What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 28
‘What about Milton?’
‘Who?’
‘He wrote that poem we read last night.’
‘Oh that. I didn’t even understand it. But unless you’re one of them, other people laugh if you talk about life and death. Or they tell you to keep quiet. Sometimes they even want to chop off your head. But with satire, it’s like you’re saying to them: You don’t have to worry about me, I’m not serious, I don’t even take myself seriously. Then you can give them a big thump before they’ve even noticed you’ve clenched your fist.’
‘How aggressive of you, Anne,’ Valentine replies, laughing. ‘I didn’t know you wanted to go round thumping people.’
‘Well I do.’
‘Why?’
‘Somebody made life impossible. You keep saying it wasn’t God, so it must be people.’
‘And how do you think life is impossible?’
‘Some people have grabbed everything, so everyone else has to fight,’ Anne begins hotly, ‘and if a woman wants to eat she has to get married and then she is always having babies. Everywhere married women are dropping dead like flies. But if she wants to eat, a woman has to be prepared to die.’
Soon after this outburst, Anne Green’s father calls her back to the hovel for marriage and childbirth and a lifetime of drudgery. We all know the outcome of this impending disaster: she steals Valentine’s The Compleat Midwife and makes off in the dead of night.
She arrives in London with only the clothes she stands up in. Unless she wanted to dress like a man, Valentine had none she could take. The money she has saved over the years she uses for the bag of medicaments she carries; the little that is left she will use for food and lodging. Until it runs out. Then what? Don’t even think about it. She takes the first cheap room she is offered. As for the food, it is usually black bread and cabbage soup, now and then a sausage, now and then no soup. When she departs, leaving everyone alive and happy after a birth, a better family sometimes gives her a portion of roasted pigeon or a slice of boiled mutton. But when there’s trouble, some refuse to pay even the regular fee. She must help herself to scraps and leftovers on her way out through the kitchens.
Everyone knows 1649 was a very bad year for the poor. The poverty-stricken young women do not eat properly. They are thin and haggard, they are not attractive to the young but worn-out men — or, if they are, their bodies are not hospitable to his seed. In the year of her death, 1650, Anne Green is not called to sufficient accouchements, and occasional meat-gifts from the well-off do not tide her over from one missed loaf to the next. Her own health begins to suffer. What is she to say or do when one large and lusty gentleman opportunes her in his kitchens, where she has helped herself to a large bowl of bubbling soup after delivering his broken wife of their tenth son? How is she to avoid the accusation of theft? How is she to get more soup? There is only one way — down on the cold floor with her legs in the air. And soon she is like the old goat’s wife in more than this: she too is expecting his child.
Anne Green knows what to do. Hasn’t she been doing it to other women for some time now? She prepares her special mixtures, some for ingesting, some for a poultice, and she prays too, hoping that it is God’s will as well as her own that this child should not be born. But the infant is viable when it slithers out, and worse, there is a witness. Anne Green’s landlady bustles into the small and bare room to see what all the fuss is about. She throws up her hands in horror when she sees the bloodied and shrivelled lump wriggling on the floorboards. ‘What are we going to do?’ she cries. ‘Oh my house, my respectable house!’
It would be true to say that Anne Green is not quite in her right mind, what with the horror of the abortion and its still living issue, not to mention the landlady’s screaming, and the sudden overwhelming fear that she will be turned out of her accommodation. Unthinkingly she shoots out her hands at the monster and throttles it.
‘Oh, you’ve murdered it!’ the landlady wails. She rushes from the room and down the stairs, crying, ‘Help, help, there’s a woman in here who has murdered her baby.’
The landlady is barren and a closet Catholic. It is not too far-fetched to claim that she saw hope in that squirming mess on the floor. God moves in mysterious ways but He had answered her prayers and now the midwife-witch has killed it. The child or hope, we are not sure which, but clearly the woman is hysterical and not in the frame of mind to split hairs.
Anne Green’s trial does not focus on the landlady’s metaphysical beliefs but on her testimony that a living child was born and then died at the hands of its mother. There is no learned physician to state that the child would have died anyway — the physicians are jealous of the midwives, why would one want to stand up in her defence? Not a one does. The guilty verdict is inevitable, as is the punishment. These are not lenient and squeamish times. She is taken back to the prison, where she is thrown in a dank cell with several other women. These others disappear one by one — some to the grave, some to the gallows, and some are restored to the world.
She spends the last night of life as Anne Green alone. But when she dies as Valentina Montague, she will be in her own warm bed and surrounded by family and friends. And she would vehemently agree with the rest of us that that is the only way to go, if go we must. We must.
Anne Green wakes up. It is still dark in the cell and very cold. She fingers the scratches she has made on the wall. It is December the fourteenth, in the year of our Lord 1650. Anne Green kneels to pray, shivering uncontrollably as her quiet words vanish into the darkness, and if she were asked she would not be able to say whether her shivering arises from horror of her crime or from the fear that she must soon follow her own prayers.
She pulls her ragged clothing more tightly around herself, to no effect. The thin and worn cloth splits like overripe fruit. Where once she was covered she is now naked. How she wishes she could go to the grave warm and fed — not such a strange desire in a body that has been so cold and hungry. However, it is not generally the case that life changes its character in its last hours although a man himself might well change. Many a heretic has called for absolution on his deathbed or as the flames of a slow willow fire lick his shrinking soles.
But this is not Anne Green’s problem. She has been a believer all her life. More lately she has even become fervent. She has prayed for forgiveness night and day, fervently hoping that the flames that lick the heretics’ feet in this world will not be licking her own in eternity. What would it be like to burn for ever? Pray to God she will never know.
She stands up and goes over to the small barred window. Dawn is opening up a thin bright slit across the black horizon. Luckily her view does not give onto the hillock where the gibbet stands: her last sunrise will not slowly illumine the means of her death. She can watch the sun come up as on any other day when she was not dying — if there ever was such a day.
Anne watches the winter sunrise till it coldly floods the prison buildings in which she is housed. By that time she can hear the shrill screaming of babies, the clamour of the crowds at the gate. They have come to see the law take vengeance upon the wicked, of which she is indubitably one. One of many perhaps. Perhaps they will step up to the nooses in twos and threes, in nines and tens. That loud hammering that has been going on since dawn could well be the construction of additional gallows. Will there be comfort in dying in company, in droves? Of course not. For the moment of an individual’s passing can never be shared round or out, since sharing involves a lessening of one’s own portion, and this is a portion that has been allotted to you and is all yours since time out of mind.
Anne is suddenly frightened that her thoughts are not reverent. She should be dwelling on the souls of the hanged fluttering up to heaven, there to abase themselves about the Creator’s feet, there to plead for an eternal life with lambs and harps and roses. On the other hand, perhaps she will have to endure the shrieks and abuses of the crowd alone. All morning they have actually been dismantling the obscenity of an excess of gallows. Every rotten, pulpy turnip is hers, every malevolent eye, every loathsome and poxy fontanelle.
The turnkey unlocks the heavy oak door and pushes it open to the piercing whine of the ancient hinges. Anne Green turns away from the window and towards the man who has come to fetch her. He is of the rough sort who knows no distinction between men, hence between criminals. There are many who would say such a lack of discrimination makes a man just. Fortunately, Anne need not run the gauntlet of rough justice. She will receive the gentlemanly kind, although some might well ask whether defenestration is not in fact preferable.
The turnkey takes her firmly by the wrists and leads her down the narrow corridor to the dank winding stairway. He opens the door at the bottom and leads her to a small courtyard where he takes a piece of twine out of his apron pocket and ties her hands behind her back. From a large hook he takes down a knotted heavy rope and places it around her neck, then he pushes her out to the waiting tumbrel. Standing in the stalled cart, Anne Green can see out of the open prison gates to the sea of faces, the press and clutch of crushing bodies, the several other carts, the wintry sky, the leafless trees. The old nag starts to walk, the tumbrel lurches. Before she knows it she has passed through the gates and has been swallowed up by noise and movement. She feels curiously detached, as if her soul were already fluttering.
The procession of the condemned makes its way through the baying crowds to the grass knoll where the gallows stand. She sees now that the structure has an adjustable capacity: no need to be knocking up or taking down — there is room for all their necks to be broken simultaneously. There are some structures of execution where the horse receives a crack across the arse, and dashes with the clattering cart and rising dust into the roaring cleaving crowds, but such devilry and dishevelment are not permitted here. The condemned stand quietly, penitently, while the dusty priest drones from the Bible: be not affrighted, the Lord is thy shepherd, He leadeth thee in green pastures, through the valley of the shadow of death His staff shall comfort thee, for ever and ever, Amen.
Anne Green looks away from his attentions, past the front row of the now quiet crowd, to an area at the side where the mothers are preparing their sick babies. They are frantically pulling the swaddling cloths off their babies’ bald heads. When the condemned are dead and dangling, the mothers will point their babies’ fontanelles at the corpses, and the babies will be miraculously cured of all their apparent and hidden diseases.
Now the time has come. Not everybody knows their own time; not everybody can prepare their thoughts, nor have the opportunity for a final prayer. But stepping into the shadow of death Anne Green is distracted from thought or prayer when she sees the blood-frockcoats in the crowd. In tall black hats and holding leather bags bulging with saws, they are forming a small and distinctive circle of their own. They have come to collect the hanged corpses for anatomizing, for the advancement of medical science. Anne Green has a sudden urge to spit. However, we do not spit on our fellow human sufferers when we are only seconds away from trying to enter heaven. Besides, the frockcoats are too far away to be spattered and the cool wind might well blow the gob straight back onto the frightened criminals.
Anne Green is suddenly jerked into place by the hangman who has taken hold of the other end of the heavy rope. Now he is attaching it to some sort of iron ring on the crossbar. She trembles as he makes minor adjustments to the portion which is around her neck and then ties on the blindfold. She has to wait only a second or two and then she hears the loud bang of the trapdoor. The last thing she experiences on God’s earth is falling, interminably falling the short distance that constitutes the slack in the rope. It takes so long she could have been falling this way all her life.
Acknowledgements
Title taken from Dream Song #26 ‘The glories of the world’ from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Information about Petone came from Brittania by the River by Warwick Johnston, a publication of the Petone Settlers Museum/Te Whare Whakaaro o Pito-one, 1999; Petone: A History by Susan Butterworth, Petone Borough Council, 1988; and exhibitions in the Petone Settlers Museum itself.
Information about the history of medicine came from The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present by Ray Porter, Fontana Press, 1999. I also made much use of Porter’s London A Social History, Penguin Books, 2000. Finally I gleaned many interesting details and much enjoyment from Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson, W. W. Norton and Company Inc, 2001.
Once again, many thanks to Jane Parkin, Geoff Walker and Creative New Zealand for all their support.
About the author
Charlotte Randall is the award-winning author of Within the Kiss. Her first novel, Dead Sea Fruit, won the South East Asian/South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best first book and the Reed Fiction Award in 1995. Her second novel, The Curative, was joint runner-up of the Deutz Medal for fiction at the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
Born and raised in Dunedin, New Zealand, she now lives in Christchurch with her husband and two children.
Charlotte Randall, What Happen Then, Mr Bones?
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‘Who?’
‘He wrote that poem we read last night.’
‘Oh that. I didn’t even understand it. But unless you’re one of them, other people laugh if you talk about life and death. Or they tell you to keep quiet. Sometimes they even want to chop off your head. But with satire, it’s like you’re saying to them: You don’t have to worry about me, I’m not serious, I don’t even take myself seriously. Then you can give them a big thump before they’ve even noticed you’ve clenched your fist.’
‘How aggressive of you, Anne,’ Valentine replies, laughing. ‘I didn’t know you wanted to go round thumping people.’
‘Well I do.’
‘Why?’
‘Somebody made life impossible. You keep saying it wasn’t God, so it must be people.’
‘And how do you think life is impossible?’
‘Some people have grabbed everything, so everyone else has to fight,’ Anne begins hotly, ‘and if a woman wants to eat she has to get married and then she is always having babies. Everywhere married women are dropping dead like flies. But if she wants to eat, a woman has to be prepared to die.’
Soon after this outburst, Anne Green’s father calls her back to the hovel for marriage and childbirth and a lifetime of drudgery. We all know the outcome of this impending disaster: she steals Valentine’s The Compleat Midwife and makes off in the dead of night.
She arrives in London with only the clothes she stands up in. Unless she wanted to dress like a man, Valentine had none she could take. The money she has saved over the years she uses for the bag of medicaments she carries; the little that is left she will use for food and lodging. Until it runs out. Then what? Don’t even think about it. She takes the first cheap room she is offered. As for the food, it is usually black bread and cabbage soup, now and then a sausage, now and then no soup. When she departs, leaving everyone alive and happy after a birth, a better family sometimes gives her a portion of roasted pigeon or a slice of boiled mutton. But when there’s trouble, some refuse to pay even the regular fee. She must help herself to scraps and leftovers on her way out through the kitchens.
Everyone knows 1649 was a very bad year for the poor. The poverty-stricken young women do not eat properly. They are thin and haggard, they are not attractive to the young but worn-out men — or, if they are, their bodies are not hospitable to his seed. In the year of her death, 1650, Anne Green is not called to sufficient accouchements, and occasional meat-gifts from the well-off do not tide her over from one missed loaf to the next. Her own health begins to suffer. What is she to say or do when one large and lusty gentleman opportunes her in his kitchens, where she has helped herself to a large bowl of bubbling soup after delivering his broken wife of their tenth son? How is she to avoid the accusation of theft? How is she to get more soup? There is only one way — down on the cold floor with her legs in the air. And soon she is like the old goat’s wife in more than this: she too is expecting his child.
Anne Green knows what to do. Hasn’t she been doing it to other women for some time now? She prepares her special mixtures, some for ingesting, some for a poultice, and she prays too, hoping that it is God’s will as well as her own that this child should not be born. But the infant is viable when it slithers out, and worse, there is a witness. Anne Green’s landlady bustles into the small and bare room to see what all the fuss is about. She throws up her hands in horror when she sees the bloodied and shrivelled lump wriggling on the floorboards. ‘What are we going to do?’ she cries. ‘Oh my house, my respectable house!’
It would be true to say that Anne Green is not quite in her right mind, what with the horror of the abortion and its still living issue, not to mention the landlady’s screaming, and the sudden overwhelming fear that she will be turned out of her accommodation. Unthinkingly she shoots out her hands at the monster and throttles it.
‘Oh, you’ve murdered it!’ the landlady wails. She rushes from the room and down the stairs, crying, ‘Help, help, there’s a woman in here who has murdered her baby.’
The landlady is barren and a closet Catholic. It is not too far-fetched to claim that she saw hope in that squirming mess on the floor. God moves in mysterious ways but He had answered her prayers and now the midwife-witch has killed it. The child or hope, we are not sure which, but clearly the woman is hysterical and not in the frame of mind to split hairs.
Anne Green’s trial does not focus on the landlady’s metaphysical beliefs but on her testimony that a living child was born and then died at the hands of its mother. There is no learned physician to state that the child would have died anyway — the physicians are jealous of the midwives, why would one want to stand up in her defence? Not a one does. The guilty verdict is inevitable, as is the punishment. These are not lenient and squeamish times. She is taken back to the prison, where she is thrown in a dank cell with several other women. These others disappear one by one — some to the grave, some to the gallows, and some are restored to the world.
She spends the last night of life as Anne Green alone. But when she dies as Valentina Montague, she will be in her own warm bed and surrounded by family and friends. And she would vehemently agree with the rest of us that that is the only way to go, if go we must. We must.
Anne Green wakes up. It is still dark in the cell and very cold. She fingers the scratches she has made on the wall. It is December the fourteenth, in the year of our Lord 1650. Anne Green kneels to pray, shivering uncontrollably as her quiet words vanish into the darkness, and if she were asked she would not be able to say whether her shivering arises from horror of her crime or from the fear that she must soon follow her own prayers.
She pulls her ragged clothing more tightly around herself, to no effect. The thin and worn cloth splits like overripe fruit. Where once she was covered she is now naked. How she wishes she could go to the grave warm and fed — not such a strange desire in a body that has been so cold and hungry. However, it is not generally the case that life changes its character in its last hours although a man himself might well change. Many a heretic has called for absolution on his deathbed or as the flames of a slow willow fire lick his shrinking soles.
But this is not Anne Green’s problem. She has been a believer all her life. More lately she has even become fervent. She has prayed for forgiveness night and day, fervently hoping that the flames that lick the heretics’ feet in this world will not be licking her own in eternity. What would it be like to burn for ever? Pray to God she will never know.
She stands up and goes over to the small barred window. Dawn is opening up a thin bright slit across the black horizon. Luckily her view does not give onto the hillock where the gibbet stands: her last sunrise will not slowly illumine the means of her death. She can watch the sun come up as on any other day when she was not dying — if there ever was such a day.
Anne watches the winter sunrise till it coldly floods the prison buildings in which she is housed. By that time she can hear the shrill screaming of babies, the clamour of the crowds at the gate. They have come to see the law take vengeance upon the wicked, of which she is indubitably one. One of many perhaps. Perhaps they will step up to the nooses in twos and threes, in nines and tens. That loud hammering that has been going on since dawn could well be the construction of additional gallows. Will there be comfort in dying in company, in droves? Of course not. For the moment of an individual’s passing can never be shared round or out, since sharing involves a lessening of one’s own portion, and this is a portion that has been allotted to you and is all yours since time out of mind.
Anne is suddenly frightened that her thoughts are not reverent. She should be dwelling on the souls of the hanged fluttering up to heaven, there to abase themselves about the Creator’s feet, there to plead for an eternal life with lambs and harps and roses. On the other hand, perhaps she will have to endure the shrieks and abuses of the crowd alone. All morning they have actually been dismantling the obscenity of an excess of gallows. Every rotten, pulpy turnip is hers, every malevolent eye, every loathsome and poxy fontanelle.
The turnkey unlocks the heavy oak door and pushes it open to the piercing whine of the ancient hinges. Anne Green turns away from the window and towards the man who has come to fetch her. He is of the rough sort who knows no distinction between men, hence between criminals. There are many who would say such a lack of discrimination makes a man just. Fortunately, Anne need not run the gauntlet of rough justice. She will receive the gentlemanly kind, although some might well ask whether defenestration is not in fact preferable.
The turnkey takes her firmly by the wrists and leads her down the narrow corridor to the dank winding stairway. He opens the door at the bottom and leads her to a small courtyard where he takes a piece of twine out of his apron pocket and ties her hands behind her back. From a large hook he takes down a knotted heavy rope and places it around her neck, then he pushes her out to the waiting tumbrel. Standing in the stalled cart, Anne Green can see out of the open prison gates to the sea of faces, the press and clutch of crushing bodies, the several other carts, the wintry sky, the leafless trees. The old nag starts to walk, the tumbrel lurches. Before she knows it she has passed through the gates and has been swallowed up by noise and movement. She feels curiously detached, as if her soul were already fluttering.
The procession of the condemned makes its way through the baying crowds to the grass knoll where the gallows stand. She sees now that the structure has an adjustable capacity: no need to be knocking up or taking down — there is room for all their necks to be broken simultaneously. There are some structures of execution where the horse receives a crack across the arse, and dashes with the clattering cart and rising dust into the roaring cleaving crowds, but such devilry and dishevelment are not permitted here. The condemned stand quietly, penitently, while the dusty priest drones from the Bible: be not affrighted, the Lord is thy shepherd, He leadeth thee in green pastures, through the valley of the shadow of death His staff shall comfort thee, for ever and ever, Amen.
Anne Green looks away from his attentions, past the front row of the now quiet crowd, to an area at the side where the mothers are preparing their sick babies. They are frantically pulling the swaddling cloths off their babies’ bald heads. When the condemned are dead and dangling, the mothers will point their babies’ fontanelles at the corpses, and the babies will be miraculously cured of all their apparent and hidden diseases.
Now the time has come. Not everybody knows their own time; not everybody can prepare their thoughts, nor have the opportunity for a final prayer. But stepping into the shadow of death Anne Green is distracted from thought or prayer when she sees the blood-frockcoats in the crowd. In tall black hats and holding leather bags bulging with saws, they are forming a small and distinctive circle of their own. They have come to collect the hanged corpses for anatomizing, for the advancement of medical science. Anne Green has a sudden urge to spit. However, we do not spit on our fellow human sufferers when we are only seconds away from trying to enter heaven. Besides, the frockcoats are too far away to be spattered and the cool wind might well blow the gob straight back onto the frightened criminals.
Anne Green is suddenly jerked into place by the hangman who has taken hold of the other end of the heavy rope. Now he is attaching it to some sort of iron ring on the crossbar. She trembles as he makes minor adjustments to the portion which is around her neck and then ties on the blindfold. She has to wait only a second or two and then she hears the loud bang of the trapdoor. The last thing she experiences on God’s earth is falling, interminably falling the short distance that constitutes the slack in the rope. It takes so long she could have been falling this way all her life.
Acknowledgements
Title taken from Dream Song #26 ‘The glories of the world’ from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Information about Petone came from Brittania by the River by Warwick Johnston, a publication of the Petone Settlers Museum/Te Whare Whakaaro o Pito-one, 1999; Petone: A History by Susan Butterworth, Petone Borough Council, 1988; and exhibitions in the Petone Settlers Museum itself.
Information about the history of medicine came from The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present by Ray Porter, Fontana Press, 1999. I also made much use of Porter’s London A Social History, Penguin Books, 2000. Finally I gleaned many interesting details and much enjoyment from Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson, W. W. Norton and Company Inc, 2001.
Once again, many thanks to Jane Parkin, Geoff Walker and Creative New Zealand for all their support.
About the author
Charlotte Randall is the award-winning author of Within the Kiss. Her first novel, Dead Sea Fruit, won the South East Asian/South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best first book and the Reed Fiction Award in 1995. Her second novel, The Curative, was joint runner-up of the Deutz Medal for fiction at the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
Born and raised in Dunedin, New Zealand, she now lives in Christchurch with her husband and two children.
Charlotte Randall, What Happen Then, Mr Bones?
