The Convicts (2 page)

In the morning they came for my father. Two burly men, thick as tree stumps, marched him down the steps mid into die fog; One at each side, pinning hii elbows, they took him off to debtor's prison.

My mother wailed. She tried to stop them at the door, quivering in her black shawls. But the men only knocked her aside so rudely that my father roared, “Keep your filthy hands off her!” He struggled for a moment, until he saw that it was useless, then looked back as the men stepped him to thestreet.

“We're hot beaten yet,” he said. “We shall weather this blow, as we've weathered all others.”

“Tell tne what to do,” I said.

His chin was turned fully to his shoulder. “You must find money, Tom,” he told me.

“But how?” I called. “Father, how?”

Already he was graying into the fog. He had no answer. My mother sobbed as she held me. “It was the bell,” she shouted. “It was the passing bell!”

“No,” said Father, nearly gone now. “You see, Tom. This is what comes from crushing cockroaches.”

I thought he was joking. I thought he was so brave to be making merry on bis way to prison. But he was really talking about himself, as I learned a moment later. No sooner had he vanished completely into the awful fog—with a final round of oaths from the men, and the fading clatter of a horse's hoofs—than another man arrived.

His voice came first—”Ahoy the house!”—and that was all I needed to know. Only one man would speak those words in a voice like that.

Out of the fog came Mr. Goodfellow. He was dressed to the nines, in top hat and cape, and the one he tipped up and the other he flipped back as he came up the steps to our door. “Good day, Mrs. Tin,” he said, with a nod to her. Me, he just ignored.

“What have you done to us now?” asked my mother.

“Why, you strike me to the quick, madam,” said he. “I'm only trying to help.”

She leapt at him. Her fingers curled, a snarl in her throat, she went up like a panther. But Mr. Goodfellow easily held her off. He was a strong man. He was bigger and stronger and richer than I or my father. In every way he was better.

“Now, listen,” said Mr. Goodfellow. He held my mother by the wrist, and she folded up at his feet, down to her knees on the floor. “I have taken it upon myself to consolidate the debts of Mr. Tin. Everything he owes is henceforth owed to me, and a trifling amount it is.”

“How much?” I asked. He didn't answer.

“How much?” Mked Mother.

“Thirty-nine pounds,” he said. “Thirty-nine pounds and a ha'penny, to be exact. But the latter I'll forgo.”

His-trifling amount was a princely sum to me. His ha'pennyalone would buy me a muffin or a cold glass of raspberryade. The balance I could hardly imagine.

“A pittance,” said Mr. Goodfellow, with a wave of his fingers. “However, I am prepared to forgo the
entire
amount if Mr. Tin will agree to work for Goodfellow and company”

“Is that what you want?” I asked. “Is that why you've hounded us for years, to get my father on your beastly ships?”

He looked at ine, and then away. To him I wasn't worth a second glance.

Still on her knees, ifty mother stared up at him. Her face had mce been pretty, but it hadn't seen the sun since Kitty's death, and now was ashy white. “How dare you, sir?” she aikedv “Weren't you brave enough to come while he was here?”

“Madam…,” he said.

“How dare you?” Mother said again, in a voice that had no fire. She managed to gather some dignity as she picked herself up and rose beside him, small and frail. “You've ruined us, sir,” she said. “All Tor reveiige, for a wound oh your pride.”

-The whys and wherefores are between myself and Mr. Tin,” said he. “But let me tell you, madam: ruined you shall be unless your husband agrees to my terms.”

He tipped his hat again and backed from the door. I swallowed, looking straight at him. “I will go,” I said.

“No!” cried Mother.

But I ignored her. “I will go in my father's place “ I told him, trembling at my courage. I thought I might faint if he took me up on my bargain. As he looked back at me, I resigned myself to a short life and an early death on the sea that I feared.

But his only answer was a laugh, a hearty laugh that shook him all over and made those cold eyes twinkle.

It was worse than if he had said no. I had offered him my life, and it angered me to be so utterly belittled.

“I insist,” I said.

He laughed even harder. “Oh, you insist,” he said, and snickered. “I need a
man,
young Master Tin. Why, you wouldn't last a day, not an hour, on the sea. You belong at Mr. Poppery's, boy. I've seen to it that your tuition has been paid for a year. It's already a portion of your father's debt.”

I turned and ran away. Consumed with shame, with hate, I couldn't bear to face the man a moment longer. I retreated to the parlor, scampering down the hall like one of the cockroaches I had startled there. I heard Mr. Goodfellow's laugh, and then his voice telling my mother, “I'll expect to hear from you directly.” The door closed, and I heard his fine leather boots taking him down through the fog.

My mother followed me into the parlor. I was looking at the few little things we owned, but I was really seeing those that were gone. The sword that my father had accepted from a surrendering Frenchman; where was that? His medals were gone, and his best braided hat. His charts and his tools and his pilot books; all of them were gone. For the first time I wondered about the pennies that had gone to the toll-booth, and exactly where they had come from. And then I thought about my school tuition, and I groaned. Why had I never seen what was happening? My father, in selling nearly everything he owned, had sold
himself
along with his sailorly things.

“It's worth any price to spare you from going to sea,” said my mother, as though she had read my mind. “I never should have married a sailor, and I won't have one for a son. You're to be a gentleman, Tom.”

I saw what despair had been brought to that end, and I vowed to set things straight. I inarched to the hail. I began pulling on my shoes, my good gleaming shoes that might have cost my father his sextant.

“Where am you going?” asked Mother.

1 bent over to tie the laces. Frayed and knotted, they seemed shamefully shabby in such fine shoes, the money I'd been given to buy laces had bought me a Chelsea bun.

“Tell me where” she said. “Are you going to sea? Tom, you're not running away to sea, are you?” Mother took my arm. “There's no future there; only death waits on the sea.”

“Let Me go/’ I said, pulling easily from her grasp. “I have to settle accounts.”

I didn't Know what I would do or where I would go. But I was certain that I couldn't leave my father in a debt's prison. I took my coat from its hook. Then—I didn't know why—I—put it back and took my father's instead. Perhaps I thought his coat would make me a man. Perhaps I wanted hhn to hold me, and since his real arms Weren't there to do itj I would have to wrap myself in the woolen ones that stnelled so Much of him.

I put on the coat; I opened the door.

Mother tried to slam it shut. “Tom, don't go,” she said.

“Mother, please.” I moved her aside and stepped out to theporeh.

“No son of mine will ever go to sea,” she said. “Tom, if you walk away now I have no son.”

“Please don't worry” I told her. I kissed her on the cheek, then hurried off before I could change my mind, before my courage deserted me. I ran into the fog, and her cries came with me.

“I have no son,” she shouted in her madwoman's screech. “Do you hear me? I have no son!”

I ran as fast and far as I could. I rail though my ribs felt stitched together, though my lungs wheezed. From street to street, through a churchyard and a field, I ran on and on. I passed ghostly houses, ghostly trees, coughing globs of phlegm, thick and yellow, as though it were bits of the fog I was retching from my body.

I knew London only from the Surrey side, as a panorama of spires and domes along the curve of the Thames. To come at it from the north, so blindly that I couldn't see more than thirty paces, left me hopelessly confused.

The streets twisted and turned and stopped altogether. Along them milled people and carts and carriages, more and more as I went along, until sometimes the street was choked from side to side. All slowly appeared and slowly faded, as though I'd come to a city full of phantoms, a drowned Atlantis in the watery fog. From the gloom and the shadows, an endless assortment of odd-looking hawkers reached out tb sell me their wares. I was offered pocket glasses and seashells, birds’ nests and coal, sponges, spoons, and a clarinet. I stumbled through a market full of street-sellers, each shouting about the thing he was selling, in such a babble of “Fish!” and “Potatoes!” and “Whelks!” and “Hot eels!” that it made not the slightest sense.

But the smells of the food were strong and enticing. I stopped in the middle of the crowd and felt through the pockets of my father's coat, hoping to find a farthing. But all I brought out was a fistful of pencils with their sharpened ends jammed into a little tin cup. I stared at them for a moment, until I suddenly felt tearscome to my eyes. A picture formed, clear as a suraiy cfay, of my father pausing on these same steets, hawking his pencils to raise the pennies that sent me toschool.

For a minute or more I stood in the swirling crowd, neirly weeing at the sadness of it, knowing that if Mr: Goodfellow suddenly emerged beside me, I would thrust those pencils through his coat, through his bre&st; and pierce his black heart. Then a hand reached out and stole the pencils. Another, perhaps the same, stole the cup.

That was nearly the end for me. I would have gone straight home if Ihad known which way to walk. But the crowd had turned me around so that I didn't know east from west, or scarcely up from down. I tried to stop a peddler and ask him for directions, but he only went rattling along with his little cart and his tiny donkey, crying out, “Buy, buy^ buy! Buy a bonnet, buy a bootlace!”

I set off through another maze of streets, past another row of shops. Then I arrived suddenly at a set of stairs, and at their bottom was the muddy bank of the Thames. I had blundered right past the City

I sat on the stone step. Cold and hungry, desperately alone, I decided to wait for the fog to thin. I pulled my collars tight, linked my hands inside my cuffs, and watched an old man trudging through the mud below me.

He was gray and grizzled; he was blind. His eyes were wrapped with a black cloth tied behind his head, its long tails drooping to his shoulders. On his back hung a tattered bag that was clotted with mud at the bottom, as though he had set it down and picked it up a hundred thousand times. He carried a farooked stick that he poked deep in the rifiuA I heard the squelching, sucking sound it made each time he pulled it out

I was used to seeing mud larks combing the riversides for their bits of bone and glass and iron, for anything they could sell. But always they'd been children; I had never seen an old, blind man at the game.

He was a master at it. He stepped and poked, stepped and poked, like a huge and ragged heron. His feet were bare, his trousers rolled to his knees, and his long coat scraped on the mud, smoothing behind him each puckered mound left by his stick.

Suddenly he bent down. The bag fell from his shoulders. His hands went into the mud, to his wrists, to his elbows. He dug like a dog, splashing the mud across his legs and his coat. He pulled out a black blob that grew smaller and smaller as he shook the mud away, until he was left with a little disk—a coin that he put between his teeth and bit, hard, on one side. Then into his sack it went, and up he got to start again.

I envied him then, as old and blind as he was. I took off my shoes, fumbling with the tangled laces. I peeled away my socks and stuffed them inside. I tied the laces together and hung the shoes around my neck, then started down the steps.

The stone was bitterly cold, the mud even colder. It felt thick as treacle, and bottomless; my foot vanished into it. Each step was a struggle, and I managed only half a dozen before the mud gripped me like glue. I nearly fell forward, crying out as I tried to catch my balance.

The blind man's head went up. “Who's there?” he asked, his voice a croak, an ugly “grawk” that made him seem more birdlike than ever.

He scared me with his quickness and his tattered clothes, the way his head swung round to listen. Surrounded by the fog, with the river flowing by, I was in the loneliest place of all. Hie city existed only as a hum of noise, a jumble of gray shapes piled atop the weed-covered stones and steps. The river was a band of darkness fading into yellow. It was creeping toward me, I saw, as I stood there with my breath bated. It came licking over the mud, around the shallow domes that cockles had made. It stretched out twisting fingers that darted toward me with amazing speed, through the hollows and ripples.

The water scared me more than the blind man did. I imagined myself stuck where I was, fixed to the mud like a bug on fresh paint, as the river rose and covered me. I saw myself underwater, swaying to and fro with the current, my arms writhing over my head.