Dan Vyleta - Smoke

The words are well-tuned, clear, emphatic. And yet there is something odd to his delivery, as though they are strange things, found at random in a pamphlet and performed.

“Mind,” he adds, “don’t lie to me. It will throw me in a rage.”

I hesitate, a breath, two breaths, before telling him that yes, a youth that answers his description called here the previous afternoon. He drank some water and was on his way.

“Heading where?”

“To London, I suppose.” I gesture to the road.

“He did not stay?”

“He did not want to.”

The dark youth nods, then bends forward and sniffs me. If his dog’s nose, wet on my leg, is an imposition, his own, dry against my cheek, is a violation. And yet I let him, do not move. No face has been this close to mine since I kissed my wife farewell.

“It’s a chore, tracking someone who doesn’t much smoke.” He shakes his head, moves his head back, takes me in. “You though! A cowardly sort. Twice the weight as I and yet you stand here like a post. And your Smoke”—he sniffs, sampling me, the pale green haze now rising from my breath—“is limp. Weak. Boring. A defeated man.”

I do not argue with him. Indeed it is true. I should have grabbed an axe handle and kicked him off my yard. But he scares me, this youth. No man’s ready for pain, not even I, my wife and daughters buried out the back.

He has one more request before he leaves. He explains it so calmly, so sanely, that I fail to understand him until he pushes me into my kitchen and fetches the knife. He does not threaten me, never says what will happen if I decline to do what he asks.

“But why?” I ask, already seated at the table, the knife shaking in my hand. My Smoke is all around us now, thin and pale as poor man’s gruel. “It makes no sense.”

He does not answer, sits there, watching; his dog flinching whenever he moves.

“Go on,” he says. “Here, let me fetch your liquor. For courage, what do you say?”

He himself drains the last of the bottle.

“Do it. I haven’t got all day.”

All the time watching me, a mouse in a trap, tugging weakly at its stuck and broken limb.

“Go on!”

The voice lighter now, impatient and gleeful; his hand raised and stroking the air before his chin as though searching it for something no longer there, a beard, a mask, a second face.

“Go on!”

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I do in the end; take measure and chop. A man can live without a finger. He discards it in the bushes not five steps from my gateposts, a child already weary of its toy; his dog following, whimpering, as angry and lost as I. By the time the wound stops bleeding they are both long out of sight.

Somewhere ahead of him, the boy with the copper hair will be walking. I want to wish him well. But the dark gentleman hurt me, wounded something that goes beyond the flesh. My hand looks like it might infect. So I sit there, boiling potatoes, and curse all those who are gentle-born.

They stay the night with Grendel. Livia is glad when he asks them to, and smiles when he shows her around proudly, leading her from room to room, a tallow candle in his hand, dripping wax on the stone flooring.

“Please,” Grendel says for the umpteenth time when they return to the kitchen where Thomas has not moved from his stool. “You must.” It is as though it is he who is the supplicant and they the ones owning warmth and shelter.

For a while Livia is afraid that Thomas will decline the offer; that she will be thrust again into his company without the protection offered by a witness. But there is after all no choice. Thomas is weak, the night cold and alive with the shouts of strangers. For her own part, Livia is free of fear as she lies down on a wooden pallet and passes over into sleep. She trusts Grendel. She has known him for four hours, and she trusts him as much as any man or woman she has ever known. It is more than a feeling; it is a matter of fact. Grendel does not, cannot smoke. There is no malice in his heart.

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When Livia rises the next morning, she finds Thomas still in the room assigned to him, curled into a blanket and radiating a clammy heat. He has not even taken off his boots. Livia watches Thomas, for longer perhaps than is decent, then accepts Grendel’s invitation to walk with him to the church. It is early, dawn not quite broken, the streets near-empty and free of Smoke. In the quiet, Livia notices how run-down the city is, how badly in need of repair. There is hardly a building untouched by decay. Walls have caved, window frames fallen, ceilings and floors collapsed; holes stoppered with rags, paper, rubbish. And yet every house seems teeming with life, each cellar hole vivid with the movement of bodies, clothed and not. Through the broken windows and doorless doorways a hundred lives stand open to perusal. A woman stripped to the waist, feeding her newborn. A gaggle of boys ringing a chamber pot, relieving themselves with the unselfconsciousness of a litter. An old man in heavy boots picking his way through the dozen sleepers, leaving between them a trail of dark mud. Grendel notices Livia’s staring and the ensuing blush.

“Too many people,” he explains. “Living on top of one another. And everyone’s always hungry. It darkens their Smoke.”

“Don’t they have work?”

“Why yes. Factory work, most of them. But the factory doesn’t pay for housing.”

“Then why don’t they leave this filth? Move into the country?”

Grendel’s voice is gentle when he answers as though he’s afraid that his words will embarrass Livia with her ignorance. It deepens her blush.

“It’s difficult, you see. When they go to a parish, looking dirty and hungry and full of sin, they get ‘pushed on.’ Concerned neighbours, rounding them up at dawn and marching them to the parish border.” Grendel grimaces as one familiar with the experience. “Of course there’s no law against going where you wish. But you can’t live without work. And there’s no work for strangers.”

Livia muses on this. “Then it’s the factories’ fault,” she concludes. “They should provide housing for the workers. Spread them out across the land. Who owns them?”

“Who owns the factories?” Grendel’s face is free of accusation. “People like your parents, I suppose. The gentry. But look, here’s our church. I better get going on that bell.”

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Charlie does not come, not at dawn, nor at noon, nor yet at dusk, when she waits for him on the steps of the church until London has sunk into darkness and people bar their houses against the night. Grendel walks home with her, the streets full now and misty with Smoke. Back in his room, Thomas lies as she has left him. Mrs. Grendel tells Livia he woke long enough to struggle into his coat and insist on heading out to meet Charlie. When she assured him that Livia and her husband were fetching Charlie even as they spoke, he collapsed back on his blankets and fell asleep at once.

“Let him rest,” Mrs. Grendel says. “He is healing. Gathering strength. It’s the last stage of illness. Two more days and he’ll be right as rain.” She speaks as one familiar with the sick. At their feet Thomas lies like a dead thing, rancid in his sweat.

Livia draws up a stool and sits with him. It is, she tells herself, an act of duty, towards Charlie as much as Thomas. And yet there is more to her gaze as she studies his curled-up form, the bold lines of his face, the blue-black mark that crawls out of the crater of his wound and insinuates itself into his cheek. She sits, feet planted a yard from his chest, the room still around her, cooking smells drifting from the kitchen. Sits, half-conscious of a question. Her hands in little fists. When she shifts, minutely, her back is stiff with tension.