by Mal Peet
“An’ if we send him back, who pays the fare?”
“We do.”
Mrs. Giggs grieved for her luck a moment or two. Then she turned her head and said, “Elsie, go on upstairs. I’ll call yer when supper’s ready.” The child fled. “He can’t sleep in the house, Walt. I can’t be doin’ with that.”
Giggs took his specs off and knuckled his eyes. “I know it. Where, tho?”
“I dunno. The barn, I guess, till we work somethin’ out. The hayloft.”
“All right.”
“Walt, I can’t scarcely believe this situation.”
“Nope,” Giggs said, and headed for the stairs while his wife went out the door, slamming it behind her.
Beck stood in the resonant silence. The savory breathing of the pan on the stove tormented him.
Giggs clomped back down with a doubled-over thin mattress under his arm, a blanket over his shoulder, and a chamber pot hanging from two fingers. “Foller me, boy,” he said.
“I’m hungry,” Beck said.
Giggs might have struck the boy if he’d had a hand spare.
“Hungry? Goddamn it, boy! We’re all hungry, and some of us’ve done a day’s work. Yer eat when we eat, if yer lucky. Now yer haul that box of yourn off the buggy and bring it over to the barn.”
It was a dim building that smelled of ordure, tarred wood, and sweetly of old grass. Giggs, cursing the effort involved, carried his burden up a ladder. At its top, he slung mattress, blanket and pisspot into a low, dark space.
He turned, looked down at Beck. “I ain’t bustin’ a gut to get that box up here. Yer can open ’er up and carry what’s in it up here yerself. When yer done, come over to the house an’ sit in the kitchen an’ keep yer hands to yerself. Understand?”
An hour later, Beck heard Walter and Annie Giggs kick their boots off on the porch. They came into the kitchen and pumped water into the sink and washed their hands. Giggs went into the hall and called his daughter’s name. His wife removed the clotheshorse, glancing at Beck as she bundled the underclothes together and took them out into the hall. She returned and put three plates on the table. Then she went to a cupboard and rummaged out an old cracked bowl. She set it down on the table a little distance from the plates. She lifted the lid off an enameled crock and took out a loaf of bread from which she sawed three thick slabs and a thinner one.
“Take yer coat off. Hang it with the others. And wash yer hands. Use soap.”
He did as he was told then watched the woman take the pan to the table and stab into it with a long two-pronged fork and lift out a rolled joint of boiled bacon strung snug into its shiny blanket of fat. She sat it on one of the plates. Beck watched its juice spread. Mrs. Giggs cut slices of meat and returned the remainder of the joint to the pan. She shared out the cut meat onto the three plates, ignoring the bowl. With a ladle she fished potatoes and bacon liquor from the pan. The bowl got a share this time. She distributed the plates to each member of her family and gestured at a low stool in the corner for Beck.
Beck walked over slowly with his bread and potatoes, intense hunger arguing with protocol. Giggs mumbled a number of words in some sort of prayer of thanks, and they all began to eat.
Beck pressed the bread into the liquid, lifted the bowl and, in the absence of utensils, drank down the broth, scrabbling around in it with his tongue for potatoes and scraps of soaked bread. He finished his meal nearly as hungry as he’d started it, the absence of fat pink meat in his bowl taunting him. He looked at the pan across the room and half rose from his chair.
Mrs. Giggs glared at him, placed the cover on the pan, and carried it away to the larder.
Later, he followed the swaying light of Walter Giggs’s lantern toward the barn. From somewhere to the left, huge ominous shapes shifted and snorted. The sheer clarity and numerousness of the stars overhead appalled him.
In the darkness of the hayloft the struggle not to howl fear and rage eventually exhausted him and he fell asleep. He dreamed that Brother Robert’s yellow fingernails were raking his back and woke up with straw stuck to his still-oozing wounds.
BECK LEARNED, IN the ensuing weeks, to loathe the Giggses’ animals. They were stupid and frightening and they stank and everything depended on them. Giggs and his wife and their daughter were their servants. They worked for the animals, worried about the animals, cursed and caressed the animals and, when they talked at all, they talked about the animals.
Because he feared and hated them, Beck was no good with the pigs. The pigpen was a horror to him. On his first morning Annie Giggs, with her skinny freckled legs stuck into gum boots and her skirt hoisted into a knot, handed him a bucket of whey and slops and led him over to the pen.
“This’s what yer do ever morning after the milkin’, all right? Mind yer don’t let ’em get ter the bucket afore yer empty it inter the trough.”
She lifted the loop of rope that fastened the gate. Beck balked. The ground was churned mud and excrement. The sows were grunting hillocks of filth with slimy nose holes you could see up and jaws that looked like they could chomp your arm off. The piglets were just squealing turds on legs, and they all came splodging and whingeing fast toward Beck.
Annie Giggs dragged the gate shut and screeched, “Git yer ass over ter the trough, boy, afore they have yer over!”
He forced his feet to plodge forward, but too late. The pigs were upon him in a stinking jostle. Fear and disgust made his guts contract and he let go of the bucket and threw up. The pigs ate his vomit and the contents of the bucket with equal enthusiasm.
He clambered dizzily back over the gate and fell to his knees. When he looked up the sky was a tilting backdrop to Annie Giggs’s furious face.
Then there was the teasing of milk out of the cows.
“Watch me, boy,” Walter Giggs said, “and learn. You learn damn quick, ’cause this’s what yer goin’ ter be doin’ twice a day every day of the year. Cows make milk, don’t matter if it’s Sunday nor Christmas. And the milk’s gotta come out no matter what.”
Giggs sat on the milking stool, hatless, and pressed his bony skull into the first cow’s side. He took a teat in each hand, almost tenderly, and began to sing. Not sing, exactly. Moan. Groan. A throaty hum that Beck slowly recognized, that took him back to the orphanage. The cow grumbled comfortably and adjusted her vast bulk. Giggs’s hands rose and fell, stroking the flaccid pink teats. Jets of milk zinged into the pail. When it was half-full, Giggs stood and slapped the beast’s flank. She ambled out into the sunlight, lowing thanks.
The next cow came into position and Giggs said, “Okay. Sit down and do what I did. There ain’t much of a trick ter it. Start gentle then go.”
Beck’s mind and his hands recoiled from the hot rubberiness of the cow’s teat; every time he touched it, his brain filled with Brother Robert’s floating pink thing, and he could barely bring himself to hold it without gagging. The beast’s reek, the ordure encrusted on her legs, repelled him further. Her heavy and restless feet close to his own worried him. Her milk wouldn’t come.
“Okay, boy. Stop. Now put yer head aginst her, like I done.”
Beck had to crane his neck to do so.
“An’ sing to her. They like that. Relaxes ’em.”
“I can’t sing.”
Giggs regarded him with a narrow eye. “Whaddya mean, yer can’t sing?”
“Well, I can’t.”
“Jesus wept. All right. Hum, then. Hum somethin’. I guess yer can goddamn hum, can’t yer?”
So he hummed the same tune Giggs had hummed. The Lord’s my shepherd, I shall not want. The humming was similar to, but better than, weeping.
“Now, git yer finger an’ thumb around a teat apiece. No, the top of the teat. Right. Now, squeeze firm and gentle and pull down. Like yer diddlin’ yerself. I reckon that’s something yer do know how ter do, doncha, boy?”
Beck gagged.
Four nights later, while Beck sat in the corner of the kitchen slurping beans and their stewing liqu
or into his mouth with a hand that was almost too sore and tired to do so, he listened to their talk.
“. . . useless. I mean, what we’re got landed with here’s just another mouth ter feed.”
“Well, I guess it’s early days yet, Annie.”
“That last one we had was piss-poor, but he learned ter milk a cow by now, Walt. For Chrissakes.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“I just can’t believe how slow he is at everythin’.”
“So what yer sayin’ ? We pay ter send him back? Get another one?”
The scrape of cutlery on plates.
“I don’t know much about darkies, Walt, but”— she shot a look at Beck crouched on his stool, face blank — “by all accounts they’re stubborn as hell. It ain’t so much as they can’t as they won’t. They don’t wan’ ter do a thing, they make out they ain’t got the brains ter do it.”
“I dunno, Annie. This boy, he’s . . .”
“Yer bein’ too soft on him, Walt. Yer know what? I bet if yer laid the whip ter him he’d be milkin’ good as you ’n’ me in no time at all.”
A pause. “Walt?”
“Yeah. I hear yer.”
When Beck’s best efforts had resulted in just enough milk to cover the bottom of the pail and the cow was restless, Giggs said, “All right, boy. Leave it. Get up.”
Giggs picked up the milking stool and carried it out into the yard, which was filling with early sunlight. Numberless crows were settling onto the pasture beyond.
“Sit there,” Giggs said, “an’ don’t move.”
He limped off toward the front of the farmhouse. When he was out of sight, Beck went into the barn and fetched the pitchfork, which he leaned just inside the door. He sat down again on the stool. When Giggs returned, he was carrying the horsewhip. Beck waited until he was within five yards then got to his feet and pulled his sweater, shirt, and vest up over his head in one bundled movement and tossed them aside.
Giggs halted, surprised, discomfited. “Listen, boy, I don’t —”
Beck turned and gave the farmer full sight of the infected oozing welts across his back.
After a moment, Giggs said, hoarsely, “Jesus, boy. Who the hell done that ter yer?”
Beck stepped to the barn door and turned to face Giggs with the pitchfork in his hands and aimed it forward, trying very hard not to let it tremble. He said, “I’ve been whipped enough, mister. I’m not fookin’ havin’ it again. Yer try it, I’ll shove this inter yer guts, so help me.”
The boy and the man stood facing each other. Sounds — crow croak, a hiss through the trees, a porcine snuffle — leached into what had seemed an impenetrable silence.
“There’ll be no need of that,” Giggs said. “Put that thing down.”
“Drop the whip, then.”
Giggs puffed his cheeks out and looked over his shoulder back toward the house. He lowered the whip, let its thong trail in the dirt. “Put yer things back on. We’ll try ’er again.”
The next day, Beck could milk cows.
“I told yer tha’s what he needed,” Mrs. Giggs said to her husband.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yer were right, Annie.”
“Spare the rod ’n’ spoil the child.”
“Yep. Never a truer word spoken.”
ONE DAY, A day during the thick sweltering heat of August, Beck was fetched from the kitchen garden by Annie Giggs and made to wash himself with soapy water from a bucket. Then Mrs. Giggs sat him on a chair on the porch and cut his hair with scissors and swept the cuttings off the porch with a broom. After that, and to his complete amazement, he was given clean clothes: a white collarless shirt too big for him and trousers rolled up into a thick cuff. Mrs. Giggs stood with her arms folded, looking away while he put them on, then led him into the kitchen and through it and into a room she called “the parlor.” It had a window that was dimmed by the windbreak pines and contained some bits of furniture that looked like they hated people.
“Sit in that chair. And wait. There’s a person comin’ ter talk to yer. Don’t touch nothin’, ’cause if yer do, I’ll know.”
She went to the door, then turned back and said, “If yer say anythin’ bad about us, I’ll make yer life merry hell. And I mean it.”
He sat for almost an hour. A fat black fly bumbled at the window, then took rest at random places where Beck thought he might have killed it if he’d had something to use for a swat.
At some point, the fly’s buzz turned into something else. Something swelling as it approached. A motor car. Beck heard the chickens getting worked up. Elsie ran out to greet it. There were voices. Muffled conversation from the kitchen that went on a long time. Then the parlor door swung open.
“Well, here he is,” Mrs. Giggs announced, in a poshed-up voice. “Ignatius, stand up, please. This is Mr. Shillingworth from the Home Boys’ Society. He’re come all this way to make sure yer bein’ well looked after. He’s goin’ to ask some questions, and you be sure to answer them true.”
She shot Beck a look to accompany this last sentence, then withdrew.
Shillingworth was a narrow and exhausted looking man who seemed to be held vertical only by the stiffness of his clothes, which comprised a starched collar, a tight tie, and a brown three-piece suit. He closed the door and creaked himself into the inhospitable chair opposite Beck. He opened a black briefcase and took from it a cardboard folder. He brought out a pair of wire-framed spectacles from an inside pocket and fumbled them onto his face.
“Ignatius Beck, born August 1907. Father unknown, mother deceased. Yes? Sisters of Mercy orphanage, Liverpool. Yes? Sponsored immigration, March of this year . . . Christian Brotherhood’s receiving home, Montreal. And you’ve been in the care of Mr. and Mrs. Giggs for, let’s see, three months or so.” He looked up and removed his glasses. “So. My job, Ignatius, is to follow up on you boys. Make sure you’re well placed. Looked after, and so forth. In good health, and so on. I must say that you look in peak condition. The life seems to suit you, I must say. You look very well indeed.”
He smiled. Beck stared back at him hollowly through eyes sunk in a half-starved face, his skin pulled tight over the bones of his cheeks. He said nothing.
“Well, I’ve had a conversation with your, ah, guardians. And I have to say I was told certain things that disturbed me. That you are an unwilling worker. Lazy was the word used, in fact. That you are very slow to acquire even basic skills. That you need supervision for the simplest of tasks. That you seem, ah, sullen. The phrase Mrs. Giggs used was ‘never had a word of gratitude out of the boy.’” Shillingworth leaned forward confidingly. “But there are two sides to every story, hmm? Which is why I’ve taken this opportunity to talk to you privately, Ignatius. Is there anything that you want to tell me?”
Beck thought for a long moment then said “I fookin’ hate ’em.”
Shillingworth put up a hand as if to ward off the fly that still patrolled the room. “That language will not do. This is a Christian household.” He pinched his upper lip between thumb and forefinger. He reinstalled his spectacles and fished a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket. “If you have specific complaints, I am authorized to report them to the Society, whereupon appropriate action will be taken. Hmm? Do you have any specific complaints?”
“They hit me. I sleep in the barn with the animals. They don’ give me enough ter eat. They hate me and I hate them.”
Shillingworth stood and went to the window and gazed out with his hands clasped behind his back. “Goodness me, boy. Hate. I am shocked, to be frank. Shocked and disappointed. Don’t you realize how lucky you are? Don’t you realize how good these people are, to take a . . . a boy like you, an orphan, under their wing? To share their home with you?”
He turned. Backlit by the window, his thin ears were red.
“It seems that you have failed to grasp the fact that, unlike thousands of boys like you, you have been given an opportunity to make something of yourself. To make a life for yourself. Yes?”
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Beck watched the fly crawl up Shillingworth’s trouser leg.
“I am unsurprised that Mr. and Mrs. Giggs find it necessary to discipline you. You would seem to think it unreasonable that, in exchange for their generosity, you are expected to work. To behave.” He softened his tone slightly. “I have spent fifteen years with the Society, Ignatius, and during that time I have seen boys with very dim prospects grow into strong, hard-working, and respectable men. You could do likewise. But only if you mend your ways and seize the opportunity that has been given you. You are unlikely to be offered another one.”
Beck looked at the floor and said nothing.
“Well,” Shillingworth said. “If that’s understood.” He returned his folder to the briefcase and went to the door. “I shall make another visit in three months’ time. I look forward to meeting a changed young man. A young man who understands the benefits of both industry and gratitude. Who recognizes the chance he has been given. Do you understand me?”
Beck said nothing. He did not look up from the floor.
When Shillingworth had driven off, Annie Giggs took Beck by the scruff of his shirt and said, or rather hissed, “See? Yer ain’t got nowhere ter go. Yer ain’t got no help. None of us does. So git used ter it.”
ON THE FIRST day of September 1923, Brother Robert received a letter.
Dear Sirs,
That boy you sent us by the name of Beck have run off. He stoal are money and food and some cloaths and other stuff. We have told the Polis but their is no sine of him. I have discused the matter with my wife and have decided that we do need an other boy to help about the place. If you have one that wood suit we wood be glad of it but this time we want a white Christian boy.
Yours fathefuly,
Walter E. Giggs
Beck had slopped the pigs and was using a stick to get their crud out of the splits in his boots when Giggs came around the corner of the house and called him over. It was the last Sunday of August, although Beck didn’t know it. He had long since lost track of or interest in how the days unspooled. They were all as alike as the leaves on a tree.