stared back, neither of us, I think, able to comprehend the crime.
Ignoring the woman altogether, my father took hold of my arm and marched me quickly toward Blair’s Land, berating me in a low whisper for dressing like a caddie to perform work well beneath the dignity of a common house servant. He’d been appointed Sheriffof Wigtownshire the year before, my father, and he was greasing already for appointment to the High Court. None of these plans included having his middle child seen tipping the waste-water bucket into the gutter or jabbering with water caddies.
Needless to say, from that day to this I have never again asked to carry water to the flat, and although the water caddie and I recognize one another from time to time in the Land’s staircase or on the High Street, we never speak a word. We each understand well enough that water and society both run downhill, and there is always something in her face that says making one of the two do otherwise is as much labor as she can spare.
O NE THING YOU will notice as I write this account is that my father’s simplest actions often require pages of explanation. His most complex, of course, require books. No one understands this better than my father, given as he is to seeing his own actions as formal decisions, decisions that beget interpretation.
So when my father orders me to haul the day’s water—to carry away the foul and return with the drinkable—it says many things to me. It says that he has already communicated this wish to William, hours before, so that William might turn away the water caddie for the day. This in turn means that my father anticipated my perjuring myself. He knew I would lie, and prepared a proper disgrace well beforehand.
It says also that William understands the disgrace, if not the reasons for it. This explains his uncomfortable look when I go back into the kitchen to ask for the same small watercask my father once stripped disgustedly off my back.
“There will be lines at the well,” William says apologetically, as though the lines will be of his own making.
My father is also saying this: What stands between carrying water and having it carried is not my birth, but his continuing good will.
Having lived through this same scene once before, however, Ifind myself strangely unruffled by it. In fact, I know just what to do: change my clothes, and leave off my waistcoat. And I know exactly into which clothes I should change.
Stuffed into the darkest rear corner of our shared wardrobe is a sack of clothing that James calls his See-Everything Suit. It is an assemblage of old caddie’s clothing he has put together from who knows where; but every once in a while when my parents are out, he will take off his modest everyday finery and put on the moleskin breeches and the rough linen shirt, wind the soiled white apron about his thick waist. He’ll slip on the battered blue wool bonnet, the
shune
with the dinged buckles. And then James will vanish into the city for an afternoon. He moves around the areas where he is not known, the Lawnmarket and Cowfeeder Row and the piers, venturing sometimes as far away as Leith or Blaw-Weary.
“A man sees everything this way,” he will maintain, when I can’t stop myself from mocking the whole charade. “Because if your silk suit clears the way in the playhouse, it blocks your way in all of the worlds adjoining it. No man wants the son of a judge watching him dead-weight his fish in the market, or whip his horse, or parade his mistress. But dress the part and you see the naked world itself. It is magic, Johnnie.”
I am laughing as quietly as I can as I pull on the various pieces of the See-Everything Suit. It looks better on me even than on James; because I am just that much taller, the pants look as though I outgrew them years ago. My wrists dangle out of the dirty sleeves, and I am just a skinnymalink, a nobody. But as far as I can figure it, there is not a single blessed thing my father can
Ignoring the woman altogether, my father took hold of my arm and marched me quickly toward Blair’s Land, berating me in a low whisper for dressing like a caddie to perform work well beneath the dignity of a common house servant. He’d been appointed Sheriffof Wigtownshire the year before, my father, and he was greasing already for appointment to the High Court. None of these plans included having his middle child seen tipping the waste-water bucket into the gutter or jabbering with water caddies.
Needless to say, from that day to this I have never again asked to carry water to the flat, and although the water caddie and I recognize one another from time to time in the Land’s staircase or on the High Street, we never speak a word. We each understand well enough that water and society both run downhill, and there is always something in her face that says making one of the two do otherwise is as much labor as she can spare.
O NE THING YOU will notice as I write this account is that my father’s simplest actions often require pages of explanation. His most complex, of course, require books. No one understands this better than my father, given as he is to seeing his own actions as formal decisions, decisions that beget interpretation.
So when my father orders me to haul the day’s water—to carry away the foul and return with the drinkable—it says many things to me. It says that he has already communicated this wish to William, hours before, so that William might turn away the water caddie for the day. This in turn means that my father anticipated my perjuring myself. He knew I would lie, and prepared a proper disgrace well beforehand.
It says also that William understands the disgrace, if not the reasons for it. This explains his uncomfortable look when I go back into the kitchen to ask for the same small watercask my father once stripped disgustedly off my back.
“There will be lines at the well,” William says apologetically, as though the lines will be of his own making.
My father is also saying this: What stands between carrying water and having it carried is not my birth, but his continuing good will.
Having lived through this same scene once before, however, Ifind myself strangely unruffled by it. In fact, I know just what to do: change my clothes, and leave off my waistcoat. And I know exactly into which clothes I should change.
Stuffed into the darkest rear corner of our shared wardrobe is a sack of clothing that James calls his See-Everything Suit. It is an assemblage of old caddie’s clothing he has put together from who knows where; but every once in a while when my parents are out, he will take off his modest everyday finery and put on the moleskin breeches and the rough linen shirt, wind the soiled white apron about his thick waist. He’ll slip on the battered blue wool bonnet, the
shune
with the dinged buckles. And then James will vanish into the city for an afternoon. He moves around the areas where he is not known, the Lawnmarket and Cowfeeder Row and the piers, venturing sometimes as far away as Leith or Blaw-Weary.
“A man sees everything this way,” he will maintain, when I can’t stop myself from mocking the whole charade. “Because if your silk suit clears the way in the playhouse, it blocks your way in all of the worlds adjoining it. No man wants the son of a judge watching him dead-weight his fish in the market, or whip his horse, or parade his mistress. But dress the part and you see the naked world itself. It is magic, Johnnie.”
I am laughing as quietly as I can as I pull on the various pieces of the See-Everything Suit. It looks better on me even than on James; because I am just that much taller, the pants look as though I outgrew them years ago. My wrists dangle out of the dirty sleeves, and I am just a skinnymalink, a nobody. But as far as I can figure it, there is not a single blessed thing my father can
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