A World Elsewhere (11 page)

“Just the one Deacon, same as last month?” he would say. “Good. No Deacon deduction then.”

He sometimes gave Deacon a large candy called a peppermint knob.

He measured off a wedge of vouchers from the roll he carried in his coat.

They were required to allow him—or else forfeit their right to vouchers—to search through closets, cupboards, under beds, through bed linen, dresser drawers. He could do anything that might turn up what he referred to as “excess.”

It was always roughly a month between visits, but they never knew for certain when the wealth inspector might arrive. As soon as you leave, Landish told him, we start roasting legs of lamb that we have hidden beneath the floorboards in the house.

“Mine is a thankless job,” the wealth inspector said, “but one that I cannot afford to lose. You never give me any trouble, Mr. Druken, but some others, let me tell you.”

So he did. He told Landish of the others while Deacon sat and listened to them talk. “What I see is what you have,” he said. “I never doubt it but I must go through the motions of making sure. This attic poses no great challenge to a man of my profession.”

“What with it being so uncluttered,” Landish said, “and having only one porthole we can throw things out of when we hear you coming up the stairs.”

“I know you like to joke with me,” the wealth inspector said. “I enjoy it, it helps me keep perspective, and I have always done right by the two of you. Truth be told to no one but you and me and the boy, I have sometimes allotted you an extra voucher or two.”

Landish, well able to imagine the treatment that he received in certain houses—the threats and offers of God only knew what sorts of bribes, the avowals of revenge and of nighttime visits to his house, whose address would have been widely known—felt grateful to him. He wore a wedding ring, no doubt had children of his own of whom he never spoke.

Landish suspected that no other wealth inspector would omit from his list as valuable an item as Captain Druken’s hat. But their inspector said it should stay in the family of the man whose great accomplishment it symbolized.

Deacon liked the hat. It was the only new-looking thing they owned. The fur was like snow that never melted and was never spoiled. The wooden box shone like the polished tops of tables he had seen in the windows of a store on Water Street when they walked to the west end to watch the trains come and go. He could see himself in the golden clasps that gleamed like the doorknobs of some houses they passed when they went out for a walk.

Deacon knew that the hat stood for something and that Landish liked it more than he let on. The hat stood for first, best, perfect. It looked nice and felt nice. It reminded Deacon of a pet dog he had seen a lady holding in her arms in a carriage that went by them on the road the day they went to see the Crosses.

That winter, they felt so pent up in the attic that they went out in the daytime even in the worst of storms, Deacon astride his neck and hunkered down behind his head like a jockey as Landish barged, waisted, chested on through drifts he couldn’t see and Deacon shouted things he couldn’t hear. Once a storm stopped, the snow was quickly spoiled by walkers and horses and carriages. For a while the snow in the streets looked like mashed potatoes and gravy, but even that never lasted long. The streets got worse, all churned up by wheels and hooves, and what the horses, cows and goats—the “dungsters,” Landish called them—left behind from their behinds.

Landish told Deacon he was lucky. He didn’t have to walk in it, and his nose was further from the smell of it than other noses were, including Landish’s.

“To the manure born,” Landish said. “Ordure will out.”

When they got home, Landish cleaned his boots as best he could before he went indoors. And then he had to climb up to the attic, boots in hand, his socks stuffed in his boots, his bare feet sticking to someone else’s stairs and floors while Deacon walked noisily ahead of him in boots as clean and dry as they were when he went out.

When it snowed heavily, Landish was hired as one of the Snowmen, the brigade who were paid to shovel snow from the streets. Landish didn’t have a shovel, but he was hired because of the rate at which he shovelled snow, about twice as fast as anyone else. They gave him a shovel, and gave Deacon a spade that was used for digging in confined spaces. A back-breakingly short spade, unless you were the size of Deacon. The other Snowmen didn’t mind Deacon. They joked about how they might shovel him by accident and throw him up on someone’s roof. Deacon picked at the snow with his spade while the men worked around him. Landish looked back now and then to make sure he was keeping up, and was not too cold or tired or getting in the way.

The Snowmen appeared in streets all over the city once the word went out that men were needed. No one was guaranteed a job. You could have shovelled the streets a hundred times before, but if you were late getting out you might not get hired. Each Snowman was given a piece of paper signed by one of the foremen that showed the exact time that the piece of paper had changed hands. When you brought it back to the foreman, he calculated how long you had been working, how much money or how many food vouchers you were due.

It wasn’t necessarily true that the bigger the storm, the more money you made, because big storms brought out what Landish called
the Snowpokes, who did almost no work and only came out because they wanted to be part of Something Big.

Flailing shovels were everywhere as the Snowmen loaded wheelbarrows and horse-hauled carts with snow or simply threw it to one side.

“We can’t have a boy in the middle of that,” one foreman said, and told Landish that unless he did something about the boy, he would have to give up his shovel and another man would take his place.

“We’ll make sure nothing happens to the boy,” the oldest of the Snowmen said, but the foreman said no.

Landish told Deacon to shovel doorsteps and stay off the streets. Deacon did as Landish said. Most of the time someone came out when he was done and gave him a piece of candy. A man gave him a steaming damper dog, a bun of pan-fried dough smothered in molasses that he quickly ate before it could get cold. He looked up from eating to see Landish smiling at him from among the Snowmen. His hands were cold and sticky when he put his mitts back on.

He became tired and cold more quickly when he shovelled by himself. Landish told him not to wait until his feet and hands hurt to say that he was cold. When he thought that Landish wasn’t looking, he put his hands in his armpits and stamped his feet. But Landish always saw him and came running and hoisted him on his shoulders. “Time to call it a day,” Landish said.

He gave the foreman back his shovel and took his pay in coins or vouchers. There was always what Landish called a shovel deduction. Less two vouchers for the shovel. Deacon hated it when, because of him, they had to go home early and Landish made less pay. But he couldn’t help stamping his feet once they got cold and wet. Landish would put him straight in the tub when they got home and examine his fingers and toes.

“You lasted longer than some of the men,” Landish said.

“I can stay here in the attic next time,” Deacon said. “Then you can shovel as long as everyone else.”

“No, I’m not leaving you alone. Especially not at night.”

“I won’t do anything wrong,” Deacon said. “You used to leave me alone with Lucy and Irene.”

“I know, but I shouldn’t have. Something might happen downstairs. Or the nuns might come and find you by yourself.”

“What might happen?”

“You never know, that’s the thing, you never know. Something.”

“A fire?”

“Maybe, or something no one can prevent or name. I don’t know what. I just don’t want you alone in the attic out here on Dark Marsh Road. If there’s one thing we’ll never run out of, it’s snowstorms. So I can come in early when you get too cold.”

But the following month went by without a flake of snow.

“I never thought I’d miss it,” Landish said, who had taken to gazing out the porthole in search of any sign that the weather might be turning hard. It did nothing but rain for a month. And then it turned much too cold for snow.

Landish had no gun, but some men gave him seabirds until, because they had so little ammunition left, they told him they could spare no more.

They walked past stores in which rabbits, though they were out of season, hung upside down in doorways. They passed a window showing apples piled in rows a dozen deep. When Deacon wasn’t looking, Landish stole two sweet oranges and some sugar-dusted cherries. He made a dessert for the boy, surprising him with a dish of orange wedges sprinkled with chopped cherries.

Soon, because of ice, no supply ships could reach the island. No fishing boats could leave it. Every port was cut off from every other.

The wealth inspector still came by, giving out fewer vouchers because the stores were running low on some supplies.

They tried to fish in nearby ponds. Landish didn’t have an ice auger and the ice was too thick for his axe. It was the same with the pools on the smallest brooks. The axe struck mud at the bottom of one hole.

Over the more distant, larger streams there formed shells of ice through which you could barely hear the tantalizing sound of running water.

Landish fished in the streams as he had when he was a boy, with a bamboo pole, a length of twine and one single-barbed, barely baited hook, baited with almost anything depending on how cold it was. There were patches of open ground, but he couldn’t break them with his axe to look for worms, so he had to fish with the eyes of trout he had caught the day before.

One day, though the footing was treacherous, Landish walked out onto a river and hacked his way to water. He told Deacon to stay back.

He had just dropped in a hook when the ice gave way beneath him. He went all the way under, briefly, then bobbed up in the hole he’d made. He heard himself breathing like a whelping seal. His heart made a mad bid to escape, battering the walls and floor and ceiling of his chest. He thrashed his way to shore, planks and squares of ice falling from his shoulders, his hair and clothing matted to him.

Deacon had thought Landish was gone. Engulfed. But Landish came up from the river like he lived beneath the ice.

Landish scrambled up the riverbank. Putting his hands on his hips and bending over, he breathed like Deacon did when he ran so fast he scorched his throat. He looked up at the sky and dribbled water from his lips.

“Landish.”

“We have to get home fast.”

Landish hoisted Deacon on his shoulders and began to run. His clothing froze, stiffened, rubbed against his skin. He reached one hand inside his hair and squeezed his ears until they burned. On the tip of his nose there was a frozen drop of blood.

“You all right, Deacon?” Landish said through clenched teeth.

“I can run.”

“No, you can’t keep up. It’s faster like this.”

Landish’s voice sounded like it did when Deacon drummed on his back with his fists.

“Fell in, did ya?” Hogan said. He was wearing a coat with the fur-fringed hood pulled up. Deacon couldn’t see his face even when Landish put him on the floor.

“He went right under,” Deacon said. “He went way down and came back up.”

“I haven’t got the stove lit,” Hogan said. “I’ll light it later on when it gets dark. I can’t spare no coal. I’m lyin’ dressed like this beneath the blankets.”

Landish lurched from side to side as he climbed the stairs. In the attic, he slipped out of his coat and let it fall on the floor behind him. The coat was coated. It stood up by itself, taller than Deacon who pushed it over because he didn’t like the way it looked.

“My follicles are icicles,” Landish said.

He clawed at his beard. His hair made a clicking sound when he shook his head. He took off his pants and fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. His collar had left a welt around his neck, his trousers another one around his waist.

He’d never fallen through the ice before, never been in winter water, salt or fresh.

Landish said his balls were in his belly and would stay in hibernation until May. There was ice in the hair above Dick and the happy couple, the former the size of a grub, and the latter like a single, purple plum.

“My toes are froze,” he said. He examined them for signs of frostbite. His big toes were rimmed with white, as were all his fingertips. White was better than red. He should never have ventured so far from home in cold like this. It could just as easily have been the boy.

They had two wooden tubs, the small one for Deacon, a larger one for Landish, barely big enough for him to sit in with his knees up around his chin. Landish, his hands a palsied pair of claws, his head a
Medusa of icicles, half filled his wooden tub with water heated on the stove. He splashed his torso. He hugged himself to keep from shaking.

“You’re like this,” Deacon said, nodding his head and clacking his teeth as he spoke.

Landish cursed himself for having tried a stream that large so far from home.

He knew from his time on the
Gilbert
that he should be stretched out in a longer, deeper tub with nothing but his head above the water, which someone helping him should be keeping hot, and that upon emerging from the tub he should be rubbed with reeking blubber, made to drink mulled rum and mummified in heavy blankets.

Using his hand brush and his back brush, Landish scoured his skin as hard as he could stand it.

“You’re making yourself redder,” Deacon said.

“Good.”

“How long can a fish hold its breath?”

“Fish breathe with their gills.”

“How long can you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you were a goner.”

“Did you know the way home?”

Deacon shook his head.

He had taken the boy too far into the woods, a couple of hours of daylight left. He had told no one where they were going. The boy would have perished too. They would have found Landish in the water and Deacon in the woods.

“Ask me more questions about fish,” Landish said.

“Why?”

“More questions.”