Cloudsplitter (18 page)

I saw several women and avoided passing each one by crossing the street to the other side. But then came one I could not avoid, and after I had passed her by with my habitually averted gaze, she called out, “Hullo, Red! Would y’ be needin’ company tonight?”

She was a girl, practically, I had glimpsed that much, and red-haired herself, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with bright white powder all over her face and a broad slash of painted lips and smudge-blackened eyes. She wore erratic scraps of cloth elaborately draped across her shoulders, wrapped, sashed, and pinned so as to suggest an exotic gown, although it was more a child’s motley costume than a woman’s dress.

I stopped and turned back to her, and she said, with a curl to her voice and a pronunciation that was noticeably Irish, “You’re a big feller, ain’t you, now.”

Because I could see that she was a child, she did not frighten me as a full-grown woman would, and I took a step towards her. “I’m ... I’m only out for a walk,” I said. She was small and thin. Her head, covered with a crumpled black lace bonnet, came barely to my chest, the thickness of her wrist seemed not much greater than that of my thumb, and her waist was smaller than the circumference of my right arm.

When I approached her, she stopped smiling and stepped back from me into a bank of shadows that fell from a cut-stone retaining wall. We were down by the canal tow path, with the river passing in the darkness below and a cobbled street out of view above. I heard a horse clop past and the iron-sheathed wheels of a wagon. It was a lonely, dark, and dangerous place for a girl, even a girl such as she—perhaps especially for one such as she, whose purpose for being there was to solicit the attentions of men likely to be drunk or angry, men likely to regard her as disposable. More particularly, of course, she was there to solicit men like me—timid, passionately curious bumpkins, who would pay to use her, yes, but would not otherwise harm her.

I was useless to her, however, a waste of her time, for I had no more than a few loose coins in my pocket. Father, I thought, with more coins in his pocket than I, would try to save such a woman. He would lecture her on the evils of her ways and give her his last money and instruct her to go home and feed herself and her babes, if she had any. John and Jason were both recently married and, even if they had been as unattached as I, would have done likewise. I knew that I, however, had I the means, would only try to use her. I am confident that Father never in his life performed the sexual act outside the matrimonial bed (where, to be sure, he performed it frequently); the same for my brothers; but I, by contrast, even at the young age of twenty-four, still and perhaps forever too much the son and brother, could not imagine myself as husband, as father, as regular visitor to the marriage bed. And so here I was, where my father and brothers would never be, soliciting a prostitute.

Though I was a full-grown man, I wore my manhood like an ill-fitting costume—not unlike the way the girl before me wore her make-up and rags, her woman’s costume. We had met in the shadows of a high stone wall, two children ineptly disguised as adults. But where she had costumed herself as a grown woman in order to keep from starving or freezing to death, I was a child got up merely to accommodate the size and appearance and the startling impulses of a man’s body. But I was probably no more successful at disguising my childishness than she, and in a diminished sense, I, too, was in danger out here—a cull, easy prey to robbers, tricksters, confidence men and women, cutpurses and cutthroats of every stripe.

“I... I have no money!’ I said to her.

“Aw, come on, now, a nicely dressed feller like yourself?”

“Yes. I live not far from here. I’m just walking, out for a walk... as I said. I... I like to be by the river.”

“Then what d’ you want with me?” She took a further, backwards step into the deeper shadows, and I could not make out her powdered and painted face any longer.

“Nothing. Nothing. Just... I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t scare me.”

“No?” I moved towards her, and she jumped awkwardly away, like a broken-winged bird, her parti-colored feathers all dusty and awry. I reached out with my right hand and placed it on her bony shoulder. Instantly, she ducked out from under it and turned her back to me, pressing herself against the cold stone wall.

“I won’t hurt you,” I whispered.

“You can’t touch me ‘less’n you pay.”

I reached into my pocket and drew out the few coins that remained, a gratuity I had received the day before from a Lowell merchant who’d had me haul five hundred weight bales of wool to his cart-copper pennies, enough for a single loaf of bread, no more. “Here, this is all I’ve got.” Looking warily at me, she half turned and opened her tiny hand; I passed her the coins, and they disappeared into her rags at once.

I peered down at my feet, embarrassed and unsure of what to do next, and when I looked up again, the girl had slid down along the wall and was about to bolt. “Hey, where’re you off to!”

“No place!” she said, alarmed, and stood stock-still, half hidden in the darkness.

“But you took my money!”

“Y’ don’t get much for coppers, y’ know.”

“But you were running off

“I was only movin’ out of the walkway some. C’m’ere, an’ be nice, mister. Don’t fret none, I’ll give you some of what y’ want, darlin’. C’m’ere, now,” she said to me in a lulling tone, as if she were trying to calm a large, frightened animal.

I moved abruptly to her but did not dare touch her this time. I was not afraid of her so much as afraid of myself. If I touched her, I did not know what would follow. Then, suddenly, it was she who had touched me. Her hand stroked me between my thighs, and a second later she was unbuttoning me, using both her hands. Before I could fully register what was happening, it was over: she was standing and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, a distant look on her face, as if she were calculating the few measly items that she might purchase with the pennies I had given her.

I turned away and quickly buttoned my trousers. “I... I’m sorry!’ I said, without looking around at her.

“What for?”

I turned and faced her. She drew her shawl over her scrawny shoulders and seemed about to leave. “Well... that, I guess.”

“You got what y’ paid for. No more.”

“Yes, I know. You’re right. I just. .. well, it’s terribly wrong, that’s all. And I’m sorry for that.”

She shrugged and started off. “G’bye, dearie. Come back when you get your wages.”

“Wait!” I called. The girl stopped a few paces off, and I ran up to her. “Don’t go yet.”

She studied my face carefully, uncertain, a little curious, perhaps, but somewhat frightened as well.

I spoke softly. “I wonder... I was wondering if I might... look at you. I’m sorry... I thought, I wonder if you might let me see you.”

She cast a look at me aslant, then glanced up and down the walkway, as if seeking an escape route. “No. No looks. Y’ got what y’ paid for, mister.”

Without touching her, I placed my right hand and left forearm against the wall on either side of her, trapping her in front of me. “I want only to look at you,” I said. “Just for a moment.”

“Look
at me? What do y’ mean? My bubbies y’ want to see?”

“Yes. And the other.”

“The other? Naw, you’re daft, mister. You’re makin’ me scared.” She had drawn down and in close to herself and had wrapped her thin arms tightly around her chest, making her seem even more like a child than before. Her large, smudged eyes looked plaintively up at me. “Please... just let me go now, mister.”

“First let me look at you. Then you can go. I won’t hurt you.”

“Just my bubbies?”

“Yes.”

“Not the other?”

No.

Slowly, she unwrapped her arms, reached under her shawl and fumbled momentarily with the buttons of her frock, and then she drew the clothing aside and showed me herself—a bony pink chest with tiny breasts. The fragile, innocent body of a child. For a second only, I stared, wishing suddenly that I were as able as she to open my own shirt and bare my breast and have it be the breast of a boy and not my thick, heavy-haired chest. So that, even as I humiliated her, I frankly envied her—when at last I realized what I was doing and was shot through with shame and looked away.

I waved my hands at her. “I’m sorry! Please forgive me” I said. “Please, cover yourself. I’m so sorry... to have done this to you,” I said. Then suddenly, not knowing what else to do, I got down on my knees before her and in silence hung my head.

“Well, you are some crack-brained cull, mister,” the girl said. She stepped around my prostrate form, and I heard her footsteps clack against the stone as she made her escape. When I looked up, she was gone. I was alone in the darkness. I heard the slosh of the river down below and the creak and groan of boats and barges bumping against the piers. On the street above, a pair of drunken men walked past. One laughed, the other sang a bit of a bawdy song.

He who once a good name gets
May piss a-bed and say he sweats...

They both laughed and passed by. Alone in the night once again, I walked for hours after that, aimless, confused, frightened by the appalling knowledge I had obtained—not knowledge of women in general or of the particular poor, nameless Irish girl whom, for a few pennies, I had used as a common whore, but knowledge of myself. I knew myself now to be vile, a beast. On my own like this, away from Father and the rest of the family, cut loose from their moral and intellectual clarity, from the virtue generated, sustained, and perfected among them, I was but a sack of contradictions and unpredictable impulses: I was a boy locked inside a maris body, my childish innocence contaminated now, not merely by longing and self-abuse, but by sexual contact of the most disgusting sort. I had inflicted myself upon a poor, pathetic street urchin, a whore, yes, but a person who, compared to me, was honest, was virtuous—was innocent. Once again, I envied her, and at that moment would have happily exchanged places with her, if for no other reason than properly to punish myself for my transgressions and my hypocrisy and to reward her for her virtue and suffering.

It should be she, not I, who could freely return to a warm household filled with a loving and upright family; she, not I, who was able to stand alongside her father and mother and brothers and sisters in church and public meetings and to walk freely about the town in the daylight glow of respect and admiration from the citizenry; she, not I, who performed honest labor and received for it shelter, food, clothing; she, not I, whose father, guide, and protector was the good man John Brown. Let
me
be the harlot, the hired property of drunken, brutal strangers. Let
me
go hungry and cold through the nighttime alleyways and dark corners of the town, exchanging brief, obscene gratifications for a few pennies. Let
me
be the victim.

Burdened with thoughts such as these, I slowly made my sorrowful way home to Franklin Street, arriving there sometime in the middle of the night. The house was not darkened, as I had expected, and when I entered I was greeted by Ruth and John and Wealthy, all in their nightclothes, gathered together in the kitchen comforting our stepmother, Mary, who sat downcast at the table with a bowl of warm milk before her. She had been weeping, I saw at once, and when I asked what had happened, John turned to me and swiftly took me aside and informed me that the baby Ellen had died just minutes before. It was a mercy, he said, for the poor little thing had not drawn a proper breath for hours. Father was still with her upstairs, and he could not be separated from the infant. “It’s as if he cannot believe her dead,” John said. Mother—for he, unlike me, called her that—Mother was all right now. She had accepted the death of the child as an inevitable thing the previous evening, although Father had not, and she had prayed for her to go as quickly and painlessly as possible. But Father had stayed up two whole nights with the babe in his arms, believing that he could somehow save her, even, at the end, trying to breathe into her mouth. But she had died in his arms, and he had refused to lay her down and now was walking up and down in the rooms above, still praying for her recovery.

I remember John saying, “The Old Man can’t seem to let this one go.” And I remember that he did not ask me where I had been until this late hour. No one asked. Clearly, and rightly, my private adventures and torment were of no account here.

Suddenly, there was Father at the bottom of the back stairs, entering the kitchen, his arms hanging down at his sides, his head lowered, with tears streaming down his face. I had never seen Father weep before, and the sight astonished and frightened me. He sat himself down next to his wife with a groping hesitancy, as if he had lost his sight, and he placed his hands against his face and wept openly as a child. No one said a word. This was beyond our understanding. I do not think that Father loved any one of his children more than the others, and he had lost at that time fully half a dozen of his babes, and he had not wept over any of them, although, to be sure, he had grieved deeply over them all, even to despair. His belief in the Life Hereafter had always been sufficiently strong that he could view their early going as a gift from God for the children and a trial from God for him. But somehow this was different. It was as if this time he believed that he, the father of the child, was being punished, not tried, by her death. “The Lord is filled with wrath against me!” he cried. ‘The Lord despiseth me!”

“No, no, Father,” we all said, and each in his own way tried to console him. We reached out to him and placed our hands on him, and several of us wept with him. Although I did not. I could not. I backed off a ways and watched in shame, for I knew the true cause of Father’s suffering, over and above his grief for the lost child. I was the cause. I knew that Father was blaming himself for my sins, condemning himself for not having interceded with me in my frequent lustful wanderings, which surely he had observed and marked. And now he believed that he was being punished by an angry God for his inattention. I did not need to hear Father say any of this; I knew it in my bones.