by Hannah Tinti
“I can put you in touch with the doctor,” said Bowers, “if you’re interested.”
Benjamin turned away from the window. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and kept an eye on Ren, as if the boy would somehow decide things. “We’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long.” The dentist took his place in the examination chair, pulled the table close, and removed the napkin from the remains of his breakfast. He lifted the bread and made a gesture, offering Ren a bite.
The purple jam shone on top. It smelled like berries and sugar, wonderful and sticky, but Ren shook his head and shrank back. Bowers seemed pleased and looked at Ren keenly with his blackened eye, as if he were making great plans for him. Then he tore the piece of toast in half, stuffed it into his mouth, and began to chew it apart. His dentures mashed together, as if they had their own mind.
“Teeth want to be lost,” he said. “Don’t give them an excuse to leave you.”
ELEVEN
A nor’easter came through Granston a few weeks later. The harbor froze several feet deep, hard enough to walk across. The fishermen came out each morning and broke their boats free with pickaxes, then raised their sails in the snow and cast their nets and pulled their lobster traps from the water.
Ren spent most of his time in the basement, rereading The Deerslayer. Tom and Benjamin played cards or went out to the local saloon. In the middle of January Tom came down with the chicken pox. Ren had caught it years before at Saint Anthony’s, and Benjamin said he had had it as a child, so Tom spent a month alone in bed, itching and moaning. Ren was glad of this, for Benjamin took him to the saloon instead, and taught him how to smoke a pipe, and gave him ale to drink, and together they would have a comfortable supper, and afterward Benjamin would tell stories.
Benjamin liked to talk about his supposed life as a sailor and all the places he’d traveled to over the years. He said that he’d crossed mighty rivers and deserts, volcanoes and mountains. And in these places he’d seen lizards and monkeys, cows with hairy udders and fish with three eyes. He spoke of the time he’d been sold as a slave in Morocco, and nearly eaten by cannibals in the South Seas, and how once he’d visited the harem of a Turkish prince and seen a thousand women dressed in solid gold.
Ren watched the other men in the bar, their mouths open, shifting their chairs closer to hear. They were mostly local fishermen and had tales of their own, about strange creatures they’d seen out on the water, and men cut in half by their own rigging. They displayed scars where hooks had gone through their bodies. And it was always at that point in the evening when Benjamin would call Ren forward and ask him to show the missing hand.
Sometimes Benjamin repeated the story of their mother and the Indian. Other times it was a lion who’d eaten Ren’s hand, or a snapping turtle as he dangled his fingers in a stream. The fishermen did not seem to care which story was being told. They only laughed and passed Ren around the room so they could see. A few had their own missing parts—an ear gone from frostbite, a leg lost to a shark. An old weathered captain had a wooden hand, just as Mister Bowers had described, and he let Ren try it on, tying the straps across his shoulder. It was three times too big and hung heavy and strange at the end of Ren’s arm, the fingers open and curved, ready to receive a shake.
When the stories were finished, the bartender would buy a round of drinks. Toasts were made. Ren’s scar was celebrated. He held it up and the fishermen cheered. Across the room Benjamin raised his glass and smiled. The smile was different from the one he’d used on Father John and the farmer. His mouth was more relaxed, his eyes merry behind the grin. If Ren did not know any better, he would have believed that Benjamin had meant it.
* * *
By the time the winter was over and the snow had melted, Granston was soggy and damp, the streets full of mud. The snowdrops pushed their tiny white flowers from the ground and then the cherry trees blossomed in all their glory. The money from the stolen jewelry had been exhausted, and Benjamin said it was time to move on.
They followed the river out of town the following day. It was hard work for the mare. They’d found a stable close by to keep her for the winter, but she had not been exercised much. Ren had visited her every week, making sure she was fed properly and when he felt brave enough resting his head against her flank, listening to her giant heart. Now she toiled in front of the wagon on the warm spring day, carrying three people uphill. They rode all afternoon, stopping to eat in a field, then napping in the shade of the trees. It would be another day before they reached North Umbrage.
It had taken some time for Benjamin to change his mind about Mister Bowers’s offer. Ren had heard the men whispering at night, Tom pressing for them to take the job, but Benjamin only said that North Umbrage was a place he would never go back to again. And then one afternoon in the basement, when Tom was nearly finished with his chicken pox, the last scabs peeling off his skin, the schoolteacher had opened a flask of whiskey to celebrate and asked Ren what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“I don’t know,” said Ren, looking over from his book.
“You’ve never thought about it? Not once?” Tom asked. “What about a fisherman, like those fellows you met at the bar?”
Benjamin was cleaning his boots at the table. He smeared a streak of black polish across a toe, then rubbed it in. “Leave him alone.”
“Don’t you think the little monster needs a profession?” Tom took another sip of whiskey. “Maybe he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life living in a basement.”
“We won’t be pulling these kinds of jobs forever.”
“You keep saying that,” said Tom, flicking away a bit of scab. “But what we need is something to tide us over for a few years instead of a couple of months.”
This conversation was one they’d had before. But this time Benjamin stopped what he was doing and gazed at his half-polished shoes. They were old boots, the heels cracked and in need of repair. He looked at Ren. He looked at his shoes again. Then he walked across the floor in his socks and spent the afternoon sharing Tom’s whiskey. Every once in a while he would turn to Ren in the corner, and each time the boy glanced back, Benjamin’s face was more troubled.
When Ren woke the next day Benjamin was gone. He returned later that evening, smelling of tobacco, and said that he’d changed his mind about North Umbrage. The men began to make their plans, and Benjamin stopped going to the tavern. Instead he spent most of his time counting out figures, and visiting graveyards, and taking notes in a small black book he kept in his pocket. He disappeared for days from the basement, and when asked of his whereabouts answered simply, “Research.” Ren had followed him once, crossing street after street through the marketplace before he saw him slip into a lawyer’s office. When Benjamin came out, he was biting his nails, and then he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and laughed, as if he’d just been told something he couldn’t believe.
Ren watched him now, holding the reins tight, steering their cart around the ruts ahead. He kept his eyes forward and his pipe set firmly between his lips, puffs of smoke trailing behind them on the road.
Soon they came upon a valley between two hills, the pastures surrounding it covered with sheep. White- and brown- and black-faced animals stretched across the landscape. The wagon passed a group of farmers, washing their herds in the river to prepare them for shearing. The men gave directions to a nearby town. There the group found an inn, where they paid for a room with the last of their money. Inside, the floors were covered with dust, the beds stained with tobacco burns. Tom settled himself at the table and Benjamin began unpacking the trunk.
Ren sat quietly in a corner, rereading the last pages of his book. Deerslayer was refusing Judith Hutter’s proposal of marriage. She had done all she could to make him love her, but it hadn’t been enough. Ren had read the ending many times, and he still felt terrible about it. Hawkeye spent the entire novel fighting Indians and righting wrongs, but when he left Judith to her lonely fate, he always
seemed less of a hero.
“There’ll be a crowd tomorrow at the shearing.” Benjamin opened the wooden case and took out one of the brown bottles of Doctor Faust’s Medical Salts for Pleasant Dreams.
“Someone might recognize us,” said Tom.
“Recognize me, you mean.”
“Does it matter?” Tom took off his coat and flung it onto the bed.
“We’re out of money. And I’ve got an idea for using the boy.”
“You should leave him out of it.”
“He wants to do it. Don’t you, Ren?”
Ren looked up from his book. He could see that Benjamin was itching for something new. Over the winter he’d told Ren about the jobs he’d pulled: impersonating sea captains, doctors, and men of the cloth; selling items from a catalog that would never arrive; forging wills and false deeds. They all followed a similar pattern: winning over the mark, a fast exchange of property, and then leaving town as quickly as possible. When they needed to stay in one place for a while, Benjamin and Tom turned to the graveyards, where the marks were more agreeable and did not take pains to pursue them.
Ren closed his book. “I want to do it.”
Tom looked worried. “I don’t think he’s ready for this.”
“Nonsense,” said Benjamin.
“He’s only a child. He’s going to get us caught.”
Benjamin sat down on the mattress, leaned back, and pulled the blankets over him. He closed his eyes and let out a puff of air. “Not yet.”
That afternoon Benjamin went to find some supper and Tom and Ren set to changing the labels, from Doctor Faust’s Medical Salts for Pleasant Dreams to Mother Jones’s Elixir for Misbehaving Children. Ren soaked the old bottles and scraped the paper away with a knife while Tom set himself up at the table with pen and ink and wrote the new words out, taking a sip of whiskey between each finished piece.
Before they left Granston, Tom had trimmed his beard and purchased a new shirt. Now he tucked a napkin into the collar to keep it from getting stained and carefully pushed up his sleeves. The light from the candle flickered across his face. He appeared calm and nearly sober.
Ren could see that his penmanship was distinguished. The ends of the letters curled into patterns; his dashes and crosses fell in waves of varying thickness. When the labels were glued into place, they looked quite professional. Tom poured himself another drink and stretched his ink-stained fingers.
Ren leaned over the table, admiring the words. “Why’d you stop teaching?”
Tom frowned. He ran a hand over his face, leaving streaks of black ink on his forehead. “Do you have any fellows?”
“I used to,” Ren said. “They were twins. Brom and Ichy.”
“And do you miss them?”
“Yes,” said Ren. As he said it, he knew it was true. He missed everything about the twins, from the way they made him laugh in chapel to their secret codes over dinner. He even missed the parts he’d always hated, like the way Brom would continue to punch him, even after he’d given up, and the way that Ichy liked to confess to things he hadn’t done.
“It’s a damned shame to lose your fellows.” Tom took another drink. There were tiny red scars on his arm, left over from the chicken pox. He pulled his sleeve down over them, then wiped his nose against the cuff. “I had a fellow, once. We grew up together, and it was just as Aristotle said: One soul, two bodies. A true friendship. You don’t get many of those in this life, I can tell you now.
“We loved the same girl and asked her to choose between us. I was a teacher and didn’t have much money; Christian had some land and an inheritance. So she got engaged to him. But she continued to meet me in the woods at night. And God help me, I would have done anything she asked.”
Tom lifted the whiskey to his lips and finished it, keeping the glass there for a moment, his teeth biting down on the edge.
“He shook my hand in church, smiling with her arm through his. And right under his nose, she still reeked of it, like a buttered bun. I had too much to drink one night and told him everything. I said, ‘Do you know what her skin tastes like?’ I said, ‘Can you smell me on her fingers?’ He took a pistol out of a drawer. He told me to stop talking. I said, ‘Don’t you think we laughed at you?’ He pointed the pistol at his own head then and screamed at me to stop, and I said, ‘Pull the trigger,’ and he did.”
Ren gripped the empty bottle of Doctor Faust’s Medical Salts for Pleasant Dreams. He stared at the label so that he would not have to look at Tom. He knew from Brother Joseph that suicides were not laid to rest in the churchyard. They were buried at the crossroads, in unconsecrated ground, like Brom’s and Ichy’s mother. Their souls were sent to hell, and their ghosts turned into white rabbits that haunted the unmarked grave, startling horses and fooling travelers into taking the wrong path.
Tom’s eyes were shut tight. He wiped his palm back and forth across his forehead, smearing the ink deeper into his skin.
“After that I stopped being a teacher.”
For a few moments they sat in silence. Ren watched Tom for a sign of what might happen next, a curse or a sob, but the schoolteacher simply rubbed his fingertips together, then began making marks across the table, a line of thumbprints, all in a row.
The boy went back to scraping the labels off, and Tom sighed and began to mix together Mother Jones’s Elixir for Misbehaving Children. He used a funnel to fill the bottles with maple syrup, diluted opium, castor oil, and a bit of soured milk, until the consistency was light and sticky, with a tinge of brownness. He poured a tiny bit into a glass and handed it to Ren.
“Bottoms up.”
The boy sniffed the liquid, then stuck his tongue in. It tasted sweet and bitter at once.
“You’ll have to be more convincing than that.”
Ren lifted the glass. The medicine took its time, sliding slowly along the edge of the cup like molasses. Only a drop fell into his mouth. It tasted terrible, but he swallowed it down. “Now what?”
“Now,” said Tom, “you have to be good.”
The next morning when Tom and Ren arrived at the shearing, it was well under way, the fields still damp with dew. Nearly one hundred men, women, and children were talking and milling about and inspecting each other’s herds. Tables with food and drink were set up on the grass. Ribbons of different colors were tied to the trees and fence railings.
Ren looked over the people gathered and searched for Benjamin. He’d left before dawn, taking the wooden case with him.
“Remember,” Benjamin had said just before he closed the door, “you aren’t supposed to know who I am.”
Ren’s boots were soaked through from crossing the field. The wet leather rubbed against his bare ankles. Tom stopped just outside the crowd, reached down, and took Ren’s hand. It was strange, pretending to be father and son. They were both ill-suited for their roles. Ren’s hair stuck out in all directions and the schoolteacher reeked of whiskey. Tom tightened his grip, and Ren looked up at him.
“No heroics,” he said. “If something goes wrong, I want you to run.”
Ren nodded, and the man and the boy stepped into the crowd. They passed the tables piled high with scones and muffins, a side of ham, a barrel of cider, and a smattering of cakes covered in sugar. As they moved closer to the shearing, the smell changed to that of fresh manure and the heavy scent of wool.
The farmers took the sheep one at a time and tossed them onto their backs, then went to work with the hand clippers, starting at the head and making their way across the spine and down the sides, until the animal’s coat came off in a single matted piece. The coat was then set apart, weighed, and examined, until its price was decided.
Bits of white filament floated in the air. The fingers of the shearers shone with lanolin, their leather aprons stained with it. As the day wore on and the sun grew high, a few took off their shirts and worked bare-chested, suspenders at their waists and kerchiefs tied around their necks.
The sheep waited behind a fence, watched ot
hers of their herd being shorn, and bleated. One by one the sheep were taken, thrown on their sides, and expertly cut. Afterward they looked naked and stunned. When they were released, the animals shook their heads and stumbled against each other in the grass, their steps wobbling, as if they had been reborn.
A contest began. A man in a vest and high boots and another with a scar along his cheek were timed against each other, their clippers flying, the sheep struggling in protest, the crowd cheering them on. When the men were finished they were covered in sweat and wool shavings. The judges inspected the fleeces, and declared the man with the scar the winner. Everyone cheered, and the next two competitors stepped forward. Nearby, a group of children climbed a tree to get a better view.
“Go on,” said Tom.
Ren left his side reluctantly and joined the other boys and girls. The children scrambled in the branches and chased each other around the trunk. Curious, a few eyed Ren as he walked over and stood next to the tree. On the other side of the field, Tom pointed at him and made slashing motions in the air. Ren wet his lips. He pulled his hand into a fist. Then he held his breath, walked up to a towheaded boy, and punched him as hard as he could in the neck.
The boy fell to the ground, gasping and wheezing. The other children dropped from the tree and formed a circle around him. Ren’s hand throbbed. He felt surprisingly good.
A boy in overalls stepped forward. “What’d you do that for?”
“I don’t know,” said Ren. “Because I felt like it.”
They watched the boy struggling for air. A few of the children backed away, and a few came closer.
“Is he going to die?” one of the girls asked.
“No,” said another. “But if he does, we know who did it.”
The boy in the overalls shoved Ren to the ground. “How’s this feel?” he said, then he started kicking. Ren tried to fight back, but the other children joined in, even the girls, so finally he just went limp, waiting for it to be over, feeling a sense of injustice all the while. He could make out the boy he’d punched, only a few feet away on the grass. The boy had recovered his strength and was now crawling over to spit on him.