by Mark Slouka
Growing tired, finally (twice we’d fallen to the cobbles in a tangle of arms and legs), my brother took him by the shirt and the scruff of his pants and sent him on his way. He fell a short distance away, more stunned than hurt, and was just gathering his wits when a well-dressed man, seemingly walking right into him, gave him a good hard kick to the middle. We called out at this injustice and started after the man, but he walked on as though nothing had happened. When we turned around the boy was running down an alley, holding his stomach. The crowd had dispersed.
That evening we bought three onions and a halfpenny’s worth of soft pears off an Irish refuse seller who waved away the wasps crawling over his browning, syrupy produce and loaded up the brimless hat we had found the day before. Later, still hungry, we bought a baked potato from a street vendor, who pulled it steaming hot out of the can with his fingers and laughed while we juggled and danced the thing between us: “Aye, be glad there be two a you, lads,” he said, rolling his r’s. “Y’ll burn yer fingers half as much.”
That was the first night we slept on the street, curled under a cart in a dead-end alley just off the river. We woke before dawn. It was so quiet we could hear the rattle of the milkmaids’ cans in the next street. Gathering up our blankets, we crept away before the owner of the cart could discover us there, and having nowhere else to go, made our way back through the silence to Rosemary-lane. Nothing moved. At the cab stand a horse dozed on his feet, his head hanging down as though grazing on invisible fields while his driver slept peacefully behind him. We didn’t talk. There was nothing to say. In the distance the fires of the first coffee stall sparked in the darkness. I could see the coffee man tending his steaming cans—blowing on the charcoal, setting the white mugs between the railings on the stone wall.
To another man the scene might have seemed familiar, even welcoming. To us it was just a reminder of how utterly exiled we now were: already distanced from the world around us by our culture and language, distanced further by the insurmountable fact of our condition, we had been exiled a third time by the loss of our money. Most daily discourse, we now realized, revolved around some transaction; money was the fuel, the oil in the lamp. Without it there was no particular reason to speak to anyone, and even less reason for them to speak to you. You passed through the world like a ghost.
The coster girl selling watercress, bonnetless and sleepy, was already in place. Behind her we could see the rabbit man lift the crate of warm jostling bodies off the barrow with a jerk, then begin setting up his table. They were both somewhere else now, in a world far removed from ours. In all my life, I don’t believe I’ve ever felt as lonely as I did at that moment.
XII.
I had heard it said that imprisoned men would weep and fight to keep from being moved from one cell to another perfectly identical to it, that they would kill to be allowed to eat their bread first and then their broth, and not the other way around. Now I believed it. Stupid with hunger, unable to think of anything else to do, we clung to habit, walking the same pattern of streets, returning to the same cart every night, creeping away each morning before dawn … Over the last ten days, by a kind of logic as irresistible as the settling of silt, we had been reduced to picking over the discarded vegetables left on the stones. Every night we would bring our collection of marshy stems and stunted roots to a pump we had found not far from where we slept and wash the dirt off of them by feel.
He came up to us as we stood on the street near a man selling a boxful of wet-nosed puppies, still crying our wares.
“Can’t say as the change had done ye good,” he said, planting himself in front of us, the folds of his trousers shiny with grease and his brown, threadbare shirt rolled up his arms. Next to him lay a wooden cage full of twittering sparrows. Something in his hand caught my eye. I realized it was his thumb. Swollen to the size of a hen’s egg, it had turned a smudged yellowish-black—the color of a winter sunset.
“You’re not looking so well yourself,” I said.
He chuckled. “See this here?” He patted the cage by his side. “Three dozen sparrers. Got the order yesterday for a shootin’ match this afternoon. Two pounds for the lot I says and not a penny less.”
“Toasters! Come and look at ’em. Toasters!” screeched a rusty-haired boy a short distance away, holding up a yellow-brown fish impaled on a fork.
He contemplated us for a moment, his hands deep in his pockets. He seemed solid as a wall. “When’s the last time you boys put yer teeth to a good Yarmouth bloater?” he said.
He bought us two fried fish and a bun apiece, then walked us over to a coffee stall where a man in a tattered cap and trousers brown with tar refused pay for three cups of coffee. “Don’t even be thinkin’ of it, Jack,” he said gruffly, as he busied himself getting the cups off the wall and wiping them out with a rag. “I’ll be owin’ ye more ’n a few cups a coffee.” He peered into one of the cups, scratched at something with a thick wedge of a nail, then carefully poured the black liquid from the can without spilling a drop. “There ye are, gentlemen,” he said, grandly, and then, turning to our friend: “Not a day goes by, Jack, but the little ones says to me: ‘Say hello to Mr. Ratty for us, Father,’ and not a day goes by but the wife and I’re glad they’re there to say it.”
We walked off a short way along the wall to a pile of bricks and ate our food—slowly, savoringly, almost giddy with gratitude—drawing out the bits of meat around the gills and sucking on the bones, then pulling them out to see whether the job was complete. Our friend, whose full name, we now learned, was Jack Black, seemed disinclined to talk about himself, and so it was only by persistent prodding that we learned that years earlier he had been known throughout London as “the Queen’s Ratcatcher”; that he had had a wife and family and a fine house in Battersea; that for fourteen years he had had a thriving business complete with a cart with rats painted on the panels and printed handbills that read, “J. Black, Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty.”
“Water rats, Norway rats … I don’t know as there’s anybody livin’ could tell ye more about a rat than I could,” he admitted finally, not without a touch of pride. “The Norway rats is bigger—light brown atop with a dirty white belly, almost gray. The water rat’s got a larger head and thicker hair so the ears scarcely show; tail’s got more hair. I killed thousands and thousands of ’em. I killed ’em with ferrets, I killed ’em with traps … If I was in a tight space I just grabbed ’em with my hands. A rat’s bite is a particular thing: It’s got a triangle shape to it, y’ see—like a leech, only deeper. Twice I nearly died—once when I got bit on the lip, the other when I forgot to tie my shirt and a big Norway rat ran up my sleeve and bit me on the muscle of me arm.
“I never known anything like it. I just went numb—I bled awful bad. By the next day the arm had swole and gone so heavy I could hardly lift it. Like a brick it was. I was bone cold with fever one minit, rollin’ with sweat the next. The bite grew an ulcer big as a boiled fish eye, and every time I lanced it and squeezed the humor out it grew back.” He paused and took a long slurp of his coffee. “I remember the doctor opening me eyes with his thumbs to see if I was still alive. Young chap he was. Told me to have the arm off, but I wouldn’t do it, and it got better.”
“What about the coffee man?” Eng asked.
“Tom? Ay, that was a bad case. Last winter his lady wakes in the middle of the night. The little ones is cryin’. When she goes into the room and strikes a light, she sees rats running into the holes in the lath and plaster. The children’s nightgowns is kivered with blood, as if their throats ’ave been cut—the rats’d gnawed on their hands and feet, you see.”
“What did you do?”
“Poisoned ’em. Nux vomica an’ oatmeal. Worked like a charm until they got smart to it—clever beasts they are. The rest I got myself, though not without a bit o’ trouble.”
We walked back to the coffee stall, where Tom took our cups, wiped them clean with the rag, and set them back on the wall.
> Jack Black picked up his cage. We started walking. “Sparrers is the rats of birds,” he said companionably, tapping the bars with a finger. “See how they pile up in the corners? Just like rats in a pit. Why, I once got fifty or sixty in the royal kitchen—rats, that is—and me with a cage no bigger ’n this. Thought I’d have to carry ’em out in my coat, but they stacked up neat as cups, one on top of the other.” He nodded to himself, remembering. “I didn’t do too badly then.”
A Jew clothesman had spread out his wares on a folding table: coats and bonnets and reheeled boots, a soiled doll in a blue dress, a child’s blanket, its small-rose pattern faded nearly white.
“So what happened?” I asked. We had stopped at the corner of Stoney-lane and Meeting-house-yard. Not far away a pretty girl was standing behind a wet table piled with perch and roach and gudgeon.
“How do ye mean?” he said. “I carried ’em out and put ’em in the cart.”
“Not that. I mean …”
“Ye mean to Jack Black, Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty?” He smiled. “ ‘Hammer become the nail,’ ’s the song says.” He looked off past a man in a dented top hat selling oysters. “One minit yer walkin’ fine, the next yer on yer arse, lads. Like ice in January.” He ran a hand through his thick badger hair. “Nothin’ to be done about it. Run—ye fall. Try to walk slow an’ careful—ye never get anywhere an’ ye fall just the same.” He smiled. “I s’pose ye can crawl on yer belly like a snail, but what’s the use a that, eh?
“No, I let ’er rip and went down.” He paused, turning to look at us. “Not so very different from the two a you, I suspect. No more ’n a year since I saw the bills for yer show at Egyptian Hall. Ye seemed to be quite the thing for a spell there.”
“It feels like somebody else’s life now,” said my brother. It was the first thing he had said all afternoon.
“Did well, did ye?”
“We met the king of France.”
“That so?” We had started walking again. “G’mornin’ t’ye, Sally,” he said to a woman behind a table-sized tray of walnuts. And then, to us: “So where’s yer king of France now, eh?”
We said nothing.
“Ye want a word of advice? Give it up.”
“We have given it up,” said my brother, irritated.
He laughed. “Yer hangin’ on like a baby to its mother’s tit. And the might’ve-been tit is dry, boys, take my word for it. Ye can suck till ye draw yer arse t’ yer neck. It won’t do ye any good.”
Suddenly he turned to face the ragtag group of coster boys and pickpockets who had been following us at a distance of twenty feet or so—yelling and laughing, gathering steam—since we had left the coffee stall. There were eight or ten of them—more than usual—some hovering along the walls, some appearing now and again in the crowd, backpedaling against the current. Now and then a twelve-year-old wit would yell “Freaks!” or “Lookit the freaks!” or “Whyn’t ye get a saw, ye bloody freaks!” and the rest, thin as jackals, would grin and show their teeth.
We had grown used to this. Rarely did an hour pass without at least a few of the little ruffians in attendance; they attached themselves to us like burrs. Still, though a thrown rock had cut my brother’s scalp a week ago, we had found that most of their work was limited to insults and an occasional rotten plum. Eventually, if we were lucky, a constable would come into view or the other costers would threaten to beat them for interfering with their business (though often as not they would turn on us for having brought them), and we would have a few minutes of peace.
The crowd had thinned for a moment, the current slowed. Our friend stood with his hands, as usual, deep in his trouser pockets, his feet planted as firmly as though his shoes had sent roots into the cobbles. Seeing him turn and come toward them, the group had shifted back, step for step, until he stopped.
“Billy,” he called out now to a tight-faced, older-looking boy whose skin seemed to have been forcibly drawn to the back of his head. “Who am I?” His voice was warm, familiar.
“What d’ye mean?” replied the youth, uneasily.
“Who am I, Billy? I want you to tell me who I am.”
“I don’t …”
“Tell me who I am, Billy.”
“Yer Jack Black, king of the ratcatchers.”
“That’s right, Billy,” said our friend, looking at him pleasantly. “An’ yer a lad with ten toes, an’ two whole ears, and a pair a seein’ eyes.” The group fell back. Prodded by some unseen signal, a full-grown rat had struggled out of our friend’s baggy shirt and scrambled to his shoulder. A second took the other shoulder. A third climbed up his collar to the top of his head and sat up like a small dog.
“I want you to spread the word, Billy,” he went on, as though he hadn’t noticed. “Ye listenin’? I hear a one a ye troublin’ me friends here, one a ye as much as forgettin’ t’ say ‘g’d mornin’ to you’ when ye sees ’em about, and by Christ I’ll sick the blood rats on ye in yer sleep.” He smiled.
Five or six of the boys nodded. They seemed mesmerized, not just by the rats but by that calm, caressing voice, gently cutting into them.
“They’ll cover ye like a blanket, me boy. They’ll shear ye smooth. Ye hear?”
They nodded again, rabbits in the viper’s eye. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for them.
“Now off with the lot a ye.”
The boys vanished. He waited till they were gone, then gently picked the rats off his head and right shoulder and slipped them back in his shirt. The third he handed to my brother. “Gentle as cats, they is,” he said by way of explanation. “Sleeps next to me at night.”
“We had ducks when we lived in Siam,” said my brother to no one in particular, petting the beast between its transparent little ears.
And just for a moment the distance we had come seemed as unbridgeable to me as time itself.
We did whatever we had to do to survive. Unable to climb trees, we were prevented from joining the birdcatchers who swarmed out to the country lanes after the redbreasts and linnets and thrushes that began to fly about at dawn; everything else we tried. Pushing a broken barrow we found near the London dock, we joined the scavengers who poured each morning over the refuse heaps. Stuffed birds and broken shaving boxes, shoehorns and pocket ink-bottles, decanters and files and trivets and chimney cranes—all these we cleaned as best we could and sold for whatever we could get.
For a while we joined the community of waste-paper gatherers who collected everything from tailors’ bills and hymn books to cheap editions of Molière; tearing the covers off the books, wrapping the rest with twine, we would sell them by the pound to a waste-paper buyer on Cartwright-street. At times it seemed to us that somewhere in London there was a buyer and seller for almost everything, from secondhand harnesses to African cowries. Unfortunately for us, we had nothing of value to sell. For a time we joined the small army of bone grubbers and rag gatherers who dug through the heaps of ashes and dirt thrown out of the houses with spades and hooked sticks, looking for anything sellable.
And we survived. Every morning we would divide our rags into lots, separating off the white rags from the colored ones, and both from the canvas and sacking we sometimes found as well. The white rags were the scarcer, and brought two or three pennies a pound; the colored ones, which we sold along with the bones at the rag shop, sold for just two pennies for five. Eventually, when we saw that the rag trade would never bring us more than five or six pennies a day, if that, we joined the grubbers of cigar ends, then the dredgers and the sewer hunters. For two memorable days, thinking our size and strength might be to our advantage, we even went out with the mudlarks, working the river’s edge, until we found ourselves beaten to the prize, time and again, by children who seemed to run over the muck, jumping from broken barrels to boards even as we floundered knee-deep and stuck fast, like a coal-laden lighter trapped by the tide.
Now and again, when we had the four pennies for our beds, we slept with a roofover our heads; more ofte
n we saved the money and slept where we could. For two giddy weeks in July or August we walked about with a mongrel bitch given to us, along with a bottle of evil-smelling stuff to rub in her fur, by one of the tribe of broken-nailed urchins who had previously delighted in tormenting us. What this sub stance consisted of we never discovered, but whatever it was, it made our charge, who was already in heat, enormously popular. Every dawn (for this was when business of this nature was customarily transacted), we would walk our white-spotted bitch, well perfumed, up and down the alleys. And every morning, dogs of all shapes and sizes and dispositions would drift out of alleys and yards like enchanted poets following the first scent of spring and (after only the briefest of introductions) ask for—and generally receive—the love they sought. We would let them start to have their way, then walk them—two-legged and foolish—around the corner, where, having completed their business, they would happily consent to the rope around their necks. My brother, not surprisingly, disapproved of this line of work; I saw the humor in it, I recall, and rather enjoyed it. But our attitudes had little to do with it; the success it brought us was undeniable: We sold them one and all to an individual known only as Carrots, who sold them to the stokers and seamen on the Hamburgh and the Antwerp and the big French steamers scraping against the docks, who in turn, we were told, sold them abroad.
An unworthy line of work? No doubt. And yet we would be about it still, I believe, had we not run out of that magic potion. For a time we tried to acquire some more—even offering a substantial sum—but the urchin in question, having secured himself a sound night’s sleep by his generosity, would have none of it.