by Anne Groß
“There,” Mrs. Postlethwaite said, breathless and smiling. “We’ll let the two Magdelenes sort it out on their own, shall we? Whichever one comes back tomorrow is the one we’ll keep.
“Hurry and finish your pudding,” the cook instructed. “Here come the lads.” Elise swung around to look across the dining hall, past the tenants who were already seated and finishing their meals, to the front door. The first five factory men stomped in with loud voices and filthy haggard faces. It was clear by the way they took their seats and slapped at the tables that their intentions were to be served beer and food immediately, in that order.
It didn’t take long for the Quiet Woman to fill with men as they ambled in, exhausted by a week’s worth of work and a full purse to show for it. Thomas placed Elise on a stool behind him and narrated the scene while he poured pints for all those who leaned against the bar. Conversation was lively, and Elise tried to follow and catalogue the information in the off chance anyone would want her opinion. There was, apparently, a war going on, a king named George, a prime minister, and a stifling upper class system. Elise noted that although the names were different from the American politicians she was familiar with, the outrage against policies was the same. Walk into any bar in Tucson in the early evening and you’d hear the same joy in shared oppression. The only real difference she saw between the watering holes she went to there and the Quiet Woman was that everyone here seemed to have grown up together.
“That one there, the skinny man with the big mouth who’s standing up at table two,” Thomas pointed out to her. “That’s Long Urie. He’ll be the first to be snoring on the floor. Best to let me know when that happens and I’ll put him out so you don’t have to clean up his vomit.”
A customer at the bar who overheard guffawed as Thomas refilled his mug. “Urie is always the first to get cut and fuddled.”
Mary swooped by the bar holding up four fingers, and Thomas grabbed four mugs from under the bar and started pouring. “Near the hearth you’ll always find Boffet and Jones. They’ve been coming here since before I was born. You just leave them two be and let Mary serve them. That goes for anyone who sits at the bar. You just leave them be, and anyone sitting in any of the armchairs for that matter. The armchair folk are the Old Mr. Ferrington’s customers. They’ve earned those chairs and they’ve taken to Mary.” Thomas paused to place the mugs of beer on Mary’s tray and drop the coins she handed him into an open lockbox. “That one over there, the one sitting down with the red waistcoat and the weasel eyes, you watch out for him. Keep your farthings safe when you bend over his lap.”
“I’m not bending over anyone’s lap.” Elise said sharply.
Thomas laughed. “You’ll be bending over everyone’s lap tonight. You won’t even know you’re doing it. Just mind what I say and watch yourself.” He set a mug in front of Elise and clinked it with his own. “That one’s for you. Drink up. I need you to be happy and smiling tonight for a change.” He took a carefully tiny sip, his eyes narrowed at Elise. “Don’t think that I’m the one wanting you serving tonight. If it was up to me you’d be sitting up in your room, well away from making any trouble. But Richard thinks you can be helpful. Don’t make him a fool.”
Elise huffed defiantly before taking a sullen gulp of her beer. She turned her head to look at Richard, who was standing in the middle of the dining room scraping a lively jig from his fiddle while stomping his foot.
“Watch Mrs. Ferrington there,” Thomas pointed out Richard’s mother who was greeting customers. Her smile was wide and practiced. “See how she always takes the money before she leaves the plates? Always remember: customers must open their purses first.” Elise only half listened as she watched Mrs. Ferrington perform a curtsy while simultaneously primping her graying updo. Elise was impressed by the woman’s grace. The men at the table were eating it up, doffing hats and scraping back chairs to stand in her presence. Apparently Richard came by his charm honestly.
Thomas gripped Elise’s arm to get her attention back. “If anyone tells you they’ve a tab in my book, collect the name and start counting drinks. At the end of the night I’ll be checking your apron pockets and whatever other hidden pockets you have, so don’t think to keep nothing from the Quiet Woman that’s hers.
“Now, finish it,” Thomas ordered nodding at Elise’s mug. Elise hesitated for one moment, then grinned and slammed back her porter. After she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, she was handed a full pitcher. “Table three looks thirsty,” Thomas dismissed.
With her heart in her mouth, braced by the cool drink, Elise approached the table already crowded with men shoveling down Mrs. Postlethwaite’s stew. Six pence, tuppence, a farthing, she had no idea what the currency even looked like until the first man pressed coins into her palm like they were feeding a vending machine. Elise looked at the money and felt a jolt. She was working again, and here was the reward in little metal discs. The intense sense of relief she felt surprised her. Things happened with money – maybe she could buy her way forward in time. Despite Thomas’s warning that all proceeds went straight to the pub, tears pricked her eyes. She quickly batted them back with her long lashes and slipped the money into her apron pocket, setting to work with renewed energy and a flirtatious smile.
When all the chairs at the tables were taken, men began to stand around the tables, shoulder to shoulder, leaning in and yelling to be heard. Elise was constantly being flagged down as she tried to keep up with the demands for more of everything. In the kitchen, it didn’t take long for Mrs. Postlethwaite’s ladle to scrape the bottom of the cast iron pot and when it did, the kitchen closed and the cook went home. Mrs. Ferrington, with Johnny’s help, cleared all the dinner plates, then said goodnight and retreated back to her quarters. Richard, quickly noticing the absence of his mother, allowed himself to be pulled into a card game.
When a loud cheer erupted, Elise looked up from pouring ale in time to see Mary leap across the room with both her hands helping her corset support her prodigious flesh. Then, grinning, she turned and leaped in another direction. Mugs bounced on tables when she landed and her breasts nearly spilled out of her dress as she pushed them up and clapped them together. “Got it this time,” she yelled, and pulled a coin out from the depths of her cleavage. Another cheer went up and three men stood to toss more coins into the air.
The man Elise was pouring for shook her elbow to get her attention. “Can you do that too?”
His friend scoffed, “You always were a man with special tastes, Jonas, but for me, I’ll not toss coins for those useless targets,” he said, pointing at Elise’s breasts. “Mary,” he yelled, “over here lass.” He waved to Mary who was bending forward and jiggling to release her cache while coins rained down around her.
“No one cares if they’re large, as long as they’re soft, warm, and round,” Jonas said. “Give us a show. Are your tits round?” Elise jumped forward, surprised by a pinch. “Her arse is round enough,” he hooted.
Elise watched her arm move through the air like someone else was carrying it, knowing full well it was her own rage that caused it to move. When she slammed the pitcher against Jonas’s chest, he was knocked backwards and onto the floor—a satisfying surprise. She stood over him and tried to hide her smile as the table roared with laughter. Her smile disappeared when she caught a glimpse of Jonas’s expression as he pulled himself off the floor, dripping in beer. “Better run, Lass,” a man called out. She didn’t need the encouragement. She was already mid-stride when she was caught in another man’s arms.
“If it isn’t the Little Lunatic,” Mr. Tilsdale said happily, giving her a squeeze. “Sweet one minute, devilish the next. Don’t know what Mr. MacEwan was thinking—you’ll never do as a barmaid.”
Elise threw her arms over her head and poured out of his grasp like water. When she bent at the knees and shimmied into a squat, she felt a draft of air rush over the top of her head. Instead of hitting her, the chair that Jonas swung crashed into Mr. Tilsdale, one o
f the chair legs hitting his neck with a sickening crunch. He clutched his neck with wide, frightened eyes, unable to even gasp. Everyone else who saw the attack caught their breath for him in horror and sympathy. Hats were placed over hearts as Mr. Tilsdale staggered from one man to the next, pleading for help with his eyes as he struggled to breathe. Everyone stopped to watch the slow death of a comrade.
“I didn’t mean it,” Jonas whimpered, breaking the spell. He was still holding the broken chair in his hands. “I swear I didn’t mean it.”
Elise pushed him impatiently out of the way and cleared the table with a sweep of her arm. “Get him up here,” she ordered, not talking to anyone specifically, but expecting everyone to jump. Thomas was suddenly at her side. “I need your knife,” she demanded.
“What knife?”
“Give it to me now.” It made sense that he would keep a knife hidden in his belt. She knew it was there. She only had minutes to work and wasn’t going to argue. The knife was handed over. Pointing to four different men, she gave the order to pin Mr. Tillsdale down on the table. He struggled for a few seconds and then turned blue and fainted.
Working quickly, she untied the man’s silk scarf, tilted back his head, and palpated his neck to find the space between his Adam’s apple and cricoid bone. She used the adrenaline that surged through her body to concentrate on the task at hand, took a steadying breath and brought the knife towards his neck.
The men around the table roared in unison and the knife was suddenly wrenched away. When the crowd lifted her from the ground to be pulled away, she grabbed Mr. Tilsdale’s torso and held on. “I’m saving his life,” she screamed over and over, desperately.
She felt, more than saw, Thomas working to push back the men. When her feet touched the floor again, she held out her hand and the knife was replaced into her palm. Quickly, before anyone could object again, she made a one-inch incision and inserted her finger to open the hole. She felt people behind her push forward to watch. She needed a drinking straw, or a pen. She looked up at Thomas. “I need the stem off your pipe.”
“My pipe? You can’t have my pipe.” Thomas looked alarmed.
No, of course not, that was too much to ask. “Get me the beer engine.”
It took Thomas seconds to return from the bar. Elise selected the shortest of the black pipes and carefully inserted it into Mr. Tilsdale’s neck. Then she blew rhythmically into his lungs to revive him. She stopped and waited. Everyone waited with her, all eyes on Mr. Tilsdale’s chest. No one moved. No one spoke. Except Jonas who whispered, “I didn’t mean it.” He was immediately shushed.
A whistle was heard through the narrow opening of the pipe and when Mr. Tilsdale’s chest rose on its own, the Quiet Woman erupted with cheers. Elise slumped in relief and felt a supporting arm slip around her waist. She looked up to see Richard staring at her with his mouth open. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked incredulously.
She leaned heavily against his side, her ribcage throbbing with a dull ache. With the immediate danger gone, she could see the black pipe sticking out of her patient’s neck in a new light. The weight of it caused it to fall distractingly to the left. “That pipe—is it lead?” she asked.
“Yes, of course. Lead pipe.”
“Fantastic.” Elise made a mental note to never drink beer that wasn’t tapped directly from the cask.
ABDUCTED AGAIN
There’s nothing like hearing the pitiful whistle of a man sucking air through a pipe in his neck to kill the mood. After a small group of customers helped Elise carry Mr. Tilsdale upstairs to his room, the tone of the Quiet Woman became dour. Even Richard, normally so optimistic, seemed only able to play a long list of soul-wrenching melodies in minor keys until Thomas exasperatedly knocked his fiddle off his shoulder. It didn’t help. Most of the men in the dining hall quietly finished up their drinks and left early. With the excitement over, Elise had regained enough presence of mind to roll a torn piece of the front page from The Morning Advertiser into a short straw to replace the lead pipe. Then she sat at Mr. Tilsdale’s bedside until he’d fallen asleep and stayed there until she was sure his airway was well established.
When she finally went to bed, sleep didn’t come easily. She was fairly certain she was staring at the ceiling because her eyes were open and she was lying on her back, but she couldn’t be positive. Was there really a ceiling up there in the pitch darkness? Having been unexpectedly thrown back in time, it was now hard to trust that even the most trivial details would conform to expectations of reality. Reality was gone. Expectations were useless.
She knew she had shocked everyone who had seen her save Mr. Tilsdale’s life. People weren’t supposed to jab others in the neck with knives and then insert objects into the holes. It just wasn’t done. The entire scene played over and over in her head as she stared into the blackness above her. There would be more to come, she thought, more distrust, more questions, more sidelong glances. She should have let Mr. Tilsdale choke to death. That was what they’d expected.
When Elise’s eyelids slowly drooped, she wasn’t surprised to see the black-haired woman behind her lids. This time, the distance between them was too far to feel threatening. The thread between them was gossamer—sticky, but weak. There was a ceiling above her, Elise thought. There had to be.
As she fell asleep, she watched the black-haired woman gather up the thread and roll it into a ball as though she was preparing to knit it into something. As the ball grew, so did her arms, and she seemed to gain a second elbow. Two more arms emerged from her ribcage and she fell onto her stomach as her legs arched out behind her. She brought the ball of goo up to her mandibles and began rolling the entire thing forward towards Elise, scuttling like a beetle as she approached with the sands of the desert slipping under her feet.
Elise pressed her lips together as tight as she could, but for some reason she was frozen to the bed and the beetle pushed its prize straight into her mouth. She felt the goo-ball being rolled down along her tongue, and then the black-haired woman’s six legs scratched against the narrow wall of her epiglottis and her glottis before moving into her esophagus. Suddenly unfrozen, Elise sat up and clutched at her neck and dug at her skin to get the bug out, but there was no access hole. There was only one other way to remove the beetle. She swallowed hard and it slipped further down. The sphincter to her stomach opened and then shut quickly.
Elise waited. Her stomach gurgled. Then she felt the beetle again—duodenum, small intestine, large intestine, rectum. She got up and sat on the pot and waited some more, then stood and looked behind her. An emerald scarab, set in glittering gold sat in the bottom of the bowl. It held the moon above its head with the soft wings of time eternal.
The dream was completely erased from Elise’s memory the next morning by a pounding headache and a vague sense of urgency which she fought by forcing herself to sit an extra five minutes on the side of the bed to pick boiled beef from her teeth. Knowing she’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, she longed to pull the covers back over her head, but Mary’s bed was already empty, and she’d never hear the end of it if she went back to sleep. She rubbed her temples and ignored the nagging feeling that she was forgetting something important; that something, which belonged to her, was missing. She was missing lots of things, she rationalized—her apartment, her car, her cell phone, her job...her life.
She had already tied all the complicated laces of her corset around her chest before she realized someone had left her a basin on the little rickety table with a steaming pitcher of water and a wedge of soap. Elise sighed heavily and began untying her stays. Mary must have decided to reward her, she decided. The plump barmaid was strangely fond of Mr. Tilsdale. The water felt good, but standing naked in the cold room with nothing but a sponge to keep her warm was not the equivalent of a hot shower. And a bottle of shampoo would have been nice.
Once dressed, her first stop was to Mr. Tilsdale’s room. He was having difficulty drawing a breath through the paper trach
tube that had gotten soggy overnight, so Elise found Mr. Tilsdale’s broken pipe, cleaned out as much tar as she could from inside the walls of the stem, and gently inserted it into the incision in his neck. The rattling sound that came through the pipe as he breathed was disconcerting, but his smiled thanks reassured Elise that he would be fine for the next few hours.
After she tied a scarf around his neck to secure the breathing tube, she brushed a spot off his shoulder. She looked closer when the spot scratched the back of her hand. A splinter from the broken chair, as thick as a pencil, had lodged itself in the muscle of his shoulder. She felt her stomach sink. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Mr. Tilsdale. She was sorry for having missed seeing the splinter the night before. If she had done a full assessment he wouldn’t have spent the last eight hours with a piece of chair sticking out of his skin. A good nurse always does a full assessment of her patients, she thought, berating herself.
There was enough of the splinter sticking out that she was easily able to take it between her thumb and forefinger, but as she drew it out, it seemed to keep coming. It had to be at least three inches long, assuming the tip hadn’t broken off somewhere in his flesh. She pressed the edge of the sheet over the tiny wound, but there wasn’t much bleeding. “All better now?” she asked. Mr. Tilsdale closed his eyes. It looked like he would have sighed, if he could have. Elise drew the blankets up and tucked him in before heading downstairs to start her day.
A whispered conversation between Mary and Mrs. Postlethwaite stopped quite suddenly as Elise entered the hot kitchen, and they stared with wide eyes as she moved to find the broom. She was starving, but her desire to get out of the kitchen and away from the puzzled looks was keener. “Don’t bother with breakfast. I’m not hungry,” she said to no one in particular. She grabbed the broom and an apple from the larder and returned upstairs.