Saints (3 page)

Anna grabbed his jacket from behind, whirled him around, and held him by the ears as she spoke directly into his face. “Take? You never take what belongs to another man, Robert, not as long as you’re my son! And if I hear you talk like that again you’ll not
be
my son, for I won’t have a coveter and a thief in my family!”

“I didn’t mean it.” Robert was ashamed, and frightened, too. Anna did not often get so angry.

“We’re educated people, God-fearing people, and I swear to God before you, my children, that we shall be honest in the sight of God, even if it means we starve!”

“All well and good, mum,” said the carter behind her, “but if we must keep stopping in the road we’ll never get wherever it is we’re getting.”

As they went up Long Mill Gate Road the buildings changed. The money had stayed behind in the heart of the city, or had been deftly carried to the nicest neighborhoods. Here the offices gave way to cheap shops, and the shops began to look filthy, with shabby buildings opening to courts knee-deep in rubbish. The people changed, too, and now the family was rather unusually well-dressed, and instead of ignoring them as the businessmen had done, the passersby stared. Such people as lived in this borough recognized bad fortune when they saw it; they had sampled enough to be connoisseurs. They watched the Kirkhams pass, and were careful to step back, to be ready to run or ward away the evil chance if they should come too near. The smell of cheap alcohol was pungent in the streets, along with other odors that it would not do to identify.

“What’s it like where we’re going?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t know,” answered his mother. “I only know the price, which is cheap, and the place, which isn’t far now.”

“Any farther,” Robert mumbled, “and we’ll be living with the hogs.”

They turned off the road just before the bridge over the River Irk, and the carter could only go a little way on the rough turning. “Close as I can go, mum.”

Anna looked at the row houses that fronted on the river. They looked abandoned, the doors swinging open, neither glass nor boards in the windows. “How much farther is it?” she asked.

“Oh, you’re here. Number four must be the fourth cottage in.”

The fourth cottage looked no better than the rest—abandoned, dead, unlivable.

“I must go see.”

Anna took Robert’s hand, commanded the other children to stay with the cart, and walked along the uneven path leading to the fourth cottage. As they approached, the smell got more and more pungent, and there was no denying what it was—human excrement in varying stages of decay.

“We’ve been cheated,” Robert said softly.

“Not for the first time,” Anna answered.

A shutter opened above them, and a woman’s head poked out. “You new?” asked the woman.

“I think so,” Anna said. “You mean someone lives here?”

“Lovely place, an’t it?” The woman giggled. “But you don’t live on the ground floor. You live above.” The woman was incredibly thin, and though she giggled, there wasn’t a trace of a smile on her face. “Are you in number four?”

Yes.

“Looks like we’re neighbors. Folks died of cholera in number four. Or something. My name’s Barton. Nomi Barton.”

“Kirkham, Anna. Which one is number four?”

“Three down from here. They starts the numbers from the other end, Lord knows why. You get upstairs through the ground floor, but tread careful, hi-ho!” The shutter closed.

Anna led the way into the house that would be their home. The stench was overpowering. The floor had been used as a privy for a long time, and was still used that way, judging from the pools of urine shining in the light from the courtyard windows. Their feet skidded on the floor. Anna held her skirts high, found the stairway in the dim light, and gingerly made her way to it, climbed the creaking treads, and opened the door at the top of the stairs.

Better, the upstairs room, but only by contrast. The plaster walls were chipped, in some places right down to the brick. And daylight came through on such a spot, proof that the walls were only one brick thick. The floor was grimy, the ceiling webbed, and the ash from the fireplace had been strewn across the floor.

“Mother, we can’t,” said Robert.

“What we must we can, and what we can we will,” she said. Her mother had always said it, and she hoped that it was true.

“Surely God loves us better than to make us live here.”

Anna had no answer for that. She walked around the room, as if she were hoping to find a door leading somewhere else, somewhere livable. Someone screamed, not far away, screamed and then began jabbering and shouting, the voice finally trailing away into nothing. A dog barked. Anna remembered her father’s dogs, and knew they would never have been permitted to sleep in such a place as this. Her mother’s wooden floors, always gleaming; fine places on a proud kitchen table; four rooms with only three of them in the family, so that her father had a library. But he had died, the college had taken back the rooms, and even the library had gone to help John Kirkham pay his impossible burden of debt.

There would be no lace curtains at these windows, she knew. And she wondered what her children would remember, when they got to be her age.
She
could remember romping down the stairs with the dogs, sliding down the banister, splashing in mud and getting a delicious and halfhearted whipping for it from a father who had not forgotten about unsanctioned fun. But
her
children—they’d remember only that they must walk carefully downstairs, and instead of cut flowers in a bowl, they would know only the smell of—

She leaned her head against the doorjamb and breathed deeply to keep herself from weeping. Robert looked at her in awe. He did not know what went on in adult minds, but he knew that his mother was in pain.

“It’s all right, Mother. We’ll clean it up in no time.”

“Aye,” his mother said bitterly.

“And I’ll work hard, and soon we’ll have enough money to move away.”

“I’m not the kind of woman,” Anna said softly, “who lives in such a place.”

“Then we’ll make it the sort of place where a woman such as you can live.”

Anna turned to him, gravely touched his cheek. “If only your father…” she said, then repented of the thought, and said instead, “I can depend on you, can’t I?”

Robert nodded, troubled at his mother’s intensity.

“We must move the furniture inside,” she said, suddenly businesslike. “The beds will go by the window, the dresser under it, the table here. Will that be good?”

No, of course not, nothing would be good, but neither of them would say it now, and when they returned to the children—for Robert was not one of the children now—they were cheerful. “Just needs a bit of fixing up,” Robert told them.

“Will you help us with the furniture?” Anna asked the carter.

“Aye, for two shillings.”

“Two shillings! Two shillings was your price to bring everything here!”

“The horse brung it here, mum, but the horse won’t carry it upstairs. I charges for me the same as for the horse. S’only fair.”

“Fair. Do as you like, then, we’ll carry it ourselves. But kindly wait here until we’re through, so we don’t have to set it all out in the mud. There’ll be an extra tuppence for you if you wait.”

“My money, mum.”

“I’ll pay you when we’ve unloaded everything. Charlie, you wait here with the man. Robert and Dinah, you hold one end of the bed and I’ll hold the other, while this strong man watches us do a man’s work.” The carter was oblivious to her abuse—it would take much harsher language for him to notice he was being insulted. It took a half hour to get the two beds upstairs, and the clothing and the table took nearly as long again. The two children couldn’t carry too far without resting, and Anna was weakened more than a little by the pregnancy.

They returned last of all for the bureau, but the cart was gone. Charlie was standing where it had been, trying to whistle. Anna knew at once what had happened. The dresser was easily worth half a pound, much better payment than the two shillings Anna would have given the carter. “Charlie! Why didn’t you tell us he was leaving!”

“Oh, he’ll be back, Mother,” Charlie said. “He only had to help a friend in Broughton.”

“If he has friends in Broughton I’m a duke!” Robert shouted. “The man’s stole our bureau!”

“He hasn’t! He told me to stand here so I could whistle when he’s looking for this place again!”

“You haven’t the brains of a louse, Charlie!” Robert shouted, until his mother’s hand on his shoulder silenced him. “He’s only seven,” she said. “How should he know when a man like that has lied?”

“We told him to stay with the cart!”

“You better stop crabbing me!” Charlie retorted.

“Enough,” Anna said, and she led them back to the cottage. As they came in the front door on the ground floor, a man was climbing into the room from the courtyard.

“What are you doing here?” Anna challenged him.

“Come to piss, mum,” said the man.

“You can do that elsewhere.”

“As good a place as any.”

“This is my cottage, and this is my floor.”

“I’m urgent, mum,” he said, unbuttoning his trousers.

Robert stepped forward, his foot splashing slightly on the floor. “You heard my mother.”

“It’s not like I’m the first,” the man said. It was plain he was amused that someone as small as Robert meant to challenge him.

“The man before you was the last.” Robert
was
afraid, but angry, too, and the anger won. But the man didn’t bother getting angry, just turned his back and began urinating into the corner. Anna put her hand on Robert’s shoulder. “You can’t teach a pig to use a chamberpot,” she said, and she led the children up the stairs.

Their bundles of clothing sat on the beds they had so laboriously carried up the stairs. There was nowhere else to set them, with no bureau; the floor was far too dirty for them to put anything there, not yet, anyway. Anna took a candle from a bag, set it in a holder, lit it. As if the candle had been a cue, rain started falling outside. Almost immediately water started dripping through the roof and ceiling, and puddling where it oozed out from behind a wall.

“It’s a blessing,” said Anna. “Now we needn’t fetch water for the cleaning.” And for the next two hours, until dark came in earnest, they washed the walls and floor of their upstairs room, and brushed the webs from the ceiling. The place was reasonably clean.

“We’ll hunt up the wood tomorrow for some more shelves,” Anna said. “We must spare the money to keep our goods off the floor.” She was tired from the labor, bent from the discouragement, and she sat against the table, looking at the children who watched her from the beds where they sat.

“We can live here,” she insisted to them.

“Aye, Mother,” Robert said.

“It stinks,” Charlie said, and the smell grew worse because he said so.

“Tomorrow,” Anna said, “we’ll clean downstairs.”

“Tomorrow I’ll find work,” Robert said.

Anna nodded. Then she used the candle to start a coal fire in the hearth. Supper would be potatoes burnt by the fire—they did not yet know where they could get water nearby, except the River Irk, which was filthy. Anna thought of asking the neighbor where they might find water, but she had seemed a repulsive woman, and in Anna’s middle-class soul there was no room yet for the admission that she was now, however much against her will, at that woman’s social level. Surely money did not make that much difference. Surely breeding and the thoughts of the heart were what made the difference between human beings and scum.

The children were asleep, Robert and Charlie in one bed, Dinah in the bed she would share with her mother, when Anna heard a sound downstairs, a snuffling sound, like an animal. Impossible for it to be anything good. Anna took the candle, opened the door, and went partway down the stairs. The sound came from the nearest corner of the room, and as her eyes got used to the dimness Anna saw that it was a man, drunken and filthy, on his hands and knees in the slime on the floor, vomiting out the night’s drink and dinner. The man saw the light and looked up.

“Oh, mum, I’m sick,” he said.

“Clearly,” Anna answered.

“God a bed? Got a bed for me? Man needs a bed.”

“Then go home to your wife,” Anna told him curtly, “but get out of here.”

The man started crying and shakily stood, walking a few steps toward the stairs. “Mum, I haven’t got a wife, her died, and haven’t got a home, landlord outed me on my arse, take pity on me, mum.” He put a foot up on the stairs.

“Get out,” Anna said, beginning to be afraid.

“Not a civil way to talk to a man what’s out of work through no fault of his own—”

He took another step up the stairs, and then Anna heard a noise behind her. One of the children. “Get back inside,” she whispered, “nothing’s wrong.” She heard the door close behind her, and almost wished the child had not obeyed. A foolish wish, of course. The children were not ready to cope with a drunken man who had completely forgotten himself.

“Where’s your man, mum?” asked the drunk.

“Asleep. I trust you won’t require me to wake him.”

“Just want a bed, mum,” said the man, lurching up the stairs toward her. He reached toward her; she recoiled, retreated a step. “Got no husband, have you?”

“Yes I have. Get off my stairs.”

“Don’t I smell sweet to you, mum? Got shit on my boots, mum? How are such a lady, living here? How did you get across this floor with your feet all pretty, did you fly?” His soiled hand touched her sleeve, caught at her fingers as she pulled away. The slime on his hand was cold and wet. She cried out faintly.

“Please go away.”

“Want a bed. Raining out,” the man said. “Man’s got a right to sleep dry.”

“I’d help you if I could, but there’s no room, none at all—”

“None of that, mum. Don’t mean you no harm, but—”

The vomit on his breath was strong, and weary as she was, pregnant and sensitive to smells, Anna thought she would faint. She almost stumbled as her foot sought the next step, found nothing. She was at the top of the stairs, and had no hope against such a lout, drunk as he was. She was not so much afraid of what he might do as she was afraid of the children seeing him and discovering how helpless she was now to protect them. It would terrify them. God knows it terrified
her
.