But the look on William’s face.
I thought that was the end of my work for the Wordsworths there and then. He could look very grim, that man. He tilts his head as if he’s thinking very hard, then he clamps his teeth shut and sort of sighs through them. It sounds like the north wind. I mean it did. No breath in him now, is there. No breath in any of them. I’m the only one of the little fam’ly left now. Except Mary, but Mary is not mine and I am not Mary’s, not the way I was for the others.
But William didn't sack me on the spot. No, not at all.
He held Joe’s tooth on a flat hand where it loomed like a relic on the altar in the church where I never go. And he said, James, do you reckon you could use one of your small implements to adjust any of the three sets of my sister’s teeth that have been causing her agony every time she fits them into her mouth? Each set needs at least one replacement tooth, and two of them have problems with their hinges.
Dorothy’s teeth?
Yes, she is barely forty-five yet her own are nearly gone.
Cora Freetorch is usually the one who does that kind of thing around here, Sir. If you want I can introduce you to her.
Cora has tried over and over again. My sister has sensitivities that Cora cannot surmount. And every time we have made an adjustment someone has to go over Kirkstone Pass and back again and it takes, as you know, all of a day. If you could make a tiny adjustment here and there, well, it would save me a great deal of inconvenience I can tell you. This very tooth, for instance, looks as if it would perfectly fit the gap in my sister’s oldest pair.
And he handed me Joe’s tooth, and I was very relieved to have it back.
You mentioned inside work? I wanted to take his mind off the unsavoury portion of what we had been discussing. I wanted to forget about putting my friend Joe’s teeth into Dorothy Wordsworth’s mouth. But William had one more thing to say about it.
It will be important not to mention to Dorothy that these are Waterloo teeth. That they are teeth that have been torn from the heads of deceased soldiers. She can’t know this or she’ll never acquiesce to our using them. We have to tell her all the teeth are porcelain or at the very worst carved animal bone, and even at that she is liable to balk. She is liable to inquire as to what kind of animal and how it was killed and even what its name was, if it had a name.
I said nothing, taking this in. I didn’t want to let on that I felt funny about lying to his sister, or that I felt Miss Wordsworth would somehow know the truth of anything no matter how convincing you were. If you are lying some people know it and she was one of those. And even if they don’t know it they as good as know it because something in their blood runs away from the person lying. They know there is love missing or sympathy missing. Something. They can just feel it the way you feel a change in the wind or a current in the water.
Because as I told you, said William, my sister has sensitivities…in fact this is exactly what I meant when I said I have work for you inside the household.
Sir?
You’ve seen my sister, I think?
Er, in the way anyone in the village might have seen her on her walks, Sir. I—when I was a young lad I might have seen her a bit more, as I was often on the fells with my mam…I decided not to tell him anything beyond this.
So you know that she is not like other women. She is different.
Is she, Sir?
She is very different. She has to be handled most carefully.
Sir?
I have been the careful one, now, for years and years. I have been so careful that there are bags under my eyes. And frankly, I’m tired and I need help. Is it a terrible thing, to ask, finally, for help?
No, Sir?
Dorothy can be…He twiddled his hands round a button and I wanted to warn him it was about to fall off any minute but I kept quiet. I learned a long time ago how shutting up helps you get to the bottom of nearly anything.
She can be exuberant, he said. Too exuberant. Because then she flattens. After the exuberant time when everything is charged and full of a joyful energy, her sun goes out like a blown lamp. Worse than flattens. What is the opposite of exuberant, Dixon?
I don’t know, Sir?
I was not about to furnish the poet William Wordsworth with a word, although various words came to mind. I had seen my own sister Penny worse than flattened. But you don’t go talking about your own sister to a man like William while he is talking about his. Not if you want to get to the bottom of your job, the job he has in mind for you. There are all kinds of people ready to rant on and on about themselves given the slightest opening. My mam is one of them but I am not. I had seen Mam lose many an opportunity through talking far too much and I knew to stand quiet as a mouse waiting for the job that would instantly benefit myself and that might in time help my sister Penny out of her worse than flattened situation.
At least, in my mind on that day I was daring to allow these hopeful thoughts.
Of course what happened to Penny happened despite all my old hopes, and I now look back on those hopes very differently. But on that day my hopeful thoughts made me hesitate to provide the poet with words that popped freely into my mind, like grey or sallow. I did not say maimed or wasted. I did not mention hunger or damp and I said nothing about lungs and I did not mention Penny’s shoulder. I wanted to! I wanted to take the chance that William might open his eyes and help Penny Dixon there and then by allowing me to bring her to work at his household, just as he was offering to open the door to me.
No. I forced myself to wait and to listen to the one man in the world who looked to be nearly ready to release the tiny bit of money needed to change my own situation. And not just money. There was hardly hope for my mam, but for myself and for Penny there was something here in this garden and in the Wordsworth household that went beyond what a few coins can buy.
Blasted?
Sir?
Enervated? Whatever the word might be, Dixon, I rather desperately need help with my sister.
Yes, Sir?
And I need it from a person who is not one of our family, and who has the dexterity of someone like yourself. I mean finesse of hand but I also mean dexterity of spirit. I sense this dexterity in your face and now I see it in your beautiful artwork covering the surface of this egg. It is perfect, and it might be only folk art but it has something refined in it, something of the angels, if I believed in angels, which I do not. But if I did…do you know what I mean, James Dixon?
Perhaps not quite, Sir. But I do enjoy making the designs on the Pace eggs…
Never mind. I see it in you. And you’ll see it too, if you spend enough time here with us, in the gardens and in our company. You might be raw now, in fact you look as if you’ve been out in the wind a few times in bare feet and a woefully insufficient coat.
Aye Sir, I have. But I didn’t mind it. You get used to it. You even come to like it better than being too well wrapped-up.
And you seem like a solitary soul, the way I once was…
Aye, Sir, I am often by myself, but then again there are creatures and mountains and streams full of fish.
And I respect a man who enjoys his own company. For one thing, he doesn’t band up with every galoot in the tavern.
Sir, I never drink.
And you don’t seem to have friends—but with us you might feel a modicum of friendship. What do you think?
I could hope so, Sir.
I still did not know what he meant by the indoor work requiring a certain spirit that he saw in me. When someone of William’s sort talks to you like that, you feel that they are putting some kind of hope in you, and it lifts you up in a lovely way even if you wish it didn’t. They think the best of you even though you are not a rich person or an important man. They see something in you that other people don’t see and maybe you yourself don’t know is there. I loved it, even though I didn’t know
what it was William saw and I was frightened he might be wrong. I know what it is now that I own, but I didn’t know it then.
Still, I was not a timid youth even though I was shy, and I did want to know exactly what he meant when he said he had other work for me in the house. So far he was talking in riddles. If I was to be of any help I had to know exactly what I was supposed to do. So I said, Sir, can you be a bit clearer about what it is you wanted me to do for your sister?
He went quiet. He often wears black clothes. Wore. He often wore black or dark clothes and that day he had on something that crumpled up as he bent into himself, as if to hold his self dear or tight or apart from troubles that haunted him.
Sir?
I wondered if Wordsworth, no longer young like me, had run out of words. Or words had run out of him. He was a giant bedraggled bird with fresh air gone out of him at that moment. Flightless and wingless and making no sound. Not dead as now but something like pre-dead. I felt he needed me to change the subject.
It has been a colder than usual spring, I said.
Yes, he managed to say. People can talk about the weather no matter what is going on inside them. Our garden, he said, has been struggling.
You’ll want help with the sweet peas. They are very tender.
They are indeed in danger.
We’d had lots of rain…as ye know. But I knew it had not been the kind of rain our north of England normally has in spring. We were missing that fresh smell that comes when spring is just starting to unlock the green that’s trapped in everything, in the soil and everywhere. It hasn’t come out fully but shows just little tips. Seams are ripping and the little tips are hardly even showing. It’s just that you know the stitches have broken and the green’s about to burst out, that’s what the rain brings out. The fragrance. And this spring that joy had not come. And it wouldn’t come, either. We didn’t know yet how there would be no summer at all that year. Although ye lot probably knew. Ye always know that kind of thing in advance. Ye must have been telling each other to hoard whatever drops of honey ye could eke out of that summer that was never a summer.
My sister, William began again. He was trying to find something essential to tell me about Rotha but he ended up telling me an odd joke instead. At first I couldn’t make out why he was telling it to me as it seemed unrelated to all that had gone on between us.
Have you ever heard the one, he says, about this doctor? A surgeon?
No, I says.
Well there was this surgeon and he saved a couple of people’s lives. Thought he was being very helpful. But after he’s saved them, one tries to hang himself and the other one tries to drown himself. And the surgeon can’t understand it. Why are they not happy about having their lives saved? So he asks them both. And one after the other they say to him, Doctor, we thought it was all finished, and here’s you saving our life! And now we’re stuck here and have to make a living and all that goes with it. Doctor, they said, pardon us but now you’ll have to foot our bills because by rights we shouldn’t even be alive. So he vows after that, this doctor, never again will he save another soul from any accident without making sure first, do they really want to be saved? So one day he goes out with a rowing party, and one of the men falls overboard and starts flailing about. He cannot swim. And our surgeon grabs him by the hair and lifts his head above the water and says, Now then, do you want to be rescued or not? And the poor man gasps, Me poor wife! How would she manage? She’s not well, and oh, our seven little bairns…And the doctor shouts Ha! Wretched bloke—no wonder you’ve jumped in! And pops him back under the water to his doom!
William started chortling. He was never a man given to much laughter but at that moment he was quaking. His whole body. He couldn't stop. I wasn’t sure, myself, how funny I found the joke. It did not seem funny at all in any way that can make a man like me laugh. I laugh at things. I think I laugh at things. But the best face I could conjure at his joke was simply one that did not look, I hoped, too puzzled.
Sam Coleridge told us that one, William said, once he’d stopped laughing. At a little party. Well we all nearly died laughing at it. We were all busting. Except Dorothy. Once the merriment died down a bit we noticed her brimming with tears. Oh, she says, however could the doctor do such a thing—was he so very inhuman as that? Well. Sam and Bob Southey and the rest of us just about fell off our chairs. But we had to comfort her, and Sam said to her he was sorry. And any time he told the joke after that he told about Dorothy’s tears and how they made him love her all the more.
Nobody wanted to let my sister down. When she trusts you, it’s like being trusted by the trees.
He said this as if he himself had disappointed or was about to disappoint her most terribly.
She’s got no guile, he said, and she is hardly able to laugh at anybody.
We sat in the garden as clouds gathered and it grew very chilly. He recapped what he needed me to do: garden work outside, mostly, and an eye upon his sister’s well-being inside. Her mental health, really, he said. Because she never leaves the realm.
The realm, Sir?
That’s what you’ve got to understand, he said. I myself leave the realm. For practical reasons. I step outside the circle. I can look back at it, shining and golden. Rimmed by time but filled with timeless and treasured air. But Dorothy never leaves it. She is always inside it.
Inside what, Sir?
Inside the place where everything in the natural world, each anemone, each oak, each aster, each daisy, each ripple at the water’s edge—are you with me, Dixon?
I think so, Sir?
Each rustle of the grasses…hangs all about you in the air. Each part listens to one another with the attentiveness of a lover.
He started laughing. It was a different kind of laughter from when he had laughed at the joke. I cannot remember exactly what he said next. Something about the air being charged, every mote of it listening. Did William say the air was listening? Could he have said that? This was a long time ago.
You see, he said, they’re all getting ready to sing their song, aren’t they.
Who is? I could not fathom what he meant. It would take me all of my years with his sister to understand.
They’re all getting ready to sing their song of glory, he said. If this frost ever melts. That’s what the poetry is. My poems. Once caught, it all goes on the page: pinned, wings of each specimen—magnificent, annihilated. But my sister! She is awake, attentive in a surround that is also awake. She knows no dead specimen, only charged song. No matter the season.
Charged song?
Did he mean charged as lightning charges the sky? What did he mean?
The clouds opened and a cold sleet fell on us. Shreds of ice lay like coconut in his jacket folds. William folded his sister’s mahogany box with the lenses in it and gave me it. I somewhat self-consciously slid it in the pocket containing my friend Joseph’s teeth, for I had no other safe place for it. I promised I’d fix it the best I could, and William asked me could I come to the house next Thursday, and that was the real start of my regular work here: part-time at first and then, with the years, more like my whole lifetime.
three
i am a bit of a fairy king when it comes to mending just about anything. From wood and stone to feather and stem, I can usually mend it.
But all the broken things in the little fam’ly!
It was hard to tell what was going on in the house at first. Cold wind thrashed outside and people ousted from their land came begging for bread and coppers all over the vale, but the household seemed harmonious and I felt lucky to be in it. You couldn’t really call it a lonely house. The cacophony of that party they had on my first Easter with them! Two roast birds and fresh bread. Their writer friends Charles and Mary Lamb—sister and brother like Rotha and William. Sarah Hutchinson and William and his own Mary in their element, and half a dozen friends. The chatter. The laughter. Y
ou’d never dream Mary Lamb had stabbed her mother to death with a carving knife.
Everybody had quietly forgotten about that.
The drinks, the pipes. The firelight on the pots and pans. True, Rotha kept looking out the window for Sam Coleridge who did not come and would never come: he had turned his back on them all by then—but even without Sam there was endless chatter and real affection. And the smells of toasted bread and roasting meat and beef drippings melting on the gravy in silver motes, glittering and welcoming. You’d never say Rotha might feel lonely in the midst of a party like that, but she grew agitated.
William whispered in the corner, Dixon, can you please take my sister upstairs?
So I did. Would you like me to leave you alone? I asked her. She sat at the foot of her bed gazing at a blank place in the wall near the window. Beyond the window your sycamore here was having a hard time trying to bud. Swallows faltered at Rotha’s window-ledge trying to build their nest in all that cruel wind. Yet she kept looking, not through her window but at the wall.
Beside her was a fancy hat box on the floor. I already knew what was in it. The box was off one of Mary’s hats, a hat Mary often wore to church, so the hat itself was in Mary and William’s room. I can’t remember the hat. But the box was a green box. It had paisley and knots of rosebuds and some gilt ribbon and it was nearly worn out, but Dorothy liked that kind of thing and in that box she kept her stack of diaries. I knew this because I had gone upstairs one day to unstick the window so she could let air in. She had to have fresh air even though spring had not come. And she had left the lid off the box, so of course I glanced in and saw her diaries. A stack of dark ones, black and blue, but tucked under them this scarlet notebook I’ve brought out here with me this morning. Something red, you notice it flickering like! I didn’t do more than glance down in the box. But I noticed this red book. I bet ye notice a scarlet blossom, how it stands out from all the others.
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