Chapter 4 #11
As the priest finishes his recitation and removes his hand from Liam’s head and turns to go back into the cottage, to what awaits him there on the table, to the work ahead, Liam stares in rapture at the man before him.
He sees an absolving smile, a pair of wise brown eyes.
He sees a representative of reason and sense, the very opposite of a ranting fool dressed in ferns.
He sees the end of uncertainty and fear. He sees the face of God.
How does a child committed to a workhouse ever make his way out of it?
Tomás thought his way around this conundrum when he lay awake at night in the dormitory. He turned it over and over in his sleepless mind. He considered it from every angle as he lay on the straw pallet he shared with three or four other boys.
Most days he rose before the morning bell was rung, easing himself out from under the coarse blanket. He would find an empty stretch of floor, perhaps over by the window, put a hand into his pocket and draw out what was stowed there—one or two pale slivers of raw chalk—and circle them in his palm.
It was possible to find them while you crossed the yard if you kept your eyes on the ground.
Easy to bend at the knee, snatch one up and hide it in your pocket.
The chalkstones were purest white, soft and crumbling in texture, and if pushed against a wall or a floorboard, they left a trail of themselves, in whichever direction you might choose.
It was a ritual he would enact until the very end of his life, when he was an ancient, bearded enigma, living half wild, given to wandering roads and byways: to rise before anyone else and, taking whatever was to hand, begin to draw.
The rasp of chalk against floorboard, its dissolution into a powdery line that could be coaxed into a shape, which became a thing, real and recognisable.
While the other boys slept on, Tomás drew as if he were a bird flying up near the clouds, looking down on the land below.
He drew the workhouse, seen from above, as if the roof had been peeled away by a gale, its confining walls, the road curving away from it.
He drew rivers, real and imagined, with bridges arching over them.
He drew woodlands and lakes, houses and fields.
And sometimes he drew a long road cutting through a deep valley, which ended with a village clustered around a cross.
Every dawn, via the chalk in his fingers, he found his way back to what he thought of as the source of his life, the fuse through which he might one day solve his troubles.
The habit helped him to think, soothed his mind: as his hands moved and his eyes followed, he was able to form plans and conjectures.
By the time he had filled all the available floor space, the morning bell would ring, and Tomás would be sent with other boys either to the yard, where they broke apart rocks, or to a low-ceilinged basement, where they were put to work operating looms or mending shoes with stitching and glue.
Good trades to have, the wardens said. So he learned how to prise off a sole worn through at the middle and how to measure and cut a new one from toughened hide, how to tap tiny nails in around its edges so that they wouldn’t work themselves loose into the wearer’s foot, how to patch leather, and how to repair a broken heel with a metal rim.
He was instructed in the operating of a loom, learning the warp and the weft and how the two must be kept at a certain tension, one against the other, the shuttle passing back and back.
The work he loathed most was oakum-picking, where he had to tease apart the fibres of old ships’ ropes, his fingernails splitting as the day wore on, his palms raw.
The girls, he knew, were in a room next door, where they were set to the laundry or the cooking, or taught needlework.
He kept an eye out for Phina, the girl he’d met by the donkeys, among the others, as they were made to file from one building to another, her golden hair shorn.
She would always nod at him imperceptibly, and if they happened to be close, she would ask, in a whisper, How are you?
and Tomás was able to say that he was getting along.
He never said he was exhausted or hungry or had had his feet scarred from the cold or that his head pained him after a day of breathing in the smell of glue.
He never said how glad it made his heart whenever she nodded at him or asked after him, or how often she rose to his mind when he was working with his chalk pieces in the dim light.
Or how the expressive arches of her pale eyebrows and the dip at the centre of her upper lip had somehow become, in his mind, intermingled with his remembered valley and the frosty road.
He couldn’t stop himself gazing at her across the clamour of the refectory or at the far end of the yard, and he discovered within himself the desire to give her something, to put into her hands an object that might bring her happiness, and to have the pleasure of watching a smile rise to her wan face.
A chance came to him on an icy winter’s day when he was sent to the head warden’s office with a message from the corpulent man in charge of the loom-work; Tomás dashed through the sleet, towards the office, where he knocked, handed the folded slip of paper to the warden’s lackey, then waited to see if there was any reply.
Through the crack in the door, he caught sight of a blazing fire, the heat of which was weaving out towards him, making his head swim, bringing bright spots to the edges of his vision.
The warden was standing with his back to the grate, his coattails pulled apart, the better to warm his behind; Tomás saw him take the message and read its contents.
In a chair beside him sat a woman Tomás recognised as the warden’s wife, and he saw to his shock that she was wearing the shawl that had been taken from Phina when she arrived.
Tomás pressed his eye to the crack. He was certain of it: it had that fine wool weave of purples and greens, the cross-layering of grey, a pattern of triangles, a fringe of sky-blue silken tassels.
The door was abruptly yanked open, and a lackey ordered him to wait. Tomás tore his attention from the shawl, the wife with her complacently folded hands, and he nodded.
Then Fate, for once, went his way. As the warden strode to his desk to scribble a reply, the wife began to take her leave; she pushed herself up from her chair, gathering the shawl about her shoulders, then moved towards the door, which the lackey jumped to open for her.
She stepped past Tomás, head averted, as if he were invisible, and turned to bid goodbye to her husband.
The conscious thought of what Tomás was about to do failed to pass through his brain because he saw his hand reach for the narrow, blunt blade he wore slung about his neck on days when he was at the loom, a tool intended for the nicking and severing of strands that had become tangled in the machinery, and quick as a diving swallow, the same hand darted forward and sliced a single tassel from the shawl.
He had it stowed in his pocket before the wife or the warden or his lackey could see.
Back at his place in front of the clacking, shunting loom, he was appalled at his daring, appalled and exhilarated.
He wished he had snatched the whole shawl away from that woman, had yanked it from her ample form and run off with it under his arm—how little she deserved it.
But what if he had been seen? What if someone had caught him taking a weaver’s knife to the warden’s wife?
How close he’d come to a shocking beating, or worse.
He had to force himself to take gulps of the dusty, dank air to slow his galloping heart.
The scrap of shawl-fringe remained in his pocket for a week, then two.
He liked to twirl its silken weave about his fingers.
Almost a month later, he was caught day-dreaming while he was meant to be mending boots, and he was lashed on both hands and told to collect the night-buckets from all the dormitories.
He made sure to walk tall, not to show how the lashes stung and sang with pain, or how excruciating it was to lift the handles of the reeking buckets.
He took two to the midden, then another, and then he went to the door of the girls’ dormitory to fetch the last. As he bent to lift it, his shirttail wrapped over his palm, Phina was suddenly there beside him, her sleeve brushing his.
She spoke in a whisper, barely making any sound at all.
I heard about your beating, she said, and I’m sorry for you.
Tomás stared at her, aware that he must cut a pathetic figure, filthy and bleeding, stinking of foul midden air.
He glanced over his shoulder, then back, and eased his fingers into his pocket, and the brush of cloth against his injuries was agony, but then he held out the blue tassel and watched her face change from puzzlement to recognition to disbelief to overwhelming joy.
She didn’t smile, as he had hoped, but instead whispered, Tomás, Tomás, with tears in her eyes, snatching the tassel to her chest, and his name in her mouth was like water to a thirsty throat, how did you ever—
At the sound of footsteps behind them, they stepped apart, silenced, the girl hiding herself behind the door, and Tomás seizing hold of the bucket. As the footsteps crossed the yard, then died away down a flight of stairs, he heard himself murmur, We have to get out of here.
The words were out of his mouth before he had time to think, and he was horrified to realise he had used the word “we.” The awful presumption of it, implying that he wanted or assumed she would be coming with him.
What a fool he was, he chided himself, bending to heft his noxious pails, to think that a girl like this would ever—
We must, she said.