The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  And then Kit Cawdron joined in and, my, he was good, because his voice was not yet begun to go, and he could really sound the part. “Because I’m to have another bair-beh,” he says, and we were all just about rolling on the slates there, but as quiet as we could.

  “I thought you just had one, missis?” says Jakes, through laughing.

  “Oh’m, I did. But ’twas only a girl, so I took her down and drowned her.”

  “Grand!” says Jakes. “Another sea-wife for our lads to net, come sixteen summers.”

  “Oh no,” says Cawdron proudly—proudly because he was doing such a fine job of imitating, proudly because he was playing a proud mam. “I tied the cross on her breast just like you done, so she cannot be caught,” he said, and gave Jakes a stage-wink, whose face was already falling. “She’ll never suffer like we’ve had to, Missis Trumbell.”

  And he was just overacting a suffering mam, staggering, with the back of his hand to his forehead, when he realized how still we all were, how puzzled our faces.

  He looked beyond us, and up. His hand snatched to his side and he tripped at his coat-edge and banged up against the wall. His face was not mammish no more, and not at all playful; he was the littlest of us, and the most frightened. He had the most to lose, after all, with Baker’s dad there at the back of us, and Mister Grinny, too, come soundless from the snug to catch us at whatever.

  We all of us shrank together and back, all around Cawdron and Jakes against the wall there, staring at those men. They were red already in their natural coloring, but the drinking had enflamed them, and now the rage tided up across their faces and they scarcely looked human. Baker’s dad—jolly Mister Baker, who would toss a flour-roll out his shop door at a quiet time, to any boy, and mustle your hair as soon as look at you—honest, I thought his head were going to burst, it swelled and trembled so, and stared.

  “What did you say, lad,” he hissed into the utter silence. Someone gave a little peeping fart at the sound of such rage, and nobody even snickered, we were all so close to shitting ourselves, every lad of us.

  Cawdron didn’t whimper or sniff; I could hear behind me how he was applied, how glued, to the wall, trying to melt away into it.

  I expected Baker to wade in. Everyone expected it. I saw Grinny’s dad expect it, and decide it must not happen, and put a hand on Baker’s arm.

  “Take that off, lad,” he said to Kit Cawdron, gentle as gentle.

  The crowd of us loosened, but only a little, at the immediate danger’s easing. “Here,” Raditch muttered, helping Cawdron behind. Silence except for the fumbling, Cawdron’s unsteady breathing, the clop and slide of the coat.

  “Come,” said Mister Grinny, holding out his hand. I could not tell what he might be thinking—how does anyone else’s dad think, and what might he want?—but he was not so red now and I was relieved. I thought, Good, they’ll not thrash Cawdron, then. It is too bad even for that. “Hang them coats up, lads,” he says, and he stands there one freckly hand ensausaging Kit’s little white slip of a paw, and the other on Baker’s sleeve who was steaming and readying to roar and punch something, as we hauled the flemming things into the coatroom, and manage to re-hang them. Everybody was shaking like the leaves of the poplars on Watch-Out Hill; everyone was clumsy and needed each other’s help.

  When it was done and the door closed, whisper-quiet, Mister Grinny was still there holding Cawdron, but Baker was gone, the snug door slamming and beyond it his hard voice spreading a silence through the snug.

  “You’ll not touch them things again, all right?” says Mister Grinny, still gently.

  “No, sir.”

  “No, Mister Grinny.”

  “We won’t. Promise.”

  “Even if you find it unlocked,” he says. “Even if the door is swinging wide open, you will not go in. You will not lay a finger on your mams’ coats.”

  “Not a finger, sir.” We all shook our heads.

  “Shan,” he says to his boy, “you go on home to your mam. All you boys, go on home. Look to your mams and see if they need aught. Bring in some coal. Make them a tea. Rub their poor feet. Or just sit and talk to them the way they like, about nice things, the spring, mebbe, or the fishing. Go home and do something nice for your mams, each lad of you, because things will go not-so-nice for them for a while. And Shan? On your way? Fetch up Jod Cawdron. The lad should have his father by him, for this.”

  Out into the cold street we scattered.

  “What will they do to Kit?” said Raditch shiveringly to me as we ran. “They will kill him!”

  “They will kill his mam,” I said. “They will kill all the mams—all those who’s had girl-babies, anyhow.”

  “Oh gawd, you think?”

  “Not kill,’ I said. “But I don’t know what they will do to them.”

  “Still, I would not be Kit, for all the tea in china.”

  “I would not be Jakes,” I said. “It is all his fault and he will feel it. I know I will knuckle him, for one.”

  “I don’t know,” said Raditch. “I don’t think a knuckling is going to set this right.”

  “No,” I said over my shoulder, leaving him on his house-step, “but I must hurt something.”

  And I ran on home.

  For a while Mam paced back and forth, muttering, the shaggy blanket dragging out behind her like a king’s cloak. From one window, past the door, to the other window, and muttering as I say, no words that I could hear.

  My dad had gone, the door banged behind him and the bang seeming still to ring, on and on throughout our house. All the swish and scratch of her blanket could not still it, all her hissing whispering, or the pad of her foot soles on the gray boards.

  Then she paused by one of the windows, fenced off from me by the chair backs, a seaweedy hummock of her shoulders and then her head, against the glary cloudlight, her hair pushed and pulled a little, a few strands waving in the wind of her warmth. She stood there applying herself to the view and silent, and I stood at the kitchen door silent, listening to the distress.

  I went to her, stood at the sill as if I were interested, innocently interested, also in the view. The same lanes slanted away: the one up, the one down. The same front steps shone whitewashed like lamps up and down the lane. The same tedious cat sat in Sacks’ window, now blinking out at us, now dozing again. And through the gaps and over some of the roofs, the sea rode charcoal to the horizon, flat-colored as a piece of slate, with neither sail nor dragon nor dinghy to relieve the emptiness.

  She was turning and turning her silver wedding ring, which she did when she was upset sometimes, to the point of reddening the spare flesh around it. She pressed and turned, as if to work free the stuck lid of a jar.

  I laid my hands on hers, paler than hers. She looked down from the view.

  “What is it, Daniel?”

  I took her hands one from the other. I turned to the window again, and draped the ring hand over my shoulder, down to my chest, and I held it and took from her the task of turning the warm silver, moving it much more gently upon her finger than she had been doing. It was loose; let it go and it would slide down to the first joint. If you held it higher and quite careful it need not touch her finger-skin at all. But I did not play so with it, only continued the turning of it for her.

  She laughed very softly, deep in her throat. “Sweetest boy,” she said. She kissed the top of my head and then laid her other hand there. And so we stood, she in her cloak blanket and me wearing her like a cloak, turning the ring on her finger while outside the steps glowed and the cat dozed and the sea sat flat behind it all, nothing of anything changing.

  My mam had never had daughters—only me, and a couple of those seal-things that did not live more than a few minutes outside of her. So after that first unpleasantness—which was all about did she know, and why had she not said, and how could they do this to the men who loved them so—our peaceful life went on. But Lonna Trumbell, across the lane, she had drowned six—“Daughters-in-law for all of y
e,” Marcus Trumbell had boasted up at Wholeman’s. Trumbell woke us up every night now, rolling down the hill when Wholeman turned him out, bellowing foulness. He would force into his house, and sometimes in his rage and hurry to hit her he would forget closing the door, and the whole dire scene would pour straight into our woken ears. Sometimes it was surprising when morning came up and the house there looked quite the same as always, after the smashings and roarings that had come from it in the night.

  I would get up and go to my dad in the front room, at the moonsilver lace at the window, his face and front patterned with its flowers. We would stand and flinch there together awhile—we had had the conversation about how Dad could do nothing, having lost no daughters himself. I have lost as many wives for my boy as has anyone, he had said to them, but still he had not the same rights to misery. He would stand there, his great hand on my shoulder and arm, his thumb at my hair and ear, and I would hold to his leg as to a big warm tree, while Trumbell’s shouts, and the wife’s, and sometimes Jakes’ and Kerry’s as well, made a kind of awful weather over there, that might yet blow across the lane, and break something of ours.

  When Dad patted and sent me off I would go in to Mam, curled tight as a hedgehog in their bed, sometimes sea-blanketed and sometimes wool. There! If you want to be held tight, clamber up next to your sea-mam when she is alarmed; she will pull you into the knot of herself where nothing can get at you. Her breath will change from uneven and muttering to slow, steady, sea-like as your presence consoles her, and behind the rushing of it and the beat-beat of her pulses calming, Trumbell’s rage is nothing, Trumbell’s blows, Jakes’s pleas; it is all happening in another house, another world, as separate from us as a birds’ duel among the clouds, as fish-monsters’ battling away down in the sea.

  They spoiled their wives’ faces, some of them. Some men made the women stay home and not show anyone, until they were not so swollen; others took them out on their arms, and very gentlemanly escorted them about the streets and in the lanes around. If you came upon the men they would greet you gruesome heartily, and say how they and their lady-wife were out for a stroll and weren’t it lovely weather?

  And you would not be able to not glance just a little at the wife. You needed to know—although what good did it do, to know a tooth was gone, to marvel how tight and shiny and bright purple eye-skin could swell up?

  And then you were caught; somehow you felt again as if you were abandoning the woman to her bully man by walking on. But my, the most thing you wanted to do was run from this awful game, from the two faces, one so wrong-colored and-shaped, the other a skin of mawkish friendliness over a red-biling rage.

  They used all to go down together, the mams, and wash their blankets in the sea. They would sit about on the rocks at the start of the south mole, with their feet hooked in the seaweed, and the water would rush up, and fizz and shush in the blankets, and rush away again. It seemed to soothe them , and we liked to be with them then, clambering about at our own play among them while they joked to one another. “I’ve a mind to let it go,” Grinny’s mam might say, “the way he’s been treating me. I’ve a mind to lift my feet and let it float away, free as a summer cloud.” Or my own mam: “Not many sea-hearts down the washing-beach this year, anyone find? Usually there is a good lot coming up by now.” They sat so solid there, and watched the crowding sea so attentive, you could imagine them not getting up from there ever, sitting like sea-rocks all night even, searching the black waves as the water and knitted weed bobbed and sucked around them.

  Messkeletha would walk along the mole above; the mams always ignored her. She would climb down now and again muttering, and wade out to one woman’s blanket and another’s. From her belt-string she took a length of weed for mending, and worked there scowling a while. Then she knotted and bit off the shining weed, and waded back, climbed back, and paced and stared again above.

  When the washing was done and the mending, she would loose one of her two-finger whistles up to Wholeman’s Inn—which would set us boys to practicing our own whistles, none of us achieving anything like the witch’s piercingness except sometimes by luck. Dads would file out of Wholeman’s—not all the dads, maybe six or seven—and gather along the rail there and watch while the mams dragged their blankets up, and spread them on the mole-top, some of them, or carried the great wet bundles in their arms or on their heads, up to their own clotheslines to dry.

  “Bye, Sal, then.”

  “Bye, Peachy. Don’t you take no nonsense now.”

  That was how it was done, before Titch Cawdron let slip. Now Messkeletha came to your door and took out your mam individual—which was terrifying, that she knew where you lived and might come back of a night and snatch you out through your dreams. It was horrible; everyone seemed blamed.

  Some mams went tall and proud ahead of her pretending their weed was not such a burden; others, particularly ones whose dads had beaten them, walked as if smacked low, or expecting to be, bobbed along gathering up corners and turning their faces from all the windows as they went.

  “My dad watches them go by,” I heard Grinny say to Asham. “Every one, and he’s not a good word to say of any of them. My mam will be scrubbing and scrubbing over the sound of him, but he’ll just talk louder—the sly look of that one, the three girls that one stole away, how Martyr walloped the smile off that one’s face. It’s shocking, and he will not let me go, not out into the yard, even. He makes me stay and listen.”

  We were none of us let out at that time, even the sons of the mam called to washing. We were a distraction, the town said, and it would grow from there: a lad would have his friend, and then his friend’s friend would tag along, and before you knew it the lot of them would all be down there, arrayed on rocks and scheming again.

  We lived high enough in the town that not many women were brought by. But when they were, Mam or Dad would hurry to close the door, and open the lace so as to show no one was looking from behind it, and find works to do in yard and scullery, and ways for me to help them. When the knock came for my mam, Dad would always have some job ready. “Here, take the other end of this, Dan’l; save your old man’s back.” Or, “Is that ash-bin still out the back lane, I’m wondering?” So that I should never see her go, never see Messkeletha take her. Or maybe that he shouldn’t see. Perhaps he was as frightened of the oul witch as I was.

  They used—and it seemed so foolish to me now, but it wasn’t then, in those accepting days when we all ran about among our mams’ skirts—they used to be allowed to gather, in this house and that, the mams and children, by themselves without men or Messkeletha. At first there would be talk and tea and sitting upright and eyes everywhere. They would talk of their men and their men’s tempers; they would talk of us, and how we were coming on, how we ate and grew.

  Then one of them would sigh and cross from table to armchair, or settee or fireside stool. All their movements would suddenly change, slowing and swaying, and their voices would lower from so bright and brittle, and someone might laugh low, too. As we ran in and out we would see more of them gather at the seated one, leaning to her or pulling her to lean on them. Hairs would be unpinned and fall, and combs brought out and combing begin, and there is nothing happier than the sight of a mam’s face when her hair is being combed. When we were littler we would run in from our play and lie among them, patted and tutted over and our own hairs combed and compared, the differences in wave and redness. Sometimes we were allowed the combing, but our arms were never long enough to do it as well as they did for each other, long slow silky sweeps from scalp to tips, the combed mam dreamy, the comber thoughtful above.

  But of course that came to an end once the daughter-matter were out. Mam combed her own hair now, and if Dad or I saw her at it we would take it on too, and it was always a pleasant time, but it was not the same, though I didn’t like to say, as a room full of warm mams murmurous by the fire, and several hairs to plait and play with as you would, and any number of bosoms to lay your head upon,
and doze away an afternoon.

  Nobody expected Aggie Bannister, after all her time hid away from us, so no one stopped her. They were too astounded seeing this white creature in midst of the clouds and gray, among coats and wool hats and clumpy boots this naked thing, all that bared skin in the cold air, the wobbling nipple-eyes mad below her determined face, and then the wobbling bottom behind, the feet that we remembered from summer, toenails and bunions and cracked heels freed of the shoes that so pained them, the slap of cobbles against foot-soles. Wrong, so wrong, for this season, for this place.

  Down she ran, Aran’s mam, through the dark gray town like a running flare, through the streets like an animal gone wild, like someone’s stock got out and not knowing about towns and hard surfaces and cold. Or about real people, and their eyes and their laughter and their cruel words. Oh, gracious who was that! Aggie Bannister! It’s Aggie! Her name, which was not her name at all but Bannister’s chosen name for her, his own name with a girl’s name that he liked tied on before like the front end of a horse costume—her name got passed all down the streets and back over shoulders into the houses, and from being on so many lips, it became soiled so badly that the woman might never be able to lift her head in Potshead streets again, nor Bannister pass by without laughter breaking out behind him, nor Aran nor Timmy nor Cornelius neither.

  It was clear where she was headed, and while she was not thinking straight, we were. Or at least, she was after a different aim: to reach the sea, whereas we only needed the view of it, so we all headed down Totting Lane and Fishhead Lane straight down, while she ran the full ramp length of the main street and across to the mole and then she clambered, all white bottom and—you could see every fold of her if your eyes were good as mine, while the young men whooped and whistled and the women and the married men turned their faces away behind their hands, and glanced again and groaned and laughed. She clambered, slipped, clambered down and then turned and with one bloodied knee ran limping, ran clumsy as if she were transforming back right there, down the pebbly gray sand towards the water.