As Meat Loves Salt

by Maria McCann

  During divine service I stood next to Ferris and heard the minister speaking a long way off, as I studied the shape of my friend’s hands, and how he clasped them. I could smell his skin and hair in the cold air of the church, and stood aching, my face a devout mask stretched over a rotten soul.

  On the way back I talked with Aunt, and felt better; but as we approached the house I started a toothache. The warmth of the fire indoors only made it worse, and the twinge grew to a clamour, until at last a torturing demon began jabbing the tooth with a hammer and chisel. Chewing cloves took the edge off it awhile, but they burnt my tongue. Meanwhile we ate goose, patties, a pumpkin pie, nuts: every dish spiced with pain. By the end of the afternoon’s celebrations I was groaning aloud.

  ‘Which one is it?’ Ferris and Aunt stood before the glass with me, each in the other’s way. They made me sit, held little mirrors and tried to shine candles in my mouth.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Aunt. ‘No black anywhere, no bloody gums.’

  ‘Perhaps a wisdom tooth,’ suggested Ferris. He spoke softly, his face creased up with my suffering.

  ‘At the front,’ I moaned.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘It feels like all of them.’

  ‘That’s the way with teeth,’ said Aunt. She flung herself into a chair. ‘You can’t have the lot drawn!’

  Ferris felt inside my bottom jaw and pressed each tooth in turn. ‘Here? Here?’

  I was quite unable to distinguish. All I could do was to hold on tight to the sides of the chair, and keep myself from sucking his fingers.

  ‘Would that my teeth were as good,’ he said. ‘Had we best fetch a surgeon in any case?’

  ‘We’ll try simples first,’ Aunt said. ‘There’ll be no surgeon willing to come out today, not for a tooth.’

  Tinctures were produced. They drowsied me so that I would fain have slept forever: but through it all the drum of pain throbbed on. Hot and cold objects were held to my jaw and produced no effect. Aunt shook her head, puzzled. It was still only six in the evening.

  ‘You are lucky, one way,’ she said. ‘You won’t be any prettier with a front tooth out but at least he won’t have to pull your head off.’

  ‘Is a back tooth harder?’

  She nodded vigorously. ‘Agony. I had one out once and I’d say it was a fair punishment for any crime!’

  ‘I don’t want to be gap-toothed.’

  ‘O, you’re bonny enough.’ I must have frowned, for she added, ‘Jacob! Vanity!’ and then kissed me on the forehead and said, ‘Forgive me, child. Let’s see what else there is.’

  Infused valerian was poured down my throat, but failed to shift the pain.

  Aunt paced the room. ‘It must be worms in the teeth.’

  ‘Get him to bed while he can still stand,’ said Ferris. I remembered Zeb with his broken rib. They helped me upstairs, for the various draughts had rendered me clumsy, and stripped me to my shirt. I perceived no timidity in Ferris’s handling of me but was scarce in a state to observe it. In my tired and drugged condition I should have melted at once, yet the agony crept by degrees into my upper jaw, my ear and the side of my skull. Lying on my side – my back – my front – with my face buried in the bolster – it was all of no use, for in the dark chamber torture blotted out my world. Fists clenched, I imagined my skull lit within by a brilliant white, which blazed out at my ears and eyes into the night. Illumination by suffering! I smiled at this theology but straightway the throbbing swelled, turned hotter and uglier and commenced cracking my skull from within, hatching from it as a chick from an egg. I beat my head on the pillow and cried out to Jesu. Again I heard the hurt men at Winchester. Well, I was not yet calling out to Mother.

  Aunt came in with a candle, Ferris walking behind her.

  ‘Here,’ she said, holding out a pewter cup.

  Poppy. The scent of it was familiar from Beaurepair. I drank the lot.

  ‘You’ll rest now,’ she told me. ‘Christopher will fetch the surgeon as soon as it’s light.’

  Ferris touched the side of my face. ‘He’ll get it out for you.’

  ‘Once it mounts into your head it’s a devil—’ Aunt’s whisper was cut off as she closed the door on me. Unseen, I shed a few tears, but soon after the poppy at last swept me away.

  My dreams were not so much wanton as disordered. The dead girl from Basing was in the chamber with me and asked me to give her her gown again. She was wearing it, stains and all. I said I had no such garment and she pulled back the bedcover to show my body fully clothed. She then took a knife from my belt.

  ‘Is this the one?’ she kept asking. I said it was. After that she touched my hand. She was cold and wet and I knew she was come from the pond.

  ‘Will you see the place where he cut me?’ she asked, and fell to unlacing her gown. I told her No, and she replied, No matter, she could show me here, and bending right over me she showed me a bloody hole at the base of her neck. I put my finger to it and she laughed and called me Doubting Thomas. My father was there but I cannot recall what he said or did.

  When I woke I could feel nothing at first. Then I understood that Ferris’s hand was on my cheek and he had brought up a candle. The pain leapt in my jaw.

  ‘Aaah! O no, no!’

  ‘The surgeon’s here, Jacob.’

  ‘It’s gone to the back of my mouth!’ I was in a terror lest we end by drawing my every tooth.

  ‘Mister Chaperain will know where to have it,’ he replied. He did not sound very sure. ‘I’ll tell him you are coming down.’

  I dressed palpitating, fearful as any guilty soul entering Hell’s Gate. I told myself I was lucky to have reached man’s estate and no worse pain than this, yet how can philosophy soothe bodily anguish? I knew then, and have often confirmed it since, that be a man never so trusting in God, yet he cannot hold his hand in a flame. Nature will not support it. The girl at Basing, she who was come to me in the night – what had she felt when the sword minced her entrails? She did not scream, was that only to cheat us at the last?

  The toothache had indeed moved. It seemed gone into the lower jaw on the right side, a white flame of agony, and what games it now played me, licking round the jawbone as if to burn me out. I tore at my clothes in the haste to don them and at last went down in my shirt and breeches. Ferris stood by the fire. Aunt was there, looking sick, and a little balding fellow with black curls round his ears. He was solid as a bull-dog and had monstrous knotted calves setting off his bandy legs. A chair stood in the centre of the room.

  I nodded to the bull-dog. ‘Mister Chaperain. Good morning, Aunt.’

  ‘Will you sit down, Sir?’ He turned to Aunt. ‘I see it now, Madam.’

  ‘He means,’ said Ferris to me, ‘that you are too big to hold and had better be tied.’

  ‘I will keep still,’ I said indignantly.

  ‘With respect, Sir, my experience tells me that even the bravest gentlemen cannot do so,’ murmured Chaperain. ‘Unless you will consent to be tied I cannot perform the extraction.’

  Had I not just been considering that Nature will not permit self-torture? ‘Very well,’ I said.

  ‘We will not bind you yet,’ he smiled at me. I sat down in the chair, feeling I think more frightened than ever I did in the army or of Walshe, either. A man may laugh when there is only the chance of pain, but not when he sees the rack and screw laid ready for him. Tied down. The sweat was already starting under my arms.

  ‘I’ll give you something,’ soothed Aunt. She pressed my hand and left the room. The surgeon now took a small hammer and began tapping at my teeth as if trying to crack hard-boiled eggs. One of his taps had me directly up and out of the chair.

  ‘Ah! That will be the fellow,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Pray be seated,’ and he again tapped in the same place. This time my arm flew up and I drove the heel of my hand into his nostrils.

  ‘Pardon me,’ I mumbled as we both rocked and held our faces.

  ‘No matter. That’s the one. Sir!
I shall lay out my batterie. You see the necessity for tying the patient,’ he remarked to my friend, who looked mighty sick already.

  ‘Poppy, quick!’ called Ferris. To Chaperain he said, ‘Pray give him time for it to take hold.’

  ‘I have other patients—’

  ‘You’ll find it worth your while.’

  Aunt came in with another jug of poppy mixture. I drank it off at once.

  ‘Courage, man, it will soon be over,’ said Ferris. He looked down on me with a kind of gentle grief. We sat awkwardly until the mixture began to take effect. I seemed to be dreaming while awake and slid sideways in the chair.

  ‘Now,’ said Aunt. I was pulled upright and felt rope go round my arms and legs. I asked if they were tying me up so that dog could bait me. Ferris enquired of me, which did I take myself for, a bull or a bear? and when I laughed they put wadding in my mouth on the left side which stopped me closing my jaws. I felt them laying stuff over my neck and chest. Something metal scraped along the teeth on the right side. I shut my eyes and kept them shut.

  ‘No need to screw up your face like that, we’re not under way yet,’ came a voice.

  ‘Alas, poor lad!’

  ‘Get a grip of his head! Ready?’ Someone seized me in a headlock from behind – it must have been Ferris – and the surgeon sat astride my lap to weight me down. I could smell his own rotten teeth, and the fingers which thrust between my lips tasted of herring.

  ‘Give me a clout, there, he’s drooling on me—’

  Red hot, white hot, wire driven deep through the quivering jelly beneath the tooth. Some eating poison thrown in a soft, open wound – I howled as well as I could through his fingers and the suffocating wad which was partly got into my throat and was like to choke me.

  ‘Madam, could you kindly hold the chair legs?’

  A crunching, splitting sound like the heart of an oak as it is felled. I was drinking my own blood. I tried to spit it out.

  ‘Stop that!…Give me the clout again!’

  ‘Let him spit,’ Ferris said. ‘Jacob, spit.’ He let go of my head so I could bend to the bowl Aunt was holding. The bull-dog was wiping his face.

  ‘Once more and we’re done. Get ahold, sir.’ My head was pulled back. Then came a cracking and tearing as though the whole jaw was being ripped out. I screamed from full lungs, over and over again.

  ‘There,’ someone said.

  The crunching stopped and pain, tasting of rust, pulsed over my tongue. Then I understood that too was blood. I opened my eyes. The little man was holding up the tooth, which to my fuddled sight seemed a huge belegged thing like a mandrake root. He got up off my thighs, his face all gory freckles.

  ‘You’ll be easier now,’ he said.

  Aunt came to me and wiped my mouth; I felt something wet and heavy being peeled off my chest.

  ‘Lord, Lord, the poor lad!’ she lamented. ‘And look – we should have taken off his shirt.’ I looked down and saw my linen brightly spotted where the blood had soaked through.

  ‘Do they all bleed like that?’ asked Ferris. He came round to the front of the chair and put some water to my lips. I opened my jaw to show I could not drink with the wadding, and he fished it out. Aunt was untying me.

  ‘O, they all bleed,’ said Chaperain. ‘Would you like to keep the tooth?’ he asked me. I nodded. ‘Keep it for a marvel,’ he went on. ‘It’s the soundest I ever pulled.’ He showed me the thing without hole or flaw. And then I fell asleep in the chair.

  My head was loose inside. ‘Sick,’ my voice said and Ferris rose from the corner and snatched up a pot. I heaved violently and a thread of blackish stinking stuff came trickling out of me. He stared at it, frowning, and called out, ‘Aunt!’ I heard her dress swish against the door as she hurried in.

  ‘He’s casting up!’ Ferris cried. ‘Look here.’ He pushed the pot towards her: she took it and swilled the contents about, sniffing at them.

  ‘Well?’ Ferris urged.

  She put down the mess and wiped my brow, then lips, with something perfumed.

  ‘Blood, gone black in his belly. What he swallowed.’

  ‘Will there be more?’

  She shrugged. ‘Keep nigh him.’

  But there was no more. I had been asleep two or three hours, for they had eaten. I could smell boiled fish in the room.

  ‘I want to go to bed,’ I said.

  ‘Becs shall put the warming pan in,’ said Ferris.

  ‘Now. I want to go now.’ When I stood up I was weak, but steady enough, so they contented themselves with mounting the stairs behind me. My feet dragged. A clean vomit-pot came with me and Aunt made me take a finger of cordial before I undressed.

  ‘What with poppy and lack of sleep you’re almost done for,’ she soothed. ‘All for a tooth, eh?’

  ‘It’s gone,’ I said. A dull ache nagged at my jaw. Where the tooth had been was a torn jelly which I tried not to stir with my tongue, for whenever I touched it the blood would well up into my spittle, like wine in water. I was as ready to sleep as an overladen beast, and no sooner had the sheets warmed to me than I was gone again.

  I slept all the rest of Boxing Day and woke, with a burning desire to make water, in the dark of the next morning. Having relieved nature I came back to bed all goosebumps and lay rubbing my feet together, but had no longer any wish to sleep and so waited, curious to know what o’clock it was, namely four, as I presently discovered by the bells of Paul’s.

  I rested quietly in the darkness and from time to time put my tongue into the tooth hole. The flesh there was tender and ragged: prodding at it brought a sullen twinge. That was no great matter. What tormented me now was that I could not see my way how to speak privily with Ferris and to know whether he truly believed himself a drunken dreamer. That incubus had been his jest. He knew how the incubus was called, he had uttered its name in the dark. But did he understand I had indeed been there? If he did, my talk could be only apology and excuse, and he, how could he answer me? Or, supposing him ignorant, why break it to him? He had said that I would lose no friend, and he had acted friendly by me since, yet I might still see him turn from me with disgust, or even put me out of the house. I thought of Nathan, and of the whisperings of the Voice. But the Voice was full of lies. I lay rubbing my butchered jaw.

  It did strike me in the midst of these benighted musings that there was One whose judgement I should fear infinitely more than my friend’s. The Jacob of the old pamphlet-reading days – who was come in his place? Until the night when I dispatched Walshe, and even after, I was wont to consider myself a good man. Caro had thought me quick to anger, but noble-hearted and upright. Yet I had not sorrowed for her as I ought. Other husbands were not so cold: again I saw Ferris bury his face in Joanna’s old shift. This brought me back to the question – had I committed an act of filthy lust? I recalled the violent flutter within me, and as I did so pleasure, that pimp to the Devil, suddenly spread in me like a stain: my prick stiffened and without thinking I put my hand to it.

  I had my answer. I made myself unclench the hand and think of scraping boots, a task I detested, but it was a long time before my blood would lie quiet. Shame festered inside me like the black vomit. There was one thing I could and would do, namely keep myself out of drink until Satan grew weary and the strength of it went down. I decided to write a letter to my mother, and did indeed write it in my fancy, and in this way gradually composed myself to sleep.

  But the Evil One, being rich in snares, at once spread his nets for me sleeping. Ferris lay with me in the wood. He was amorous like a woman, took my hands and put them inside his clothes. From this I suddenly started awake almost dying, unable to hold off any longer. The thing was done while I was still drowsy and the pleasure, shot through with a flash of pain in my jaw, sharp in the extreme. For a long time afterwards, I lay afraid to go back to sleep, wherein there now lay a danger. I had an incubus of my own, and already it bade fair to master me.

  FIFTEEN

  Broken Men


  When I finally went downstairs that day, I found Rebecca lying in wait for me as usual, full of questions about my health. I assured her that the toothache was gone and said I thought I could eat something now. She at once announced that she would bring me some of yesterday’s pie of preserved fruits, ‘So good it were a pity to have missed it’, which she had saved expressly for me. I said that was very kind, and when she left the room I let my head droop forwards onto the table, thinking that wherever men and women lived together their desires cut away the ground each from under the other. It needed only for Ferris to fall amorous of Becs to make our misery complete. The notion afforded me a tight smile; I straightened up and it was thus that she found me on her return.

  ‘I am right glad to see you merry,’ she said. ‘The Master and Mistress were saying what pain you had, for a good tooth too. Mistress said it was a shame.’

  She had arranged the food on a pretty Dutch dish and brought some salep without being asked, setting the whole before me with a flourish. O child, I thought, look elsewhere, I am sold twice over. I said, in common politeness, that the pie seemed very good, and this was enough to bring on an ogle. Taking some of the salep, I carefully mumbled the piecrust into the left side of my mouth.

  ‘Look, Sir.’ She was holding something out to me: the tooth. I disliked seeing it in her hand, and took it from her only to lay it down by the side of the dish.

  ‘It’s sound as marble,’ she said. ‘Mister Chaperain said your teeth were all excellent.’

  ‘Excellent!’ I snorted.

  ‘Are they not?’

  ‘Does he think I gave myself a toothache, for the pleasure of seeing him?’

  ‘O no, Sir. He meant only that you had good teeth.’

  I knew myself churlish and wondered why she so grated upon me. Hoping someone would soon call her away, I took up the pie and nibbled at it, halting to ask, ‘Where is everybody?’ – this being as near as I could get to telling her I did not want her company.