T. Boyle - Water Music

Ned hesitates at the door, his voice floating on a wave of adrenalin: “The Brunch farm,” he stammers, “old woman, which way is it?”

The semblance of a smile twists her lips. “Farmer Brunch? I thought you boys was friends o’ the Squire’s?” The joke catches in her throat and she begins to hack and wheeze like an overworked horse, but Ned is already out the door, white-hot with terror and rage and confusion, fighting through the brambles and jerking at Boyles’ sleeve for all he’s worth.

“Arf a mile. . up the road, peach. . peachfuzz,” the old woman shrieks at his back. “At the fork. Just climb the fence and cut across the pasture. Stone cottage with a tumbledown barn. . out back. ‘Ear?”

Ned is running, panicked, every syllable an injection of fire and brimstone and the caustic salts of perdition, conscience rasping in his ear, Boyles forsaken, legs churning, arms parting the dead stalks and lowhanging branches as if they were waves and he a breaststroker making for shore, running for the cold hard road and the sanctuary of the Brunch farm like a filicide caught in the act.

♦ A TICKET TO GOREE ♦

Half a mile up the road they come to a fork. A milestone on the right indicates the way into Hertford proper. On the left, a neck-high wall of interlocking stones, an empyrean expanse of greening pasture maculated with stubborn patches of ice, and in the distance, as the hag had indicated, the stone cottage flanked by the tumbledown barn.

Boyles stops short, puzzles over the milestone and then, scratching his head, crosses the road to the stone wall, hikes himself up on his elbows and takes a good hard squint at the distant farmhouse. After a minute or two of intense concentration, rapid lip movement and the ticking off of various sums on his fingers, he turns back to Ned. “This’ll be it, Neddy, looks like.”

Ned is only half listening. The encounter with the hag and her strange timid ward has anesthetized him, deadened him to the cold and the uncertainty alike, shut his ears to hope, calculation and the insipid chattering voice of his traveling companion. He can still see the child’s eyes, hear the hag’s squawks of triumph, feel that empty strangling sensation in his gut, the insidious cramp of a truth so unimaginable it can only be digested in the dark essential atmosphere of the bowels. When he looks up at Boyles, he can only nod.

A heave, a ho, and a thump, and they’re in the pasture, looking half a dozen startled sheep in the eye. As they muck their way across the field, the farmhouse begins to look somewhat grander and more extensive than they’d been led to expect, the barn less tumbledown. Is this a tenant’s cottage? With three chimneys and a second story?

Boyles is rubbing his hands with glee and Ned is on the verge of making the deductive leap between the unwonted sprawl of the farmhouse and the hag’s ulterior motives, when the first shotgun blast knocks them flat. The second blast flings a fistful of mud in their faces and neatly threads the odd ball or two through their breeches and into the tender uncallused flesh along the nether plane of their thighs and buttocks. An instant later a pair of wooden-faced gamekeepers are standing over them, guns smoking and boots glistening. Then there’s a voice, deep as thunder along the spine of a mountain, righteous and indignant as the voice of God, barking out a terse command: “Off the ground, shitface.”

Ned rises slowly, his buttocks on fire, staring into the mouth of the gun. The man behind the gun is as impassive as a weasel with a rat in its mouth, sallow and dead-eyed.

“But — but you don’t—” Ned begins, but the man merely cuffs him with the stock of the gun in an automatic and exquisitely fluid snap of shoulder and elbow, and Ned finds himself face down in the mud again. Then there’s the cold pressure of steel against the back of his neck, the cords drawn tight around his wrists, the quick itch of the burlap sack jerked over his head. The whole thing, from the initial shock of the report to the blind stuttering march across the fields, takes no more than five minutes. Through the pain in his flank and the throbbing of his jaw, Ned can make out the sniffling inebriate whimper of Boyles at his side, and in the distance, faint as the multifarious hissing of adders in a pit, the mad liquid screech of the hag.

♦ ♦ ♦

The rest is as predictable as rain in Rangoon. Squire Trelawney, determined to put a stop to the alarming incidence of poaching on his estate, sourly forgoes his dinner to sentence the pair to six hours of strappado followed by peine fort et dure, and if at that point still viable, strangulation unto death. The Squire’s brother points out, as a matter of purely theoretical interest, that as the transgressors had neither fowling piece nor pelf about them, they should perhaps be sentenced for the less flagrant offense of trespassing. Not that he wishes to circumvent his brother’s authority, mind, nor to in any way suggest that the guilty parties should be lightly dealt with, it is just that he finds the thought of torn sockets and crushed ribcages most distressing before dinner. The Squire, framed by the mounted heads of stag and boar and surrounded by his collection of seamen’s knots, hesitates a moment, fiddling with his wig and staring off into space as if ruminating over his brother’s objection. After a minute or so, his stomach rumbles mightily. “Oh, all right, Lewis, have it your way,” he grunts finally. “Twenty years at hard labor.”

There follow two months of close confinement at the base of an abandoned well, long since gone dry, but damp as a sink nonetheless. The food is poor, the incarcerees step on one another’s toes, Boyles complains incessantly. “Wisht I’d never of been born,” he groans, face to face with Ned in their cylindrical prison, barely able to move his arms without tangling them in his companion’s. “And me feet — me feet’s so wet the shoes is rotted off ‘em. Besides which, I’m cold — spring, summer, winter — it’s like the Arctic down ‘ere.”

In the daylight, Trelawney’s overseer — a vicious psychopath with a spine so twisted his head lies flat against his left shoulder— lashes them to a plow beside an arthritic ox and drives them through the clods and mire of the fields from dawn till dusk. At night, they sleep in shifts. One of them climbs halfway up the well shaft and clings to the wet rocks, while the other hunches in the slime below, napping fitfully. As Ned clutches at a willow root one night, bracing himself against the far wall of the shaft with the cramped muscles of his legs, it begins to occur to him that he may have died after all, that his resurrection at St. Bartholomew’s was nothing more than a waking in hell, and that everything that has transpired since — every ache, shin splints, stitch and cramp, every crack in the jaw and kick in the ass, every turnabout, disappointment and gut-wrenching loss — is no more than the tiniest link in the eternal concatenation of torments he must live through, moment by moment, muttering his soft savage imprecations over each, as if they were the devil’s prayer beads.

It seems he’s not far wrong.

Two months later a constable rides out from London to haul the prisoners from the well, chain them to the back of a wagon and march them into town, where they are remanded to the hulks in order to serve out the remaining nineteen years and ten months of their sentences, shoveling mud. The hulks, if anything, are closer and damper than Squire Trelawney’s well, with the added liability of constant exposure to the reeking breath, runny bowels and festering phlegm of hundreds of hardened criminals, father rapers, generalized pederasts and blood drinkers alike. It’s pretty rough. Packed in at night, three to a berth, in the leaking, creaking holds of rotted tubs perennially mothballed in the Thames and stinking of their slow transubstantiation to sawdust and mulch. Slopped like hogs on cabbage soup and gruel. Forced down into walled enclosures, thirty or forty feet beneath the level of the river, to ply the shovel, wield the pick and haul buckets of rich, reeking muck. Dredging, they call it. Backbreaking, spirit-crushing work. Lay the shovel down to wipe your brow and they lay open your back.