tucked under his chin, afraid. Each of her children’s deaths came as a physical blow, hammering her into the ground so that she lost height and emerged shrunken.
After Ned died, they sat numb and motionless, waiting for the disease to cross over and attack the others. But it never did. Bean still slept in the house, while the girls (dressed in rough linen and wool dresses with just a single shawl among them) stayed out of doors all winter and came home each day rosy with health. To the neighbors, it looked like carelessness to lose four boys and keep the girls, who weren’t worth half so much alive. For Mam, it was first the loss, then the disapproval of the loss that ruined her; the sense, somehow, that a lack of fastidiousness in blacking the stove might have caused her boys to slip away. No one much counted Bean as solace, what with his silence and his odd ways. Behind her back they called him the cuckoo in the nest.
The village carpenter was so old, he ought to have been hard at work on his own coffin. Unable to keep up with so many dead children, he enlisted Pa to hammer together coffins for the two younger—one for John and the smallest for Ned, both without a single right angle. Pell hated it. She imagined a shoddy coffin could hinder a person’s access to whatever heaven there might be, cause him to overshoot somehow, or fall out and plummet back to earth in flames.
For the funerals, Pa claimed precedence over the vicar of Lover and, once established in the church pulpit, refused to give it up. “These innocents,” he began, “shall be saved, and gathered up to the kingdom of heaven by His mercy. Yet here today before Him stand sinners doomed to plunge downward, down to the darkest circle of hell, where ye shall find rivers of flame to melt the very flesh off thy bones, accompanied by the terrible screams of a thousand lost souls. Repent!” By now he had begun to shake with self-righteous ire, and seemed to have forgotten where he was, and why. “Repent, oh ye sinners, lest the Devil scourge ye till his lash runs crimson with thy blood and thou beg for mercy not forthcoming. Repent, lest he pour red-hot lava over the filthy tools of thy fornication and run through thee with his fiery pokers. Then ye shall think to repent, too late!”
Crucially, he seemed to have forgotten that the majority of souls gathered in the church that day were members of his immediate family, for whom sorrow and loss and overwork had relevance, and poverty, and rage against the vagaries of fate. But fornication?
Louder and longer he preached, calling for flames and trumpets and angels and demons to behave in ways that (to Pell) seemed unlikely in so unprepossessing a setting as Nomansland, and for the wrath of God and the punishments of Satan to be visited upon them all with an unseemly range of sadistic reproofs.
Mam acknowledged none of the many words he spoke, but sat looking straight ahead with empty eyes, and gained no solace from his sermon. When the hymns began, accompanied by exhortations and shouting, Pell slipped out.
The doctor from town declared the problem to be typhus. Not that he’d come out to visit the family when it might have helped, but four deaths in such close proximity required official inspection against the possibility of epidemic.
“Definitely typhus,” he told Mam, looking down his nose at them all, and Pell supposed they must have looked filthy to him, despite being as clean as their existence allowed. It was no use blaming Mam, who walked on earth like something inanimate come partway to life.
The doctor required the bedding to be burned, which was no bother, it being straw. He also insisted that they fill in the night closet and dig it anew, and that the house be scrubbed top to bottom. And then he departed in his smart gig, hoping never to be summoned to such a place again.
These jobs fell to the girls. Despite the futility of scrubbing packed earth, thatch, and sod, Pell and Lou attempted
After Ned died, they sat numb and motionless, waiting for the disease to cross over and attack the others. But it never did. Bean still slept in the house, while the girls (dressed in rough linen and wool dresses with just a single shawl among them) stayed out of doors all winter and came home each day rosy with health. To the neighbors, it looked like carelessness to lose four boys and keep the girls, who weren’t worth half so much alive. For Mam, it was first the loss, then the disapproval of the loss that ruined her; the sense, somehow, that a lack of fastidiousness in blacking the stove might have caused her boys to slip away. No one much counted Bean as solace, what with his silence and his odd ways. Behind her back they called him the cuckoo in the nest.
The village carpenter was so old, he ought to have been hard at work on his own coffin. Unable to keep up with so many dead children, he enlisted Pa to hammer together coffins for the two younger—one for John and the smallest for Ned, both without a single right angle. Pell hated it. She imagined a shoddy coffin could hinder a person’s access to whatever heaven there might be, cause him to overshoot somehow, or fall out and plummet back to earth in flames.
For the funerals, Pa claimed precedence over the vicar of Lover and, once established in the church pulpit, refused to give it up. “These innocents,” he began, “shall be saved, and gathered up to the kingdom of heaven by His mercy. Yet here today before Him stand sinners doomed to plunge downward, down to the darkest circle of hell, where ye shall find rivers of flame to melt the very flesh off thy bones, accompanied by the terrible screams of a thousand lost souls. Repent!” By now he had begun to shake with self-righteous ire, and seemed to have forgotten where he was, and why. “Repent, oh ye sinners, lest the Devil scourge ye till his lash runs crimson with thy blood and thou beg for mercy not forthcoming. Repent, lest he pour red-hot lava over the filthy tools of thy fornication and run through thee with his fiery pokers. Then ye shall think to repent, too late!”
Crucially, he seemed to have forgotten that the majority of souls gathered in the church that day were members of his immediate family, for whom sorrow and loss and overwork had relevance, and poverty, and rage against the vagaries of fate. But fornication?
Louder and longer he preached, calling for flames and trumpets and angels and demons to behave in ways that (to Pell) seemed unlikely in so unprepossessing a setting as Nomansland, and for the wrath of God and the punishments of Satan to be visited upon them all with an unseemly range of sadistic reproofs.
Mam acknowledged none of the many words he spoke, but sat looking straight ahead with empty eyes, and gained no solace from his sermon. When the hymns began, accompanied by exhortations and shouting, Pell slipped out.
The doctor from town declared the problem to be typhus. Not that he’d come out to visit the family when it might have helped, but four deaths in such close proximity required official inspection against the possibility of epidemic.
“Definitely typhus,” he told Mam, looking down his nose at them all, and Pell supposed they must have looked filthy to him, despite being as clean as their existence allowed. It was no use blaming Mam, who walked on earth like something inanimate come partway to life.
The doctor required the bedding to be burned, which was no bother, it being straw. He also insisted that they fill in the night closet and dig it anew, and that the house be scrubbed top to bottom. And then he departed in his smart gig, hoping never to be summoned to such a place again.
These jobs fell to the girls. Despite the futility of scrubbing packed earth, thatch, and sod, Pell and Lou attempted
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