Saints (8 page)

“Not so hard, please,” Charlie begged.

“Isn’t my boy Charlie happy? Doesn’t he like to be clean?”

And Charlie smiled, standing naked in the tub as the water began to turn black, and then even blacker with his blood as it dripped an ever darker crimson down his legs. He smiled, and silently decided that they could put him in jail or hang him or poison him but he would not work for this man for seven years, or one year, or one week, or one more day if he could help it. He smiled until Whitesides deftly pulled the brush across his young and tender loins, and then again, and then again; Charlie screamed and fainted, and knew nothing more until morning.

Dinah carried an armload of pots and pans and loaded them on the cart. When she turned around, she paused a moment to glare at the bored workmen waiting for the Kirkhams to vacate their cottage. They took no notice of her wrath.

Robert and Mother emerged from the building, carrying a trunk. One of the men muttered, “Lot of work for nothing. Might as well tear it down with the rubbish inside as out.” It won some laughs from the other workmen, but got no response from the Kirkhams. Robert held his peace because of his mother’s hand on his arm. Dinah held her peace because she knew that if she spoke what was in her heart she would surely burn in hell. She turned her back on the men and went inside.

Back inside the now-empty room, she was surprised to find herself sad at leaving the hideous place. They had come there in their first grief at Father’s going—surely it should have no hold on her heart. It had always been cold more than a few feet from the fire, and the smell had never entirely left downstairs. The place was cramped and ugly and a shameful sort of home for them. But she could not bear the thought of leaving it, for when they left, the workmen would kill the place, and with it something would die. Not something of Dinah, but something of the family. All they had now of Charlie would surely die. For there he was reading in the corner; there he was at the fire, preparing food for her and Robert when they came home for dinner; there he was in his bed quarreling with his brother and yet crying quietly when Robert refused to play with him.

Dinah felt something bitter that she did not want to name. Charlie did not need to leave us. In all our poverty, it was only our loss of faith, only our fear that split us up.

But not
my
fear.

No, she did not blame Robert. Rather she recognized inside herself something that she only now began to understand. When she had seen Father on the night he left, she had believed the lie that he would soon be back. Yet underneath her naivete she had been wise; she had felt a terrible loss and an anger that was so cold that she had to crawl into her mother’s bed to stay warm enough to sleep.

And when Robert had explained that there was no choice but to send Charlie off with the sweep, she had found no words for argument. Yet again, she felt that cold anger, that sense of loss and grief. She had
known
that it did not need to be this way, had known that once again a man who thought he was wise was being wrong and cruel.

She had always been stubborn, had always thought her own thoughts. But now she knew that when she felt that sureness in herself, it would be true. She would never trust anyone again, she was sure. Only herself. Only the wise grief inside her.

And now, once again, she felt that inward agony of loss. Mother had tried to find Charlie. Robert had searched. Even Hulme had been so generous that he let Mother look for him for three days before she had to return to work. They had not found him. Manchester was too large, and no one noticed sweeps except when their chimneys were dirty. At last someone had told Robert that he had seen a sweep with a few boys heading out of Manchester toward Liverpool. The description was vague, but seemed to fit, and Anna and Robert had decided they had no choice but to be content with that. Perhaps later, when Charlie came back, they’d find him. In a few weeks they’d look for him again.

Dinah knew better. They were wrong. Charlie was in Manchester, and Charlie would come back. But when he came, because of those workmen with their crows, their hammers, their gunpowder and fuses—because of them Charlie would find nothing, the building gone and no one to tell him the way to where his family lived.

Well, it isn’t so. He will find
me
. I will be waiting for him, and I will bring him home.

“Dinah, what are you still doing here?” Robert stood in the door.

“Nothing.” Annoyed at his peremptory tone, she turned and faced her older brother. “Wishing for Charlie,” she said.

Robert wordlessly turned and walked down the stairs. Dinah knew she had been cruel; it was an unfair weapon to use on Robert, and it was low of her to wield it so readily.

She followed him downstairs. The carter was actually helping load the last sacks of clothing and pans as Dinah came out the front door. The workmen, seeing the end of their wait was near, were a bit freer of tongue as they began to pry at the doorjamb. “And where do such folks go from here?” one asked.

“Couldn’t find a place worse than this—got to be better for them.”

The note of kindness died with the next man’s laugh. “Wherever they goes soon gets like this. Scum always forms on the top of the porridge.”

The cart lurched forward. Silently Dinah walked ahead, letting her mother and brother watch to see that nothing fell from the cart. Her shoes slapped and sucked in the mud. She did nothing to soften her steps. Let the mud have its way with her; it would wash.

She stopped on the hard surface of the road and turned to wait for the others. The horse strained to pull the cart up the slope, and Dinah joined the others in helping to push. Her arms were strong now, though she was only eleven; carrying bobbins in the factory had firmed her body so that she felt she could have pushed the cart alone.

Behind them came the first of the explosions. They did not turn. Only when the cart was well up on the road did they glance back. One end of the building was in ruins, only a small section of wall standing. As they turned to leave, another explosion shuddered the ground. This time they saw the walls belly out or convulse inward, the lines of bricks undulating and finally sinking emphatically into a sea of dust. As the noise of the explosion faded, they could hear the gay laughter of the workmen, as if it were a holiday.

“It’s nice to see someone who enjoys his work,” Anna said drily.

The carter hooted. “The devil does
that
, mum! The devil does
that!
”

At first Dinah walked near Mother and Robert. She hated the way Robert was giving directions to the carter. She hated the way he made decisions and Mother blithely went along. For she recognized in Robert’s manner an almost perfect imitation of Father, the way he spoke, expecting to be obeyed.
Almost
perfect, because in Father there had always been a weakness, an inadvertent humility that turned his commands into requests, his petitions into pleas. Robert lacked that. Robert was as strong as his father had not been, and Mother, still weak from her delivery, still broken in spirit from the loss of her new infant and her youngest son and her home, all in the last few weeks—Mother seemed to accept Robert’s leadership gratefully.

Well,
I
do not accept it.

She strode forward, ahead of the cart. Why should she follow along behind, forced to endure her mother’s obedience to a mere boy?

“Dinah,” Mother said.

She pretended not to hear.

“Dinah,” said Robert. “It’s better if you walk with us.”

I am not your daughter, boy.

“Dinah, we’ll stay together!” Robert said.

Dinah turned and faced him, but did not move. The cart came up to her, and she did not move. There they stood in the middle of the street, people swirling around them, and Dinah would not move.

“
Will
you not make a scene here!” Robert’s request, far from being a plea, was a command.

Dinah would not bear it. “The man who sleeps with Mother is my father. The man who sleeps with me will be my husband. Tell me, Robert, where do
you
sleep?”

“Children,” Mother pled helplessly.

Dinah watched Robert’s face go red. She knew that because she held her tongue so much, people thought she was dull or inarticulate. On the contrary, she knew that her tongue could sting, that she had a knack for finding the weakest place in other people and probing it directly with her daggered words. And now that she had let herself go this far, she would not soften it. “How will Charlie find us, Robert?” She asked because she was certain he had not so much as thought of the question.

“He’ll look up the factory, and they’ll tell him where we live.”

Dinah did not bother reminding Robert that they had never taken Charlie with them to the factory, so he did not know the way. She did not remind him that because they had rarely talked about the factory at home, there was a good chance that Charlie would not even remember the company’s name. She only looked at him coldly until he was forced to glance away. Then she turned her back on him and strode off toward their new house. She heard the cart start moving after them. She heard the carter chuckle and say, “Pity the man who weds
her
.” She shrugged off the insult. The man she married would be such a man that she would never need to speak to him that way. The man she married would have had the faith not to force Charlie to leave. The man she married would have real authority, not usurped power that belonged to someone who had gone. The man she married would by God be stronger than her. It did not occur to her that there might not be any such man in the world.

Dinah led all the way home, and that night whenever Robert and Anna spoke to her, it was with deference. Once Mother screwed up her courage enough to say, “I think you ought to speak more kindly to Robert. He’s got so much responsibility, and he’s so young.”

“If I’m too much of a burden for him, I’ll leave. I have money enough to keep myself now, plenty of other girls do.”

Anna was angry. “I’ve lost enough of my children!”

“Then you’d best keep Robert in check. If he has his way he’ll soon be the only child you have.” It was cruel and, worse, untrue. But she did not unsay it. In silence she continued to unpack and set out their pitiful belongings. As the sun was setting she walked to the door and opened it.

“Where are you going?” Anna asked.

“To the old house.”

“Why?”

“Someone should be there, in case Charlie comes.”

“He won’t come,” Robert said. “He’s not even in Manchester.” Dinah looked at him coldly. This time he did not look away. “Remember that tomorrow’s Monday, and you have to work.”

Dinah walked out the door, pulling it closed behind her. Let him tell her to come home early—she would come home because she needed her strength, not because of his command. She would not argue with him, nor did she care so much for him that she would deliberately damage her own health to flout him. That much she would grant him—the authority to stand at the edge of the sea and command the waves to roll, the tide to ebb.

The opportunity for escape did not come until Charlie had been with Whitesides for a day over two weeks. In the daylight hours he was never out of Whitesides’s sight. By night Whitesides slept with the key to the room on a chain around his neck. When Whitesides went out alone, he shot a bolt that had been installed on the outside of the room; he came home reeking of alcohol, but showing no sign of drunkenness except a great deal of affection for Charlie and Raymond, which he showed by beery kisses on their lips, which they had to pretend they enjoyed.

Despite knowing he would soon return, they managed to enjoy his absences. They had little in common—Raymond was only a farmer’s son, the ninth child in a family that could not decently support two, and Charlie’s love of reading meant nothing to him. Nor did Raymond miss his family. “They were as wonderful as slugs, if you get my meaning,” Raymond said. “Old Whitesides’s tough and a bastard if there ever was one, but I’m eatin’, an’t I? And I’m gettin’ into the best rich houses and trompin’ dust on the floor, and every now and then I get to piss in their gardens, which does my heart good, I can tell you.”

But friendly and cheerful as Raymond managed to be when Whitesides was gone, when the master came back Raymond was one of the enemy. Not that he didn’t mean well, and he obviously mitigated Charlie’s suffering as much as he could without Whitesides noticing. But he was thoroughly Whitesides’s tool, and could no more disobey him than fly. Charlie confided nothing to him about his plan to escape at the first opportunity.

The second day of work had been worse, if possible, than the first, because all the sores of the day before were reopened and stung worse than before, and Raymond had used the needle again until Charlie could hardly walk; his muscles rebelled and would not take him up the chimney until pain drove him up. By the third day, however, he was toughening, and it finally occurred to him that the life was physically endurable after all, though it left him exhausted and the scrubbing at the end of the day never stopped hurting.

His decision to run away, however, did not waver. It was not his body that suffered most. Even though his family had sent him away, he knew they had not dreamed his life would be like this. They loved him, and the thought of them put him where he no longer let Whitesides’s tortures put him—near tears. He was eight, and had lost his father only half a year before. The loss of all the rest of his family was more than he was willing to bear.

His opportunity came when their work moved out of Ardwick and into the older houses in middle-class Chorlton. The architecture was different—the houses stood close together, but they rambled a bit more, and instead of rising two stories sheer from ground to roof, there were gables and roofs on wings extending from the ground floor, too.

Charlie watched to see if Whitesides would notice the difference and guard him closer, but the man seemed oblivious. Perhaps he thought that because Charlie was being cooperative and climbing well—and smiling uninterruptedly—there was nothing more to worry about. In fact, in the last few days Whitesides had been growing almost maudlin in his affection. Later, remembering the man—something he would generally avoid doing—Charlie would wonder if Whitesides even knew what he was doing to his boys. Perhaps the sweep thought that all was well with them, and his cruelty was nothing but good discipline, necessary to keep the wicked little creatures in the strait and narrow way.

It was not a theological strait and narrow way that Charlie confronted now: the chimney was stone, which made it at once harder and easier to climb. There were handholds and toeholds all the way up, making the passage quick and easy; the stones, however, jutted into his back painfully whenever he leaned back. It didn’t matter to Charlie, however. It was only on the down climb that the stones would matter, when he had to lean against the back wall to work. And he was determined that he would never climb down the inside of this chimney.