What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 10
Pater approves of Frederick’s choice of girl, though. Approves so thoroughly Frederick begins to wonder if there’s something wrong with her, or him. But she’s so fresh from the country he can smell the perfume of apples on her skin. They marry in his own raw town with her family absent owing to a surging flood to the north, a flood that stops the wedding-bound relatives dead in their tracks, saturates their wedding finery through to the skin, and causes them to turn back with their clattering gifts of saucepans and kitchen knives. Then on his wedding night, Frederick learns that the perfume of apples comes out of a bottle, and a cheap one at that.
With the support of his paternal grandmother, who knows all of the right people from whom to buy, Frederick takes up selling medicines. Pater turns out to be his best customer and Frederick is appalled when Pater confesses he’s been secretly dosing himself up for most of his life.
‘It was your grandfather’s fault,’ Pater explains. ‘He had to keep himself well so the surgeons would never get their hands on him. He had a horror of surgeons, said they were always cutting people up who might have lived but for the dismemberment.’
Frederick laughs in disbelief, but his father waves his finger at him in warning.
‘You can laugh. But your grandfather always told the story of his great-great-grandmother — well, I don’t know how many greats — but she woke up to find they were cutting her open, only one more slice and that would’ve been the end of her. And, needless to say, the end of all of us. So your grandfather decided he’d go straight from his own bed to the grave, give no quarter to the sawbones with their blood-lust and scalpels. It follows he had to stay in the pink of health. Which he did with his many elixirs.’
‘Perhaps he got buried alive,’ Frederick observes. ‘That used to happen quite frequently when the relatives didn’t call in the doctors.’
‘Huh,’ Pater scoffs. ‘It used to happen even when they did.’ Now Pater too drinks the medicines as if they were prolongers of life — yellow for this, red for that.
‘How do you know you’ve got those diseases?’ Frederick inquires.
‘I haven’t got them,’ Pater replies, ‘I’m preventing them.’
‘Still, at least Pater is cheerful,’ Mater says to her son. ‘Your grandfather was a proper misery. You’re lucky he died before you had anything much to do with him. He was always concocting some nightmarish nostrum out of bat-spit and mandrake, always laving himself, always muttering prayers under his sulphurous breath, always thin and yellow and sour.’
Frederick laughs with delight, as he always does at his mother’s cynical and extravagant descriptions. No one else talks like this — unkindly apt, yet with a spirit of amusement rather than indignation: we’re all frail, my boy, we’re all human.
‘And your grandfather met someone on the boat, so the story goes,’ Mater continues, ‘a very old man, ninety, he said, with long white hair, a former Bedlamite who put the fear of God into him, told him it’s not just the surgeons’ knives you’ve got to be afraid of, it’s the apothecaries’ poisons. Believe me, I know, he said. They had me locked up in their asylum for fifteen years.
‘Don’t swallow all that stuff, he said to your grandfather when he saw all his toxicants, not that he would have seen the worst of them, mind — where do you get a crocus in canary wine on a sailing boat? Your grandfather said he had numerous fascinating conversations with this old man, who was as strong as an ox and not the least affected in the brain by his past or age, but the old man never convinced your grandfather that gambling with luck was better than being slowly poisoned.
‘Josiah got off the boat still hugging his medicine box and even though he could see there was no smog in the sky, even though the river beside Britannia looked like flowing glass, even though he could see the seashells on the bottom of the sea a mile out from our beach, then called Pito-one, he never stopped his restless search for the catholicon.
‘In the meantime he dosed himself religiously with whatever came to hand. His wife had to dose the new baby Samuel too, and rub him with life-preserving oils and fumigate his clothing with smoking herbs. You’d think with all the other work that had to be done he’d have forgotten his obsession, but no, old Josiah’s folly sustained itself and him until his death at the vinegary old age of ninety-three.’
‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ Frederick asks. ‘That his potions kept him alive?’
‘Of course not,’ his mother answers. ‘It was his ill-humour that pickled him.’
But at this time, the glassy river and the clean sea are but an artefact of his grandfather’s defective memory, or perhaps a figment of his perfective imagination — we shall have to wait to see if it turns out to be true. Some truths can only be discovered by going backwards. In the first decade and a half of Frederick Montague’s life, the sea for half a mile out is red with blood and choked with offal. If there are shells on the bottom or fish below the surface you’d never know and anyway, the sharks that are attracted by the floating meat would gobble all the fishes up.
The greedy sharks swim in the blood of the two hundred thousand animals slaughtered per annum, animals that are efficiently converted into forty-seven thousand carcasses, twelve hundred and ninety-four tons of tallow, sixty-three tons of hoofs, bones and horns, sixteen thousand cases of preserved meats and twenty casks of hide by the clever butchers of the meatworks. When you do the sums with your pencil on butcher’s paper it might seem there’s some missing bodies. No, say the housewives, the retail butcher shops are all supplied and you can purchase cheap cuts at the works’ back door. Poverty here doesn’t mean hunger.
Any intrepid soul who fancies a walk on the beach must brave the stench of corruption that sweeps in off the polluted sea. Or, if he instead turns his head towards the town — we presume this valiant soul is a man because the women are at home boiling up the cheap cuts of meat to make them edible, and beating the butter and sugar for economical cakes, and slapping the miscreant children to stop them hitting each other, and making ball dresses out of flour sacks, you know how it is when some old misery describes her worked-to-the-bone-but-goodness-we-were-happy past — when this bold but disconsolate man turns his head away from the sea, it is not to meet a sweeter wind blowing off the passionflower inhabiting the lowland and montane forests but to get a noseful of the foul winds of fellmongery.
If on a good day this particular reek is milder, there’s the cloying redolence of the jam factory, the yeasty halitosis of the brewery, the rancid transudations of the woollen mills, and the sickening fetor from the factory making violin strings and surgical sutures out of sheep gut to fill the malodorous gap. Amidst this discarded flesh, stink and soot the man must live out his life. He won’t go walking on the beach again — he doesn’t want to hear the sharks threshing after kidneys in the shallows — and he’ll go downwind only to work. He has a comparatively sweet-smelling job at the basket factory, making prams from willow and supplejack. While this poor man slaves, Frederick Montague is nothing but a boy with dirty knees running about the town, albeit he’s growing up quickly. It’s 1893. He’s thirteen already.
The keeper of the memory of perfection, Josiah Valentine Montague, peeps out over the immaculate white sheet that folds back over the edge of the blood-red blanket, and listens to his grandson shouting in the yard. The sun is streaming through the thin curtains, hurting his rheumy eyes. This is what it comes to: bleached ballerinas on a cotton curtain blasted by the insolent sun of the last day you’ll ever know. Is it something in the end to die of old age in your own bed? He always thought it would be, as if he would be cheating something. Now that it’s happening, he’s not so sure. The something’s there at the end, profoundly uncheatable. What would have suited him better then? Drowning in the storm-bedevilled straits as so many fishermen have done, or in the bullrush swamp beside failed Britannia? Being buried by rubble after an earthquake, or incinerated in a fire, or dying by inches from a malignant lump that weighs more than he does?
Josiah shudders and lifts his wrinkled and pale hand up to the light. It’s still warm, the blood is still moving. He’d imagined his mind would be less clear, that a mental shroud would be drawn over his own physical demise, that the curtain would be well down before the hero entered his final collapse. Instead he feels especially alert. It’s this that has made him believe today will be his last day on earth — his own alertness is like a portent.
His hearing is not good, however. He’s startled when Pater’s wife comes into the room with his invalid’s lunch of minced meat and thick-skinned custard, and he waves her away with an ephemeral hand. Today he’ll feast on a vision, a memory of salvaged whisky, colonial hams, liquid opium, the mesmerising blue of the harbour and a Scotsman with emerald eyes.
‘Ah look,’ Mater suddenly says. ‘It’s raining.’
Josiah wakes up and looks to the window where the curtain is now pulled back and the sky has turned dark. ‘I brought you your tea,’ she says, and Josiah turns to the clock to see that indeed the entire afternoon has passed away and he not with it. Will he even know when he has died? Our own death might be the one thing we can be completely certain about beforehand but never actually experience — surely a blasphemous thought for a man still trying to believe in God. The rain continues through the night and into the next day. Josiah wakes up to it and then sleeps again. It turns out that the last experience of Josiah Montague’s life is to be a surpassing flood.
Everyone remembers the flood of 1893. It turned up its nose at only a tiny number of elevated houses; the rest were invaded without restraint. Josiah will not die in his own bed but on top of a wardrobe, and the family will be so busy bailing out the living room with saucepans they won’t even notice. Well, we don’t mean he will slowly putrefy and a skeleton in a blanket will be discovered at Christmas when Mater hands the frail old man his pre-dinner sherry. No, at tea-time when an exhausted Mater goes to tuck his blanket round him more securely she will suddenly step backwards and exclaim, ‘Oh dear, Josiah’s gone!’
Floods are of course the bane of this failed town situated between the river and the sea, and although on a fine windless day this makes for an alluring setting (prior to the inauguration of the meatworks, we hastily add), the river appears to have decided to expel the beleaguered townsfolk. And in spite of the fact that this allows for much picturesque drollery with the escapes and floatings of household objects, the swimmings of cow and sheep, the trampings of sodden boots through post-diluvial ooze and mud, it also makes for a boring history of meetings and expenditures and public works that are instigated to quell the river’s wrath. We won’t bother to describe them. We shall only mention that even on the night of Josiah’s death, the river problem still has not been satisfactorily solved. After bailing out his house and weeping over his father, Pater goes out to survey the tide-mark on the fenceposts of Mr Kirk. ‘The water was nearly up to the top of them,’ he exclaims, and both men decide that what is needed is a stopbank.
No sooner said than done, or should we say, no sooner desired than the arduous work is started. The townsmen build the stopbank with the labour of their own hands, the sweat of their own brows — no use asking the old River Board, because it’s defunct; no use imploring the disdainful Borough Council. After it is built, and whenever it floods, the menfolk have to defend the stopbank from attack — not by the obstructed river gods but by the enraged humans living outside its protection. They demand that the river be allowed to express itself freely in its ancient and favoured channels and not be forced to pond ever more deeply, thanks very much, in their own back gardens.
So on endless nights of unremitting downpour Pater takes his turn in one of the sentry boxes along the stopbank, peering out through the pelting rain for marauders with picks and shovels. This is gang warfare at its most surreal and sublime: God-fearing men on duty at their frontiers, guarding the trembling women and children from the heathen outlaws of the neighbouring town. This is a very uneven battle: the chosen stand on high on the stopbank, the cast-out are wading slowly towards the enemy through cold swirling water while lugging their heavy weapons.
The rain abates, the water drains away. It just goes to show there’s nothing you can do to ensure that you die in your own bed, fate can always intervene. A statement which might seem to imply maliciousness on fate’s part, when it is its couldn’t-care-lessness we should deprecate. These are the private thoughts of Mater as she sorts out Josiah’s belongings after he becomes a headstone in the cemetery. But what’s this big old book tucked in here with these out-of-date trousers?
The fine morning disappears as Mater sits engrossed in the story of Josiah’s great-grandmother Valentina Montague. She’d like to say, Well that explains him, only it doesn’t. Silly old Josiah’s ancestor seems so much wiser than he ever was. Not that you can believe any of it. Fancy waking up in an anatomy class when you’re the object of dissection! Really, the woman must have had the most fevered imagination. Still, Mater is thoroughly delighted with the book and shows it to Pater. Henceforth there are readings from it every night after dinner. Their six children sit in front of the fire and block their ears — young Frederick will have to wait till he’s a nearly old man to savour its perfervid entertainments.
Josiah Montague picks up the shovel and throws a scoop of earth on top of his wife’s coffin as it is lowered into the clay hole. Then he looks up at the sky, not because he expects she is going in that direction, but because he is still there to see it. Not that it’s up to much — a chilly pale blue with thin clouds, the sky that the hand of God plays when the sinner’s soul needs warmth and splendour. When he used to speak like that to his now dead wife she would stop her ears. ‘You’re a blasphemer, Josiah,’ she’d admonish.
‘Why can’t He just for once give a man what he needs, what he wants,’ Josiah replied. ‘All that power and never a kindness. To think He could just stand up and reveal Himself to everyone and there’d be no more need for the ridiculous cavortions of belief and faith. What good are they to anyone?’
‘Are you becoming an atheist?’ his wife asked timidly, as if she feared the answer.
‘Certainly not,’ Josiah replied briskly. ‘I’m far too frightened.’
Now here he is burying her, and he always thought it would be the other way around. Who’s going to throw the clods on him? Perhaps his reaffiliated son Samuel or his lost son James, or maybe he won’t die till this noisome two-year-old brat Frederick grows up. Would his wife have turned up to do the job anyway? They’ve been estranged for years — is that the word you use when you live in separate houses, share nothing but the occasional meal, the odd desperate copulation, a desperation that is smote the instant the spasms stop. Funny how he’d thought there’d always be another woman out there for him, that it was just a matter of time. But time ran out.
Josiah tramps back with the sniffling friends and relatives to his sister-in-law’s house where her sons and daughters have organised the food and drink. Mourners dressed in black file past, kissing and whispering into the ears of the assembled bereaved. Josiah doesn’t hear a word, just smells their piscine breath, the ear far too close to the nose for comfort, for the little pearls of wisdom that relatives cultivate over long years until they’re fishified. He makes sure he gets offensively drunk, not because the alcohol’s free — no doubt the bill will find its way home, most of the bills do — but so that no one will use this as an occasion for patching things up. How he loathes that expression, even more the sentiment behind it: someone is dead, now we all have to love each other. But love doesn’t stop the dying, does it, and why waste what’s left of your life enduring a patched-up kinship that is fast unpatching itself?
Josiah leaves early, catches the train back to Pito-one, loves the view out of the carriage windows, sea all the way — some days the sea is so enticing it’s a wonder the bullock drays don’t drive off the road straight into it. And the weather has improved too, he notices, as he winds down the window. The sky’s almost presentable, the air is fresh and smelling headily of the cleansing ocean … well, until the stench of the slaughterhouse hits him full in the face.
Josiah gets off the train, begins to walk home, past the railway buildings, past the slaughterhouse, the boiling-down house, the tallow sheds, the bone-dust shed, the piggeries, stables and butcher’s shop of the meat company. You don’t have to see the seawater to know that the blood of the last financial year’s two hundred thousand animals has rendered it less than pellucid. All the way home he can’t rid himself of the intrusive comminglement of his wife’s funeral and the rites of the slaughterhouse. She comes to the knife naked, strung upside down by the toes; the butcher in galoshes and vast leather apron slits her open with one slice; he hauls out her innards into the buckets; her torso goes off to be flayed; the blood drains into the sea — it’s amusing to imagine, but how would he know, he’s never seen any of this process.
Later that year Josiah hears that a shipment of frozen meat from Port Chalmers has reached England in perfect condition, and it seems to him some cycle has been completed: the old country has exported its unwanted, and the unwanted have presented the motherland with a shipment of gelid carcasses, the miraculous and clever transformation of the live and useless into the useful and thoroughly dead.
Samuel Montague laughs at Josiah and tells him to be less cynical, but Josiah can’t find any reason to be. He folds his wrinkled hands over his little pot belly and looks stubborn. Samuel sighs. The old man is definitely going downhill. ‘I think it’s time you moved in with Mater and me,’ he says. ‘You might have that old-man’s tummy but the rest of you is skin and bone. You look like nothing but a piece of driftwood.’
