“You stupid fucking Irish!” he screamed as the quirt ripped over my neck. “It was Witherow!”
With two great mitts at Motion’s jacket, Boggs tore him clean out of the chute and jostled him to the wall. There Thomas took a number of hard blows across the ass, sobbing and holding his tongue with all his strength. Finally Boggs spun him around and prodded him back to his place beside me.
“I’ll be damned if this will continue, boys!” barked the foreman, to be heard by all above the clamor. He stood near us for a time, angrily straightening his coat as we bent to our work. At last he took up his supervisory pacing again.
Thomas looked long at me, red-faced and grim. He snorted through wet nostrils and returned to his work without a word.
I allowed a few days to pass. Then I lit a fire again.
I gave Thomas the signal that all was clear, so he sat back from the chute and stretched out his stiff spine and neck.
“Boss!” I shouted, and Boggs turned to find him so.
The boss pounded off two blows of the rod and Thomas bit his tongue till it bled. He showed me that night at school.
“You see!” he said. Neat tooth marks ran like hyphens across the bluish tongue. “I did this but I didn’t make a squeak. I’m doing good, huh? Not a squeak!”
“Better, Thomas, yes.”
“Better, for damn sure, than beating you with the boss’s quirt!” He heeled back and socked me so hard at the shoulder that I stumbled away from him.
“Yes, Thomas. Better.”
As for me and my lessons—I was getting nowhere. I stood in the tall grass of our hills like a castaway, distracted by the dark rustlings about me.
I went forward in tiny jerks, all my weight tilted onto the balls of my feet, half-fearing I would come to the edge of the world with each step. I struck my head on low branches. And always Thomas would come ripping out of the dark to knock me down and pummel me. Blackness and nothing more fronted me at every try, inscrutable blackness through which Thomas would lead me sprinting in terror. I had blindness and terror, while Thomas simply bit his tongue and every day grew calmer under Boggs’s rage.
THAT WINTER MRS. PRICE, THE BRAKEMAN’S WIFE, LOST HER SECOND son in ten months’ time to the Black Diamond Company. The first boy, Charles, had been bucked from a runaway rail-car on a rainy morning as the coal train screeched down slick rails to New York Landing. Now Samuel—a spragger of ten—shattered his skull against an outcropping in the Clayton Tunnel gangway while hustling alongside the cars.
Samuel was buried beside his brother on Rose Hill. Practicing a superstitious piety like most good Congregationalists in our town, Mrs. Price arranged for the burial to be carried out at night, by the light of a few lamps. Any goblins of ill luck would find harder trafficking this way.
Mother and I were there among a crowd of workmen and their wives. Near to us stood Reverend Parry, head bowed and eyes squeezed shut, lips twitching in silent prayer. Josiah Lyte stood bleached by lamplight at the head of the grave, reading aloud from the little book in his white hands. He bent and scattered dirt over the coffin and his lean face broke into a notchy smile.
I stood there in that thick congregation of black coats and skirts and listened to the words of the death rite and suddenly—instantaneously—everything around me was illumined. Darkness shuddered and went pale. Shadows slunk back and I saw the verdant green grass, the blue crystalline flakes in the quartz headstones lining the graveyard. I wished at once that Thomas were there. I could have bolted through the deep night without fear. All was vivid, as in sunlight. The earth shifted and bulged warm under my feet.
But promptly the lamp-rays quavered through filing shadows. The mourners were parting, dark again, and my mind’s sunlight was snuffed. The earth at my feet sank and settled, as if with a silent belch. Mother stepped away to greet some ladies. The unfilled grave was left to the few men—Mr. Price among them—who stayed to seal it.
I turned and started down the hill through the headstones. I was seeking mother in the dark when someone behind me spoke my name. Squinting back into the lamplight, I saw Josiah Lyte hastening toward me. His waxen face and hands gleamed against the blackness. One of those weird hands flashed and gripped my shoulder and he began chattering with low voice.
“Asher Witherow, I saw you! I kept my eyes on you, you see. I knew you for a remarkable young man all the time! The rare soul will glow, without fail, of course it will! And strange that I should see it, but I have and that is that—” He stopped and seemed to still his tongue with considerable effort, then chewed his lips eagerly and stared at me as though I might speak a language not his own, which he knew a little of and was trying to recall. He clenched my shoulder as if worried I might run from him. “Asher, I have seen. I’ve seen the manner in which you stand on the earth. I’ve watched your face at funerals, in the company of the dead.”
I sputtered that I meant no offense, that I knew the solemn thing death was. Mother said I was young still and intended no harm in things I couldn’t yet understand. I told him this.
Lyte shook his head. His mouth curved in a scalloped smile. “You’ve made no offense,” he said. “I mean to tell you that—that I’ve seen. I noticed you first at Edward Leam’s burial. I saw it then in you, only I couldn’t speak of it surely enough. But I marked you.”
I saw now that his eyes were almost transparently green, the skin beneath them streaked with pallid rings. And his dark eyebrows were very thin, two tiny crescents like gills slitting his brow. He pulled me closer. “I saw the earth filling up beneath you,” he whispered. “I saw the flowers at your feet!”
Mother appeared at my side.
“Asher—Oh! Good evening, Mr. Lyte.”
“Mrs. Witherow, good evening.” Lyte released me and stood straight again. “I was just speaking to your boy here—about the funeral. A sad event no doubt, but the Lord has his designs.”
Mother cast her eyes at Lyte’s feet, submerged in shadow though they were. “Yes he does, Mr. Lyte, that is sure.”
“Your Asher’s a remarkable lad, Mrs. Witherow.”
Mother took my hand. She turned away. “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Lyte. Good evening.”
“—And he does well in school I’m told. Mr. Evans says Asher has an aptitude for his lessons that’s rare among boys his age.”
Though I never knew her to shy from anyone, mother balked and stammered before Josiah Lyte. It makes me shudder to remember. She pulled me down the hill after her. “Yes. Well really, Mr. Lyte, we must go.”
Lyte waved a waifish hand. “Good evening, then. Good evening, Asher.”
“Good evening, sir.”
And then I was walking through the darkness with mother. We picked our way down the graveyard path to the Somersville Road, then turned and moved up the saddled ridge. A soft fog hovered in the hills around us. Just beyond the crest of the road a cloud of it rose and churned like steam against the blackness.
Mother’s fingers were frigid. With her free hand she clutched the weighty shawl at her breast. “Does Josiah Lyte speak often to you, Asher?”
“Sometimes at school he stops me with a word or two.”
“What does he say to you?”
“He’s eager about my learning. Asks me how school agrees with me.”
Mother