T. Boyle - Water Music

Then, like the punchline of a bad joke, the moment passed into history. Tullochgorm lifted the tankard to his lips and took a long thirsty gulp. No reaction. He turned the pages of his book. There followed an instant during which he looked down at the pot of yellow liquid, took a puzzled experimental sip, and then spewed it all out like a whale coming up for air. Thirty-six heads dropped, suddenly absorbed in the intricacies of Latin grammar. Georgie Gleg looked up. The schoolmaster was having a fit of some sort, gasping and retching, pounding on the desk with the flat of his hand, blood vessels bursting in his face like a fireworks display. Georgie was awed, puzzled and frightened at the same time. But if he was surprised, the surprise was short-lived. For Tullochgorm was staring at him. Not staring exactly — glaring. Looking daggers. A froth of saliva and partially digested food on his chin, his eyes piglike with rage and hatred, Tullochgorm was glaring at him.

Georgie Gleg, ten years old, began to feel very small indeed.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was all downhill after that. There were peaks and valleys, of course, but essentially the plane of Gleg’s life inclined toward the nether pole. The immediate result of the incident with Tullochgorm was expulsion, followed by a tripartite thrashing at the hands of Georgie’s mother, Quaggus and the schoolmaster. For the next two weeks Gleg was forced to take a cup of his own urine with each meal, and to stand in the town pillory, erected ad hoc, for half an hour each afternoon. At the end of the two-week period he was unceremoniously booted from the house at the long end of Quaggus’ foot, and sent up to Edinburgh, where he was to live with his uncle Silas and attend the local school.

Surprisingly, Edinburgh wasn’t all that bad. For one thing, no one knew him in the big city. No one knew of the slain eagle and the tiles slathered with blood, no one accused him of harboring the evil eye or of curdling milk by his mere presence. To his schoolmates he was just another gangling, flap-eared object of ridicule — nothing special. Through the hail of abuse he even managed to nurture a friend or two — other misfits, of course — but it was a start. For another thing, Silas Gleg took an active interest in his nephew. He dressed him properly, hired a tutor, gave him an allowance — Georgie began to develop as a laird’s son should. He graduated with high honors.

At this point, Quaggus stepped in. Since there was really no estate left to manage nor any patrimony to speak of, he argued, the boy should set himself up in a professional way, earn a living, learn to maintain himself. Silas Gleg reluctantly agreed. Georgie was first apprenticed to an apothecary, and then later, when the druggist unexpectedly passed on, to Silas Gleg’s old friend, Dr. James Anderson of Selkirk. There he met Ailie, and his life developed into something worthwhile, something beautiful, something that for the first time approached the sublime. When she agreed to marry him he felt as if he’d conquered the world. Alexander, Caesar, Attila the Hun — they were pikers by comparison.

But then, just when life was opening up to him like an orchid in bloom, it snapped shut again, deadly, vituperative, rotten at the core. She left him. Crept off in the shadows as if he were some beast she couldn’t face in the light of day. The relatives and neighbors had gathered. Quaggus and his mother. Uncle Silas. It was to have been the crowning moment of his life.

He left Selkirk the day after Christmas. There were no explanations, no apologies, no farewells. Stoop-backed, valise in hand, he headed off in the direction of Edinburgh. It was cold. The wind swept down out of the north with a sound like the keening of birds, and the crusted branches rattled like chandeliers at a wake. If he’d bothered to lift his head he would have looked out on a ripple of cropped gray hills, sorry gashes of erosion, trees stark beyond any hope of renewal. He didn’t bother. Hunched against the wind. Gleg struggled on, weary and disconsolate, limping along the roadway like some half-dazed footsoldier beating a retreat from an enemy he could neither subdue nor comprehend.

♦ LIFE AFTER DEATH ♦

“It’s happened before, I tell you. An obstruction in the windpipe, shock and coma, the premature pronouncement of death. Good Lord, man, it was snowing to beat all hell — and Christmas morning on top of it. Who’s to blame the hangman for maybe rushing things just a bit?”

With the slow, steady persistence of grains accumulating in an inverted hourglass, the voice of reason is beginning to have its effect on Quiddle. Still, he resists. “He dangled twenty minutes, didn’t he?”

“Psssh,” Delp waves his hand contemptuously. “Need I remind you that the human animal is infinitely various, and that what will dispatch one quite neatly may not necessarily, inexorably and in all cases do the trick for another. A Fiji Islander might not last more than five minutes in the waters off Greenland, but what of an Eskimo? Or better yet — take your average greengrocer. He’d go up like a wad of paper if you sent him through a bed of hot coals, and yet the Indies are swarming with fakirs who do it three and four times a day — for a lark. Use your sense, man. Who’s to say that twenty or thirty or even sixty minutes’ hang time is sufficient to choke out a human life without first taking into consideration the vagaries of time and place, weather conditions, the type of knot and quality of rope, the endurance of the individual and any of a thousand other intangibles?”

“I don’t care how you explain it, I still think it’s a miracle that that man in there is alive. Whether it’s the hand of the Almighty or just a ripple of the law of averages, I’ll wager it’s the most extraordinary thing to happen round here since Queen Elizabeth’s handmaid got hit by lightning and sprouted a beard.”

Delp’s eyes have gone cold with exasperation. “Wager away,” he grunts, pulling the pipe from his mouth as if he were unplugging a drain, “but I’ll tell you this — I want that character out of here in a week’s time. Chafe his neck, let some blood, feed him broth — whatever it takes — but get him on his feet and out that door.” Here he pauses to strike a match and suck the yellow flame over the bowl of his pipe. “I have no objection to your parading him around a bit, incidentally. There’s been a lot of folderol about the miracle of modern science and all that, the patients looking on it with a certain degree of awe and so on. Walk him around. I don’t think it would hurt us a bit — if you know what I mean.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The door swings back and scatters light through the little room. In the doorway, Quiddle. A tray in his hands. Pewter mug, golden crust, steam rising from a bowl. “Well, you’re awake then,” he booms in a jaunty, whistling-in-the-churchyard sort of voice.

Ned Rise lies on a pallet in the corner, a dirty blanket pulled up to his neck. The room is dank and windowless: earthen walls, brick floor, deal planks overhead. A cellar of course, crude and unfinished, and yet not without its amenities: a washstand and tub of water, fireplace carved out of the wall, bucket of coal, framed mirror. Beside the door, a tottering rack of clothes and an upended grocer’s basket cluttered with books (medical texts and religious tracts) and the refuse of quotidian life: apple cores, cheese rinds, loose tobacco, the stumps of deceased candles. Someone has painted a window on the far wall and framed it with a fluff of soiled yellow curtain.

“So — how are you feeling?” Quiddle hollers, edging into the room and making motions toward the low table at the foot of the bed.

Ned says nothing. He lies there, unshaven, hair matted, the red rope burn a reproof round his neck. His eyes stick out like swords.