by Van Reid
“Now, what have you pair been up to?” asked Thaddeus indulgently, while the boy and the girl scraped their shoes at the threshold.
“We saw Mrs. Roberto!” said Timothy again.
“She’s some pretty,” said Melanie, with great feeling.
Tim might not have admitted as much himself, but he voiced no objection.
“Say hello to Mr. Moss,” said Mabel.
“Are you in the Moosepath League?” asked Tim, who had seen Sundry with a member of the club the day before.
Sundry scratched his head, as if he weren’t sure, but then nodded.
“How many are coming?” asked Mabel.
Sundry was up to this change in topic. “Oh, I’d say ten or twelve.”
“Well, I’m making pies,” she said, which may have meant she was too busy or that she was in the business and might as well make some more.
“Where did you see her?” Annabelle was asking Tim.
“Has Melanie spoken to her father yet?” said Thaddeus, and all other conversation came to a halt. He had forgotten that his shirt was half undone, its tails pulled out over his belt. “Have you spoken to your dad?” he asked the little girl.
Melanie seemed unsure.
“Have you told him that we’d like to take you in, dear?” said Mabel.
“He wasn’t there yesterday,” said Melanie.
“Where’s that?” asked Thaddeus. The kid had been closemouthed about her father’s whereabouts, and he half expected the man had run off.
“Down where he stays,” said the child.
“She shouldn’t be sent on her own,” said Mabel.
Thaddeus nodded. “Why don’t you take me there, fellow? I mean ... why don’t you take me there?”
“I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” said the little girl.
“You wouldn’t be telling me, you’d be taking me,” said the broad and broad-bearded proprietor of the Faithful Mermaid.
Melanie was bright enough to understand what difference there was between telling and taking but might also have been uncertain enough about speaking to her father by herself to waver at the thought of having company on the errand.
“Let’s do that,” said Thaddeus as if she had already acquiesced.
The girl’s expression revealed nothing. After a moment she said simply, “It’s dark.”
Thaddeus’s brow furrowed. “We’ll take a lamp.”
“Shall I go with you?” volunteered Sundry Moss.
The gathered family considered the offer and its source carefully.
“I’ll go!” said Tim.
“No, you won’t,” said his mother.
Thaddeus wondered where they were going. He liked this fellow Sundry Moss and was prepared to think highly of him. Moreover, any association with the Moosepath League was a mark of favor in the eyes of the Spark family; the charter members—Mr. Ephram, Mr. Eagleton, and Mr. Thump—had puzzled everyone at the tavern, but one could not fault their sincerity of purpose. Most important, Thaddeus didn’t know where the little girl would lead them. “If you like,” he said to Sundry. “Thanks.”
Draped in his chair, arms folded and legs crossed at the ankles, Sundry looked as if he had just offered to go get the mail—sometime next week.
“Dark, you say?” said Thaddeus to the little girl.
“Oh, it will be.”
There was a storm lantern by the back door, and Thaddeus shook it to judge how much oil was in it. Mabel wasn’t very sure about this mission. There was no telling what hole Burne Ring, a notorious dipsomaniac, might have crawled into. “I want to know where you’re going,” she said.
Melanie’s mouth formed a surprised O.
“She’s not supposed to tell us,” said Thaddeus.
Mabel chewed on this for a moment, then said, “You be careful. Tuck in your shirt and button up.”
Thaddeus grunted and set down the lamp to tend to his apparel. When he began to fumble the buttons with his thick fingers, his daughter took over, and he lifted his chin so that she could reach under his great beard.
“It’s no wonder you can’t button your shirt right,” said Annabelle. “You won’t even look at what you’re doing.”
Thaddeus seemed amused. “I can’t put my undershirt on right, either.”
Mabel turned to Sundry Moss, who was standing, now, looking as ready as anyone could be. “Thank you,” she said quietly, but he only pulled a bemused expression and shrugged. “What do you think he’ll say?” she asked Melanie.
The little girl’s eyes widened. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I haven’t spoke with him for a while.”
Mabel brushed the hair from Melanie’s eyes. With her other hand, she snatched at Tim’s collar. “You stay here!”
“Mommy!”
Mabel pulled the boy closer to her and said, “You be careful!” to her husband again.
“We’re not going off to sea!” was all Thaddeus said as he disappeared through the back door. It was hard to imagine he could meet any danger, walking out into such a shining afternoon.
Sundry Moss put on his hat, gave a nod over his shoulder, and followed.
“I’ll watch where they step,” said Melanie.
When they were gone, Mabel said to Annabelle, “Go get Davey. I want him to follow them so that someone knows where they’ve gone.”
Making their way down the busy sidewalks, Thaddeus and Sundry were surprised how quickly Melanie stopped, pointed, and said, “Over there.”
Thaddeus looked across the street at the dilapidated building as if he’d never seen it before. The day was bright, and only a single billowed cloud was visible scudding east, but the decaying pile before them appeared to suffer under a lowering sky, as if shadowed by an accretion of soot and steam from the neighboring chimneys and stacks. More social distance than mileage lay between the Faithful Mermaid and Pearce Eddy’s flophouse.
“You should have told us he was staying there,” said Thaddeus to the little girl as they crossed the street. He wondered why he had been required to carry a lamp.
“Daylight not enough for you, Thad?” shouted some wag at the corner.
“Yes, it is, to be truthful,” Thaddeus called back. “It’s some of the people you meet that aren’t so bright.” This raised a laugh.
“He’s not staying there anymore,” said Melanie, scooting ahead of an oncoming wagon. “I’ll show you.” She led them by the dark doors to the cobbled alley alongside the flophouse. Thaddeus and Sundry hurried after. Halfway down the old way she paused to point out the tin lid of an old coal chute. “That’s where I come up,” she informed them.
“Come up?” said Thaddeus. “You mean, from where you and your dad stay?”
“It’s down there,” she said. “It was awfully cold this spring, but Dad says it’ll be nice when the summer gets hot.”
“Like a room at the Grand,” said Thaddeus, but kindly. Melanie and her father were actually living under a flophouse, which seemed to him something symbolic and a picture of how far a body could fall.
Sundry was struck by the cool and dark of the alley. He gazed up at the sky, which had been pinched by the confines of the street. The air had lost its soft summer breath, and the sun its power to light the corners and hollows. Even the clamor of the busy street behind them had surrendered its vitality, stretching to a thin dissonance. A breeze met them from off the harbor and beyond the alley they could see the crowded precincts of Sturdivant’s Wharf, where a great five-masted schooner, obstructing light from off the water, thrust its prow toward them—a giant peering into a cave.
When they emerged from the lower end of the alley, the harbor was more apparent and the bright fittings of a brig, anchored further out, seemed to wink at them. They were under the massive prow of the schooner when Melanie said with all due seriousness, “I didn’t think you wanted to use the chute.”
Thaddeus patted her head and said, “How does your father get there?”
She pointed at a crude ladder that dro
pped down the side of the wharf. Sundry peered over the edge and considered how cold the harbor water must be.
“Down there?” said Thaddeus.
“That’s where Daddy goes.”
The ladder was punky and weather-worn. Thaddeus gave it an experimental kick with the toe of his boot, and pieces of it squelched off. Sundry saw that a sailor on the deck of the schooner was gazing over the rail to watch them, and he gave the man a salute.
“Who would clamber down anything like that?” said Thaddeus.
“That’s where Daddy goes,” said the little girl. “I do sometimes.”
“It’s a way down,” said Sundry. “It just may be quicker than a person intended.”
“And a little farther,” added Thaddeus.
“What is this place?” asked Sundry, indicating the building behind them.
“A flophouse,” informed Thaddeus.
He might have said more, but Melanie Ring said, “We stayed there once.” It might have been the City Hotel, from the look on her face.
“Let’s take a look,” said Sundry. From what he understood about the term flophouse he didn’t know which would prove less pleasant—a plummet into the cold harbor or a tour of the city’s dregs and near dregs.
With cracked pilasters ranked at either side of the wide front door, paint-less walls and windows blinded with yellowed sailcloth, the looming building gave little evidence that it had once been the home of a prosperous business. There was only the faded sign of the Chalmers and Holde Shipping Firm still hanging beneath the cornice, which itself was chipped and splitting with exposure to the wind and damp air of the waterfront.
Sundry was a man of the countryside and a farmer by birth and upbringing. He was not unfamiliar with certain earthy verities of life, having mucked out stalls and held vigil with his parents over calvings and foalings. But farmers (or good farmers) take pride in the living quarters of their stock, and even in winter the barn doors are often thrown open to let in the sun and the air.
He had been, in recent months, exposed to some of the city’s less reputable denizens—simply walking the streets, one saw the fierce and the destitute as well as the laboring and the prosperous—but he had never walked where the fierce and the destitute were the rule, though even in such a place it could never be said that they ruled.
Something more than a smell met them like a physical thing when they opened the door. A cacophony of snores and groans and coughing reached out, low and difficult to parse into separate elements. Thaddeus had had occasion to enter such a place in his lifetime, searching for a wandering relative or a delinquent customer, and he had experience enough to steel himself. Melanie walked in ahead of them as if there were nothing to separate the dank interior from broad daylight. But Sundry, who flinched at little, hesitated at the threshold like a suspicious cat. Suddenly the climb down the ladder at the edge of the wharf seemed less worrisome.
The light of day hardly entered with them, and when the door swung shut, there was only the occasional gas lamp, barely flickering, to give off a weak halo and mark the way. Sundry pressed a sleeve to his nose and mouth, hoping to stifle the fetor of unwashed bodies and stale liquor. A small way down the front hall was an old table with a leg at three corners and a stick propping up the fourth. Here sat a half-drowsing troll, grizzled and lank-haired, who snapped to at their approach and regarded them with instant suspicion.
“Where’s Pearce?” asked Thaddeus.
The man squinted from Thaddeus to Sundry to Melanie and back to Thaddeus. “What time is it?” he returned, flashing toothless gums.
“Well, it must be three o’clock.”
“He wouldn’t be about,” said the troll, hunched and gnarled over the table, himself like a piece of ancient furniture.
“We need to get down in your cellar,” said Thaddeus straightforwardly.
“You can’t do that,” said the old man.
“Well, we need to.”
“The stairs mightn’t hold you, I daresay. Even Pearce won’t go there. He says Darvey Bones is down there.” The old man offered a grin and laughed. “It’s haunted for sure, wouldn’t you guess?” He looked down at his own knobby hands and muttered. “Those who were drowned over the years don’t wander too far.” There was an active quality to his use of the verb drowned in this sentence that caused a shiver. “I’ve heard them, even lately.” The man looked up, delighted with this news.
“Where’s the door?”
“To the cellar? You can’t go there,” said the old man, but he rose from his seat, which was in itself surprising, and hunchbacked and shuffling, led them past dark and doorless rooms. Sundry peered into one of these as they passed and was startled to see that ropes were draped four feet or so from the floor and that several men appeared to be sprawled on these—hanging by their armpits but sleeping. Others occupied the floor or something like great hammocks.
The halls grew dimmer as they went. The muddle of sound and the smells thickened about them, and Sundry was glad when the cellar door was forced open and something of the harbor air wafted up to mingle with the unhealthy atmosphere of the flophouse. “You can’t go down there,” said the old man again, even as the taverner tried the top steps.
“I’m not sure this is much refinement above the ladder,” said Thaddeus.
Sundry thought he’d rather have chanced falling into the harbor than come through this place, but here they were.
“It doesn’t creak too much,” said Thaddeus, though the stair let out a painful groan when he put his entire weight on it.
Sundry was about to tell the little girl to stay where she was, but then he looked at the old man, who grinned with his toothless gums and repeated happily, “You can’t go down there.”
“Step lightly,” said Sundry.
The ancient and long-unused coal room beneath Pearce Eddy’s flophouse—toward the western end of the Portland waterfront—was not the darkest place Burne Ring had ever inhabited. That distinction must be reserved for his own self. Sometimes it seemed to him that wherever he went, he took with him a room even larger and darker than this black-walled chamber that shivered day and night with the footfalls and snores of the business above. In that larger, darker room Burne’s head echoed with his own voice and the voices of others (if they really were voices) like sounds heard from across a vast floor. He rarely emerged from the coal room by day, and he never emerged, these days, from that darker place. The level of light in his memory had dimmed so that even his dreams were shadow upon shadow.
By the summer of 1897 Burne Ring was either drinking or starving for drink. To say that he had become a creature of the dark is not to suggest that he was wicked but only that flesh is weak. He sinned and repented and sinned again in rapid succession—sometimes in a matter of minutes. It was not a hard heart, besides, that brought him to these straits, but a broken one—a broken heart and the weakness flesh is heir to.
But weak flesh might amount to the same thing as wickedness. Burne’s ability to settle his cravings by any legal means had greatly diminished; in fact, he hardly had the wits to sweep a doorstep these days, but he could filch from a backyard or pilfer from an unwary pocket without much planning. He stole and repented and stole again. He suffered for what he was compelled to do, and his suffering did not strengthen or enlarge him. What had not killed him made him weaker still.
Burne Ring and his lone child lived, after a fashion, in that coal black, coal-blackened room deep in the cellars of the old building. The room itself was only feet away from the edge of high tide, and when the wind came up at the full of the moon, the harbor was just another blind creature sniffing at the crumbling threshold. The man and the child were ghosts, hardly more than rumors along the waterfront, and if anyone knew or even suspected where they were living, nothing was ever said to Pearce Eddy, who ran the flophouse above them. Pearce thought the cellar haunted and stayed away.
There were piles of rags in one corner of the old coal room and planks that Burne had
dragged from beneath the wharf and upon which they slept in the continual dark. Mailon could sense the dawn before the smallest hint of light (and never more than the smallest hint) found its way into the room. The child came and went without question. Sometimes he came back with food, and when he did, Burne judged his little son by his own downfall. In brief lucid moments when he could consider how that food must have been gained, a great anger offered to rise from within. What had Mailon done to come by food, or what had someone else done? But the thought and the anger were soon lost in the great black room that Burne inhabited. He could not stay angry at an echo. Sometimes he even ate what his little boy brought him.
Stretched in the corner of the room that once had held the fuel to feed the stoves and fireplaces of the Chalmers and Holde Shipping Firm before that company’s decline and the present decline of the building itself into the waterfront silt, Burne Ring recalled the face of his son, but he had more or less forgotten his daughter, and it took him long, arduous moments to climb from his forgetfulness in the strange, dark hour when she returned.
Time grew and retracted without logic, and when he thought that he hadn’t seen his son for a long while, he also knew that he could not trust his sense of hours passed. Something might have happened to Mailon, but how was the father to know? Then again, Mailon might have been at his side moments ago, those moments simply expanded into a day or a week.
“Mailon,” he said into one blind room or another. In the last hour or day (or week, perhaps) a physical infirmity had overruled his need for drink, and he had drifted during some span of time from drink to delirium tremens without moving from his plank. “Mailon,” he said.
“Daddy,” came the child’s voice as from across an immense space.
“Mailon.”
“Daddy,” came the faraway voice that was yet at his elbow.
He sensed the child beside him. “Mailon.”
“I’m not Mailon, Daddy.”
“Where’s Mailon?”
“I’m here, but I’m not Mailon, Daddy.”
“Where’s my boy?”
“I’m here, Daddy, but I’m not a boy.”