The Boys in the Trees

by Mary Swan

  McAdam said that there had been a story going around that Heath was, in fact, a lord or an earl or some such thing, sent away from his estate in disgrace, and Robinson said he remembered his wife saying something like that. That’s all it was, Spence said. A story the women passed around, like something out of one of their novels. Not a jot of truth in it—ask Lett.

  Lett spoke through a haze of bluish smoke, said, No rich blood there, that’s certain. He came from Liverpool latterly, as far as we know. Our man talked to his old employer—no, the son of his old employer. A brickyard, it was. Lett said that the son didn’t know the details, only that there had been some dishonesty. Also some kind of family tragedy, a child dying, maybe even two children, and the old man took pity; otherwise Heath would surely have been jailed. It was before his time there, but the son thought his father had paid passage to Canada instead, said he was soft like that. There were one or two still at the yard who remembered him, Lett said, but only vaguely. No idea of his background, where he had been before. Maybe we could have found out more, made further inquiries, but we decided there was no point in it. He waved his hand to indicate and knocked the platter the serving boy was lifting away. A long, ugly piece of gristle landed on Lett’s shoulder, slithered down his sleeve, and something chased over his face before Spence began to laugh, before he joined in. The boy left quickly, things rattling in his hands, and Jervis began another joke, one that Robinson had heard him tell before. Beside him, Luft was saying something, and Robinson noticed that he had to blink to bring the face into focus, had to strain to hear the words that slipped under the loud laughter from the other side of the table. Something about bootstraps, he thought, and Lett. Something about Luft telling his own son that he could do anything, be anything he wanted. Interesting, isn’t it? Luft said, and Robinson nodded, watching the fingers, permanently ink-stained, as they straightened a fork on the wine-stained cloth. Interesting that we seem to have nothing but scorn for the wretch we hanged today, mock him for ideas above his station, all of that.

  What are you saying? Robinson asked, blinking again. But Luft just shook his head, called over to McAdam and drew attention to his empty glass.

  • • •

  The room was becoming very warm, faces shiny and all jackets now off, collars undone. McAdam had just finished a song about a bonny lass, banging time on the edge of the table, and Spence was trying to sing a song of his own, his body convulsing with violent hiccups, the rest of them laughing until their sides ached. Everything was wonderful and Robinson thought, Like this, let me stay like this.

  For some reason he thought of something he’d read out to Eaton, a foreign item in the newspaper. They were building a tower in Paris, and it was already so high that the men working on top enjoyed sunshine, while fog and mist prevailed below. That’s what it felt like, something like that, basking in warmth and everything so clear. Everything he saw, even the edges of the door, the way it opened slowly, the wary look on the boy’s spotty face as he came in with two more bottles. There was something about doors, he knew there was something about doors that had been nagging at him, and watching the boy’s cautious entrance he knew what it was, so clear, so simple. There were two sides to every door, that was it, that was important, and someone stood outside, someone in, and it was something to do with that. This thing about doors that was nagging.

  He remembered remembering his first days in Emden, sitting at his desk, the new clock ticking, looking at the door and wondering who would first come through. His landlady’s tapping before that, and himself inside, lunate, hamate, triquetrum, on the verge of a different life. He remembered learning the sound of Lilian’s knocking, the first time thinking it the scratching of some small animal, and he remembered that while he was certain of his diagnosis, it sometimes seemed that all that was really wrong with her was a profound, unbearable sadness. He suddenly saw how easy it had been for him, asking his questions, making his notes, sending her on her way with encouraging words. How easy the compassion, the involvement, all of it easy, even the sleepless nights, the bedside vigils. He thought of old Miss Burns again, of the praying calluses on Mrs. Toller’s knees.

  It had something to do with doors and he remembered a splintered, foul-smelling staircase, the terrible fear on a young girl’s face as he stepped into the tiny room, Faith rising from the one chair to thank him. He thought of Marianne behind her closed door, instead of himself outside it. Thought of what Eaton saw, rousing from a nightmare, seeing his door slowly open, black leaping shadows in the lamp glow. His child, his only child, and he thought of all the others, conceived out of love and youth and hope, the ones who refused to stay. Thought of Eleanor, who so nearly did. What did it mean that the only survivor was his beautiful son, made from drunkenness and rage and despair.

  That’s what it had been, it was clear to him now, in his quiet space inside the swirl of noise and heat and hard laughter. It hadn’t seemed so at the time, that memory still with him, although he had done his best to put it aside. Late at night and restless, the bottle and the glass, trying to read in his chair, pacing the room, sitting down, then pacing again. Thoughts racing in his head and then out of the spin of them a memory, a picture of Marianne’s smile, of her hand on his sleeve, and a sudden understanding that he was wrong, that it had all been wrong, his solicitude, his restraint, and he knew, he suddenly knew how to get it all back. And then his hand was on the door, the flowery scent of Marianne’s room, her hair spread out around her lovely face, against the white of the pillow. So long since he had seen her like that, so long since they had laughed through the curtains of her hair and he was overwhelmed by love, he was overwhelmed and he had to tell her, had to show her, her pushing hands meant nothing because he knew how to make it right, he knew how to bring it all back, he did. But later, when he touched her face, his hand slipped through her tears.

  • • •

  He found himself in the street and his thoughts were moving faster than his feet, or maybe it was his feet stepping ahead of his thoughts. Something, at any rate, was not working properly with something else, so he stood completely still, and waited. The street was dark and quiet and he fumbled at his pocket, his fingers moving slowly enough for his mind to recall that his watch was still missing. For a moment it seemed very important to know what the time was and he turned to see if the lights from Blyth’s were still up full, but that was a mistake. The spinning made him remember that there had suddenly been no air in the private room, made him remember Spence’s gray head resting on the table, a lock of his hair, just the tip of it, lying in a puddle of something that had spilled. A rush of sound and then only his own blood pumping, filling up his ears. Reddened faces, mouths opening and closing, but only the sound of his own heart’s work. And now he was in the empty street and he roped in his scattering thoughts, tried to make them address the problem of his feet, making one move, then the other, trying to get them into a rhythm they could continue on their own. His shoulder bumped against a hard surface and he leaned into it for a moment, knowing that there was something he was forgetting, something that he had suddenly known in the heaving room he had left behind. His fingertips knew that they touched rough stone as he pushed himself straight, pushed a little too hard but caught himself, righted himself. He would have to think about the important thing later, he would, but first he had to get to the end of this empty street, round the corner, face another long, dark road.

  • • •

  There was something important and he had the feeling that it was something familiar, that he’d been here before, more than once, been in the moment just after he’d understood the important thing. It seemed that time was also in disarray, the end of the block was no closer but when he looked down at his feet they appeared to be stepping along quite smartly, propelling him straight ahead, still straight ahead while the rest of his body leaned into the corner he had arrived at unexpectedly. He wasn’t aware of falling, but down on the ground he thought it would be nice to clos
e his eyes and rest a little, and he might have done that. Singing voices spilled out of Malley’s, somewhere nearby, and he knew that for some reason it was not a good thing to be lying facedown in the dirt so he pushed himself up, his hand slipping wetly the first time he tried. It wasn’t good to lie flat in the dirt and that had something to do with the hoarse, singing voices, with the top curve of Eaton’s ear, his soft brown hair above the pulled-up blanket. He remembered riding out with his boy on a round of visits, telling him about sickness, about accidents, and Eaton saying, But who takes care of you?

  Robinson’s feet were moving faster but he didn’t know if they would keep on. He knew that at that moment he would have given all the tea in China to have Marianne cradle his head in her hands, to have her stroke his brow and say, Hush now. There there. Then he thought about China for a little while, trying to remember if it was a real place. He tried to keep thinking about China instead of thinking about the steaming plates on the tray Blyth carried, the boy behind him with angry pustules on his face, the taste of roasted meat in his mouth, Lett’s glistening chin. It was no use and the picket fence wobbled beneath his wet hand as he leaned over and retched, everything that he held splatting onto the colorless bush on the other side.

  • • •

  Better, much better, although he was still thick-fingered, fumbling for his handkerchief, wiping at his mouth, his mustache. Thinking about how the dark took the color from everything, how the best that the cold moon could show was shades of gray. He remembered the galloping horses and thought that they might not have been black at all, and for some reason that made him feel easier, although he’d had no idea they were still moving somewhere in his mind. But then he thought that it made no difference what color the horses really were, even if they were; he had seen them, seen them black. That thought went away when he brought the handkerchief down from his mouth and saw it was blotched dark, his hand too. A wound somewhere, a cut, and he wrapped the cloth tight around his hand, one more thing he would have to tend to before he could finally sleep.

  Looking around, he realized that he had stumbled right past his own house, not even recognized it in the bleaching moonlight. He had left his bloody palm print on the Barnes’ whitewashed fence but there was nothing he could do about that, although he had a brief idea that he should knock on the door, should say he was sorry, just sorry. He would have done it, but the house was dark; they were asleep, all of them, Alice and Sarah, their lonely mother whose name he couldn’t remember. Turning his head, he saw that all the houses were dark, saw all the dark houses in lines everywhere, everyone silently sleeping, even the spirits behind the Heaths’ boarded windows, and he understood that he was the only one awake, the only guardian. Too tired to let the thought do more than flicker, to wonder what would happen when he was gone. For he would be gone, soon enough. He would begin to move soon enough, his feet would obey, and his hand would open his own front door. He would climb the stairs as quietly as he could, find his bed and close his eyes, slip into his place in the dreams they all were dreaming. Leaving only the dark houses lining all the empty streets, only the cold, constant light of the indifferent moon.

  Button

  THERE’S NOTHING REMARKABLE about it. Color of old bone, size of a small coin, holes for thread to pass through. It’s only where it comes from that gives it meaning, and how long will that last? It may be kept in a small tin box for a generation or two, and then someone will want or need the box for something else. Hold the small button in the palm of a hand, half remembering a passed-down story, and put it into another container, a jar, maybe, for safekeeping. Doing that, but at the same time wondering if there really was a story, thinking that even if there was, it might not have been true. It may have come from one of those posed in the battered album that has also been passed down, faces faded or darkened with age, people with names no one alive still knows. And why assume that they always told the truth? Still, the button goes into a glass jar and someone thinks, late at night, of the way that stories lose their meaning, just like objects do, as the years wheel on, as new ones take their place. Someone understands that this thought too will be gone and no one will know, no one will ever know.

  And perhaps sometime later, someone else will find a glass jar with one bone-colored button, add a few more. Maybe with a pinprick of a thought, or maybe the story is completely gone, although there are others. Over time the jar will fill up because that’s the thing about buttons, they are always falling off, they are always turning up in a house, in a life, and you don’t throw them away; there will surely come a day when you need just that color, just that size. The first small button is probably still rattling around in a jar with many others, old ones, newer, all shades and sizes, bits of trailing thread. Nothing at all to set it apart; it could have belonged to anyone.

  Long Exposure

  BEFORE I OPEN my eyes I hear the river, and I know that I’m waking up in his bed. Not yet dawn, but I can tell that it’s near by the way I can just make out the shape of the chair where our clothes are piled, the long, inky band that must be one of my stockings. Before I knew Sam I would have thought, It’s dark, but now I see the shades of it. Know that if I keep my eyes on it that chair will begin to emerge, slowly but ever steadily, until it is finally just there, the thing that it always was. I should get up; I should be gone before there’s anyone about to see me carefully closing the back door. But it’s warm in his bed, there’s the sound of the river and the sound of his breath, and I turn and curl myself around him, my cheek on the smooth skin of his back, I breathe in the smell of him and all that is more important than what anyone might say.

  • • •

  In Liverpool, before everything happened, we all slept together and if one of us complained that someone was kicking, that someone was pulling at the blanket, our mother would say we were lucky to have a bed at all. The little ones didn’t know, some of them not yet born, but my brother Frank and I remembered the cellar room before. Only our blanket between us and the hard earth, and the water that slid down the walls. It was true what our mother said, that things could always be worse.

  Sometimes I still catch myself thinking she will find us. Sail across the ocean and gather us up, tap at my door with the baby in her arms. It’s a silly thought; for one thing, the baby would not be a baby anymore, would be older than I was when Miss Weir came. It used to be that I could hear my mother’s voice when I thought of her. Just like I could see her face, and never gave a thought that it was something that could fade away, like the photographs Sam showed me, that hadn’t been properly fixed. Only an outline left, sometimes just the trace of an eyebrow. At the very first, I saw her everywhere. Walking down the street ahead of us when we left Miss Weir’s in our straggling line, or standing outside if I looked down from a high window. In the rumbling crowd waiting for the big ship, and even at New Home. Maybe that’s what happened, maybe it’s because of all those false mothers, the mistakes I made. Some just the shape of her, or wearing a shawl like her faded one, a way of turning their heads. Maybe they all jumbled up in my mind and erased my own real mother. Maybe it was my fault, maybe I should have known.

  • • •

  Yesterday morning they hanged the murderer Heath, and one of the jailers told Sam that for a consideration he would let him in to photograph the body, before they nailed down the box. Sam said that would make him no better than Taylor, who tried to get into the house while the bodies were still on the floor. Instead, the plates I developed show the crowd outside the jail, all gazing in the same direction. A few closer views of women with baskets, a stooped old man who looks to be shaking a stick at a tree. They could be gathered for any reason at all, maybe a parade or a revival meeting, and if someone saw them, years from now, they would have no idea.

  Sometimes Sam is asked to take photographs of dead children, and though he has never said, I think that is why he taught me to use the dark-room so soon. He does it well; they look like they are sleeping, those children
who shimmer in the fixing bath. They look like they have said their prayers and closed their eyes, never dreaming that they really would die before they woke. There are one or two in town who just appear when they hear that a child has gone, but Sam waits to be sent for. He can’t afford to turn down any work, but he always hopes that word won’t come. It feels so wrong, Sam says, setting up his camera in the hush of a grieving house, asking for the drapes to be opened wide. He says he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to remember their child that way, but I think I do.

  Most of our sitters are alive though, and most of them come to the house, and take their places on the red plush settee or on one of the rickety chairs. Sam is still a little cheaper than the other photographers in town and mostly it’s families that come, stiff in their best clothes, or a young couple just married, with not much money to spare. One of the first times I helped Sam in the studio there was a farm family, the wife maybe not much older than me but with three little ones already. We heard the jingling harness, saw the wagon stop, all of them wrapped in blankets that they carried inside to warm up a little, bringing a cold smell. One of the boys ran back to stroke the big horse’s nose, and white clouds swirled round his head.

  The farm wife had a freckled face, and while Sam was arranging the children she asked me would those freckles show, and could we fix the photograph so they didn’t. Sam had already told me that he never did that kind of painting, but behind a screen in the corner there was a shelf with a brush and a little pot of powder, and I took her there, patted her cheeks and forehead while she closed her eyes. I undid her hair and did it up again, a little looser, and when she looked in the oval mirror, something in her face let go.