his court paraphernalia in the room he shares with my mother. I pretend to work with Aristotle, listening, waiting. Finally, the footsteps make their way back up the trance, and he stops beside my chair, a satchel of briefs in one hand, the white and red satin robes he wears to hear criminal cases hanging magnificently, falling just to the floor. We regard one another.
It is the current custom for Lords and advocates living near the Court of Session to parade there each day in full state, and so the freshly powdered full-bottomed wig hangs about his long jowls like the ears of a massive and disapproving spaniel. In a moment he will be gone, gone about the business of ordering the hanging of men accused of not much more than what I have just committed at his own dining room table, and I pray that he will go without saying anything more.
But it is a prayer with no real faith behind it, and he clears his throat.
“Since you are home today, with nothing pressing to do,” suggests my father casually, “I wonder if you might fetch us all some water, John.”
7
O NE MORNING WHEN I was eight, I happened to be in the kitchen when the water caddie shuffled in with the first of the day’s two buckets of potable water. It was an event that happened like clockwork, each day about eleven, but for some reason that morning it struck me as a brilliant adventure, this quest for water. I took it into my head to follow the water caddie out to the pump below Parliament Square, and I begged my father’s servant William to ask her if I might.
So William asked this tired woman if I might go along, and she picked up the bucket of foul water he had standing by the door for her, and she smiled and said, “Ay, lad. For a bittock.”
But tagging along was not enough—to
help
was what I was mad after, and William rummaged in the pantry and found the smaller water barrel he used on holidays when the caddies stayed at home. There were straps for my arms, but before handing it to me, William looked at the dust collected on the slats and told me I’d best change into my oldest clothes, and leave off my waistcoat.
When I had changed, the squat older woman and I walked down to the street, where she emptied the bucket of our foul water into the gutter. We continued along the south wall of the Square, past the goldsmiths and the dressmaker’s shop, and thenwe descended the long Parliament Stair, what the woman called the Old Back Stair.
At the stone well, she stretched up to pull the small handle, while I steadied first her large tapered bucket, and then my own cask. But she let go the switch when the cask was little more than half full. “More than enough for you to carry, mannie,” she said.
Still, the cask was heavy enough to allow me the illusion that this woman and I were caddies hauling water together, workers. People in their flats would slake their thirsts because of my work. I imagined this process repeated a thousand times around the city, buckets and casks of water rising methodically into the air, to the very tops of the tallest tenements, a rainshower in reverse, an all but invisible daily miracle.
The caddie told me that I’d make a fine soldier one day, I carried so well and so uncomplainingly. And every woman loved a soldier, she added, showing her bad teeth and the pretty smile they could manage.
As we finished the climb of seventy-six steps, each of which I counted aloud to her, someone took me by the meaty part of my arm and spun me around. With the cask strapped to my back, it threw me off balance, and I nearly fell to the cobblestones. But the hand held me, and I found my feet.
It was my father, standing beside the tenement at the head of the stairs, staring in amazement at what he had in his grip. His forehead was creased in a way that meant not simply thunder, but lightning as well.
“
What are ye doing, ye two
?” he whispered incredulously. “
What do ye think ye’re doing?”
The caddie and I simply
It is the current custom for Lords and advocates living near the Court of Session to parade there each day in full state, and so the freshly powdered full-bottomed wig hangs about his long jowls like the ears of a massive and disapproving spaniel. In a moment he will be gone, gone about the business of ordering the hanging of men accused of not much more than what I have just committed at his own dining room table, and I pray that he will go without saying anything more.
But it is a prayer with no real faith behind it, and he clears his throat.
“Since you are home today, with nothing pressing to do,” suggests my father casually, “I wonder if you might fetch us all some water, John.”
7
O NE MORNING WHEN I was eight, I happened to be in the kitchen when the water caddie shuffled in with the first of the day’s two buckets of potable water. It was an event that happened like clockwork, each day about eleven, but for some reason that morning it struck me as a brilliant adventure, this quest for water. I took it into my head to follow the water caddie out to the pump below Parliament Square, and I begged my father’s servant William to ask her if I might.
So William asked this tired woman if I might go along, and she picked up the bucket of foul water he had standing by the door for her, and she smiled and said, “Ay, lad. For a bittock.”
But tagging along was not enough—to
help
was what I was mad after, and William rummaged in the pantry and found the smaller water barrel he used on holidays when the caddies stayed at home. There were straps for my arms, but before handing it to me, William looked at the dust collected on the slats and told me I’d best change into my oldest clothes, and leave off my waistcoat.
When I had changed, the squat older woman and I walked down to the street, where she emptied the bucket of our foul water into the gutter. We continued along the south wall of the Square, past the goldsmiths and the dressmaker’s shop, and thenwe descended the long Parliament Stair, what the woman called the Old Back Stair.
At the stone well, she stretched up to pull the small handle, while I steadied first her large tapered bucket, and then my own cask. But she let go the switch when the cask was little more than half full. “More than enough for you to carry, mannie,” she said.
Still, the cask was heavy enough to allow me the illusion that this woman and I were caddies hauling water together, workers. People in their flats would slake their thirsts because of my work. I imagined this process repeated a thousand times around the city, buckets and casks of water rising methodically into the air, to the very tops of the tallest tenements, a rainshower in reverse, an all but invisible daily miracle.
The caddie told me that I’d make a fine soldier one day, I carried so well and so uncomplainingly. And every woman loved a soldier, she added, showing her bad teeth and the pretty smile they could manage.
As we finished the climb of seventy-six steps, each of which I counted aloud to her, someone took me by the meaty part of my arm and spun me around. With the cask strapped to my back, it threw me off balance, and I nearly fell to the cobblestones. But the hand held me, and I found my feet.
It was my father, standing beside the tenement at the head of the stairs, staring in amazement at what he had in his grip. His forehead was creased in a way that meant not simply thunder, but lightning as well.
“
What are ye doing, ye two
?” he whispered incredulously. “
What do ye think ye’re doing?”
The caddie and I simply
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