LITMIR.BIZ

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had just enough on me. I counted out the coins and stooped to put them in her hand. She bit each one in turn to see if it was true before putting it in her apron pocket. When she was finished she left the hovel with a queer hopping gait and went to fetch the charm from out the back. A stink of stale sweat and piss hung about after she was gone, and the jackdaw hopped and flapped all about me, shitting on everything, including my hair. Its croak was loud in that little place and had me all of a jitter. The bird could talk, too, but in strange riddles of which I could make no sense.

      I waited so long that I wondered if the old woman had died out there. Through a rip in the sacking over the window I saw the hut where she kept the captive birds. Their fretful twittering could be heard all over the wood. Round about me in the shadows of the room were all manner of nasty-looking instruments among the cages. I didn’t care to wonder at their use.

      At last Old Jinny came back with one of the poor creatures in her hands, wrapped in a bloody cloth. It made a fearsome racket and set the jackdaw hopping and flapping about in a frenzy. My nerves were frayed.

      ‘I be thinking I shan’t go through with this matter, after all,’ I shouted above the din.

      She burst into shrill giggles. ‘’Tis too late,’ she said, holding the little bundle out to me. ‘I’ve already plucked her.’

      ‘Plucked her? What do you mean, plucked her?’

      ‘The bird has to be plucked, my girl, if you want the charm to work.’

      ‘That be the wickedest thing I ever heard!’

      ‘I can’t stick the feathers back into the creature, can I?’ she said.

      What was I to do? I had already paid her two shillings, a king’s ransom. And the bird would die now, anyhow. I let her put the creature in my shaking hands, and nearly dropped it when I felt its warmth and how it wriggled inside the grubby cloth.

      ‘A song thrush. A hen for a man, a cock for a woman,’ said Old Jinny, leering at me. ‘Tie it to the rafters in the bed-lier’s room. Twenty-four hours should do it. It might take longer if there is no rash on the man. Once the fever has been spirited from the human to the fowl, the bird will turn black and bloated. And then it will expire.’

      I made sure nobody saw me on the way back, which was not easy because the creature was making a din fit to wake the dead. It fair pecked my hands and wrists to pieces. When I got home, Tegen wouldn’t help me so I had to tie it to the beam by myself. I knew the best knot to bind its legs but it was a dreadful fiddle with only one hand spare and the little creature raging to break free of me. Once the thing was tied and hanging, it went madder still, spinning in a flurry, its feeble plucked wings flapping furiously and its screeches deafening me and echoing around the room as it tangled itself in the string. I was overcome with the horror of it then, but it was too late to turn back. The foreigner groaned in his sick bed, disturbed by the noise. When the bird had tired itself, it hung there a moment twitching, its eyes bulging and unnatural, its grey wrinkled flesh covered in bloody pinpricks.

      I couldn’t bear staying in the room with the wretched creature, so I fled down the stairs to the kitchen. I sat at the table and took deep breaths, waiting for my heart to slow to its usual beat. Mamm looked away from me and Tegen scowled.

      ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ I said. ‘It’s only for a day or two. A man’s soul matters more to the Creator than a bird’s.’

      Later, on the way back from the well, I passed Johnenry in the lane. He blocked my path.

      ‘I be in a hurry,’ I said, nodding at the pails of water in my hands. He stood his ground.

      ‘I suppose you’re in a hurry to get back to that big fellow you fished out of the cove?’ he said.

      ‘It were only Christian to give him house room until he be better. The fellow was close to death.’

      ‘You be the last woman I ever thought would turn nurse maid.’

      ‘It fell to me, as I were the first that saw him.’

      ‘Well, don’t expect me to carry him to the graveyard when he breathes his last. You be trying my patience, Mary. Think about how things stand, now. You need to make up your mind. A man can keep on fathering children until they nail him in his coffin but a woman’s got to squeeze the beggars out while she still can.’

      ‘So these be the sweet wooing words you use now you’ve had your way with me?’

      ‘I used up all my sweet words the other night. And you seemed to like them enough then, the way you was rolling underneath me.’

      ‘Wash your dirty mouth out.’

      ‘Let’s not be enemies, Mary,’ he said, more mildly. ‘It heats my blood to think of the way some of they be slanderin’ you, and I want to take care of you, that’s all. To protect you.’

      ‘I got by fine without a man to protect me all these years, so why would I need one now?’

      He stepped toward me as if a hornet had stung his ass. ‘I ain’t got the patience of Job. ’Tis meant, you and me, even if you won’t admit it. Why can’t you lean more to the common way?’

      ‘Maybe I don’t care to. And you ain’t the master of me, Johnenry. So let me pass.’

      He took my arm, twisting it and hurting me, a nasty look in his eyes. ‘What in God’s name be wrong with you?’ he said. ‘Is you sickening?’

      I pulled my arm free and half a pail of water slopped over his trousers. I left him standing in the lane looking like he’d pissed himself.

      All that night I sat in my chair and kept vigil on the foreigner in the sickly glow of the smoking tallow. On the chest was a pot of herbs that the Widow Chegwidden had given me. Earlier, I had mixed the brew with a little milk and spooned it between the foreigner’s lips. The smell of the potion mingled with the odour of sickness in the room.

      My head throbbed fearfully from the blow I’d taken from the barrel. Perhaps some of the sense had been knocked out of me. I thought about Johnenry and what he’d said when I met him. Why had I taken a strange man into the house and risked the mud-slinging that would follow? Perhaps I was sickening after something, as Johnenry said. But I couldn’t help myself. My heart went out to the man, thinking how he’d been thrown this way and that at the mercy of the waves, lashed to that barrel. And my woman’s nature stirred at the notion of this big, dark fellow, at once so strong and yet so helpless. It did trouble me, I own, the hold the foreigner had on me. I consulted with the stone idol, but her face was set in a sulk so I put her on the floor, facing away from the sick bed.

      The man’s breathing was quick and fretful. While he slept the bird hung quietly, twitching every so often on its string. Whenever the man roused himself with a groan and twisted in his narrow cot, the bird thrashed around as if crazed, taking on the pains of the man. The foreigner drew the life out of the bird’s body and into his own, and the bird grew more and more sickly as it took on the man’s contagion. I prayed for the bird to breathe its last and there were times when I almost went to fetch a pair of stones to brain the poor creature and bring its misery to an end. But I saw how the man in the bed was repairing, so I gripped the seat of my chair tight, to hold me at my post. Every so often I went over and wiped sweat from his brow with a cloth dipped in cool water. Time passed and the man’s strength returned little by little while the bird’s ebbed away.

      In the dead of night such a hush was over the world that the wings of a moth flitting about the flame were loud as sheets snapping in the wind on laundry day. The cottages in our lane were huddled together so close that I could hear the snores of all the neighbours throbbing through the walls. At closing time the footsteps of the men staggering home from the kiddlywink – where men of the worst sort spent their time drinking and gambling – echoed out in the lane, with snatches of song, a quarrel and much profanity. The drunkards disturbed the gulls in their slumber and they made a row of their own over the rooftops.

      By the time the first hint of daylight showed

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