” I say, “I’ve got the rot.”
I show him to my storeroom, where my potatoes lie riddled with black; break one in half and show him the deep veining, clammy to the touch.
“You’re welcome to a plateful, if you can stomach them”—I point to the stove, where I am heating my lunch—“but they may do you more harm than good, not being used to such fare.”
He wavers, clutches the broken spud I have shoved in his fist, too tired to think. When I offer him a stool, he sinks down exhausted.
“Maybe I’ll try a bite.”
Once they are boiled, I fry the potatoes in some dripping. The smell that rises from the pan is frightful, even to me, but the hole in the boy’s stomach proves bigger than his disgust. I don’t offer him seconds. I don’t have enough to be generous, and it won’t do him any good once the food hits his guts. We each have a thimble of liquor afterwards. “Calms the brewing storm,” my Mary used to say. A better use for the potatoes perhaps.
“You are dead tired, son,” I say when he rises to leave. “I can offer you shelter. A place in the barn. You won’t make London tonight.”
“I can’t,” he answers, giving it thought. “I have friends ahead, waiting for me. They’ll be worried.” And then he adds, firmly, with a simplicity I did not know existed amongst the gentry: “You are a good man.”
“Ah,” I say, embarrassed, “I smoke as much as the next sinner. But the sun is out today, and my knee’s finally on the mend.
Small blessings, eh, son?”
“Are you married?”
“Was,” I say, pointing to the row of crosses that mark my wife’s and daughters’ graves. “It’s a hard life.”
“A hard life,” he repeats like it is news to him, and weighty information. “Thank you for your kindness. Good-bye. Beware of dogs.”
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I chew on this all through the night—Beware of dogs—my stomach queasy with the rotten food. At dawn the second gentleman comes calling. He is a dark one, head to toe, fine clothes shiny with Soot, as though they have been lacquered by an enterprising tailor. A young one, too, not much older than the copperhead. His dog is an odd thing: red, drooping eyes in a dark, drooping face. A beaten cur, slavish and vicious. It steps close and smells me like I am a steak.
“I am looking for a young man who passed this way,” the dark one says to me. His face lacks colour underneath the Soot. It is pale and papery, as though it has been powdered with chalk.
“You wouldn’t have seen him? Well-born, dirty, reddish hair.”
The words are well-tuned, clear, emphatic. And yet there is something odd to his delivery, as though they are strange things, found at random in a pamphlet and performed.
“Mind,” he adds, “don’t lie to me. It will throw me in a rage.”
I hesitate, a breath, two breaths, before telling him that yes, a youth that answers his description called here the previous afternoon. He drank some water and was on his way.
“Heading where?”
“To London, I suppose.” I gesture to the road.
“He did not stay?”
“He did not want to.”
The dark youth nods, then bends forward and sniffs me. If his dog’s nose, wet on my leg, is an imposition, his own, dry against my cheek, is a violation. And yet I let him, do not move. No face has been this close to mine since I kissed my wife farewell.
“It’s a chore, tracking someone who doesn’t much smoke.” He shakes his head, moves his head back, takes me in. “You though! A cowardly sort. Twice the weight as I and yet you stand here like a post. And your Smoke”—he sniffs, sampling me, the pale green haze now rising from my breath—“is limp. Weak. Boring. A defeated man.”
I do not argue with him. Indeed it is true. I should have grabbed an axe handle and kicked him off my yard. But he scares me, this youth. No man’s ready for pain, not even I, my wife and daughters buried out the back.
He has one more request before he leaves. He explains it so calmly, so sanely, that I fail to understand him until he pushes me into my kitchen and fetches the knife. He does not threaten me, never says what will happen if I decline to do what he asks.
“But why?” I ask, already seated at the table, the knife shaking in my hand. My Smoke is all around us now, thin and pale as poor man’s gruel. “It makes no sense.”
He does not answer, sits there, watching; his dog flinching whenever he moves.
“Go on,” he says. “Here, let me fetch your liquor. For courage, what do you say?”
He himself drains the last of the bottle.
“Do it. I haven’t got all day.”
All the time watching me, a mouse in a trap, tugging weakly at its stuck and broken limb.
“Go on!”
The voice lighter now, impatient and gleeful; his hand raised and stroking the air before his chin as though searching it for something no longer there, a beard, a mask, a second face.
“Go on!”
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I do in the end; take measure and chop. A man can live without a finger. He discards it in the bushes not five steps from my gateposts, a child already weary of its toy; his dog following, whimpering, as angry and lost as I. By the time the wound stops bleeding they are both long out of sight.
Somewhere ahead of him, the boy with the copper hair will be walking. I want to wish him well. But the dark gentleman hurt me, wounded something that goes beyond the flesh. My hand looks like it might infect. So I sit there, boiling potatoes, and curse all those who are gentle-born.
BONE MUSIC
They stay the night with Grendel. Livia is glad when he asks them to, and smiles when he shows her around proudly, leading her from room to room, a tallow candle in his hand, dripping wax on the stone flooring.
“Please,” Grendel says for the umpteenth time when they return to the kitchen where Thomas has not moved from his stool. “You must.” It is as though it is he who is the supplicant and they the ones owning warmth and shelter.
For a while Livia is afraid that Thomas will decline the offer; that she will be thrust again into his company without the protection offered by a witness. But there is after all no choice. Thomas is weak, the night cold and alive with the shouts of strangers. For her own part, Livia is free of fear as she lies down on a wooden pallet and passes over into sleep. She trusts Grendel. She has known him for four hours, and she trusts him as much as any man or woman she has ever known. It is more than a feeling; it is a matter of fact. Grendel does not, cannot smoke. There is no malice in his heart.
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When Livia rises the next morning, she finds Thomas still in the room assigned to him, curled into a blanket and radiating a clammy heat. He has not even taken off his boots. Livia watches Thomas, for longer perhaps than is decent, then accepts Grendel’s invitation to walk with him to the church. It is early, dawn not quite broken, the streets near-empty and free of Smoke. In the quiet, Livia notices how run-down the city is, how badly in need of repair. There is hardly a building untouched by decay. Walls have caved, window frames fallen, ceilings and floors collapsed; holes stoppered with rags, paper, rubbish. And yet every house seems teeming with life, each cellar hole vivid with the movement of bodies, clothed and not. Through the broken windows and doorless doorways a hundred lives stand open to perusal. A woman stripped to the waist, feeding her newborn. A gaggle of boys ringing a chamber pot, relieving themselves with the unselfconsciousness of a litter. An old man in heavy boots picking his way through the dozen sleepers, leaving between them a trail of dark mud. Grendel notices Livia’s staring and the ensuing blush.
“Too many people,” he explains. “Living on top of one another. And everyone’s always hungry. It darkens their Smoke.”
“Don’t they have work?”
“Why yes. Factory work, most of them. But the factory doesn’t pay for housing.”
“Then why don’t they leave this filth? Move into the country?”
Grendel’s voice is gentle when he answers as though he’s afraid that his words will embarrass Livia with her ignorance. It deepens her blush.
“It’s difficult, you see. When they go to a parish, looking dirty and hungry and full of sin, they get ‘pushed on.’ Concerned neighbours, rounding them up at dawn and marching them to the parish border.” Grendel grimaces as one familiar with the experience. “Of course there’s no law against going where you wish. But you can’t live without work. And there’s no work for strangers.”
Livia muses on this. “Then it’s the factories’ fault,” she concludes. “They should provide housing for the workers. Spread them out across the land. Who owns them?”
“Who owns the factories?” Grendel’s face is free of accusation. “People like your parents, I suppose. The gentry. But look, here’s our church. I better get going on that bell.”
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Charlie does not come, not at dawn, nor at noon, nor yet at dusk, when she waits for him on the steps of the church until London has sunk into darkness and people bar their houses against the night. Grendel walks home with her, the streets full now and misty with Smoke. Back in his room, Thomas lies as she has left him. Mrs. Grendel tells Livia he woke long enough to struggle into his trousers and insist on heading out to meet Charlie. When she assured him that Livia and her husband were fetching Charlie even as they spoke, he collapsed back on his blankets and fell asleep at once.
“Let him rest,” Mrs. Grendel says. “He is healing. Gathering strength. It’s the last stage of illness
. Two more days and he’ll be right as rain.” She speaks as one familiar with the sick. At their feet Thomas lies like a dead thing, rancid in his sweat.
Livia draws up a stool and sits with him. It is, she tells herself, an act of duty, towards Charlie as much as Thomas. And yet there is more to her gaze as she studies his curled-up form, the bold lines of his face, the blue-black mark that crawls out of the crater of his wound and insinuates itself into his cheek. She sits, feet planted a yard from his chest, the room still around her, cooking smells drifting from the kitchen. Sits, half-conscious of a question. Her hands in little fists. When she shifts, minutely, her back is stiff with tension.
The silence weighs on her, is like a blockage in her thoughts. She needs to speak to learn what she is thinking; finds comfort in the fact that he cannot hear.
“Charlie did not come today,” she says, so quietly it sounds only within her, the words a movement of her jaw. “I’m worried about him.”
She crosses her legs, uncrosses them, disconcerted by the warmth of thigh on thigh.
“And yet I was scared of his coming. Isn’t that strange?”
Scared, she thinks now, because he will bring something. The memory of the mine. The taste of his skin: two tongues at odds, sparring, breaching the guard of the other’s lips. They shook hands when they last parted.
“But I was scared of something else too. Scared that he would know.”
She holds her breath, listens to Thomas’s breath, deep if uneven, the hint of a whistle marbling each exhalation.
“Something happened, did it not, Thomas? Between us? Yesterday. In the muck of that street.”
As she says it, she knows it is true. Something did happen—not just in the alley where she lay beneath that stranger’s grope but before, on the road, at the creek, perhaps, while she was cold and wet, off guard, or later, in the night shelter of a chapel doorway, when he breathed his warmth into the nape of her neck.
Thomas noticed her.
