Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  So Aleš knelt on the edge of the bed, took a corner of the blanket, and reached towards the child’s head that was emerging, wet and bloody with dark ringlets of hair.

  The baby boy came into the world quickly, though he was scrawny and his cries seemed faint and not as heartfelt as Aleš remembered the cries of his other children. He wrapped his new son in the swaddling his wife had set aside and gave him to her to nurse. She was drowsy and sweaty, Aleš’ daughter continuing to wipe her brow as the baby tried to suck between half-hearted cries. Aleš heaved a sigh of relief that nothing had gone awry with the boy’s birth.

  When Ryba the midwife came the next day, it was nearly lunchtime.

  “I have only now returned from the birth at Miklos’ house—do you know him?—and my neighbor tells me that you came to my door last night,” she explained to Aleš, who had answered the knock at their door.

  Aleš, his eyes dull, nodded in silent agreement.

  “So I hurried over as quickly as I could,” she told him. Her voice trailed off and she looked around the disheveled house.

  The shutters were all still closed, so the room was dark. But it was cold in the house, nearly as cold as the mid-December day outside. Not so cold that Ryba could see her breath in the air, but Aleš knew it was a colder house than she had expected. And much more quiet.

  “Has the child been born?” she asked Aleš.

  “A son,” he answered.

  “Is he asleep?” she asked. He could hear the concern mounting in her voice.

  Aleš shook his head and led her into the back room of the house.

  Ryba showed shock at what she saw.

  Aleš’ other children were all either dozing in various positions and corners of the room or sitting listlessly on the floor, staring into space. Even the oldest girl was sitting on a chair beside the bed and simply stared at her stepmother in the bed.

  The woman in the bed was lying there, her eyes closed. A small bundle, tightly wrapped in swaddling, lay at her side. Both the baby and his mother were still. Very still. The linens and blankets on the bed, moreover, were drenched with blood, which had begun to dry and cake along the ridges and folds of the sheets.

  Ryba turned to Aleš. “Oh, Aleš,” she whispered. “What happened?”

  Aleš stared at the bed. Ryba’s words barely registered.

  “Aleš.” She touched his shoulder gently. “Tell me what happened here last night.”

  “The birth pains started,” he answered her, his voice flat. “She woke me and I went to fetch you, Ryba. But you were not there. My knocking at your door and calling for you woke your neighbor, however, and he offered to send his wife to assist here with the birth. At least until you came. But he would not let her come unless I paid him first. Unless I paid him more than what you might ask for assisting at a month of birthing.”

  Ryba shook her head.

  “When I returned here, I knew I had to fetch my mother-in-law and that she would be able to help,” Aleš continued in his dull voice, never taking his eyes from the bloodsoaked bed. “But my wife insisted there was not time, that the baby was about to be born. So I helped. I helped and my daughter here helped. We did what we could to ease her pains and wrap the baby when he was born and give him to her to nurse. But he was a thin baby and he had a hard time crying. He did not suck strongly as he nursed.”

  Ryba took Aleš’ hand in hers.

  “Then the afterbirth came,” he went on. “The afterbirth and the blood. So much blood. She could not stop bleeding. Blood everywhere. And then he stopped crying. The baby. He stopped crying and just shivered. Shivered and then he was dead. They were both dead.”

  “And the cold?” Ryba glanced at the hearth. “How long has it been since you had a fire in the hearth?”

  Aleš stood there, with Ryba resting one hand on his shoulder and holding his left hand in hers. “Days, I think,” he finally answered. “We had a small fire for cooking in the other room but no other fire for days.”

  “A week,” the ten-year-old spoke up. “It has been a week since we had warm coals.”

  “I am so sorry, Aleš,” Ryba said again. “I can help you clean. Shall I fetch the priest for the Last Rites? Or go tell your mother-in-law and her family? What about the gravediggers? Shall I tell them to begin preparing the grave?”

  Aleš shook his head. “I went to the priest. I went to the gravediggers. My wife’s family heard and tried to come but I threw them away from my door. I refused to let them in to see her like this.” He pointed at the bed.

  “The priest said he could only come if I would promise a small gift to the parish, since that is the custom. The gravediggers told me what it would cost to dig a grave in the winter. If I did not have enough coins to buy coal to warm my family, how can I have as many coins as they want? I cannot afford what the gravediggers ask. I cannot afford what the priest wants. My wife and children have been shivering for a week. A month. Too long.”

  Aleš turned his face to Ryba’s.

  “There has been food for the children, but not enough. I have gone without supper, and so had my wife. We have been cold. I had only a few coins I was saving to give you for assisting at the birth. But those few coins will not be enough for the priest and the gravediggers. And the shame that I let this happen to my wife—and that she will have no proper grave but only the common grave of the parish poor folk—will destroy her mother. She will die of a broken heart.”

  Sobs wracked Aleš’ body, great howling sobs and lamentation. “If I had coins, I would have been able to offer your neighbor what he wanted, his wife would have been here and perhaps she might have known what to do to stop the bleeding or help my son suck more strongly at his mother’s breast. If I had coins, we would have had coal and heat. If I had coins, we would have had enough food. If I had coins, I would be able to give the priest money to pray for my wife and the gravediggers enough to bury her. But I have no coins!”

  He spat at the floor.

  “Do you know whose fault all this is? Do you know who is responsible for all this misery?” he demanded furiously between his tears. “All this misery comes from František demanding the repayment of the loan without allowing me to make provision for my family. I was only asking for more time to pay my debt and he insisted that he could not grant that small request. František had no heart and now I have no wife or son!”

  Aleš collapsed at the foot of the bed, screaming and shaking with sorrow and shame and fury.

  “František!” he cried. “It is all because of František!”

  Christmas came and went. Aleš and his eldest daughter had tried to cook meals and care for the younger children and clean the house but it had all been too difficult. So he had spoken with various relatives and arranged for his children to stay with different aunts and uncles in the city. His daughter had been the last to leave, and he had taken her to the house of her step-grandmother. The children had each wept when they parted from him but she—his eldest—had been the most tearful.

  “There, dry your tears,” he had tried to comfort the girl. “I will not be far from you. I will be living where we have always been living and you will be just a few streets away. We will see each other and your grandmother here—well, she will teach you everything you need to know to manage a house and care for a family.”

  “But I know all those things!” the girl had insisted stubbornly. “I know how to cook and clean and sew. I did all those things with Mama… my real mother… and with my nevlastní matka also. But it was Mama who taught me the most about cooking, remember? Nevlastní matka always made me care for the younger children but it was Mama who let me cook and stir the pot for supper.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Aleš agreed, brushing a curl away from his daughter’s forehead. “You always did well, stirring that pot and cooking those suppers with her. You should not think that I did not notice. I did. I never tasted any suppers as fine as those you helped cook.”

  “That’s because Mama always showed m
e which herbs go with which stews and soups to make them special and tasty,” the girl explained to her father. “She showed me how much to use and when to add them to the pot and how to hang them so they dried proper and which merchant stalls in the market had the best herbs and which…”

  “Yes, yes. I know she taught you all that,” Aleš interrupted her. “And now your nevlastní babička will teach you more of that same kind of thing. Now you go and be a good girl and do not give your nevlastní babička any trouble and I will be up to visit in a few days to see how you are making on with her.”

  So he had left her with her stepmother’s mother, who was a kindly and gentle soul even after what Aleš had allowed to happen to her daughter. But that had been this morning and now it was nearly midnight, the eve of the New Year, and Aleš sat alone in the dark at the table where they had eaten suppers together as a family until František’s greed had destroyed their lives.

  He had made himself a simple supper hours ago but the dirty bowl and spoon still sat on the table. The sweet smelling bundle of herbs he had taken down from its hanging spot so he could add some to his stew was still on the table as well. The objects he had used during his supper preparation—the knives, the stewpot, the wooden mixing spoons, the remnants of vegetable stems—were scattered around the kitchen. A single candle made of tallow sputtered on the table and Aleš sat in the pool of its light, remembering happy days.

  He poked at the bone in his bowl with the spoon. He had put a few bones in the stew for their marrow but the seasoning had not enhanced the taste of the stew.

  “I don’t know hardly anythin’ about herbs,” he muttered, remembering his wife’s cooking lessons with the children. “Now if… if only my daughter were still here to cook…” He could not bring himself to say her name. It was heartbreaking enough to recall her face and her tears when he had parted from her. “If only she were here to cook, she would know which herbs to add to make this stew proper ’n tasty.”

  Aleš thought of each of his children in turn and the promises he had made to visit them. Even the promise made to the dead son at the edge of the common paupers’ grave as the gravediggers were filling in the layer of soil atop the newborn and his mother. Aleš recalled his happiness with the boy’s mother and then…

  The flame of the candle he was staring at twisted and flickered. A soft spot along the ridge of the candle rim had given way and melted tallow streamed down the side of the candle and onto the tabletop. Aleš reached for the first thing he could—a loose sprig from the bundle of herbs—to poke at the soft ridge of the candle and push the tallow together to dam the flood of liquid fat from the candle top. Having accomplished that, he used the sprig to push the wick itself slightly to one side and away from the rift in the tallow.

  As he continued to mindlessly stare at the flame and poke and prod the wick, his thoughts turned back to the son and wife whose grave he had promised to visit even though he could not make an offering for the priest to say a requiem Mass. He thought of František in his parlor, counting and recounting and then counting his coins again. He thought of the rich tapestry hanging in the room behind František as Aleš had begged to postpone the final payment of the debt. In the depths of the flame atop the tallow candle, Aleš imagined seeing František sitting in his parlor, the rich tapestry hanging behind him, a merry fire playing on the hearth…

  “Saint Florian, burn my neighbor’s house but spare mine!” Aleš remembered the children’s rhyme.

  The sprig in his hand burst into flame. He dropped it and it sputtered and burned on the table for a few moments. Arcs of light and shadow danced about the room as the length of the herb curled up and into itself in the fire. A sweet but pungent fragrance filled the room as the flame consumed the herb. Then there was nothing but a wisp of ash left. Aleš brushed it aside and reached for a flagon of ale he had gotten in the market after leaving his daughter at her step-grandmother’s.

  He opened the flagon and took a long swallow.

  František had fallen asleep in the chair before the hearth in his bedroom. He had fed his charms their weekly drops of wine and then gone to a tavern for a festive supper to mark the eve of January the first, the midpoint of the Christmas holiday. The maid, who would on occasion arrive with bruises inflicted by her oaf of a husband, had gone to her home and was planning to attend a supper hosted by her neighbor, who was a midwife. František’s other servants were all with their families as well. Although František was not a popular man, he found it more enjoyable this evening to eat a meal in a pub full of happy, singing folk rather than alone in an otherwise dark, empty house. After listening to all the drunken singing that he could tolerate, he had come home and sat down to read a book by the light of a candle in his bedroom and had dozed off in the chair.

  Earlier in the day, one of the newer servant girls had been dusting in a room not often used on the uppermost floor of the house. She had seen the dry and withered holly branch on the fireplace mantle and gathered it up with the rest of the trash to be disposed of that afternoon. No one ever saw her take it away or noticed that it was in the tub of rubbish carted away by the rubbish man on his wagon.

  But now, in that seldom-used room on the uppermost floor of František’s house, there was a spark and a flash on the cold, dark hearth. The kindling had been laid out long ago and the fire never lit. A small flame flickered in the midst of the kindling. It danced, filling the room with a sweet pungency though no one was there to appreciate the fragrance. Then the tiny flame caught hold of the kindling and soon a happy fire roared on the hearth.

  But the fire was hungry. The kindling was not enough to satiate its appetite. Having consumed the kindling, the fire peered out of the hearth and slid its way across the floor. Undulating like a serpent, it slithered around the room, tasting the velvet curtains and the dark wooden wainscoting with its flickering tongue. Soon the velvet and the wainscoting were feeding the hunger of the flames, even as the serpent of fire continued to make its way around the room, tasting the floorboards as it went. Reaching the door of the room, the fire paused and then crept up to peek through the keyhole into the hallway. As it grasped the door, the smell of scorched and burning wood filled the air. But then the flames slipped out of the room, under and around the door and began to taste and consume the hallway, the other doors to other unused rooms on that floor, the stairway landing.

  The candle had sputtered out. The expensive woodblock print book in František’s hand had fallen to the floor. His nose twitched in his sleep. Semi-awake, he raised his hand to swipe away the irritating smell. He coughed. He coughed again. Bleary-eyed, he struggled to fully wake. He coughed again as a smell he only half-recognized tickled his nose and scratched the back of his throat. He rubbed his eyes but could see little in the dark. He peered around the room.

  Then he saw the flicker of light under the door of the room. Unsteady light of some sort danced in the hall outside his door. He stood, his legs momentarily pricked by thousands of needles as he tried to move them. He shuffled to the door, coughing again as the irritating smell grew stronger and scratched more insistently at the back of his throat. His eyes began to water. As he reached for the doorknob, his mind realized what the smell was.

  “Kouř! Smoke!” When his fingers closed around the doorknob, the metal was warm. He pulled the door open to peer into the hallway.

  The hallway was illuminated by dancing ribbons of flame that were shimmering along the walls and the stairway leading to the third floor. He glanced up the stairs and could only see more fire. Dense smoke hovered in the air and twisting ropes of the smoke curled into his sleeping room.

  “Fire!” his mind screamed. “Hoří!” he called out, even as he realized that he was the only person in the house. He slammed the door shut to think a moment.

  “The hallway is still clear,” he said in the smoky darkness. “The fire seems worse upstairs, not down. How did a fire begin upstairs? No matter! Wait, perhaps one of the houses to either side has caught
fire and the fire traveled to my roof? Why haven’t the watchmen at the Old Town Hall seen the flames and begun to ring the fire bell? What a fool must be on duty to miss two houses ablaze!”

  He thought another moment. “I must escape,” he reasoned. “I must escape! I can run down the hall and down the stairs… Then out into the street! Then I will be safe! But my house… My things! What about my things?” He dashed to the window and looked out into the street. The light of the fire was reflected in the windows across the street and the shadows dancing on the cobblestones below. But no one had fled into the street yet. No one but him seemed to be aware of the danger they faced if fire raced unchecked along the houses.

  “I must get out!” he told himself again. “Then perhaps I can raise the cry! If the watchman the Old Town council has hired is such a fool as this, they deserve whatever destruction comes of his inattention! But not me! Not my house! I should not bear the brunt of his incompetence!”

  Another thought crowded in on the heels of the last. “The casks in the cellar! My coins! I cannot leave my coins to be buried beneath the ash and rubble of my house! I cannot! There must be time… I will run to the cellar and bring up my casks and that way I will at least not be destitute! I will be able to rebuild my house and buy again the things to fill it! I will not let this fire destroy me! I will not!”

  František stepped back to the door and lightly touched his fingertips to the doorknob. The metal was hot this time. Not so hot that he could not touch it, but nearly so. Burying his nose and mouth in the crook of his elbow, František wrenched the door open and dashed through the hall and down the stairs to the main floor of the house. He was nearly knocked aside by the wall of heat that slammed into him. He could hear timbers falling on the floor above. He glanced up at the ceiling. Flames along the walls had reached the edge of the ceiling but he thought he could also see scorch marks that must be from the fire eating the floorboards above him.

  He gasped for breath and pulled a thick wad of smoke into his lungs that set him coughing and hacking. He was bent double at the bottom of the stairway, coughing and choking. He glanced up and the fire was already much more intense in the hallway outside his bedroom than he had thought possible in so few minutes.