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Back to Moscow Guillermo Erades

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Ольга: (. . .) я чувствую, как из меня выходят каждый день по каплям и силы, и молодость. И только растет и крепнет одна мечта . . . Ирина: Уехать в Москву. Продать дом, покончить все здесь и – в Москву . . . Ольга: Да! Скорее в Москву. Антон Чехов. Три сестры

Olga: (. . .) I feel how every day my strength and my youth are leaving me, drop by drop. Only one dream grows and gets stronger . . .

Irina: To go back to Moscow. To sell the house, to finish everything here, and – to Moscow . . .

Olga: Yes! As soon as possible, to Moscow.

Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters

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F IRST I NOTICED THE cockroaches. Smaller, quicker. Every time the lights went on, I glimpsed their glossy mahogany shells darting across the floor. They were called tarakany and, perhaps because I liked the word, I felt no hostility towards them. They roamed freely around my room, enjoying the darkness beneath the rusty cot, crawling up the cracked walls, onto the desk – totally unconcerned by my presence.

Other than the cockroaches, Sektor E was deserted. On my first night I’d ventured into the maze of corridors hoping to bump into other international students. To my disappointment, I’d heard nothing but the creaking of the wooden floors under my feet. I’d located the communal kitchen, strewn with empty vodka bottles and crushed beer cans. The fridges were stocked with a wide selection of used ketchup 1

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and rancid milk, courtesy of the language students who had fled the university at the end of summer, just before my arrival.

With nothing else to do, every night I would go for dinner at the sixth-floor bufet. The bufet was always empty and smelled, like the rest of the university building, of rotten wood and disinfectant. I would sit at the corner table, trying to read a bit of Chekhov, the greasy plastic tablecloth sticking to my elbows. On each table stood a glass bud vase with a single red flower. They were made of plastic, these flowers, but for some reason the vases always contained water.

As soon as I opened my book, a chubby lady with bleached hair and heavy make-up would storm in from the kitchen, slap the menu on the table and wait, hands on hips, for my order – her beefy body exuding a kind of impatience and irritation I was, in those early days, unaccustomed to.

The menu in front of me, a simple sheet of paper, bore a short list of dishes handwritten in Cyrillic. To my despair, I was unable to identify the different letters, let alone understand the meaning of the words. Nor could I rely on the lady’s assistance – she had made it clear during our first encounter that it was not her job to make any particular effort to communicate with me, her only evening customer and yet a stupid nekulturniy foreigner.

Undeterred, I would stare for a few seconds at the menu, nodding slightly, as if to indicate that I somehow understood what was written on the paper, that I was indeed considering the different choices.

‘Soup,’ I would say, every night, but I’d pronounce the 2

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word in a guttural way, making it sound, at least to my ears, more local.

So it was soup every night, with Chekhov as my dinner companion.

Now, when I look back at those uneventful nights, I feel a soft wave of nostalgia washing through my chest. So treacherous is the nature of memory that I can’t fully evoke the boredom, sadness and disappointment I surely felt back then.

What I recall when I picture my younger self reading the short stories of Anton Pavlovich in an empty canteen, is a sweet sense of tranquillity which, in truth, I might have not felt at the time. I’m aware that it’s only from the vantage point of years passed that I now see those days as the calm prelude to the life I was sucked into – and to the tragic events that ended it.

One Tuesday night, two weeks after my arrival, I went for dinner later than usual and found two other international students at the bufet. They were chatting in English over the remains of dinner and cups of instant coffee. By their accents I guessed that the one who did most of the talking was American – the other one Latin American, perhaps Spanish.

They wore well-ironed shirts, hair gel, cologne.

I pretended to read my Chekhov book, excited but unsure about how best to approach them, not wanting to look desperate or lonely. I waited patiently for a pause in their conversation and, adopting as casual a tone as I could muster, I jumped in.

‘You guys going out tonight?’

‘Sure,’ the American said. ‘Tuesday. Ladies’ night at the Duck.’

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‘The Duck?’

‘Man, you don’t know the Hungry Duck?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Two weeks.’

And that’s how I met Colin.

I put Chekhov aside and joined their table.

An hour later, the three of us were heading towards the city centre in a battered zhiguli we’d hailed outside the university. Colin sat in the front seat, chatting to the driver, giving directions. I couldn’t understand what he was saying but I could see he knew his way around. Diego, who turned out to be Mexican, sat in the back, telling me how he had arrived in town, just a few months earlier, to study engineering. He had managed to score a little-known scholarship for Latin American students, he was saying, not too generous but enough to get by as long as he lived in the university residence. ‘Awesome place,’ Diego said, pointing to the dark city.

‘You’re going to love it.’

Following Colin’s instructions, the driver pulled over by a small produkty shop where we bought a bottle of Stolichnaya and a few plastic glasses. Then the zhiguli drove through avenues five or six lanes wide, crossed the river, and passed beneath hanging traffic lights, which seemed to work but were largely ignored by the driver.

The zhiguli dropped us next to a metro stop. By foot we continued through a covered alley into a dark parking lot. We arrived at a poorly lit door and joined a group of young guys waiting in the cold.

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‘Vodka time!’ Colin opened the Stolichnaya bottle and filled our plastic goblets. ‘To the Duck,’ he said, half smiling, ‘best club on Earth.’

Colin’s half-smile, I later learned, was a permanent facial feature, not meant to convey any particular emotion; every time he talked, the half-smile made him look as if he knew more than he was willing to share.

We drank up. The vodka warmed my throat. My stomach burned and shivered: the thirsty little Cossack inside me, expecting another quiet Chekhov night, had been caught by surprise.

More people arrived and joined the queue, bouncing on their feet to keep warm. As far as I could tell, they were all guys, all expats, all about our age.

After pouring more vodka into our plastic glasses, Colin grabbed my shoulder and said, ‘Believe me, man, there is no better place to be young, foreign and male.’ I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the club or the city, but I agreed with a wide smile.

I glanced at other guys in the queue. They were drinking, smoking, chatting. I couldn’t stop smiling and they returned the smile, with little nods. By the time we were done with the bottle of vodka, I felt an unspoken but strong connection among all of us in the queue – a sense of camaraderie and shared anticipation.

Suddenly I was no longer thinking about Katya or Amsterdam. The thirsty little Cossack was cheerful: up on his horse, rattling his sabre, ready for battle.

At eleven sharp the door of the club was opened from the 5

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inside and I found myself carried through the entrance by an all-male stampede. I was pushed into a corridor lined with mirrors, where some of the guys hurriedly retouched their hair, and there was a booth where we paid the cover and a cloakroom where we dropped our jackets.

At the far end of the bright corridor, a black metal door throbbed with loud music. As we approached, my heart pumping fast, I was taken aback by the stench of spilt beer and vomit. I held my breath.

Colin pulled the door and beckoned me in. ‘Welcome to the Duck.’

Stepping into the main room, I was slapped by a wave of wet heat. It was balmy and smoky and dark, and at first I saw only the colours of the disco lights – laser reds and greens and purples – but as my eyes adapted to darkness, I started to discern what, I later learned, The Exile was describing as the wildest clubbing scene in the Northern Hemisphere.

Hundreds of dyevs dancing under the strobe lights. On the chairs. On the tables. Singing, screaming, their eyes red and watery, their clothes drenched in sweat. A bunch of them danced topless on the bar, bouncing their shiny young breasts, waving their bras over the all-female crowd.

They had arrived at the Duck hours earlier, from all over the city, from the most remote metro stations and trashy suburbs, and by the time we guys were allowed to enter – Tuesday night, eleven sharp – they had drunk themselves into submission.

These were the same dyevs who just a few months later 6

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would wear fake designer clothes with glittering logos to make it into Zeppelin or Shambala, and would only talk to us if we bought them overpriced cocktails and glasses of champagne; but back then, at the Hungry Duck, they gulped down tons of free beer, vomited on the carpets, stumbled among the tables and, when they were so wasted they could no longer stand on their cheap high heels, they threw themselves into the arms of those of us blessed with the chance to live, at such a turbulent moment of its history, in the wonderful city of Moscow.

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PA RT ONE

Tatyana’s Lesson

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1

O N 8 J UNE 1880, shortly before he died, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky walked onto a stage in central Moscow and, in front of a cheering crowd, delivered a long and emotional speech to celebrate the unveiling of Pushkin’s statue.

According to several accounts of the event, which were captured in the diaries and journals of the time, the atmosphere was electrifying. Fyodor Mikhailovich himself wrote later that day that the crowd kept interrupting him, applauding enthusiastically every few sentences, standing up in ovation.

At the very end of the speech, the audience completely lost it when Dostoyevsky made his impassioned call to follow Pushkin’s example and embrace both the uniqueness of Mother Russia and the oneness of humanity.

What came to be known as the Pushkin Speech had an enormous impact on Russia’s intelligentsia at the time. It 11

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soon became one of the defining moments in the cultural history of the country – a new chapter in Russia’s endless debate between those in favour of a Western course for their country and those, such as Fyodor Mikhailovich himself, who saw Russia as a unique nation with a crucial role to play in the history of humanity.

By the time he delivered the speech, Fyodor Mikhailovich was an old man in poor health. He felt this was his last opportunity to set the record straight on Pushkin, to prove that, to Russians, Pushkin was much more than ‘just’ the national poet. In a letter he wrote to his wife a few days before the speech, Dostoyevsky had said his participation in the event would be essential, as ‘the others’ were not only determined to downplay the importance of Pushkin in Russia’s national identity, they were also ready to deny the very existence of this identity.

My voice will carry weight, Dostoyevsky wrote.

That day in June, Fyodor Mikhailovich talked about Pushkin’s prophetic existence, and his role in understanding and defining the Russian character. Dostoyevsky made it clear that, without Pushkin’s genius, there would be no Russian literature, at least not as the world knew it.

The speech was dedicated in great part to Pushkin’s masterpiece, Evgeny Onegin. Dostoyevsky focused on the character of Tatyana, after whom, he said, Pushkin’s verse novel should have been named. After all, Tatyana, not Onegin, is the central character of Russia’s most famous love story.

Tatyana Larina, an innocent girl living in the provinces, has a crush on Onegin, a sophisticated dandy visiting from the 12

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capital. She writes him a rather tacky love letter, but Onegin, who had somehow misled Tatyana, doesn’t write back as she’d expected. Instead, he rejects her in a cruel and condescending manner, causing her pain, humiliation and a lot of very Russian sorrow. There are some complications – and a duel, of course – and then Onegin splits.

The years go by and one day Onegin bumps into Tatyana in Peter, which back then was the capital of the empire and not the provincial backwater it is today. She’s all pafosni and elitni, Tatyana, because she’s managed to snag an aristocrat.

Onegin now realises how hot Tatyana is and tells her he really really wants her. This time for real.

In spite of the years, Pushkin tells us, Tatyana remains in love with Onegin. Now, finally, she has a real chance to be with him. So, what does Tatyana do? Does she ditch her husband and elope with her true love?

Nyet, she doesn’t. In the culminating scenes of Pushkin’s long poem, Tatyana decides to stick with her husband and, in her own nineteenth-century way, tells Onegin to fuck off.

A simple love story which most Russians know by heart.

Many are even able to recite entire chapters – ‘ya k vam pishu’, Tatyana’s letter, being an especially popular passage.

The symbolism of the story should not be ignored.

Tatyana, the pure girl from the countryside, embodies the essence of Russianness, while Onegin, the cosmopolitan bon vivant, is a cynical fucker corrupted by modern European values. Onegin’s life is about superficial pleasures. Tatyana’s is all about meaning.

Why does Tatyana reject Onegin? Dostoyevsky asks in his 13

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speech. Pushkin had made Tatyana’s feelings clear. Wouldn’t she be happier if she dumped her husband and took off with her true love? Fyodor Mikhailovich pushes his case further.

What would have happened, he asks his Moscow audience, if Tatyana had been free when Onegin finally made a pass at her? If she had been a widow? She would still have rejected him, Fyodor Mikhailovich says.

Russian as she is, Tatyana knows that there is more to life than happiness.

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2

‘T ELL ME , M ARTIN , WHAT impact has Aleksandr Sergeyevich had on your life?’

We were sitting in Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s office in the humanities faculty, a cramped room with ceiling-high bookshelves that lined every wall and partially covered the room’s only window. It was a couple of days after my arrival in Moscow, and we were meeting to discuss my research project. With her fleecy moustache and thick glasses, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna matched the preconceptions I had of Russian professors.

For her, asking about Aleksandr Sergeyevich was not a simple icebreaker – it was her way of testing my commitment to the research project and, in a wider sense, my devotion to the world of Russian literature. But I was newly arrived and unaware that Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was on a 15

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first-name-patronymic basis with Russian authors, so it took me a while to realise she was not asking about a mutual acquaintance – she was talking about Pushkin.

You mean that Aleksandr Sergeyevich!

Once I understood the implications of Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s question I could not bring myself to tell her that I – a doctoral student in Russian literature, a scholarship laureate, a soon-to-be-called expert – had never read a single line by the national poet, the father of modern Russian language, the very incarnation of the Russian soul. She would be devastated and I would be uncovered as a fraud.

She stared at me across the books piled up on her desk, awaiting an answer, her smile revealing the sparkle of a gold tooth.

Of course I had read about Pushkin – he was all over the place when I drafted my project proposal. I just never got around to reading what the illustrious man himself had written.

Sitting on the wobbly visitor’s chair, pondering what to say, I glanced around the office. The window, half-blocked by books, had been sealed around the frame with brown adhesive tape – a deliberate attempt, I imagined, to further isolate the academic space from the outside world.

‘Pushkin,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

Then, looking into Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s magnified eyes, I launched into an improvised answer on the impact Evgeny Onegin had had on me. The greatest love story, I said, so much truth in it. I added that I’d read Nabokov’s famous translation, and that it had so moved me that I’d resolved to 16

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learn Russian in order to absorb the poetry as originally written by Aleksandr Sergeyevich.

Lyudmila Aleksandrovna nodded slowly, visibly touched.

She removed her glasses and wiped her teary eyes.

She believed me. How could she not believe in a foreigner who loved Pushkin?

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3

‘T HIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS ,’ Colin says, his finger resting on an open page of The Exile. ‘I can’t believe they gave Propaganda two fuckies.’

Stepanov lifts his sunglasses, leans over Colin’s shoulder, glances down at the newspaper. ‘Propaganda is definitely no match for the likes of Cube or Papa Johns.’

‘Papa Johns deserves its two fuckies.’ Colin flips the page carelessly, ripping the edge. ‘They pack the dance floor every Sunday night with dyevs from Samara and Tula and fuck knows where.’

‘But there are very nice girls in Propaganda,’ I say, not fully understanding Colin’s point.

Colin looks at me, his Irish-blue eyes reddish from the night. ‘Sure,’ he says, half smiling, ‘but when it comes to taking them home, man, they are uptight. Propaganda is full 18

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of spoilt Muscovites. They’ve picked up stupid ideas from the West.’

The waitress is now refilling our coffee mugs.

‘What do you mean, stupid ideas?’ I ask.

Colin takes a sip of coffee, wipes his mouth. Then he takes a swig from his beer glass. ‘You know, they got it into their heads that decent women must make themselves unavailable.’

My head is throbbing, I feel sick. I look around for the fastest path to the toilet and see that the place is empty, aside from a table at the back where three Russian men are drinking cocktails and laughing loudly. For a moment I can’t tell where we are, or how we got here. My ears are buzzing. The lack of music fills me with sudden regret that we are no longer in a club. I see a buffalo head on the wall staring straight into my eyes, which scares the shit out of me, but then it makes me realise that we are at the American Bar and Grill, in Mayakovskaya.

‘Man, you should take that shapka off,’ Colin says, gripping Diego’s shoulder. ‘It’s fucking hot in here.’

Diego grabs his hat by the earflaps and pulls it further down on his head, though it still doesn’t cover his long hair at the sides. ‘My shapka is part of my look,’ he says, grinning.

‘It gives me an edge.’

We all laugh. Diego has only recently switched his Latino image, which involved heavily gelled hair and unbuttoned black shirts, for the furry shapka look, anticipating – he would later claim – the style Pasha Face Control was to make popular during the elitni era. But, no matter what he wears, 19

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Diego’s large hairy body and clumsy moves give him the air of a big placid bear.

‘This shapka makes you look like a tourist,’ Colin says.

‘Russians don’t wear those hats any more.’

‘Precisely,’ Diego says, raising his thick dark eyebrows. ‘The shapka gives me a foreign and exotic air. Besides, it’s a great conversation piece. All the dyevs ask me about it.’

‘That’s not even real fur,’ Stepanov says. ‘Where did you get that piece of shit? On a matryoshka stand by Red Square?’

I look at my watch and realise it’s six in the morning. My vodka-flooded brain is shutting down. The thirsty little Cossack is exhausted from battle, stumbling next to his horse, ready to crash in his tent. I can hardly keep my eyes open. I ponder whether to go to the toilet first or wait for my eggs and bacon.

This is two months into my stay.

In a way, Colin was right about Propaganda. It was at that time that Propaganda introduced a kind of face control. Not a strict door policy – that would come later – but they made an effort to keep the trashiest dyevs out on the street. Expats were always welcome, of course, all we had to do was say a few words in English to the bouncer and we were in. But Propaganda’s face control – which heralded the arrival of the post-Duck elitni era – distorted the night’s demographics, which had, up until then, played to our advantage. There were fewer dyevs inside the club now, and the ones who made it in somehow felt they could afford to be more demanding.

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In any case, as The Exile famously wrote back then, Propaganda remained the best place in Moscow to meet dyevs who were out of your league.

It was in Propaganda that I met Lena.

Thursday night: Propaganda night. I’d been drinking with the brothers, vodka and whisky shots at Stepanov’s place, then vodka shots and beer in Propaganda. After a piss run, I found myself standing by the bar, captivated by a pair of big blue eyes. Straight blonde hair falling over her forehead, stopping in a perfect line just above her eyelashes. Classic Propaganda haircut.

‘I’m Helen,’ Lena said.

The music was loud, so Lena and I had to talk into each other’s ears. Lena’s hair smelled of rose water and cotton candy. Her voice was soft and sensual.

I ordered two shots of vodka and we toasted za vstrechu, to our encounter. I held my breath, drained the vodka glass, bit the lemon slice, breathed again. The alcohol made a lovely burning pang in my stomach.

Lena took a small sip and left her glass, almost full, on the bar. ‘I like the DJ,’ she said.

I looked at the dance floor and saw Colin and the other brothers forming a circle around what I assumed were Lena’s uglier friends. The music was a tedious techno beat I didn’t really care for.

‘I love the DJ,’ I said.

Lena and I talked for two or three minutes, which, back then, was as long as I could go before my Russian started to fail.

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She didn’t smile, Lenushka, not even at the very moment when we first met, and, as I tried to make conversation, I couldn’t help but think she was somehow distracted and absent. Lena was distracted and absent, I imagined, because she’s a nice dyev and we’re in Propaganda and, whatever The Exile said, nice dyevs come to Propaganda to listen to the DJ and dance with friends. Not to meet foreign men. In her eyes, I thought, I’m nothing but a shallow Westerner, a soulless pleasure-seeker looking for an easy fuck.

‘So you’re an expat,’ she said.

Our cheeks touched accidentally. My entire body stiffened.

‘Student,’ I replied.

Lena was now fiddling with the lemon slice that came with her vodka. She looked towards her friends on the dance floor and for a moment I thought: she’s about to walk away.

Then she turned to me and finally asked The Question.

‘Why Russia?’

Now, I could tell Lena about my studies in Amsterdam. I could tell her about Katya and how she’d ripped my heart out and eaten it, leaving a hole in my chest. I could tell her how I’d had no choice but to leave the city. I could tell her how Moscow had not even been near the top of the list of universities I’d initially applied for. But that’s not what I told her. That was not a good story for Propaganda.

Instead, I carefully placed my hand on Lena’s shoulder, stared into her big blue eyes, and pronounced the magic word.

‘Pushkin,’ I said. To make sure she fully absorbed the 22

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sweetness of the sound, I separated the two syllables. Push.

Kin. Lena was now intrigued. I carried on and delivered the Propaganda version of my coming-to-Moscow story, telling Lena how the poetry of Aleksandr Sergeyevich had changed my life. I’d practised most of the sentences at language class with Nadezhda Nikolaevna so I didn’t find it too difficult to describe, in my simplified Russian, how I’d gone from discovering Pushkin to being interested in Russian literature to obtaining a research scholarship in Moscow. My story was a good story.

Colin said, with Moscow dyevs you just need a beautiful story that makes sense, it doesn’t need to be true.

To my surprise, I found myself whispering some Pushkin verses in Lena’s ears. Ya vas lyubil and so on.

Then, for a brief moment, Lena smiled. Lena smiled with her lips, with her big blue eyes, but also with her entire body.

She pulled her shoulders back and I caught a glimpse of a small golden cross dangling above her cleavage, sheltered by the lovely curve of her breasts.

Lena smiled, I thought, because she now trusted me. How could she not trust a foreigner who loved Pushkin?

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4

A S FAR AS I COULD tell, Nadezhda Nikolaevna was the oldest person I’d ever met. With ashy hair and deep wrinkles, she had reached that age where old people start to shrink and look pitiful. Yet, like most babushkas in Moscow, she radiated determination, a historical toughness visible in the way she pressed her lips together firmly and looked straight into your eyes.

I was meeting Nadezhda Nikolaevna four times a week in a small classroom at the humanities faculty. If I had been out the night before, which was often the case, I would spend our three academic hours – which each lasted forty minutes – struggling to keep my eyes open while she read bits from old soviet books and made me repeat words such as perpadavaltelnotsa, prepadavaltelnetsa, prepodavatelnitsa, which I couldn’t quite pronounce but just meant teacher, for chrissake.

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But, against my own expectations, the combination of lessons at university and chatting up dyevs in nightclubs seemed to be working – I was picking up the language. During our lessons, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who had been teaching Russian to foreigners for decades, spoke simple Russian and mimed vividly, so, after a few weeks, I was able to figure out, if not exactly what she was saying, at least the general idea she was trying to convey.

Sometimes I got it badly wrong though. One day Nadezhda Nikolaevna walked into the classroom looking particularly morose and told me she was devastated because her cherepakha had just passed away. I’d been to the Duck the night before, so cherepakha day must have been a Wednesday.

The remains of vodka in my blood had put me in a dark mood and Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s tragic loss made a strong impression on me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, regretting my inability to express proper condolences in Russian.

I didn’t know the word cherepakha. In my mind, I went through all family-related vocabulary I had learned so far, which at the time was limited: brat, brother; sestra, sister; syn, son; dochka, daughter. As far as I could tell, cherepakha had not entered my lexicon.

‘Life goes on,’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna said. ‘Let’s get to work.’

At that moment, confused by my unexpected encounter with death at such an early hour of the day, I couldn’t help but admire what I identified as yet another example of Russian resilience. I found myself thinking of Ilyusha’s death 25

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in The Brothers Karamazov, about The Death of Ivan Illich, about the natural and yet intimate relationship Russians have with mortality.

‘Cherepakha?’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna asked.

‘I don’t think I know the word.’

‘Yes, Martin, you know, something that something slow and something hard.’

‘I’m sorry, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, I don’t understand.’

Then, in a gesture I will never forget, Nadezhda Nikolaevna raised her elbows and moved her arms in a slow crawling motion. She tilted her head, inflated her wrinkled cheeks, and stuck her tongue out. It made a gruesome sight.

‘Cherepakha, cherepakha!’ she repeated.

She took my notebook, started to draw. First she made a big circle. Then, with the precision of an architect, she drew two short perpendicular lines on each side, followed by a smaller pear-shaped figure on top, a head, I realised, and I gradually understood what she was trying to draw.

That’s when I learned that cherepakha means turtle.

From then on, every time I encountered the word cherepakha, what came to my mind first was the image of Nadezhda Nikolaevna sticking her tongue out, and not the reptile she had mimicked for my understanding.

One day, at the end of our language class, Nadezhda Nikolaevna proposed that we go on an excursion into town later in the week. She thought that, as a prospective Russian literature expert, I’d be interested to see Gorky’s house, a beautiful art nouveau building in central Moscow which had been turned 26

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into a museum. I wasn’t wild about the idea of having to get up earlier to spend the morning in a museum, but Nadezhda Nikolaevna seemed really keen so we made plans to take our last lesson of the week to the city centre.

On Friday morning, I stood in the middle of the Arbatskaya station platform, among the rush of Muscovites, waiting for Nadezhda Nikolaevna. It was the day after I’d first met Lena in Propaganda and I’d had barely two hours’ sleep.

My head was aching and clouded; my throat dry. Yet, as I tried to identify Nadezhda Nikolaevna in the moving mass of people, I felt a cheerful tickle in my chest, an unusual feeling of excitement, provoked not so much by the prospect of visiting Gorky’s house as of meeting Lena later in the day.

Nadezhda Nikolaevna emerged from the crowd wearing a babushka headscarf and carrying a plastic bag. Out in the street, we walked slowly along the frozen pavement of the Boulevard. The temperatures had dropped in the last few days and we were both tucked into our winter coats. Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s gait was stooped and – in my head – turtle-like.

For a brief moment, it crossed my mind to offer her my arm, but then I thought the gesture condescending, a bit ridiculous, and I continued walking at arm’s length.

We turned left at Malaya Nikitskaya and soon reached Gorky’s house. The babushkas taking care of the museum were almost as old as Nadezhda Nikolaevna. After paying for the tickets, we were ordered to wear giant felt slippers over our shoes so as not to damage the original parquet floors.

Slippers strapped on, we glided carefully over the polished floors of the museum. I was particularly impressed by the 27

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large library, which, according to a laminated leaflet in faulty English, contained Gorky’s own books, most of which were annotated in the margins by the great writer himself.

Despite my Propaganda hangover, I tried my best to follow Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s enthusiastic explanations about the beautiful house and Gorky’s life. The mansion, she was saying, had been commissioned in the early 1900s by a wealthy banker called Ryabushinsky. After 1917, the building had been expropriated by the Bolsheviks and used as headquarters for several soviet institutions. When, in the early 1930s, Gorky returned from Italy, he was bestowed with plenty of honours, including, Nadezhda Nikolaevna said, renaming both Tverskaya Street and the city of Nizhny Novgorod after him. Stalin awarded him the Ryabushinsky mansion, with the intention that it would become an intellectual hub for soviet writers.

As I listened to her talk, I pictured Gorky and his illustrious visitors – which, I was told, included Stalin himself – discussing literature and socialism beneath the stained-glass windows and carved wooden frames. Every now and then, my mind would temporarily drift from Gorky to Propaganda, as I was bombarded by flashes of the previous night. The big blue eyes. The goodbye kiss.

Nadezhda Nikolaevna seemed proud of the museum. I made sure that I looked impressed by everything she was telling me, even if I missed some of her explanations. When we were done with the first floor, we tackled the spectacular staircase, which had a wavy banister that ended in a bronze jellyfish-like lamp. I let her go first, and discreetly positioned 28

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myself behind, worried that, with the cumbersome slippers, she might trip and roll down this fine but slippery example of Russian art nouveau.

Half an hour later, as we walked back towards Arbatskaya, Nadezhda Nikolaevna suggested that we find a café and sit for some tea. ‘The visit only took us one hour,’ she said, ‘we still have time left.’

I was hoping to stay around the centre, see if Stepanov was at home so that I could crash on his couch for a couple of hours before meeting Lena.

‘It was a very interesting visit,’ I said. ‘I think we can consider it a full lesson. Let’s stop here and meet next week.’

‘Martin, I would prefer if we finish our lesson time. I’m paid for a three-hour lesson and it’s my job to give it to you.’

She looked determined. Not wanting to offend her sense of duty or make her feel I didn’t value her teaching, I agreed to continue our lesson.

We walked into the Old Arbat. A few stands stood in the middle of the pedestrian street, selling wares for tourists: soviet flags, matryoshka dolls, lacquered boxes, painted eggs.

We walked into the first café we saw. It was warm and cosy inside. The wood-panelled decor imitated a traditional Russian country house and included, near the entrance, a real stuffed cow. We sat at a small table by the window, facing each other, and ordered a pot of black tea.

I was afraid we wouldn’t have much to talk about, but Nadezhda Nikolaevna continued speaking about Gorky. To my surprise, in the intimacy of the café, she was giving me an entirely different spin on Gorky’s story. As I understood it, 29

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Nadezhda Nikolaevna was now telling me that Gorky was a sell-out. While he’d written very interesting stuff in his early years, after 1917 he’d become a puppet of the soviet regime, especially following his return from Italy. The house we’d just visited, I was being told, was unworthy of a writer who claimed to represent the proletariat. In exchange for supporting Stalin’s increasingly totalitarian regime, Gorky had been granted plenty of favours, including a position as president of the Writers’ Union.

‘And for what?’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna said. ‘He didn’t write a single good line after the revolution.’

I wondered why Nadezhda Nikolaevna hadn’t told me this version of Gorky’s story while we were inside the museum.

Perhaps, I thought, she was afraid that the dezhurnayas following us across the rooms – to ensure that we didn’t break or steal anything, I’d assumed – would intervene if she deviated from the official version of Gorky’s story as presented by the museum.

When the tea arrived, Nadezhda Nikolaevna took a small foilwrapped parcel from her plastic bag and placed it at the centre of the table. ‘A little surprise,’ she said, smiling. She unwrapped the parcel, uncovering a napkin with a few rolled-up blinis.

‘I made them myself for our little excursion,’ she said proudly, as she extended the napkin with the blinis next to the teapot. ‘I hope you like blinis with tvorog.’

Noticing my hesitation, Nadezhda Nikolaevna explained that it was fine to bring your own food to cafés in Moscow.

‘The food in these places is expensive and not very good,’ she said.

I could see from the menu that it was possible to order an 30

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entire meal for two for the price of a cocktail in Propaganda.

I took one of the blinis and had a bite. Buttery, sweet, delicious.

‘They are lovely,’ I said.

Over tea and blinis, Nadezhda Nikolaevna continued with Gorky’s story, telling me how, in the end, the great soviet writer had fallen out of favour with Stalin and had probably been killed by the secret services.

‘They painted the walls of his bedroom with poisonous paint,’ she said. ‘So Gorky fell ill and died.’

‘Interesno,’ I said, nodding. I wondered why Stalin’s people, who had kidnapped, tortured and killed with pleasure, would resort to such creative methods to murder an ageing and not particularly dangerous writer. But I was getting accustomed to the myths and parables Russians used to explain their recent history. When the official version of historical events seemed artificial, the emergence of alternative narratives was only natural. These stories, some of which might have held a grain of truth, spread by word of mouth through Moscow’s many shared kitchens.

The hot tea was bringing me back to life. I was really enjoying our excursion. The Gorky Museum, the stories, the chilly air outside. I was particularly touched by the home-made blinis.

As Nadezhda Nikolaevna was finishing the story of Gorky’s death, the young waiter who had brought the teapot came over and planted himself next to our table.

‘Woman,’ he said, addressing Nadezhda Nikolaevna.

I had learned that, ever since the perestroika, Russians had had a problem addressing each other. The word tovarisch – 31

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comrade – previously used to address any fellow soviet citizen, had become politically obsolete. But pre-revolutionary language was not really an option: during the seven decades of communism, the old words for sir and madam were deemed too bourgeois and had fallen into disuse. Now, when addressing a stranger, Russians were left with little choice but to say man, woman, boy, girl, or – to people around my age – young person.

Nadezhda Nikolaevna, wrapped up in telling Gorky’s story, didn’t seem to notice the waiter.

‘Woman,’ the waiter repeated, now louder, without the slightest trace of a smile. ‘You can’t bring outside food into this café.’

‘Oh,’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna said, looking up and smiling, ‘but these are blinis that I made at home.’

‘I don’t care what they are,’ he said. ‘You need to order food from our menu.’

Nadezhda Nikolaevna blushed, embarrassed at having been talked down to – or perhaps, I thought, at having provided me with the wrong information about Moscow’s customs.

The cheerfulness she had shown all morning dissolved at once. She looked down, started to wrap the rest of the blinis.

‘Woman,’ the waiter said, not moving an inch from the table, ‘if you can’t afford the food in here, just stay home.’

‘Go fuck yourself!’ I found myself saying, in plain English, as I jumped up to face him, knocking over my chair.

The waiter, confused, stepped back and disappeared into the kitchen. *

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A few minutes later Nadezhda Nikolaevna and I were walking in silence along the Old Arbat. ‘I’m sorry I snapped in the café,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t my intention to make a scene.’

‘Moscow is changing,’ she murmured, gaze fixed on the pavement, a sad tone in her voice.

She seemed even older, more fragile – walking now with difficulty. As we moved along the pedestrian street, I offered Nadezhda Nikolaevna my arm. We made our way towards Smolenskaya, flanked by families and tourists. With one hand she clutched my elbow, with the other she carried the plastic bag with the unfinished blinis.

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1

Behold the man.

He shuffles out of Clappison’s courtyard onto Sykes Street and snuffs the complex air—turpentine, fish-meal, mustard, black lead, the usual grave, morning piss-stink of just-emptied night jars. He snorts once, rubs his bristled head and readjusts his crotch. He sniffs his fingers, then slowly sucks each one in turn, drawing off the last remnants, getting his final money’s worth. At the end of Charterhouse Lane, he turns north onto Wincolmlee, past the De La Pole Tavern, past the sperm candle manufactory and the oil-seed mill. Above the warehouse roofs, he can see the swaying tops of main- and mizzen-masts, hear the shouts of the stevedores and the thump of mallets from the cooperage nearby. His shoulder rubs against the smoothed red brick, a dog runs past, a cart piled high with rough-cut timber. He breathes in again and runs his tongue 1

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along the haphazard ramparts of his teeth. He senses a fresh need, small but insistent, arising inside him, a new requirement aching to be met. His ship leaves at first light, but before then there is something that must be done. He peers around and for a moment wonders what it is. He notices the pink smell of blood from the pork butcher’s, the grimy sway of a woman’s skirts. He thinks of flesh, animal, human, then thinks again—it is not that kind of ache, he decides, not yet, it is the milder one, the one less pressing.

He turns round and walks back towards the tavern. The bar is almost empty at this hour in the morning. There is a low fire in the grate and a smell of frying. He delves in his pocket, but all he finds there are breadcrumbs, a jackknife and a halfpenny coin.

‘Rum,’ he says.

He pushes the single halfpenny across the bar. The barman looks down at the coin, and shakes his head.

‘I’m leaving in the morning,’ he explains, ‘on the Volunteer.

I’ll give you my note of hand.’

The barman snorts.

‘Do I look like a fool?’ he says.

The man shrugs and thinks a moment.

‘Head or tails then. This good knife of mine against a tot of your rum.’

He puts the jackknife on the bar, and the barman picks it up and looks at it carefully. He unfolds the blade and tests it against the ball of his thumb.

‘It’s a fine knife that one,’ the man says. ‘Hant never failed me yet.’

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The barman takes a shilling from his pocket and shows it.

He tosses the coin and slaps it down hard. They both look.

The barman nods, picks up the knife and stows it in his waistcoat pocket.

‘And now you can fuck off,’ he says.

The man’s expression doesn’t alter. He shows no sign of irritation or surprise. It is as though losing the knife is part of a greater and more complex plan which only he is privy to.

After a moment, he bends down, tugs off his sea boots and puts them side by side on top of the bar.

‘Toss again,’ he says.

The barman rolls his eyes and turns away.

‘I don’t want your fucking boots,’ he says.

‘You have my knife,’ the man says. ‘You can’t back away now.’

‘I don’t want no fucking boots,’ the barman says again.

‘You can’t back away.’

‘I’ll do whatever the fuck I like,’ the barman says.

There’s a Shetlander leaning at the other end of the bar watching them. He is wearing a stocking cap and canvas britches caked with filth. His eyes are red and loose and drunken.

‘I’ll buy ye a drink myself,’ he says, ‘if ye just shut the fuck up.’

The man looks back at him. He has fought Shetlanders before in Lerwick and in Peterhead. They are not clever fighters, but they are stubborn and hard to finish off. This one has a rusty blubber knife pushed into his belt and a gamy, peevish look about him. After a moment’s pause, the man nods.

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‘I’d thank you for that,’ he says. ‘I’ve been whoring all night and the whistle’s dry.’

The Shetlander nods to the barman, and the barman, with a grand show of reluctance, pours out another drink. The man takes his sea boots off the bar, picks up the drink and walks over to a bench by the fire. After a few minutes, he lies down, pulls his knees up to his chest and falls asleep. When he wakes up again, the Shetlander is sitting at a table in the corner talking to a whore. She is dark-haired and fat and has a mottled face and greenish teeth. The man recognises her, but cannot now recall the name. Betty? he wonders. Hatty?

Esther?

The Shetlander calls over to a black boy who is crouching in the doorway, gives him a coin and instructs him to bring back a plate of mussels from the fishmonger’s on Bourne Street. The boy is nine or ten years old, slender with large dark eyes and pale brown skin. The man pulls himself upright on the bench and fills his pipe with his last crumbles of tobacco. He lights his pipe and looks about. He has woken up renewed and ready. He can feel his muscles lying loose beneath his skin, his heart tensing and relaxing inside his chest. The Shetlander tries to kiss the woman and is rebuffed with an avaricious squeal. Hester, the man remembers. The woman’s name is Hester and she has a windowless room on James Square with an iron bedstead, a jug and basin, and an India-rubber bulb for washing out the jism. He stands up and walks over to where the two of them are sitting.

‘Buy me one more drink,’ he says.

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The Shetlander squints at him briefly, then shakes his head and turns back to Hester.

‘Just one more drink and that’ll be the last you hear of it.’

The Shetlander ignores him, but the man doesn’t move.

His patience is of the dull and shameless kind. He feels his heart swell then shrink, he smells the usual tavern stench—farts and pipe-smoke and spilled ale. Hester looks up at him and giggles. Her teeth are more grey than green, her tongue is the colour of a pig’s liver. The Shetlander takes his blubber knife out of his belt and places it on the table. He stands up.

‘I’d sooner cut ye fucking balls off for ye than buy ye another drink,’ he says.

The Shetlander is lanky and loose-limbed. His hair and beard are dank with seal grease and he reeks of the forecastle. The man begins to understand now what he must do—to sense the nature of his current urges and the shape of their accomplishment. Hester giggles again. The Shetlander picks up the knife and lays its cold blade against the man’s cheekbone.

‘I could cut ye fucking nose off too and feed it to the fucking porkers out back.’

He laughs at this idea and Hester laughs with him.

The man looks untroubled. This is not yet the moment he is waiting for. This is only a dull but necessary interlude, a pause. The barman picks up a wooden club and creaks up the hinge of the bar.

‘You,’ he says, pointing at him, ‘are a skiving cunt, and a damned liar, and I want you gone.’

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The man looks at the clock on the wall. It is just past noon.

He has sixteen hours to do whatever it is he must do. To satisfy himself again. The ache he feels is his body speaking its needs, talking to him—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a mumble, sometimes a shriek. It never goes silent; if it ever goes silent then he will know that he is finally dead, that some other fucker has finally killed him, and that will be that.

He steps suddenly towards the Shetlander to let him know he is not afraid, then steps away again. He turns towards the barman and lifts his chin.

‘You can stick that shillelagh up your fucking arse,’ he says.

The barman points him to the door. As the man is leaving, the boy arrives with a tin plate of mussels, steaming and fragrant. They look at each other for a moment, and the man feels a new pulse of certainty.

He walks back down Sykes Street. He does not think of the Volunteer, now lying at dock, which he has spent the past week labouring to trim and pack, nor of the bloody six-month voyage to come. He thinks only of this present moment— Grotto Square, the Turkish Baths, the auction house, the ropery, the cobbles beneath his feet, the agnostic Yorkshire sky. He is not by nature impatient or fidgety; he will wait when waiting is required. He finds a wall and sits down upon it; when he is hungry, he sucks a stone. The hours pass.

People walking by remark him but do not attempt to speak.

Soon it will be time. He watches as the shadows lengthen, as it rains briefly then ceases raining, as the clouds shudder 6

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across the dampened sky. It is almost dusk when he sees them at last. Hester is singing a ballad, the Shetlander has a grog-bottle in one hand and is conducting her clumsily with the other. He watches them turn into Hodgson’s Square. He waits a moment then scuttles round the corner onto Caroline Street. It is not yet night-time, but it is dark enough, he decides. The windows in the Tabernacle are glowing, there is a smell of coaldust and giblets in the air. He reaches Fiche’s Alley before them and slides inside. The courtyard is empty except for a line of grimy laundry and the high, ammoniacal scent of horse piss. He stands against a darkened doorway with a half-brick gripped in his fist. When Hester and the Shetlander come into the courtyard, he waits for a moment to be sure, then steps forward and smashes the half-brick hard into the back of the Shetlander’s head.

The bone gives way easily. There is a fine spray of blood and a noise like a wet stick snapping. The Shetlander flops senselessly forward, and his teeth and nose break against the cobblestones. Before Hester can scream, the man has the blubber knife against her throat.

‘I’ll slice you open like a fucking codfish,’ he promises.

She looks at him wildly, then holds up her mucky hands in surrender.

He empties the Shetlander’s pockets, takes his money and tobacco, and throws the rest aside. There is a halo of blood dilating around the Shetlander’s face and head, but he is still faintly breathing.

‘We need to move that bastard now,’ Hester says, ‘or I’ll be in the shit.’

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‘So move him,’ the man says. He feels lighter than he did a moment before, as if the world has widened round him.

Hester tries to drag the Shetlander around by the arm, but he’s too heavy. She skids on the blood and falls over onto the cobbles. She laughs to herself, then begins to moan. The man opens the coalshed door and drags the Shetlander inside by the heels.

‘They can find him tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I’ll be long gone by then.’

She stands up, still unsteady from the drink, and tries impossibly to wipe the mud from her skirts. The man turns to leave.

‘Give us a shilling or two, will you, darling?’ Hester calls out to him. ‘For all me trouble.’

It takes him an hour to hunt down the boy. His name is Albert Stubbs and he sleeps in a brick culvert below the north bridge, and lives off bones and peelings and the occasional copper earned by running errands for the drunkards who gather in the shithole taverns by the waterfront, waiting for a ship.

The man offers him food. He shows him the money he stole from the Shetlander.

‘Tell me what you want,’ he says, ‘and I’ll buy it for you.’

The boy looks back at him speechlessly, like an animal surprised in its lair. The man notices he has no smell to him at all—amid all this filth he has remained somehow clean, unsullied, as if the natural darkness of his pigment is a protection against sin and not, as some men believe, an expression of it.

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‘You’re a sight to see,’ the man tells him.

The boy asks for rum, and the man takes a greasy halfbottle from his pocket and gives it to him. As the boy drinks the rum, his eyes glaze slightly and the fierceness of his reticence declines.

‘My name’s Henry Drax,’ the man explains, as softly as he is able to. ‘I’m a harpooner. I ship at dawn on the Volunteer.’

The boy nods without interest, as if this is all information he has heard long before. His hair is musty and dull, but his skin is preternaturally clean. It shines in the tarnished moonlight like a piece of polished teak. The boy is shoeless, and the soles of his feet have become blackened and horny from contact with the pavement. Drax feels the urge to touch him now—on the side of the face perhaps or the peak of the shoulder. It would be a signal, he thinks, a way to begin.

‘I saw you before in the tavern,’ the boy says. ‘You had no money then.’

‘My situation is altered,’ Drax explains.

The boy nods again and drinks more rum. Perhaps he is nearer twelve, Drax thinks, but stunted as they often are. He reaches out and takes the bottle from the boy’s lips.

‘You should eat something,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’

They walk together without speaking, up Wincomlee and Sculcoates, past the Whalebone Inn, past the timber yards.

They stop in at Fletcher’s bakery and Drax waits while the boy wolfs down a meat pie.

When the boy has finished, he wipes his mouth, scours the phlegm from the back of his throat and spits it out into the gutter. He looks suddenly older than before.

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‘I know a place we can go to,’ he says, pointing across the road. ‘Just down there, see, on past the boatyard.’

Drax realises immediately that this must be a trap. If he goes into the boatyard with the nigger boy, he will be beaten bloody and stripped down like a cunt. It is a surprise that the boy has misprized him so thoroughly. He feels, first, contempt for the boy’s ill-judgement, and then, more pleasantly, like the swell and shudder of a fresh idea, the beginnings of fury.

‘I’m the fucker, me,’ he tells him softly. ‘I’m never the one that’s fucked.’

‘I know that,’ the boy says. ‘I understand.’

The other side of the road is in deep shadow. There is a tenfoot wooden gate with peeling green paint, a brick wall and then a snicket floored with rubble. There is no light inside the snicket, and the only sound is the crunch of Drax’s boot heels and the boy’s intermittent, tubercular wheezing. The yellow moon is lodged like a bolus in the narrowed throat of the sky.

After a minute, they are released into a courtyard half-filled with broken casks and rusted hooping.

‘It’s through there,’ the boy says. ‘Not far.’

His face betrays a telling eagerness. If Drax had any doubts before, he has none left now.

‘Come to me,’ he tells the boy.

The boy frowns and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. Drax wonders how many of the boy’s companions are waiting for them in the boatyard and what weapons they are planning to use against him. Does he really look, he wonders, like the kind of useless prick who can be robbed by 10

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children? Is that the impression he presently gives out to the waiting world?

‘Come here,’ he says again.

The boy shrugs and walks forward.

‘We’ll do it now,’ Drax says. ‘Here and now. I won’t wait.’

The boy stops and shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says, ‘the boatyard is better.’

The courtyard’s gloom perfects him, Drax thinks, smooths out his prettiness into a sullen kind of beauty. He looks like a pagan idol standing there, a totem carved from ebony, not like a boy, more like the far-fetched ideal of a boy.

‘Just what kind of a cunt do you think I am?’ Drax asks.

The boy frowns for a moment, then offers him a beguiling and implausible grin. None of this is new, Drax thinks, it has all been done before, and it will all be done over again in other places and at other times. The body has its tedious patterns, its regularities: the feeding, the cleaning, the emptying of the bowels.

The boy touches him quickly on the elbow and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. The boatyard. The trap. Drax hears a seagull squawking above his head, notices the solid smell of bitumen and oil paint, the sidereal sprawl of the Plough. He grabs the nigger boy by the hair and punches him, then punches him again and again—two, three, four times, fast, without hesitation or compunction— until Drax’s knuckles are warm and dark with blood, and the boy is slumped, limp and unconscious. He is thin and bony and weighs no more than a terrier. Drax turns him over and pulls down his britches. There is no pleasure in the act and no 11

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relief, a fact which only increases its ferocity. He has been cheated of something living, something nameless but also real.

Lead and pewter clouds obscure the fullish moon, there is the clatter of iron-rimmed cartwheels, the infantile whine of a cat in heat. Drax goes swiftly through the motions: one action following the next, passionless and precise, machinelike, but not mechanical. He grasps onto the world like a dog biting into bone窶馬othing is obscure to him, nothing is separate from his fierce and surly appetites. What the nigger boy used to be has now disappeared. He is gone completely, and something else, something wholly different, has appeared instead. This courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer.

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2

Brownlee considers himself, after thirty years pacing the quarterdeck, to be a fair judge of the human character, but this new fellow Sumner, this Paddy surgeon fresh from the riotous Punjab, is a complex case indeed. He is short and narrow-featured, his expression is displeasingly quizzical, he has an unfortunate limp, and speaks some barbarously twisted bogland version of the English language; yet nonetheless, despite these obvious and manifold disadvantages, Brownlee senses that he will do. There is something in the young man’s very awkwardness and indifference, his capacity and willingness not to please, that Brownlee, perhaps because it reminds him of himself at a younger and more carefree stage of life, finds oddly appealing.

‘So what’s the story with the leg?’ Brownlee asks, waggling his own ankle by way of encouragement. They are sitting in 13

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the captain’s cabin on the Volunteer, drinking brandy and reviewing the voyage to come.

‘Sepoy musketball,’ Sumner explains. ‘My shin bone bore the brunt.’

‘In Delhi this is? After the siege?’

Sumner nods.

‘First day of the assault, near the Cashmere Gate.’

Brownlee rolls his eyes and whistles low in appreciation.

‘Did you see Nicholson killed?’

‘No, but I saw his body afterwards when he was dead. Up on the ridge.’

‘An extraordinary man, Nicholson. A great hero. They do say the niggers worshipped him like a god.’

Sumner shrugs.

‘He had a Pashtun bodyguard. Enormous sod named Khan. Slept outside his tent to protect him. The rumour was the two of them were sweethearts.’

Brownlee shakes his head and smiles. He has read all about John Nicholson in The Times of London: the way he marched his men through the most savage heat without ever once breaking sweat or asking for water, about the time he sliced a mutinous sepoy clean in two with one blow of his mighty sword. Without men like Nicholson—unyielding, severe, vicious when necessary—Brownlee believes the Empire would have been lost entirely long ago. And without the Empire who would buy the oil, who would buy the whalebone?

‘Jealousy,’ he says. ‘Bitterness only. Nicholson’s a great hero, a little bit savage sometimes from what I heard, but what do you expect?’

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‘I saw him hang a man just for smiling at him, and the poor bugger wasn’t even smiling.’

‘Lines must be drawn, Sumner,’ he says. ‘Civilised standards must be maintained. We must meet fire with fire sometimes. The niggers killed women and children after all, raped them, slashed their tiny throats. A thing like that requires righteous vengeance.’

Sumner nods and glances briefly downwards at his black trousers grown grey at the kneepiece and his unpolished ankle boots. Brownlee wonders whether his new surgeon is a cynic or a sentimentalist or (is it even possible?) a little bit of both?

‘Oh, there was a good deal of that going on,’ Sumner says, turning back to him with a grin. ‘A good deal of the righteous vengeance. Yes, indeed.’

‘So why did you leave India?’ Brownlee asks, shifting about a little on the upholstered bench. ‘Why quit the 61st? It wasn’t the leg?’

‘Not the leg, God no. They loved the leg.’

‘Then what?’

‘I had a windfall. Six months ago my uncle Donal died suddenly and left me his dairy farm over in Mayo—fifty acres, cows, a creamery. It’s worth a thousand guineas at least, more probably, enough, for sure, to buy myself a pretty little house in the shires and a nice respectable practice somewhere quiet but wealthy: Bognor, Hastings, Scarborough possibly. The salt air pleases me, you see, and I do like a promenade.’

Brownlee seriously doubts whether the good widows of Scarborough, Bognor or Hastings would really wish to have their ailments attended to by a shortarse hopalong from 15

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beyond the Pale, but he leaves that particular opinion unexpressed.

‘So what are you doing sitting here with me,’ he asks instead, ‘on a Greenland whaling ship? A famous Irish landowner like yourself, I mean?’

Sumner smiles at the sarcasm, scratches his nose, lets it go.

‘There are legal complications with the estate. Mysterious cousins have appeared out of the woodwork, counterclaimants.’

Brownlee sighs sympathetically.

‘Aint it always the way,’ he says.

‘I’ve been told that the case could take a year to be resolved, and until then I have nothing much to do with myself and no money to do it with. I was passing through Liverpool on my way back from the lawyers in Dublin when I ran into your Mr Baxter in the bar of the Adelphi Hotel. We got to talking and when he learned I was an ex-army surgeon in need of gainful employment, he put two and two together and made a four.’

‘He’s a fierce sharp operator, that Baxter,’ Brownlee says, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I don’t trust the bastard myself. I do believe he has some portion of Hebrew blood running in his withered veins.’

‘I was happy enough with the terms he offered. I’m not expecting the whaling will make me rich, Captain, but it will keep me occupied at least while the cogs of justice turn.’

Brownlee sniffs.

‘Oh, we’ll make use of you one way or another,’ he says.

‘There is always work for those that are willing.’

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Sumner nods, finishes off his brandy, and places the glass back down on the table with a small clack. The oil lamp depending from the darkwood ceiling remains unlit, but the shadows in the corners of the cabin are deepening and spreading as the light outside begins to fail and the sun slides out of sight behind an iron and redbrick commotion of chimneys and roofs.

‘I’m at your service, sir,’ Sumner says.

Brownlee wonders for a moment exactly what this means, but then decides it means nothing at all. Baxter is not a man to give secrets away. If he has chosen Sumner for a reason (besides the obvious ones: cheapness and availability) it is probably only that the Irishman is easy-going and pliable and clearly has his mind on other things.

‘As a rule, there is not much doctoring to be done on a whaler, I find. When the men get sick, they either get well again on their own or else they turn in on themselves and die—that is my experience at least. The potions don’t make a great deal of difference.’

Sumner raises his eyebrows, but appears unconcerned by this casual disparagement of his profession.

‘I should examine the medicine chest,’ he says, without much enthusiasm. ‘There may be some items I need to add or replace before we sail.’

‘The chest is stowed in your cabin. There is a chemist’s shop on Clifford Street besides the Freemason’s Hall. Get whatever you need and tell them to send the bill to Mr Baxter.’

Both men rise from the table. Sumner extends his hand and Brownlee briefly shakes it. Each man for a moment peers 17

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at the other one, as if hoping for an answer to some secret question they are too alarmed or wary to ask out loud.

‘Baxter won’t like that much, I imagine,’ Sumner says at last.

‘Bugger Baxter,’ Brownlee says.

Half an hour later, Sumner sits hunched over on his bunk and tongues his pencil stub. His cabin has the dimensions of an infant’s mausoleum and smells, already, before the voyage has even begun, sour and faintly faecal. He peers sceptically into the medicine chest and begins to make his shopping list: hartshorn, he writes, Glauber’s salt, Spirit of Squills. Every now and then he unstoppers one of the bottles and sniffs the dried-up innards. Half the things in there he has never heard of: Tragacanth? Guaiacum? London Spirit? It’s no wonder Brownlee thinks the ‘potions’ don’t work, most of this stuff is fucking Shakespearian. Was the previous surgeon some kind of Druid? Laudanum, he writes by the eggish light of a blubber lamp, absinthe, opium pills, mercury. Will there be much gonorrhoea among a whaling crew? he wonders. Possibly not, since whores in the Arctic Circle are likely to be thin on the ground. Judging by the amount of Epsom salts and castor oil already in the chest, however, constipation will be a sizeable problem. The lancets, he notices, are uniformly ancient, rusty and blunt. He will have to have them sharpened before he begins any bleeding. It is probably a good thing he has brought his own scalpels and a newish bone saw.

After a while, he closes the medicine chest and pushes it back beneath the bunk where it rests beside the battered tin trunk that he has carried with him all the way from India.

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Out of habit, automatically, and without looking down, Sumner rattles the trunk’s padlock and pats his waistcoat pocket to check he still has the key. Reassured, he stands, leaves the cabin, and makes his way along the narrow companionway and up onto the ship’s deck. There is a smell of varnish and wood shavings and pipe-smoke. Barrels of beef and bundles of staves are being loaded into the forehold on ropes, someone is hammering nails into the galley roof, there are several men up in the rigging swinging pots of tar.

A lurcher scuffles by then stops abruptly to lick itself.

Sumner pauses beside the mizzen-mast and scans the quayside. There is no one there he recognises. The world is enormous, he tells himself, and he is a tiny unmemorable speck within it, easily lost and forgotten. This thought, which would not normally be pleasing to anyone, pleases him now. His plan is to dissolve, to dissipate and only afterwards, some time later, to re-form. He walks down the gangplank and finds his way to the chemist’s shop on Clifford Street where he hands over his list. The chemist, who is bald and sallow and missing several teeth, examines the list, then looks up at him.

‘That’s not right,’ he says. ‘Not for a whaling voyage. It’s too much.’

‘Baxter’s paying for everything. You can send him the bill directly.’

‘Has Baxter seen this list?’

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and horny; below his rolled-up shirtsleeves, Sumner sees the blue fringes of an old tattoo.

‘You thinkI’d trouble Baxter with shit like that,’Sumner says.

‘He’ll be troubled when he sees this fucking bill. I know Baxter and he’s a tight-fisted cunt.’

‘Just fill the order,’ Sumner says.

The man shakes his head and rubs his hands across his mottled apron.

‘I can’t give you all that,’ he says, pointing down at the paper on the countertop. ‘Or that either. If I do, I won’t get paid for it. I’ll give you the regular allowances of both and that’s all.’

Sumner leans forward. His belly presses up against the burnished countertop.

‘I’m just back from the colonies,’ he explains, ‘from Delhi.’

The bald man shrugs at this intelligence, then sticks his forefinger in his right ear and twists it noisily.

‘You know I can sell you a nice piece of birchwood for that limp,’ he says. ‘Ivory handle, whaletooth, whichever you prefer.’

Without answering him, Sumner steps away from the counter and commences gazing around the shop, as though he suddenly has a good deal of time on his hands and nothing much to fill it with. The sidewalls are crammed with all manner of flasks, bottles and tantali filled with liquids, unguents and powders. Behind the counter is a large yellowing mirror reflecting the hairless verso of the bald man’s pate. To one side of the mirror is an array of square wooden drawers, each with a nameplate and a single brass knob in its 20

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centre, and to the other is a row of shelves supporting a tableau of stuffed animals arranged in a series of melodramatic and martial poses. There is a barn owl poised in the act of devouring a field mouse, a badger at perpetual war with a ferret, a Laocoönian gibbon being strangled by a garter snake.

‘Did you do all those yourself?’ Sumner asks him.

The man waits a moment, then nods.

‘I’m the best taxidermist in town,’ he says. ‘You can ask anyone.’

‘And what’s the biggest beast you’ve ever stuffed? The very biggest, I mean. Tell me the truth now.’

‘I’ve done a walrus,’ the bald man says casually. ‘I’ve done a polar bear. They bring them in off the Greenland ships.’

‘You’ve stuffed a polar bear?’ Sumner says.

‘I have.’

‘A fucking bear,’ Sumner says again, smiling now. ‘Now that’s something I would like to see.’

‘I had him standing up on his hindmost legs,’ the bald man says, ‘with his vicious claws raking the frigid air like this.’ He reaches his orangey hands up into the air and arranges his face into a frozen growl. ‘I did it for Firbank, the rich bugger who lives in that big house on Charlotte Street. I believe he still has it in his grand entrance hall, next to his whaletooth hat stand.’

‘And would you ever stuff an actual whale?’ Sumner asks.

The bald man shakes his head and laughs at the idea.

‘The whale can’t be stuffed,’ he says. ‘Apart from the size, which makes it impossible, they putrefy too quick. And 21

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besides, what would any sane man want with a stuffed bloody whale anyway?’

Sumner nods and smiles again. The bald man chuckles at the thought.

‘I’ve done lots of pike,’ he continues vainly. ‘I’ve done otters aplenty, someone brought me a platypus once.’

‘What do you say we change the names?’ Sumner says. ‘On the bill. Call it absinthe. Call it calomel if you want to.’

‘We already have calomel on the list.’

‘Absinthe then, let’s call it absinthe.’

‘We could call it blue vitriol,’ the man suggests. ‘Some surgeons take a good amount of that stuff.’

‘Call it blue vitriol then, and call the other absinthe.’

The man nods once and does a rapid calculation in his head.

‘A bottle of absinthe,’ he says, ‘and three ounces of vitriol will about cover it.’ He turns round and starts opening up drawers and picking flasks off the shelves. Sumner leans against the countertop and watches him at his work—weighing, sifting, grinding, stoppering.

‘Have you ever shipped out yourself?’ Sumner asks him.

‘For the whaling?’

The chemist shakes his head without looking up from his work.

‘The Greenland trade is a dangerous one,’ he says. ‘I prefer to stay at home, where it’s warm and dry, and the risk of violent death is much reduced.’

‘You are a sensible fellow, then.’

‘I am cautious, that’s all. I’ve seen a thing or two.’

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‘You’re a fortunate man, I would say,’ Sumner answers, gazing round the grimy shop again. ‘Fortunate to have so much to lose.’

The man glances up to check if he is being mocked, but Sumner’s expression is all sincerity.

‘It is not so much,’ he says, ‘compared to some.’

‘It is something.’

The chemist nods, secures the package with a length of twine and pushes it across the counter.

‘The Volunteer is a good old bark,’ he says. ‘It knows its way around the icefields.’

‘And what of Brownlee? I hear he’s unlucky.’

‘Baxter trusts him.’

‘Indeed,’ Sumner says, picking up the package, tucking it under one arm, then leaning down to sign the receipt. ‘And what do we think of Mr Baxter?’

‘We think he’s rich,’ the chemist answers, ‘and round these parts a man don’t generally get rich by being stupid.’

Sumner smiles, and curtly nods farewell.

‘Amen to that,’ he says.

It has started to rain, and above the residual smell of horse dung and butchery, there is a fresh and clement tang to the air. Instead of returning to the Volunteer, Sumner turns to the left and finds a tavern. He asks for rum, and takes his glass into a scruffy side room with a fireless grate and an unpleasing view into the adjoining courtyard. There is no one else sitting in there. He unties the chemist’s package, takes out one of the bottles and dispenses half of it into his glass. The 23

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dark rum darkens further. Sumner inhales, closes his eyes and downs the concoction in one long gulp.

Perhaps he is free, he thinks, as he sits there and waits for the drug to have its effect. Perhaps that is the best way to understand his present state. After all that has beset him: betrayal, humiliation, poverty, disgrace; the death of his parents from typhus; the death of William Harper from the drink; the many efforts misdirected or abandoned; the many chances lost and plans gone awry. After all of that, all of it, he is still alive at least. The worst has happened—hasn’t it?—yet he is still intact, still warm, still breathing. He is nothing now, admittedly (a surgeon on a Yorkshire whaling ship, what kind of reward is that for his long labours?) but to be nothing is also, looked at from a different angle, to be anything at all. Is that not the case? Not lost then, but at liberty? Free? And this fear he currently feels, this feeling of perpetual uncertainty, that must be—he decides—just a surprising symptom of his current unbounded state.

Sumner feels a moment of great relief at this conclusion, so clear and sensible, so easily and quickly reached, but then almost immediately, almost before he has a chance to enjoy the new sensation, it strikes him that it is a very empty kind of freedom he is enjoying, it is the freedom of a vagrant or a beast. If he is free, in his current condition, then this wooden table in front of him is also free, and so is this empty glass. And what does free even mean? Such words are paper-thin, they crumble and tear under the slightest pressure. Only actions count, he thinks for the ten thousandth time, only events. All the rest is vapour, fog. He takes 24

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another drink and licks his lips. It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission, it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage.

Sumner leans his head back against the whitewashed wall and peers vaguely in the direction of the doorway opposite.

He can see the landlord over yonder, behind the bar, hear the clink of pewter and the clatter of a trap-door closing. He feels, rising inside his chest, another warm swell of clarity and ease. It is the body, he thinks, not the mind. It is the blood, the chemistry that counts. In a few more minutes, he is feeling much better about himself and about the world. Captain Brownlee, he thinks, is a fine man, and Baxter is fine also in his way. They are dutiful men, both of them. They believe in act and consequence, capture and reward, in the simple geometry of cause and effect. And who is to say they are wrong? He looks down at his empty glass and wonders about the wisdom of requesting another. Standing shouldn’t be a problem, he thinks, but talking? His tongue feels flat and foreign, he’s not sure, if he tried to speak, what might actually come out—what language exactly? What noises? The landlord, as if sensing his dilemma, glances in his direction and Sumner hails him with the empty glass.

‘Right you are,’ the landlord says.

Sumner smiles at the simple elegance of this exchange— the need sensed, the satisfaction offered. The landlord enters the side room with a half-full bottle of rum and tops him up.

Sumner nods in thanks, and all is well.

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It is dark outside now, and the rain has ceased. The courtyard glows yellow with a vague, gaseous light. There are women’s voices in the next room laughing loudly. How long have I been sitting here? Sumner wonders suddenly. An hour? Two? He finishes his drink, reties the package, and stands up. The room seems much smaller than when he first came in. There is still no fire in the grate, but someone has placed an oil lamp on a stool near the door. He walks carefully into the next room, peers around for a moment, tips his hat to the ladies, and regains the street.

The night sky is crammed with stars—the grand zodiacal sprawl and in between the densely speckled glow of unnameable others. The starry sky above me and the moral law within. He remembers, as he walks, the dissection hall in Belfast, watching that foul old blasphemer Slattery slice happily into a cadaver. ‘No sign of this chap’s immortal soul as yet, young gentlemen,’ he would joke, as he delved and tugged, pulling out intestines like a conjuror pulls flags, ‘nor of his exquisite reasoning faculties, but I’ll keep on looking.’ He recalls the jars of sectioned brains, floating helplessly, pointlessly, like pickled cauliflowers, their spongy hemispheres emptied entirely of thought or desire. The redundancy of flesh, he thinks, the helplessness of meat; how can we conjure spirit from a bone? Yet this street looks lovely despite all that: the way the dampened bricks glow reddish in the moonlight, the echoing clack of leather boot heels on stone, the curve and stretch of broadcloth across a man’s back, of flannel across a woman’s hips. The whirl and caw of the gulls, the creak of cartwheels, laughter, cursing, all of it, the crude harmonics 26

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of the night, coming together, like a primitive symphony.

After opium, this is what he likes best: these smells, sounds and visions, the crush and clamour of their temporary beauty.

Everywhere a sudden alertness that the ordinary world lacks, a sudden thrust and vigour.

He wanders through squares and alleyways, past courtyard hovels and the houses of the rich. He has no idea which way is north or in what direction the dock now lies, but eventually, somehow, he knows he will sniff his way back there. He has learned to stop thinking at such times and trust his instinct. Why Hull, for instance? Why fucking whaling? It makes no sense, and that is its great genius. The illogic of it, the near-idiocy. Cleverness, he thinks, will get you nowhere, it is only the stupid, the brilliantly stupid, who will inherit the earth. Entering the public square, he encounters a legless and tatterdemalion beggarman whistling ‘Nancy Dawson’ and knuckling his way along the darkened pavement. The two men pause to talk.

‘Which way to the Queen’s Dock?’ Sumner asks, and the legless beggar points across with his filth-caked fist.

‘Over there,’ he says. ‘Which ship?’

‘The Volunteer.’

The beggar, whose face is riddled with smallpox scars and whose truncated body halts abruptly just below the groin, shakes his head and giggles wheezily.

‘If you chose to ship with Brownlee, you fucked yourself up the arse,’ he says. ‘Right royally.’

Sumner thinks about this for a moment, then shakes his head.

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‘Brownlee will do,’ he says.

‘He will do if you want things fucked up,’ the beggar answers. ‘He will do if you want to come home fucking penniless or not come home at all. He’ll do for all that, I agree with you there. You heard about the Percival? You must have heard about the fucking Percival?’

The beggar is wearing a grimy and shapeless tam-o’shanter patchworked from the numerous broken remnants of older and finer headgear.

‘I was in India,’ Sumner says.

‘Ask anyone around here about the Percival,’ the beggar says. ‘Just say the word Percival and see what comes back.’

‘So tell me then,’ Sumner says.

The beggar pauses a moment before beginning, as if to better measure the hilarious breadth of Sumner’s naivety.

‘Crushed to matchwood by a berg,’ he says. ‘Three years ago now. Its holds were filled up with blubber at the time and they didn’t rescue even one single barrel of it. Not a scrap.

Eight men drownded and ten more perished of the cold, and none of those that lived made even sixpunce.’

‘Sounds like a misfortune. It could happen to anyone.’

‘It happened to Brownlee though, no one else. And a captain that fucking unfortunate doesn’t often get another ship.’

‘Baxter must trust him.’

‘Baxter’s fucking deep. That’s all I’ll say about fucking Baxter. Deep is what Baxter is.’

Sumner shrugs and looks up at the moon.

‘What happened to your legs?’ he asks.

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The beggar looks down and frowns as though surprised to find them gone.

‘You ask Captain Brownlee about that one,’ he says. ‘You tell him Ort Caper sent you. You tell him we was counting up my legs together one fine evening and there seemed to be a couple of ’em missing. See what he says about that one.’

‘Why would I ask him that?’

‘Because you wouldn’t hardly believe the truth of it coming from a man like me, you’d likely write it off as the ravings of a loon, but Brownlee knows the bloody truth of it as well as me. You ask him what happened on the Percival. Tell him Ort Caper sends his best regards, see what that does to his digestion.’

Sumner takes a coin from his pocket and drops it into the beggar’s outstretched hand.

‘Ort Caper’s the name,’ the beggar shouts after him. ‘Ask Brownlee what happened to my fucking legs.’

Further on, he begins to smell the Queen’s Dock—its sour, bathetic pong, like meat about to turn. In the gaps between warehouses, between the piled-up planking of timber yards, he can see the tin-cut silhouetted line of whaling ships and sloops. It is past midnight now and the streets are quieter— some muted sounds of drinking from the dockside taverns, the Penny Bank, the Seaman’s Molly, now and then the noise of an empty hackney carriage or the grumble of a dustcart.

The stars have swivelled, the swollen moon is half hidden behind a bank of nickel-plated cloud; Sumner can see the Volunteer, broad-waisted, dark and thick with rigging, a little 29

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further down the dock. There is no one walking about the deck, at least no one he can see, so the loading must be complete. They are only waiting for the tide now, and for the steam tug to pull them out into the Humber.

His mind moves to the northern ice fields and the great wonders he will no doubt see there—the unicorn and sea leopard, the walrus and the albatross, the Arctic petrel and the polar bear. He thinks about the great right whales lying bunched in pods like leaden storm clouds beneath the silent sheets of ice. He will make charcoal sketches of them all, he decides, paint watercolour landscapes, keep a journal possibly. And why not? He will have plenty of time on his hands, Brownlee made that plain enough. He will read widely (he has brought his dog-eared Homer), he will practise his disused Greek. Why the fuck not? He will have precious little else to do—doling out purgatives now and then, occasionally certifying the dead, but apart from that it will be a kind of holiday. Baxter implied as much anyway. Implied that the surgeon’s job on a whaler was a legal nicety, a requirement to be met, but in practice there was bugger-all to do—hence the risible wages, of course. So yes, he thinks, he will read and write, he will sleep, he will make conversation with the captain when called upon. By and large it will be an easeful, perhaps a mildly tedious, sort of time, but God knows that is what he needs after the madness of India: the filthy heat, the barbarity, the stench. Whatever the Greenland whaling is like, he thinks, it will surely not be anything like that.

30

WORK LIKE ANY OTHER A NOVEL

VIRGINIA REEVES

SCRIBNER New York窶キondon窶サoronto窶ゴydney窶クew Delhi

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Alabama does not mean “Here we rest.” It never did.

— Mrs. L. B. Bush, from “A Decade of Progress in Alabama,” 1924

Kilby Prison marks the impending transfer of the State of Alabama from the rear ranks of prison management to the front ranks. Alabama is following the example of the State of New York and the State of Virginia in establishing a central distributing prison to which prisoners will be sent immediately upon their conviction, and where they will receive: first, a thorough study of their history; second, a most thorough examination, mental and physical, by trained experts; third, a thorough course of treatment to remove any remedial defects; fourth, assignment to that prison and employment for which the convict is best adapted; and fifth, a systematic course of reformatory treatment and training, in order that the prisoner may be restored to society, if possible, a self-­ respecting, upright, useful and productive citizen.

— Hastings H. Hart, from Social Progress of Alabama, 1922

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Pa r t I

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CHAPTER 1

T

he electrical transformers that would one day kill George Haskin sat high on a pole about ten yards off the northeast corner of the farm where Roscoe T Martin lived with his family. There were three transformers in all, and they stepped down electricity that belonged to Alabama Power, stepped it down to run on new lines along a farm fence, then on through the woods, then straight to the farmhouse and the barn. Roscoe built the transformers himself. He built the lines. He did not have permission.

The idea for running in power arrived nearly a year before the power itself. He should’ve been eating dinner with his family, but he’d hurt his son and made his wife cry, so he was walking the cursed land his wife had forced him to. He took the path through the north corn to bring him close to the new power lines along Old Hissup Road. The corn was to his hips, still young, and the giant grasses brushed his fingers, a sickly feeling that set him shaking out his hands as if to unseat an insect. Of all the crops on his wife’s land, corn was Roscoe’s least favorite, something obscene in its size and growth, in its stalks and blades and seeds—everything too big.

His wife and son had been reading together on the sofa, an oil lamp on the tall table behind them lighting the pages. When he’d first courted the boy’s mother, Roscoe had read with her, but she shared books with their son now.

They hadn’t looked up when Roscoe came into the room.

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“What are you reading?” he asked.

“A book,” his son mumbled, snuggling closer to his mother.

Roscoe peered at the cover. “Parnassus on Wheels, huh? What’s it about?”

Annoyance showed on Marie’s face. “It’s about a woman who owns a traveling bookshop. She has a brother she’s sick of caring for.” Her voice was weary, as though she were talking to a troublesome child shirking his lessons. “The brother refuses to work the farm.”

She seemed to recognize her overstep before Roscoe reacted, offering him some kind of conciliatory gesture, an uncertain stretch of her hand that he slapped away. Gerald sank deeper into her side.

“I am not the ugly one here,” Roscoe said to her. “You knew I wasn’t going to become a farmer.”

She’d reached for his arm again, but the anger came quick, the way it did, pushing him taller, shooting him toward that ceiling her daddy had plastered himself. Roscoe wrenched the book from Marie’s hands and threw it across the room, where it broke a ceramic plate that hung on the wall.

“Go upstairs, Gerald,” Marie said.

But Roscoe leaned down into his son’s face. “You reading about a lowlife like your pa? Some shiftless loaf-about who won’t work his own farm?” The boy’s eyes went wide, the whites of them showing all round, and he tucked his lips inside his mouth like a coward.

Roscoe put his hands on Gerald’s arms and lifted him away from his mother. Marie grabbed hold of Gerald’s shirt, but Roscoe had a firm grip. He held the boy in front of his face, squeezing his upper arms. He whispered, “I am smarter than you’ll ever be.”

Then Marie had appeared again in his vision, clawing at his arm and his face, screaming at Roscoe to stop, and he did—he dropped their son at his wife’s feet and slammed himself out the front door to walk the ugly fields to the power lines he loved.

A farm was no place for an electrician. He’d said it enough times, and he’d wallowed away the past year tinkering with an old 4

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WORK LIKE ANY OTHER

mechanical thresher and reading in his late father-in-law’s library.

Every day, Marie asked him what he was going to do, and every day, he said, “Anything but work this goddamned farm.”

“You came,” she replied. “You didn’t have to.”

Her resentment was as strong as his, stronger even, with what he’d just done. The boy’s arms would be bruised.

Roscoe stood under the nearest of the power lines. The air was darkening around him, and the cicadas had started their crying, wiry and metallic. If Marie’s father hadn’t died, Roscoe would still be working in the powerhouse back at Lock 12. They’d be living in the village, and he would be doing the work he loved.

Roscoe had a letter from his old foreman—his job was open for him should he wish to come back.

He was considering exactly that option when the idea for the transformers came, a vision before him—two or three of them perched on a freshly raised pole, linked up to new lines he’d twist himself. He saw light fixtures in the farmhouse, the kitchen appliances Marie had loved back in the village. And he saw the farm saved. Surely, electricity had the power to do that.

Exhaustion finally sent him back toward the house, and in the midst of the cornfield he recognized exactly how electricity could save Marie’s land. He would electrify that damn thresher—wasn’t that what he was already trying to do?—and he’d have that great machine do the work of the men Marie hired every season with money they didn’t have. The thresher would run for free on their pirated power, and the farm would see a profit, as it had only in the legends of Marie’s childhood.

He chewed on the idea for a month before taking it to Wilson.

was on the front porch, drinking coffee and reading the almanac. She’d barely spoken to Roscoe since their fight before his walk in the corn, and she refused to acknowledge him when he came through the screen door.

MARIE

5

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The day was mild and green, everything growing in the April sun.

“Do you know where I can find Wilson?” Roscoe asked.

Marie didn’t look up.

“Marie, do you know where Wilson is?”

She kept her eyes down. “He’s working.”

Roscoe wished he could tell her instead, that she were the person he’d go to with news or ideas. He wished for an invitation on her face, something welcoming, even just the hint of a smile.

Marie, he wanted to say, I have something for you to liken to your birds. Marie was a birder—a thing he’d loved about her from the start—always catching a tune, a pattern, an errant flit of blue in the holly, and she defined people and ideas by the birds they typified.

She’d called him a cedar waxwing early in their courtship, the two of them walking along the Coosa River. The waxwing is known for its bandit eyes and tips of yellow and orange. “Look,” she’d said. “See that? They’re eating the dried berries.” She pointed out the birds’ haphazard flight, wheeling and turning over the water.

“They’re drunk as beggars up there. The berries are all fermented now.” She’d paused. “You’re a waxwing. All this electricity getting you drunk.” Later, she admitted that they were her favorite, these drunken birds, and Roscoe had taken it as a compliment that was both rough and tender.

Roscoe couldn’t remember the last time Marie had pointed out a waxwing. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had been tender between them.

“Where is Wilson working?” he asked.

“North field. He’s mending rails on the far fence line. He could use your help.” She was looking at her book again, her features cast in their resident fatigue, and Roscoe left her without saying goodbye. They were long past greetings and farewells.

The paint on the rungs of the porch steps was chipped and flaking, and Roscoe kicked bits free as he walked down. The steps had been white once, as the house had been white, but everything 6

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was gray now, the exposed boards and the remaining paint dulled by age. Roscoe glanced back at his wife, sitting under the roof of the porch, and he saw the sadness in her surroundings, the great failing of her father’s house and land. Creepers had taken over the chimneys and lattice of the porch. The brick underneath crumbled in places, the mortar giving way to the vines. This was no longer the home of Marie’s childhood, and Roscoe could understand—right here, for just this moment—his wife’s disappointment. She had come here to save the place, to return it to the glory it had known under her father’s care, but there had been no improvements since their arrival. They weren’t even holding steady. Their yields and income continued to decline, the house to deteriorate, the land to fail them.

At one time in their lives Roscoe would have told her these thoughts, a time when his compassion would have helped.

He left Marie in her crumbling house and took a trail through a thicket of woods, veering right at its fork. Left led to a cottage where Wilson lived with his family. Right led to the cornfield, ending at the furrows.

Roscoe made so much noise that Wilson had his eyes on him before he’d fully cleared the crops.

“What brings you out here, Ross?”

Roscoe leaned his weight against the new rail Wilson had just hung. “I’m thinking about a project. Could use your help.”

Wilson laughed the way he did over cards the nights Roscoe could convince him to play or over the fishing lines they strung out into the pond, begging for catfish or bass or bluegill. His was a light laugh, a whistle of breath through his nose.

“Can’t imagine this project’s got much to do with the farm.” Wilson hammered a nail into a thick branch, recently cut, leaking sap.

“I figured out how to save the place.” Roscoe believed it. And not just the place, but his life with Marie. The thought raised a yearning in his gut. He could fix things. He could make them right again.

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“The place don’t need saving, Ross.”

These were Marie’s words, and she spread them like the words of God. She had everyone, temporary hands included, thinking the place needed nothing more than its people. She was wrong. Her father had been wrong, too.

“I want to run lines in. Here along the edge of the field. It’s the perfect spot. I can tap that pole right past the corner.”

Wilson finished up with a second nail and jiggled the new timber, testing its strength. The wood didn’t budge. “Those lines are bound for the city, Ross. What makes you think they’d run a line in here?”

“I wouldn’t ask them.”

Wilson laughed again and moved down a fence post. The next top rail was rotted through, broken in its middle. “You talking about stealing?”

Now, Roscoe laughed. “There’s already so much current lost in line transmission—what we would take is nothing in comparison.

A drop of water from a lake, Wilson. Nothing missed.”

Wilson pried at the nails anchoring the rotted wood. “How are you going to tap those lines without killing yourself?”

“We’d knock out the power first, and anyway, I’ve been doing this kind of thing a long time.”

Wilson looked at him. “Even if you could make it work, what’s electricity going to do for the farm?”

Roscoe pounded his hands down on the solid rail in front of him, so good was the idea. “I’ve figured out how to convert a fuel-powered thresher to run off electricity. Think of it—all the shucking and picking we’d be rid of. We could get more fields of peanuts in. And then have the machine do the bulk of the labor. I know it’d make this place profitable, Wilson. I know it.”

Wilson looked off into the neighboring property, its grasses grown tall while its resident cows worked the other side of the land. He had to be imagining the thresher. Roscoe willed it into his friend’s mind, the giant machine squatting in the shop, churn8

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ing out ears all plucked from their stalks, ready for market. See it, Wilson.

Wilson shook his head. “The farm don’t need electricity, Ross.

It needs more hands.”

“Goddamn it, Wilson. That’s Marie’s pitch, and even I know we can’t afford more hands. Growing up here doesn’t make her an expert. You know that. Hell, you were here when she was a schoolgirl up in her father’s library reading all day, and then gone to the university the first chance she got. She’s a goddamned teacher, not a farmer.”

“It’s her land, Ross.”

“It’s mine, too.”

Wilson shook his head again. “You gonna pull boss ranks on me, now?”

Roscoe kicked at the bunched grass near a fence post. He wasn’t Wilson’s boss. Marie wasn’t either. Wilson had lived on this property since he was a boy, and he’d helped Marie’s father tend it all through her childhood. He was the boss of the place, if anyone was, Roscoe coming to him for permission, a subordinate with a revolutionary idea. Just give me a chance, boss! Let me try.

“I’m not your goddamned boss. I’m an electrician, and if I’m going to stay here, I have to do something that’s mine.” Roscoe leaned his elbows on the rail. “I know how little I’ve done around here this past year. This is what I can do.”

Wilson kept working.

“I got word from my old foreman at the powerhouse. Says there’s a spot for me. Open door. If I don’t do this, I think I’ll have to go.”

“You wouldn’t leave Marie and Gerald.”

“I would.” Saying it, Roscoe fully understood its truth. If this didn’t work—the transformers, the lines, the thresher—he would go back to that village at the Lock 12 dam on the banks of the Coosa River where he’d first met Marie. He’d move back into the single-employee apartment house and walk down the clay road to the dam each morning, all those wires and conduits awaiting him, 9

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all those new lines to run. He would leave his wife and son to get back to the drive and purpose of that work. He would.

Wilson set his pry bar into the gap between pole and crossbeam to wrench the broken rail loose. Roscoe watched, half hoping Wilson would refuse his proposal. He could walk back to the house and pack a small bag, kiss his son on the top of his head and Marie once more on her dry lips, and then start south. He would walk the whole way and never grow tired.

“What’s my part?” Wilson asked.

“I’d need your help raising the poles and getting the lines strung.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

Roscoe saw himself walking through fields like this neighboring one, down lanes chalky with red dust, past farms worse off than Marie’s.

“Is Marie gonna know about this?”

Roscoe saw himself turning around, walking back up those porch steps, gathering Marie into his arms. “She will know we have power.”

“But she won’t know how we’re gettin’ it.”

“It will come from the power company, as far as she knows, and that will be enough.”

“You gonna fake the bills?”

“If I have to. Alabama Power will bring in their own lines in the next five years or so. It’ll work itself out.”

“So I’ve only gotta lie to your wife for five years.”

“Tops.”

“What about Moa?” Roscoe hadn’t thought about Moa, though he should’ve. She had a place in every plan that unfolded on the farm. Moa was Wilson’s wife, and she was the land’s matriarch, her presence both firm and embracing. She was only eight years older than Marie, but when Marie’s mother had passed away, Moa had taken up the 10

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role. She was tall and slender and coffee colored, much lighter than Wilson, and she rolled her hair under on each side in a shape like a wave. Roscoe knew she kept a soft spot for him, defending him most chances she got, but he knew, too, that she’d never lie to Marie. He didn’t think Wilson could lie to Moa either. Their relationship was built of evening walks to the pond, their three children back at the house with Gerald. They were easy with one another, quick with smiles and gentle chiding.

“Would you be able to keep it from her?” Roscoe asked.

Wilson pried at the wood, the nail whining as it let go. “It’d probably be better if she didn’t know. Should something go poorly, it’d be good she not be a part of it.”

“Nothing will go poorly.”

Wilson shook his head and lifted the old rail, tossing it into the neighbors’ grasses. “Here”—he lifted up the new one—“think you can hold an end for me?”

It was the first farmwork Roscoe had helped Wilson with, and he didn’t mind taking it on. He told himself he didn’t need to go back to the powerhouse at Lock 12. He didn’t need to leave. He would stay here and make this land successful. He would have his work back, a job of currents and wires, forces and reactions, and the farm would grow so strong that it could run itself. Marie could return to teaching, if she chose. She could set up a small school on the land, use the books in her father’s library. They would reclaim something in their marriage, and Roscoe would figure out how to know his son. They would be all right.

dinner, Moa remarked on his mood. “Goodness, Mr. ­Roscoe.

You sure is fit this evening. What’s got you so excited?”

Marie looked at him with her eyebrows raised, her face saying, Yes, what exactly is this? Judgment was in her expression, prickly as cornstalks.

“I received some fine news today.”

OVE R

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Roscoe and Wilson each sat at one head of the table. Roscoe had Marie to one side and Gerald to the other, and Wilson’s family flanked him, too—Moa and Charles to the left, Henry and Jenny to the right. They sat exactly that way for their weekly meals, their two families always coming together in the big house on Wednesdays.

“Well?” Moa pried.

“Alabama Power wants to electrify some rural properties, and we’re one of the first on their list.”

Curiosity seemed to be edging out the disappointment on Marie’s face. “We’ll get power here on the farm?”

“That’s right, and they asked me to run the lines in—contract work.”

“Does that mean we’ll get lights, Pa?” Gerald asked.

“That’s exactly what it means, Son, and what’s more—we can get that old thresher running.”

“You know we don’t have the money for that,” Marie said. “Let alone the fuel it’d take to make it run.”

“That’s it, though,” Roscoe said. “I can convert it to run off electricity.”

“Wouldn’t the electricity be expensive, too?”

“Electricity won’t run anywhere close to fuel prices.”

Roscoe saw Marie wanting to smile, but she fought it, keeping her face in its rigid calm. “I thought farmwork was beneath you.”

“It’s just not mine. This is.”

Roscoe followed Marie’s eyes around the table. They stopped on Wilson, who sat still and quiet. “What do you think of this, Wilson?”

Wilson’s face was as unreadable as his silence. “Well, Ms. Marie, Roscoe’s discussed it plenty with me, and I think it’s just what the farm needs.”

Wilson’s belief—genuine or feigned—was enough to make Marie believe, and Roscoe watched the faintest smile cross her face.

“You’ll do this work?”

Roscoe nodded, and the gesture set them apart. They were alone 12

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for a moment, as they had been before Gerald’s birth, alone and young and hopeful, walking the banks of the Coosa River, watching the water make its way to the dam where it would build electricity.

They were mesmerized by their future—all the light and power and change—filled with it, their own excitement rushing and flowing.

Roscoe realized he missed those sensations. He missed his wife.

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CHAPTER 2 / ROSCOE

T

he wall around Kilby Prison is twenty feet high, with four strands of barbed wire along the top. Every other strand is charged with sixty-six hundred volts of electricity. The other two are grounded, and so far as I know, the live ones have never been cut.

From the front Kilby looks like a redbrick school, a place for teachers like my wife. Shrubs line the front walk to the double doors, with globe lights on either side of the entrance. An eagle spreads its wings in a circle over the tall letters spelling out the prison’s name.

The year is 1926, which seems as if it should mean something, more than a quarter of this century gone. I’ve been in this place for three years, and that, too, seems as if it should mean something. I just passed my thirty-third birthday, and my life has become only years before Kilby and years during. I hope for years after, but not too frequently. Hope makes disappointment that much harsher when it arrives.

Fall has come again, thin winded and tawny, and I’ve just finished my work tarring up the cracks between the thirty-foot sections of the wall that open up with the cold shift. The warden pieces together a crew to paint the gaps with tar, and I’ve been part of it since I came. I’m pulled from other work, and it’s a good job to get for those few weeks. Out of the shirt factory and the cotton mill, out of the dairy. There’s air to breathe along the wall, wafting in 15

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through the openings. Across Wetumpka–Montgomery Highway is the oak grove. Grazing pasture is to the east and fields of corn and beans and mustard, cotton to the north. Even the dirt and gravel in the pit to the west is something sweeter than the scent inside the wall. Stick your eye to those cracks and it’s the world out there, a world we paint over with tar. The air gets sticky and black, and then we’re closed back into Kilby. There’d never be the time nor the tools to make one of those cracks fit a man through, but we dream about it, think about excuses to get out to the yard alone. We may sneak a fork or two out of the mess hall. We may chip at those cracks with the rocks we find. We don’t talk about it. We don’t work together.

Escape is solitary as confinement, or should be.

I was on the wall when Deputy Warden Taylor sought me out.

“You’ve made a name for yourself. Bondurant and Chaplain— they’re singing your praises. Best worker they’ve ever had and other such remarks. That true?”

“Can’t speak for anyone else, sir, but I do my best with the work that’s given me.”

“Seems you might be a good fit at the pens. Come on out first thing tomorrow. I’ve sent word to your other foreseers so they won’t be putting out the call.”

“Yes, sir.”

So today, I’m heading to the gate to meet him at the dog pens.

Beau’s guarding the east side, and he spits his tobacco juice right at my feet. “Taylor making you one of his little bitches?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Won’t win you any points with your cellmates—not that you’ve got many points as is.” He laughs. “Bet you’re thinking if you make dog boy, you’ll make trustee, ain’t ya? I’m sure Mason’s told you it’ll keep you safe, those trustee ranks, but I’ve seen plenty of trustees in the infirmary.”

“I’ve no interest in working the dogs, sir.”

“Shut your mouth.”

He pounds on the metal door before unlocking his side. An16

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other guard unlocks the outside gate and waves me through with his shotgun.

“Take him to Taylor. And keep that gun on his back.” Beau’s been gunning for me since I arrived. “Think you’re better than all of us in here?” he asked me a couple months in. “All tidy mannered and educated. From what I’m told, you didn’t even get your hands dirty when you killed that boy. Probably sitting in your well-lit house eating some fancy meal with your wife. That looks a hell of a lot like cowardice to me.”

The guard on the other side of the gate settles the double barrels between my shoulder blades. “Walk.”

There are nerves in me as we approach the pens. Deputy Taylor is at the closest run, a dog himself, snouted and whiskered and thick in the neck. His jowls shake as he yells at my escort, “What you doing pointing that gun on him?”

I hear the guard shifting behind me. “Was told to watch this one, sir. Was told he might run.”

“You think I’d invite a runner out here? Jesus, boy, don’t know that you’re quick enough to be working this side of the wall.”

The guard comes level with me, his gun hanging down next to his legs. “Just following Beau’s orders, Deputy.”

Taylor laughs and pitches his head toward the gate. “Get on back to your post, and stop taking orders from Beau. Man’s a guard, same as you.”

“Yes, sir.”

When he’s a ways off, Taylor yells, “And you best not bring any boys out here at gunpoint again, you hear?”

“Yes, sir!”

I take comfort in seeing a guard reprimanded.

“All right, Martin, let’s see what these dogs think of you.”

Taylor tugs gently on a dog’s ears, then lets go and shouts, “Back!” His voice is hard and whiplike, and the dogs drop their paws off the top rails of their pens to the ground, expectant.

Two other men are farther in, mucking out the dogs’ waste and 17

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filling their water buckets and food bowls. The smell here is worse than at the dairy, everything ripe and foul, and I want Taylor to see that I don’t fit, that it’s a mistake to assign me to these beasts.

“First thing we’ll do is get you handling them. They’ll learn you as a master when you’re here and as a scent when they’re chasing you. Dog boys is the practice, see. Got to get a belt on you and get you hooked up to one, see how they do at the end of that line.

“Jones!” he shouts to one of the other men. “Get me a belt and a lead.”

“Yes, sir.”

I watch Jones head toward a close-by barn. “Now, the belts we use are of my own making.” Everything about Taylor is large—his belly, his voice, his hands. “Made ’em so that you boys could hook yourself up to nine dogs if you wanted to.”

I do not want to.

He goes on about the leather leads, and in the middle of this talk the sirens start blaring, their whirl and pitch like some great bird descending from the sky. Every time I hear them, I think of Marie’s knowledge of birdcalls, naming all those feathered bodies by their noise alone.

“Redtail,” she might say of the siren. “Thick feathered and dusty.

It’s protecting its territory, warning off other birds.”

The dogs have brought their paws to the top rails of their pens again, their voices joining the sirens.

“Jones!” Taylor is shouting. “Jackson! Get those dogs belted up!”

Jones runs from the barn, strapping a belt round his waist. He drops another at my feet.

“Put it on, boy,” Taylor says. “Trial by fire on this one.” To Jones, he says, “Bring out Ruthie. She don’t care who she’s belted to so long as she has a scent to track.”

The belt is about two inches wide and thicker than any other I’ve ever worn. Two rings are on either side of the buckle, the base of them sewn over with extra patches. These must be what I could hook nine dogs to.

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The guard who held his gun to my back comes running, a scrap of cloth in his hand.

I work to fasten the belt over my pants and shirt.

“Pick up that lead,” Taylor says to me. He turns to the guard.

“Solid scent?”

“Straight off his back.”

I have the lead in my hand, and Jones is hauling a whining dog from the pen. “Strap one end to her collar, and the other to one of those rings on your belt.”

“What’s going on?”

“Taylor loves to throw new boys right in,” Jones says. “Just follow the dog. She knows what she’s doing.”

“The man’s still in sight,” Taylor shouts at us. “Right in the close cotton. Get your dogs over here.”

My dog pulls me to the piece of shirt in Taylor’s hand. She buries her snout in the fabric, huffing and snorting, then lifts her head to the air and lets out a great howling siren of her own. “Follow along, Martin,” Taylor says to me. The other two men are at the scrap now, too, their dogs digging into the smell, but I am going, my feet tripping me forward, this great beast hooked to my hips, tugging with a force I’ve not met before. She is a plow, an ox, an engine, cranking and turning and driving us on. I want reins attached to her muzzle, something to whoa her back.

The dog doesn’t slow as she puts her nose to the ground, all her movements connected. I hear the others behind me, and the pounding of horse hooves, and then Taylor draws up, high on the saddle of a tall bay. It looks like Marie’s horse once looked, back when they were both young. When I left for Kilby, that horse was nibbling the grasses around the farmhouse like a big, lazy dog, her back swaying deep between her withers and haunches, a great slump that could no longer support the weight of a person. I don’t know if she’s still alive.

The dog leads me into the cotton field, and we slow down.

Cotton is a rough crop to move through. The plants let go of their 19

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moisture come harvest and turn their stems to twigs, hard and sharp. Taylor slips ahead. He has his Winchester across his lap. I still hear the yells of the other boys and dogs behind us.

“There!” Taylor shouts, and I see the escaping man, the great tear in his prison shirt that yielded the scrap for the dogs, such a fatal error in the running trade. He’s still in the cotton, his back bright against the plants.

A field guard is after him, then Taylor and his horse, then this dog and me and the others.

“Boy!” I hear Taylor shout. “You stop!”

The man doesn’t slow. He’ll reach the woods in a moment, and I don’t know what that means for me, whether I’ll be forced to follow. If this great machine of a dog continues at her same speed, my body will collapse, a tethered anchor dragged through the undergrowth, my skin and clothes tearing against the ground and the brush.

Taylor draws his horse up short in front of us and slides down from the saddle. “Stop that dog!” he shouts to me.

I dig my heels in and hunker back, lowering myself into the cotton, down to the ground. The dog’s head whips, and she lets loose the most mournful cry.

“Stop!” Taylor shouts to the escaping man.

The other men and dogs arrive on either side of me. Each holds a hand out to help me up.

“Sit,” Jones says to the dogs. “Wait.” All three of the beasts drop down, their snouts still turned toward Taylor.

Before us, Taylor aims his gun toward the sky. He pulls the trigger, and it fires a cannon’s worth of shot. “The warning shot’s enough to stop most runners,” Jones whispers. “Nine out of ten, I’d say.”

But the man is not stopping, even though the cotton keeps his movement slow. He presses on, ragged and halting, and then—he falls. I watch the crops swallow him.

“Want us to go on by you?” Jones asks.

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“Wait,” Taylor says, as though Jones were just another of his dogs.

Taylor moves ahead, his face trained on the spot where the man went down. I picture that escaping man still going, working his way woodward under the cover of the cotton, elbow-crawling along a furrow line.

How Taylor can move so quickly, I don’t know. He’s already yards away. The field guard before him has moved out of the line.

Other men are around, too, working the field, all in stripes. Taylor’s warning shot has brought them up tall, their hands paused in their picking, their eyes on the scene. They’re all pulling for the downed man. I can see it. They are granting him a tunnel, a secret passage there, exactly where he’s fallen, a corridor to the ocean where a ship waits. I want it for him, too.

But he returns to us, his body rising up through the cotton, pricked and ragged.

“Stop!” Taylor shouts once more. He levels his gun. I am close enough to hear him say, “All right, then. I’m gonna do this.”

How is it that a shot fired across land can sound so much fiercer than one fired toward the sky? I have never heard anything so loud.

The man falls, and Taylor looks around. Shock is on his face, a little fear. He’s sweating and pale, and he shouts at the men in the field, “Keep to your work!”

To me and the other two, he says, “Best bring those dogs on up here, just in case that didn’t land where I think it did.”

The other guard is there already, marking the spot, and Taylor’s mumbling to himself as he walks. My dog is quiet, but still pulling.

We level up with Taylor, and I hear that he’s counting. “Nine,” I hear him say. “Ten, eleven.” He’s counting his steps.

Nineteen, it turns out. He fired from nineteen steps away.

My dog brays when she sees the downed man, and he covers his face. “Don’t put that dog on me. I’m not running. Please, just don’t put no dog on me.”

I pull the dog back, and Taylor tells her to sit.

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The skin on the man’s side is torn up, and when he moves his hands from his face, I nearly don’t recognize him through the pain.

His name is Jennings. We do a little business here and there—milk that I sneak from the dairy in exchange for cigarettes. It’s another act of theft, I know, and I have stolen enough, but smoking is one of the only graces I have found here, one of the only familiar routines.

“We best get this boy to the hospital,” Taylor says to the other guard. “Get some men. They can make a sling of their sacks. Come on, now. Boy’s losing blood.”

The men materialize, sprouting up out of the last of the cotton as though they’d always been there. A tall man with only one tooth—a front one—slides his sack under Jennings’ head and shoulders. He takes one side and a short fellow takes the other.

Two more are at Jennings’s waist, two more at his feet. They lift him, and the sounds that come from his mouth are gut-shot and black, like the blood wetting the midway sack, like the blood spotting the plants. It’s bright on the cotton, dark on the stems and ground. The crops are crushed down in a circle here, stamped out in a near-perfect ring.

“Put those dogs away,” Taylor says to us as he goes.

We watch the men heave Jennings away. They move toward one of the wider row lines so they can walk easier. The fields are still stunned into disorder, the guards caught up in whispering, the men in clumps. If ever a dog boy was to run, this would be the time. We could push our dogs off toward the woods on some trail we’d contrived, deep into thick cover before anyone would notice we’d gone the wrong way. We could part and run our own directions, me with this dog at my waist, crossing creeks, scaling Montgomery, swimming rivers and lakes until we reached Marie’s land. I could walk up the drive with this beast, both of us tired from our chase—“Rabbits,” I could tell my wife and son. “We’ve been hunting rabbits.”

“What the hell you still doing out here, boy?”

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I don’t know the guard who’s turned his holler on me, but he’s approaching. He’s motioning with his gun. “Taylor told you to put that dog up,” he shouts. “Go on, now.”

“Sir,” I say, and tug my dog back toward the pens, the other two men off ahead of me. They’re quiet when I catch up.

“Lead that dog on into her run and then you can unhook,” Jones says.

I’m nervous to enter the pen with the pushing throng of dogs, but I ease myself through the sagging gate anyway.

“Hell of a thing,” Jones continues. He’s staring at me when I look up. “Hell of a thing.”

“Yeah.” It is some sort of hell, this thing we’ve seen with its dogs and sirens, its cotton and striped men, its blasts and shots and blood.

“That’s not what this job’s about. Ain’t never seen that before.

Never seen Taylor shoot a man.”

“Nope,” the other dog boy, Jackson, says. “First for me, too, and I been out on these dogs since Taylor started the goddamn pack.”

I set my dog loose among the thicket of bodies—snouts and tails pushing their way into other snouts and tails. They’re not interested in me, all of the remaining dogs crowding round the one I brought back as though asking about her day. What was the chase like? I hear them asking with their eyes. You get it?

Taylor is away with Jennings, the other guards back at their posts. The three of us convicts are alone here with these dogs, and the itch to run takes me full by the shoulders, shaking me to standing tall and alert.

“There aren’t any guards around,” I venture.

Jones laughs. “You thinking about running? That your ticket?”

“Luck to you,” Jackson says, joining in the laughter.

“What?” I ask them.

“This is the best there is,” Jones says. “You get put out here on these dogs, and you’re looking at trustee ranks, early parole, time outside the damn wall. But you run when you’re out here? A broken 23

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trustee’s the bottom of this ladder. You don’t climb anywhere, and you sure as hell don’t get paroled.”

“That’s right,” Jackson says.

I know what Marie would counsel in this situation: “Patience, Roscoe. Do the work. Let the reward come later.”

But I just saw a man shot, I would tell her. I am an electrician. I should not be here.

“Best thing for you to do is head over to the gate,” Jones says.

“Get yourself back inside that wall and wait to hear from Taylor.”

He gives me a leveled, honest stare. “These dogs are good. And your scent will be damn easy to track, starting at the pens as you are.”

The image of these dogs after me melts the itch away—me as the runner and these men as the chasers tied to dogs. I can hear the men shouting and the beasts’ whining behind me, their quick feet and their snuffling breaths. They suck in every speck of my scent, tiny bits of dust that fire a need in their brains. Follow, those bits say. Find.

I don’t want to be chased.

So I leave the pens, Jones and Jackson there with the dogs. I head back to the guard at the outer gate who shoved his gun into my back earlier, and I look away from the smirk on his face.

Beau unlocks the interior door and shoves me through with the barrel of his gun. “Get on back to the dairy. Don’t belong out here anyway.”

“I’m going, sir.” I’m glad of the gate and the door swinging shut behind me. I prefer the mulled quiet of the dairy barn to what I’ve seen and done today. I imagine Marie laughing at the irony of this—my wanting of a barn.

leaves the hospital the next morning.

“Wasn’t so bad,” he tells us in the yard. “They got all the shot out.” The triumph in his voice doesn’t match the blood in his eyes, or the shuffle in his walk, the way his hand goes to his side again JENNINGS

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and again, pressing. The next day, his back’s bowed, a crease that never rights itself, and then he starts sweating, his face gone gray and dusky.

He seeks me out in the yard, wanting to hear the whole thing told again. “What’s it like seeing someone shot down like that, Ross? Which way did I fall? I can’t see it. It’s all too quick for me.”

“I don’t know. You fell forward.”

“What’d old Taylor do?”

“He walked over.”

“Bastard counted his steps along the way, didn’t he?”

I nod.

“Nineteen,” Jennings says. Everyone knows the number, now, shooting through the fields and the cells like some secret we’d been trying to figure out for years—far enough away to miss and scatter that shot all over the field, but close enough to blow a man’s side open should it land just right. Nineteen. We whisper the word like a curse.

Jennings is sweating too much, beads on his lips and forehead.

“You all right?” I ask.

“I’m feeling a little hot, tell you the truth. Think I’ve got myself a fever.” He pushes at his side again and tries to straighten his back.

It catches at an angle, keeping him bent, then he drops down to his knees.

One of the guards comes over. “What’s this?”

Jennings doesn’t speak.

“I think he needs to go to the hospital,” I say.

“He that idiot got himself shot?”

“Yes, sir.”

The guard laughs. “Hey, Buckshot. Come on. Let’s get you to the infirmary.” Jennings doesn’t move, and the guard finally drags him to standing by one of his arms. “The hell you expect?”

The chapel is just past the hospital, and I know they’ll be calling on Chaplain to come discuss Jennings’s soul while he sits in his sickbed. Jennings is in on a liquor violation. He can’t have more than a year or two left. But he’s a damaged man walking next to 25

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that guard, not the same man to get me cigarettes, not even the man running through the fields just a few days ago. We change so quickly in here.

pulls me from the barn the next day, ordering me back through the east gate.

“Jesus Christ,” Beau says.

He pushes me through, and the guard on the other side walks me to the pens, his gun pointed at the ground.

“You hear about Jennings?” Taylor asks as soon as I’m level with him. In the same breath, he says “Go on” to the guard.

“I was with him when he went back to the infirmary.”

“Died this morning,” Taylor says. “Blood poisoning. Goddamned doctor didn’t get all the shot out. X-rays showed a ball lodged there in the boy’s kidney. Wasn’t anything to be done then.”

I have seen a man shot and killed from nineteen steps away.

“No sense in a death like that, Martin.” I cannot tell whether Taylor’s truly mournful for the loss of life or whether Jennings is just another lost prisoner to him, a man taking his release early.

“No sense.” Taylor shakes his head.

I can hear Marie’s voice in the rustle of the dog bodies: You know all about senseless deaths, don’t you, dear?

Taylor and Marie are both wrong to rely on sense as a measurement, though. Making sense is about logic, and logic follows instructions, like electricity culled from water and transported along lines. If you point power somewhere—no matter the kind—it’ll follow its course until it hits something. Perfect sense.

“How are you feeling about this work, Martin?” Taylor turns his face from the dogs to look at me. “Think it suits you?”

“Due respect, sir, but I don’t know that it does.”

Taylor almost smiles. “You’re wrong, Martin, but it was a hell of an introduction, I’ll give you that. You stick on the barn for a while yet.”

TAY L O R

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“Thank you, sir.”

“Ain’t for you, Martin. Can’t have a boy out here who’s not ready for it. You best be next time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, go on.”

I glance once more at that pack of dogs, all red and black and needy, so different from the dairy cows in the barn.

“Go on,” Taylor says.

I could run right now, take to the cotton like Jennings, crawl my way through its branches until I get to the woods. I do this again and again. I run. I escape. I return to my wife and son.

I don’t know if they’re still there.

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CHAPTER 3

R

oscoe used galvanized storage cylinders from the shop for the transformers’ bodies, but he had to go into Rockford for the copper wire. The local mercantile was called Bean’s, and Marie’s family had been frequenting it since Edgar Bean opened its doors, a charge account still on file, though there wasn’t money to cover the things charged.

Roscoe took the mules and wagon in. He left Wilson back, not wanting him to take part in this particular dishonesty.

When he walked in the door, Bean hollered, “Roscoe Martin!

What brings you here?”

“I finally have some electrical work.”

“You and your fancy electricity.”

Bean was like Marie’s father in his love of flames over bulbs.

They’d both sworn that the country would never let itself get fully electrified, and if the country failed them, well, hell—they’d stay strong at least. “You’ll never see a wired lamp in this store,” Bean had told Roscoe once. “Fire needs to be out in the open, someplace we can keep an eye on it. Don’t belong inside wires.” Marie’s father had conceded slightly since his son-in-law was in the trade. “Never my library, though. If you light up the house someday, that’s one thing. But you stay out of my library. I want to know what’s near my books.”

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­ arie’s father. “All that power is stored inside wires, which are M stored inside rubber coatings. There’s no threat to you. In fact, it’s safer than flame. If you break a lamp bulb, the light just goes out.

If you break a wicked lamp, you’re likely to see your whole house go up.”

“No, no, son,” the men would reply, and Roscoe would keep at them until Marie laid a hand on his arm, or one of them forced the conversation in a new direction.

Roscoe couldn’t understand their hesitancy and mistrust. He had only experienced fascination, intrigue, desire to know more.

That first time he’d seen electrical streetlamps, in Birmingham, he’d thought he was seeing magic—something from the fairy tales he’d once told his sister. Those glowing bulbs belonged with princes who could be changed into toads and then back again with a kiss. They belonged with talking animals and flight for flightless creatures, rather than his father’s world of coal and tunnels and prosperity at the expense of others’ bent backs and widowed families. Then he’d found Faraday, and science had supplanted the magic—long descriptions of experiments that took Roscoe months and sometimes years to understand—and all while still working for his father in the mines, a candle’s flame lighting the pages of the books he read every chance he could, trusted and esteemed narratives to which he could return. Electricity had freed him from his father’s life.

He’d told as much to his father-in-law, and the man had listened, genuine care in his pale eyes.

“We find our own salvations, Son,” he’d said. “You have your electricity, and I have my farm, and we both have my lovely daughter and a wagonload of books. We’ve more in common than not.

You keep to your lines, and I’ll keep to my land, and we’ll meet over the supper table to talk about what we’ve been reading.”

Marie’s father had been a good man. Bean was a good man, too.

Lying to him about this project felt like lying to Marie’s father, and Roscoe disliked it. He’d make them both proud, though, distill their fears, prove the strength of his trade. A lie was worth that.

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“I’ll need quite a bit of copper wire,” he told Bean. “The work’s about midway between our place and the dam, and they’ve asked me to get the supplies up on this end. It’s a first, for sure. They’ve always provided everything in the past, but it seems there’s wire heading in every direction but this one. What’s your spool count right now?”

Bean looked at a clipboard on the wall behind him. He flipped a few pages. “Looks like I got about ten rolls in the barn.”

“I’ll need all of them. My foreman will be coming through with the check soon as he can, and we’ll guarantee it with our account.”

“That’s a lot of product, Roscoe.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bean rubbed at the peppered beard on his chin, holding his rheumy eyes low on Roscoe’s face as if the answer were stored there, some sign to be trusted in Roscoe’s lips or jaw.

“You don’t make good on this, and I’ll be forced to take the debt back any way I can. I could go after the land.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s your father-in-law’s land, son.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bean nodded, once, and then scribbled on a slip of paper. “Head on round back and give this to the boys. They’ll help you get it all in the wagon.”

“Thanks, Bean.”

“Whatever this is, it makes me nervous, Roscoe.”

“It’s fine. You wait.”

had Wilson weld the iron cores for the transformers, thick, ringlike creations about a foot wide and tall, squared at their corners.

“Whatever you say,” Wilson said, given the instructions.

“Here.” Roscoe flipped pages in the bound register he now kept.

He found his drawing of the transformers, a plan deducted from ROSCOE

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Faraday as much as from his own work with Alabama Power. “I’ll wrap copper round the cores.” He tapped at the page. “Iron is permeable to magnetic force, so it’ll move the current from one side—the receiving side—over to the sparser secondary coil on the other side of the ring. What’s not shot off through those secondary wires will return to the primary, and we’ll be left with a twist of wires housing about half the original voltage. We’ll feed those wires into the next ring, making the turns of the secondary coils even less, and then again, and after the voltage passes through three, we’ll be down to a current close to safe. I’m going to leave it higher for the transmission from the road to the shop. If we stepped it down all the way up front, we’d lose too much over the distance and risk a weak current. I’ll put one more transformer close in to step it down to two-twenty.”

“You’re talking another language, my friend.”

“I’m not,” Roscoe insisted, just as he had with Marie’s father once, and Bean. “It’s like—a windup toy. Think of those windup toys the kids have. It’s like one of those as it winds down. Imagine that the strength of your hand stays the same, but the mechanism inside slows down. You’re just changing the size of the spring.”

Wilson cocked his head. “Why’s it so important to you that I understand?”

“Don’t you want to?”

Wilson smiled, the same slow, easy smile he brought to most things. “There’s a lot I seek out, Ross. You’ve seen me on those trails—the likes of the crops on this land, all their stages of growth, all the things I might do to make them stronger and bigger. There’s workings of music I’m right taken by. Even Moa’s cooking calls my attention at times, all those leavenings and flavors. But this here”— Wilson tapped at the drawing—“this isn’t my concern. Agreeing to help you was me agreeing to help this farm, not agreeing to be your student.”

Roscoe clapped him on the back, glad of his honesty. “I hear you, but I won’t stop the lessons.”

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“You want to holler at a deaf man, that’s your concern.”

They both laughed at that, and Roscoe found himself grateful for the camaraderie. He’d not worked with anyone since Marie had taken them away from the village, and he missed collaborative discipline and drive. He’d liked Wilson from the day they met— both for the man he was in person and for all the stories Marie had told—but only in this work had Roscoe felt friendship, loyalty, shared lives. He could see their families growing thick and comfortable, Roscoe and Wilson running the land and the wires, the wives and children happy, big meals and steady comfort. Maybe he and Wilson could even start their own electrical business installing transformers for the other farms, a marriage of their separate work.

He left Wilson to his welding and walked the line route again.

the cores done, Roscoe started winding wire. Wilson checked in on him periodically, and Roscoe tried, again, to explain, holding up one of the iron rings. “See? The voltage will be doing laps.”

Wilson shook his head. “When do we start raising poles? I’m readying to get some actual work done.”

“Soon.”

But the transformers took longer than that. A solid month had passed before Roscoe was confident enough to test them.

Together, Roscoe and Wilson raised their first pole, just nine yards from the original line. Then they hauled out wheelbarrows full of tools, those three transformers unrecognizable in their galvanized frames, all of the rods and coils hidden deep inside, along with levers to stop and start the current. The levers were in the off position, where they’d stay until Roscoe connected the first transformer to the live line, and then it to the other two.

Wilson helped Roscoe mount the transformers on the new pole, evenly distributed with the lowest one ten feet above the ground.

Roscoe attached the first stretch of line that would lead to the house and the shop.

WITH

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“You seem comfortable with this work,” Roscoe noted.

“Only ’cause we’re not hooked up to anything yet. You plug those wires into that live line and just see how fast I run out of here.”

“You won’t run.” Roscoe knew it was for show, this disinterest.

He’d seen the information seeping into Wilson’s thoughts. He’d even found him winding wires around a core one day. “Just trying to keep this moving along,” Wilson had said.

Roscoe had shown him a finished core, noting the differences in the sides, then left Wilson to finish the one he was working on.

was too dangerous to risk linking up to a ten-thousand-volt current, so Roscoe and Wilson set about temporarily halting the power on the main transmission line. Roscoe had already selected the pine they’d fell a couple miles toward the dam, just down from a crossroads where it’d be easy to locate—he didn’t want linemen stomping around the fields searching for the outage. The past several weeks had seen heavy rains, and the water helped with the story Roscoe had built—just an old tree loosened by weather, ready to topple.

They left their supplies with the transformers and rode horses to the tree. “Even when it’s down, we won’t have that long of a window,” Roscoe said. “They’ll get this line running as quick as they can.”

“So we’ll ride like hell once the tree falls.”

“That’s right.”

Wilson had spent a few days there already, and the tree swayed under the axes they took to its roots and the ground. They hitched their horses to long chains looped round the trunk and whipped them forward. The pine came easily, crashing against the lines, sparks and snapping branches spooking the horses into high-kneed gallops.

Roscoe and Wilson unhooked and wound the chains, swung into their saddles, drove their ankles into their horses’ flanks. They IT

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raced along the trail slashed wide for the power line, and Roscoe found himself whooping like a boy, Wilson there with him, an adventure on their hands.

Back on their land, they tethered their horses to the fence and positioned the ladder against the pole that belonged to Alabama Power. Roscoe grabbed a wooden stick and climbed to line height.

“If we failed, there will be sparks,” he shouted to Wilson. “Best stand clear.” A binder was on the line, coupling wires together. He needed to make the lines touch—different currents on different wires. If they touched quietly, the lines were cold. If not, Roscoe could be thrown from the ladder by the shock. He hesitated, knowing the power he might touch.

“Ross,” Wilson called from below. “This is what you do.”

Roscoe nodded. Camaraderie, companionship, a joint destination. This was what he did. These were his elements, his knowledge, his home.

He felt everything pause—the breeze, the birds, the trains on their tracks and the fish in their ponds. Even the great turbines back at Lock 12 stopped spinning, the water holding back its movement, the powerhouse winding down. The lines had gone cold.

“Clear?” Wilson said.

“Clear.”

Now, Roscoe would work.

He strapped his tool belt round his waist. He looped the connecting line over his shoulder and climbed back up the ladder.

Carefully, he removed the rubber coating from the binder, exposing the wires underneath. It was simply a matter of more weaving, more winding. The individual strands of copper from his new line were ready. He’d been doing this for a month, and then for years before that.

When his line was attached, he cut a new opening in the binder coating and replaced it over the coupled lines.

It was done.

“How long will it take them to clear that tree?” Wilson asked.

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“Could be within the hour, and certainly no later than evening.

We’ll come back and test then.”

Roscoe wasn’t patient, but he didn’t mind the long stretch of that afternoon, the prospect of power meeting him at the day’s end.

He was content to unsaddle the horses, brush them down, pump water into their trough. He found Gerald round the back of the house collecting ants, putting them in a jar with dirt to study their habits, and Roscoe knelt next to the boy to help pluck the small bodies from the hole they exited. Gerald was smart to choose small, black ants that didn’t sting. He didn’t tell his father to leave, and Roscoe took encouragement in that.

dusk, Wilson and Roscoe met at the fork in the trail and walked back to the transformers. Roscoe had made a small electric motor, a simple circle of coiled copper, bound together with rubber and mounted on small iron rods over a magnet. The current would probably be too strong for it, but if it was flowing, they would see a reaction.

Roscoe connected the last wires—smaller bundles—to the line from the last transformer. These, he connected to the iron rods of the motor.

“Time to flip the levers,” he told Wilson.

They repositioned the ladder against their own pole, and Roscoe climbed to the transformers, lifting all three levers into their on positions. Then he was jumping to the ground to the sound of Wilson’s shouts. The coil circle was a blur of hot, fiery proof. They stared at it like men bewitched by beauty or magic until the small wooden base of the motor caught fire, and then with more shouts from Wilson, Roscoe knocked the connecting wires away. They stamped out the small flames and shook hands over the trifling of smoke.

AT

the thresher’s electric motor had moments of difficulty, but nothing compared to the initial acquisition of wire and tapBUILDING

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ping the line. Roscoe worked steadily, dividing his time between the thresher and the poles. He continued bundling wire to string along the ceramic insulators he’d brought from the village—boxes of them that were slightly flawed and given to him for nothing.

Marie had insisted they stay behind when they moved to the farm, but he’d insisted they come, and it was one of the few standoffs in their years of marriage that he’d actually won. The boxes of insulators had followed them to the land, and here they were—being put to use.

Roscoe ran lines along the fence where he’d first told Wilson about the idea. They raised tall poles through the woods, one right at the fork toward Wilson and Moa’s quarters—“We’ll get you two power soon enough,” Roscoe promised—and they kept the lines high all the way to the final pole between the barn and the house.

The farmhouse still had to be wired, but Gerald was the only one itching for that particular luxury.

Marie stood by, showing an interest she hadn’t shown since their courting times, back in the village. She visited Roscoe in the shop and walked with him out to the lines. “Tell me again how the transformers work.”

He would take her to his drawings, saying, “As you remember, it all starts with dual attractions,” explaining, again, how some bodies are graced with extraordinary attraction lurking below their surfaces. “You have to awaken the attraction, though, create it. You remember the Faraday experiment with the wax and the flannel?”

“No. Show me again.”

He was sure she did remember, but he had no qualms demonstrating the base of electricity for her yet another time. “We’ve been seeing electricity forever,” he said, taking a round stick of wax from a shelf, “in the shocks we feel when we’ve become charged.” He rubbed the wax against his flannel shirt and held it close to Marie’s head, his wife laughing as the thin threads of her hair rose to meet it.

“When you run the wax through your hand, the attraction will go away,” Marie said, drawing a smile from her husband.

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“You were paying attention to your lessons, weren’t you?”

He could see her back in the village, young and eager and inquisitive, sitting across from him in the dining hall while he talked on and on. She’d once told him it was a poetry of sorts—his lectures on electricity.

“We can introduce attractions and remove them,” he continued.

“And Faraday took it further by showing how we can transfer the force, how we can harness and move it to other places.”

“Through copper.”

“And other materials. But copper is one of our best conductors, yes. That’s why I’ve used it in these cores.” Here, he’d take her to the guts of the transformers, showing her Wilson’s ironwork and his own windings of wire.

Marie wasn’t with Roscoe, she was educating Gerald, teaching him his geography and history, reading and writing, arithmetic, science. The two of them could be found in the front yard, studying more ants, or off in the fields taking notes on the crops. Marie felt like a teacher again—all this time with this one student—and Roscoe watched their son grow with his education, changing from the resentful boy he’d been into a young man ready to learn. They were all in their right roles—electrician, teacher, son.

Roscoe worried, at times, about Bean coming to call, looking for payment on his copper. Roscoe had sent in one small check, not enough to cover a quarter of one spool, along with a note promising the rest in full soon. Bean had sent a note back with clear numbers, Roscoe’s token payment deducted. Roscoe needed just a few months. That time would see the corn ready for harvest, and a great surge of income not spent on temporary pickers. They’d knock the stalks down with the tractor and send them to the thresher. They’d be the first farm in the county to have corn, and the money would come. Roscoe knew it. He’d pay off Bean, and his family would settle into the comfort of prosperity—lamps blazing in the living WHEN

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room, Gerald reading one of his adventure books, Marie studying up on her birds, Roscoe returning to Faraday’s words like a religious man to his Bible. Maybe, under those new bulbs, Gerald would take an interest, and Roscoe would be given the chance to be a father, explaining a part of the world to his boy.

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