THE LIVES OF SCAVENGERS
I WAS BORN from your grave into this sunless world. I clawed my way out of cold earth with curled hands, my mouth filled with worms and my nails stained petrichor. The rot was the warmth left behind me.
For a long time, this was what I knew there was of life. I ate the worms and chewed the bones to strengthen my jaws and I drank the dew which pooled on the stone of the funeral yards. Whether it was a good life or a bad one did not concern me.
When others came to my graveyard, I lurked behind the stones and studied them. I dared not approach, and in a similar manner, those who saw me looked away. I understood they were afraid. Mistakenly, I assumed it was of me. Now I understand they averted their eyes to avert their shame. That which is not acknowledged is no one’s responsibility. This was the way of the undercity, ignored by the city-above.
The first time someone met my eyes, it was a person dressed in the plump rose of a worm’s belly. The long hair of her head hung limp like mine, though it was tucked into a lace veil. Later, I learned rose was the color of mourning. Of woman’s mourning. Men mourned in other colors.
The woman met my eyes through her veil. Her expression did not change. She did not look away. I fled back to my hole of worms and dew. To have been seen frightened me.
The next candle’s mark, she returned with rinds of bread and cheese. She sat with the food next to her until I approached and snatched the food away. The texture was more pleasant to chew than the bursting worms. It became our routine over the course of several days. She came to my yard with bread and patience, until I came so close as to sit with her.
As I chewed, she spoke.
“I am called Voierry,” she said. “I am a widow, so time is of no import to me. I have more of it than I please.”
My mouth full, I did not answer.
“Do you know from whence you came?”
I swallowed. “Here.”
Behind her veil, her black eyes caught the lantern-light. “Ah! I heard the grave-children were born with speech, but the spheres have not moved to grant us any in decades. That is how you were left ignored. A shame. But Voierry is here for you.”
This meant nothing to me. I took more of the cheese rind. I enjoyed the chew between my molars.
“Do you know how you came to be? Of the spheres and the saints?”
“No.”
She told me of the three saints of decay who governed the paths of those such as me: the vulture, the hyena, and the scarab. All were important, she said. Only one was to be feared. She looked at my teeth and she told me which sphere I was governed by.
I snapped my teeth together.
“Do you fear me?”
“No,” she said, and I could tell she spoke the truth in her kind words. She was not afraid, though she always wore the veil. Even the dim throbbing of lanterns was difficult for her eyes.
She returned daily for a fortnight. At the end of that passage, when she saw how close I now dared sit near her, she asked me if I wished to learn what life was like without dirt as a second skin. That was the manner in which I, the grave-child, became instead the widow Voierry’s child. The name she bestowed upon me was Makké, heir of misfortune.
I was proud, but jealous when I learned that I was not the first of her children, nor the only stray. One such son, Ivan, the eldest, came to her house often and fixed what was broken; her bench, her pantry shelf, her bathing-bucket.
I did not like him.
He did not like me. He mocked my name. I sat in the corner when he visited, and bared my teeth at him. He bared his teeth back, and Voierry laughed and said we were alike.
She spoke proudly of his accomplishments, a night watch in the darkest gloom, a handyman. He stood against the dark and did not flinch even in the hour when the veins of the city above flowed too thick and the city’s blood dripped down to the streets of our lightless slum. Brave, she said. Clever.
Not clever enough to stand in the cover and keep his night-hat unstained, I thought. And what he fixed was not fixed long. The bench slouched, the pantry moldered, the bucket leaked. He left with her change, her bread, her gratitude, more than the worth of a bench a bucket could well serve as. Of his own earnings he did not give, though he bragged of them before her and she was proud. He asked for her last savings in the rose-colored bag she tucked into the back of the cabinets and she laughed at that too.
But who was I to note such a thing? I had come from dirt. I knew only how to break, not to mend. About this, Voierry was patient and kind. She had time, she told me. She had nothing to give but time.
Voierry was poor, but to me, our meager food was a feast. She was not much learned, but to my ears her scraps of knowledge were encompassing. I learned quickly. Among the lessons I learned was that what she had to give was not enough for me.
The hunger of the grave, the redness of my belly, and the hunger of my saint grew and gnawed at me, and I became hollow with it. My motions were rote and my teeth were razors. I tried to be gentle, but in my hands, pots and buckets warped or shattered. I wished to be content, but I was not. She knew, and it hurt us both. She often was short with me. Her patience was not drawn from such a deep well as time.
I watched Voierry closely even when we argued, to learn from her. Her kindness, to me, seemed weak. A concession of territory. When she shouted, I knew she was treating me as an equal, and I tried to repair and repay and show her the patience she had shown me. When she spoke softly and called in Ivan to mend what I had destroyed, I knew she was giving in, and to see him speak softly to her and smile pityingly at me and leave with whatever his eyes fell on enraged me.
I left her house when she treated me in that way, knowing and hating that she often turned to Ivan in my absence. What I turned to in her absence was the grave. Your grave I could find by scent alone, and it was gouged with words. I sat by it in silence and anger I could not put full thoughts to. Neither the widow nor I knew letters, so I did not puzzle out your name.
Perhaps this was better. An image can be admired wholly. To know a man wholly is to know betrayal.
Here I will not mince. What followed was not the fault of Voierry. None could have provided enough for me. Her only fault was trust.
In that afternoon my hunger overcame me and in hollow-bellied anger I threw the crooked bench into the pantry shelf to break them both of their emptiness. Voierry cried. I left when she spoke of Ivan, Ivan who helped and helped and did not hurt her, unlike her troubled child.
I paced in the graveyard among my kin, the rot and the bones, and I touched the stones and I considered my anger. I was troubled, yes. My efforts were my best, and my best was often poor. I understood that I was not a sufficient child. But I did not lie, I did not take, and I did not understand why she saw this difference between myself and my hunger and Ivan and his greed.
After a day alone, I returned, and the bench was fixed and the pantry bare. Voierry bade me search for her savings in their rose-colored bag. Her eyesight was poor. She had misplaced the money. We overturned the house. The money was not found.
With disgust I said Ivan had taken it; his eyes had fallen on it many times. She said Ivan had not, and condemned me for speaking ill of my brother, though he was no brother of mine.
I went searching for him. I had not gone much into the city, but I knew Ivan’s name, I knew what he spoke of, and overnight I found him intoxicated, hot-faced, and penniless, draped in a broken chair in the filthy back-room of a smoky building. I swore at him and cursed his name and demanded what he had stolen.
“What will a grave-child and a hag do with money?” he mocked, and clapped his hands while the friends his mother’s stolen money had bought him laughed. “Buy needles and leeches? Why not give, gamble, enjoy life in this sorry hole?”
Not that he called it a hole, or myself what I was, but that he called Voierry a hag! I had no use for words. I lunged and clawed and bit him and from his jacket while he shouted and beat at me I wrested the rose-colored bag the coins had been in. I could not conceive of losing the sum, but he had spent it with frivolity on cards and spinning tops. Later I would learn it was a sum easy to lose; but to Voierry and I it had been the wealth of the world.
Ivan’s friends of convenience threw me onto the street. Ivan laughed with drunken bluster and crowed his victory as I retreated. I returned, bruised, to Voierry, with the empty bag.
She blamed me.
I wailed. I shrieked. I offered to work—none would have me. I offered to steal—Voierry shouted that stolen coin would curse us both. Had it cursed Ivan? I asked. He seemed well. He brought us dry rinds and spotted cheese. How kind! No food became less. My hollowness turned inside out. I chewed the furniture to fill myself with splinters. I begged on the street; Voierry did the odd jobs she could for old food from the city above.
All our efforts were not enough. The food was hard on her, and gave her pain. I dug and ate worms from the street and watched Voierry grow slower much too quickly.
Ivan came smugly by with old bread and offered to take the house from Voierry. She could not take care of it, nor of him, or me. This was true. I asked him to take her in, without me. She cried. As though I had never bit him, he smiled kindly and with pity and patted me on the head. On him I smelled guilt.
“Unkempt grave-child,” he said. “Of course I will care for my own mother.”
To her he spoke softly and in that moment I saw the grace Voierry saw in him and I was glad. Of course, he would help his mother. Even a rotten man was moved by guilt. That I would be in the street, and Voierry with her son who returned for her; it was enough. I helped her gather things, some clothes, and Ivan said he would be back for the rest, her needles, her darning gourd, the profession that until now had fed her. He asked me to finish gathering them while he was gone.
Yet some small seed of mistrust bade me trail them.
They walked toward his house, and past it, toward the end of town. Away from the graveyard and away from the shadow of the highest sphere, out of the sheltering wings of the saint ossifrage of the city-above. Further they walked from the central sphere to the realm of the sphere-below, the farmer’s wetlands, where lived the forgotten, the marshes, the leeches, the mosquitos and the abandoned; saint scarab-beetle’s sphere of shit, the beginning and the end of life.
At the edge of a field slumped a mouldering house. The poor-house, stinking of mildew and rot. Our hut had been cleaner; our hut had not been left to curl in upon itself. The walls did not mask the thin sound of sobs from my saint’s ears. There was no care in this place. It was where people were left to be buried without remembrance.
Voierry knew. Voierry clapped her hand on her son’s back and went through the fence willingly, as though this was her place. I followed them to the gate. I watched them embrace, and Ivan kissed her on each soft cheek. He promised to visit. He promised to bring her the last of her work.
He promised not to forget her.
In his gait as he turned away I saw the spring of a man freed of a burden. I heard the laugh he made at the gambling table.
I waited for him to turn the corner on the marsh road, out of sight of the windows of the poor-house.
I killed him. I killed him as a cat does; I was not kind. I felt my saint within me as I ate of his chest and belly, and I was filled. The remains I sunk into the marsh-fields so that he might have some use in death as he had not in life. In that moment, watching the body sink into the mud, I was satisfied, my hunger and my anger.
It was a fleeting satisfaction.
Voierry’s spinning-work I bundled and left at the gate of the poor-house for her. Not long after I heard she had died of her grief. Her work did not sustain her through the loss and my betrayal; and I knew it was a betrayal, but that had not stopped me.
The council of the city above would condemn us both, and from their council, our blood would pass down to the grave in the hour of blood, but I bore no guilt. I returned to the graveyard and cleaned my hands and mourned there.
I mourned, but I did not die.
Ivan and Voierry both were gone, one before the other, though to me it felt they had parted the other way around. Their passings swallowed each other in my memory; one after the other, always, without closure. One I thought would bring me happiness, the other sorrow; but Ivan’s passing brought me sorrow as well, and for a long time I lingered in it. I watched in the yard and each in the color of rose I searched for the manners of Voierry or the memory of Voierry.
When at last I understood I would not find her in another, I grew weary of mourning Voierry in every shadow. Their end was death, but not my death.
Mosquito wives, ticks and leeches, death-feeders who snap bones in their teeth; they came and went from my yard. So did I go, first in their paths and then on my own to the city above. I traveled far. I passed through the ossifrage’s council of blood without guilt and further still.
My hunger never lessened. Whether I had done ill did not concern me, but when I could, I tried to do good as had been done for me; and after many years of this, at last I understood what Voierry had meant when she told me she had only time to give.
To her memory I would offer gratitude; to her child, patience; to her body, rest and the knowledge that the space she resided in was hers to have. Never should she have had to fold herself away.
Through all of this, you, the body of whom I was born of—
I never thought of you at all.