The resurrectionist, p.7
The Resurrectionist, page 7
She scans them surreptitiously, hopefully, for him.
He is there, as he always is. The tallest of the mudlarks. The oldest and most unmistakable. Shirtless and raw in the burgeoning heat.
He pauses at the sight of her. He is a primal thing, she thinks, hair uncombed, body smeared in filth, unapologetic. He fills the river with his indifference—the rest around him are lost shades, faceless things consigned to a permanent background in his presence.
He lifts his chin subtly to her. He is ridiculous. Too cocksure.
The marks on her arm are his. Left when he kissed her the night before. There is too much anger in him, too much ardor, too much defiance. He has foolish, uneducated ideas about overthrowing the upper classes, but he will never be more than a mudlark. He thinks violence is the only way forward, and given that the working class vastly outnumbers the elite, it’s merely a matter of taking up arms and taking control of the country. He is all body and no mind—what must be done can only be done with the fist. She knows with near certainty that he will end up a four- or five-bottle man like his father, dead on the floor of a tavern because he’s overestimated the abilities of his fists. He has no future. And she knows better than to have such a dizzy yearning for this bottom-feeder, to let him put his hands on her, kiss her with an aggressive fervor that borders on frightful.
The problem is that he’s beautiful.
seven
Job
It was a different man that ran the Yorkshire mill.
True, the name was Job Mowatt.
But it meant something different then.
It had a heft, he supposes, in the way that it meant something in his absence.
Funny how a name can presuppose a man, outweigh him.
Not now—all that has been pared away.
His name is no more than part of the anonymous noise of the city, a background irritant on someone else’s lips—if at all—and even then just a bit of breath that wouldn’t evoke feelings one way or another in anyone who might by chance have made out the specifics.
Probably better to be shorn down to nothing.
To be rid of the enterprising mind.
He who would lord it over all those workers at their spindles: twenty-nine hundred at its zenith!
The mill was to add another floor, another waterwheel!
How fortune had shone upon him.
It was not that he was moneyed then, not initially, though for his industry, he would soon find himself to be.
He would become not just the field hand he had been since youth but instead a landowner.
Four years of forced sobriety will do that for you, when not a single pence goes to the publican, though a few pints of ale at the end of the day would be a welcome reprieve from the otherwise moiling crush of your daily existence.
Four years of backbreaking labor, of going without, of eating a single meal a day, your body growing thin in hopes that your purse might grow fat.
By then he had enough money to buy a tiny plot of land in the West Riding with a sickly building situated on a crucial bit of stream frontage.
Four more years of this, of single-handedly turning that building into a mill, of single-handedly constructing from scratch the waterwheel that would power it, of procuring older spinning mules cast off by owners of larger mills as they relentlessly modernized their own operations, jettisoning workers in favor of machines.
Those richer millowners, all too willing to sell him their old wares, all too willing to watch as he powered his spindles with water and animals, much as they had done in generations past but eschewed them now in favor of steam, that great boon of the Lancashire coalfields.
He was a curio, this solitary man out there waging naive war against the laws of business and the natural world, laws they knew through experience to be inviolable: the laws of the cotton business, which required economies of scale, achievable only through mechanization; the laws of the human body, which was, in comparison to the machines now spreading across the land, a gross, inexact, and unreliable tool, one that could only be goaded and denied so much before it broke; and most of all, the laws of class, the distinctions of the world.
The quality were quality for a reason.
They were a different breed, privy to the larger truths of society, the arcs of history, the rise and fall of civilizations.
They knew the structures that were required to maintain civilization, and they were those structures.
England was an empire precisely for people like them.
People that respected the past and built toward the future, with great libraries that informed their decisions with the wisdom of the great thinkers of antiquity.
People that read.
An illiterate field hand was not much more than a Malabar or an African or a dog, no matter his determination.
Capable of service but not leadership.
Job had been born into a house without book or pamphlet, into a community without teacher, school, or library.
Mostly he was born without time.
The luxury of years in youth to tease apart words and unspool the alphabet.
The mandate of the earth swallowed all other aspirations beyond growing what needed to be grown and getting it to market.
But a person does something long enough, he gets good at it.
He carded by hand a hundred thousand seeds—a million—from the bolls, spun them and boiled them to set the twist, observing with great satisfaction, as a machine does not, the color deepening throughout the process, the organism maturing into a whole new thing that seemed nothing like a plant but instead an instrument of civilization. His instrument, his contribution.
Those fibers would become textiles down the line, and after that clothes on people’s backs.
The middlemen recognized the quality of his homespun cotton and paid a premium for it.
They wanted more.
He took on more workers and paid them well because he knew the great price they paid with their hands and their bodies and their minds.
The mill-owning gentry around him took notice.
He was still that uneducated curio, but one whose operation, while still meager, had to be considered legitimate competition.
This name, Mowatt, was not on any registry anywhere—surely he was of peasant stock.
Still, to that name now were being ascribed words like “mettle,” “humility,” “self-determinism,” “artisanship,” “sovereignty of mind and intent.”
Things the gentry, who had never tilled their own land or turned their own spindles, had never cultivated in themselves.
Every season his output and workforce grew.
He took on a wife of country stock like him, Mary, and soon they had a child.
He allowed himself a drink every now and again.
And often, on the tail end of that drink, he would contemplate with some satisfaction the fact that he had somehow broken the sacrosanct shackles of English class, gone from gallied peon to one the community around him was calling a “mushroom,” as if he had sprung to prominence and fortune overnight.
Yes, if that night was thirty years long and had begun with his birth and ended on this evening, with this drink, after all those decades of unrelenting toil.
Oh, the illusion that it was his doing, his industry, that had delivered him to such a place!
How vain we are in success!
The larger world is, in fact, only spinning as it has always done, and we are swept along.
Swept along by the changing fortunes of England, he is one day a newly minted entrepreneur, the next a man struggling against high taxes and skyrocketing food prices.
For it is Napoleon’s world, not his—King George’s world, not his.
They are squared off across the Channel, and war comes to the land.
A dozen years of war with ever-tighter trade restrictions.
Belts are tightened each and every year, the ledger nipped and tucked wherever it could be.
Where before he was that noble, beloved, and self-made millowner who paid his workers well—who was of their stock, one of them—now things evolve.
He cannot keep them all on the payroll, cannot compete with the other millowners with their tight ledgers and deep pockets.
Old money is old money for a reason.
It is deep and strong as a great anchor in open sea, able to withstand the storms of history as they come and go.
There is no longer need for homespun—what is needed now is quantity, speed.
A soldier’s clothes, like the man in them, are not meant to last.
It is not long before Job goes to the other millowners, asks for a loan. They claim without much anxiety that they are stretched to breaking too and, as such, cannot help.
They say they fear their remaining workers, who have grown restive as a result of wage cuts.
The ones that term themselves Luddites and call for the rejection of the machines that have taken their jobs.
Job would be a Luddite too, he thinks, if he could afford it.
Better a life of the hands, even if it be slower, than a sped-up world that cannibalizes itself for profit.
Job knows the millowners are playing the longer game, as they always have—there is opportunity here in war.
In this case, to flush their less capitalized competitors from the market.
To improve their margins by pruning their workforce.
Without access to money—the strange, conceptual form of money that keeps the elite going—the loans, the bonds, the stocks, the sundry financial instruments that only they understand—Job is ruined.
His workers, the ones he’s let go, turn on him.
The only solace he has now is that he did not resort, as the other millowners did, to shooting the protesting workers.
Instead, he shuttered the mill and tried to find another way to make his wages.
To stay afloat until things got better and maybe open the mill again.
But it is George and Napoleon’s world, not his.
The war demands ever more money, ever more taxes.
Only those born with that great stabilizing anchor of old money seem to be able to avoid debt and unemployment, the insidious, magnetic pull of the only legitimate business currently booming in the country: soldiering.
So it is that Job fights in Spain and Portugal and Italy, repelling the French, while Mary stays home with his only child.
He sends them his meager wages, but Mary is nevertheless forced to scrounge for work.
He fights with that hope that is singular to the soldier—that this battle will be the last, that this battle will break the back of the enemy, and a return home to family is imminent.
But the war metastasizes.
He is sent further afield—to the West Indies, South Africa, India.
He spends more time on ships than on the battlefield, being shuttled in dank, sunless forecastles across thousands of miles of indifferent sea.
All the while, Mary works, and the price of food goes up, and her wages are not enough.
Years, too, metastasize, and soon Ivy is six years old!
How much master of his fate is he now?
He attempts to build an image of his daughter with each letter he receives from Mary—which must be read aloud to him by whatever literate soldier is currently garrisoned with him.
If she was such when I last saw her, he thinks, and I add this much height to her, this much weight to her, then might she look like this?
Mary’s descriptions, as read to him, seem to evoke less and less with each letter that comes.
Something is happening.
Even before handing off each letter to his reader, he can see that the penmanship grows looser, more wild, elegant cursive becoming scribbles.
First the letters devolve into incoherence, then stop altogether.
He spends three more years this way, fighting off new enemies—Neapolitans, Batavians, Argentines, Marathans—all apparently in some confused way backed by, or allied with, France.
He breaks three sabers, goes through countless guns.
He kills for country, though that country is a dim, faraway thing that he has conflicting feelings about.
He is a completely different thing than what he started out as, that is clear to him.
All the ideas he had about himself.
He realizes, for the first time, that the entirety of his life is an accident, the by-product of a thousand—a million—greater forces and dynamics colliding.
How could he think what he thought—that it was he and not fortune that determined things, that shaped him and carved his reality out of the universe?
How humbling, how tempering is the upside of misfortune, the blessing of failure.
The ego is shattered into a thousand pieces, and the foul demon of pride is exorcised.
A man is left to humble reality, without distinction, only the day-to-day immediacy of things that conceits like name and station and reputation cannot touch.
We are meant to sleep and eat and survive.
The rest is folly.
No, there is one more thing.
We are meant to get home.
He returns home once the war is done with the rest of the discharged soldiers.
Hundreds of thousands of men returned to a society in which lines had been radically redrawn.
Properties once thought to be owned are now owned by someone else.
Effectively pawned to keep pace with the inflating price of living.
Mary and Ivy are nowhere in Yorkshire.
He only knows that the mill was sold off, long ago, and that Mary signed the paperwork.
Last that was heard, she took the child to London and the two were living somewhere in the crowded squalor of a workhouse.
It takes him a week in London to learn that Mary is dead by her own hand.
Rendered mad by the impossibilities of a single mother’s existence in a time of escalating prices and no prospect of employment.
Broke and without shelter, you find yourself a man or whore yourself or whore your daughter, and she will do none of these.
She too is proud, and that pride shatters her.
So now she is buried in a pauper’s grave, one of dozens—anonymous, without pomp, already fading into the nothingness of history as the grave’s mound sinks level to the earth. The grass grows full over it, and what lies beneath—unmarked by a stone—is only a whisper, a secret, and soon will not even be that.
Ivy, however.
She has been sent to an orphanage, he learns.
He finds her, and she is a scared thing.
She does not recognize him. Her mother—before her faculties went—told her stories about him, painted pictures of how he looked in her mind, but the war has changed him, and there seems nothing in the stories that matches this man.
She will not at first go with him, preferring instead the familiar, if traumatic, tumult of the orphanage to this strange man that has appeared in her life.
It wrecks him—it’s as if his world has steadily calved off around him since the war began.
It’s one thing to lose money, to lose business and station.
Another to lose the woman you love.
But even with all that, there is still a place to go, a reason, an axis, however fragile, upon which your existence might still turn, if your child is still in the world.
A last refuge.
But when that child looks upon you and rejects you, it is a pain beyond shattering.
Job has not wept, not through his losses, the horrors of war and the loss of countless comrades, not at the tragedy of Mary.
But the impassive look in nine-year-old Ivy’s eyes is too much.
His own blood, for whom none would care more, denies him as if he is a frightful beast!
And because of it, Job falls apart.
He barely makes it out into the alley outside the orphanage.
Masculine affect stripped away, he pulls himself into an unseen corner, and it is not so much that he sobs but that the sobs sob him.
He is powerless. It’s a wave a long time coming, the culmination of five years of unrelenting perdition.
It all pours forth from him, eyes and nose and mouth streaming unimpeded.
He is as a child—this is something he realizes in the midst of it with a strange sort of detachment, as if he is watching himself from on high, within the same body that convulses with heartbreak yet somehow separate. A child just like those on the other side of the walls, terrified in the face of the great overwhelm that is life.
In need of solace, of the hand of the mother or father that stills the pain, buffers the fear.
He, of course, has no such solace, his parents long since passed, his friends or comrades all dead or scattered to the winds.
He is just a homeless, penniless man in London.
Ah, but that is why there is God.
Otherwise, how would any man or woman get up from the ground after the whole of them has been shattered?
This would be half this country and half this world.
Half the beings ever born into the hardscrabble chaos of humanity.
Yes, everything subtractive, a process of loss, either gradual or abrupt.
Why, then, go on?
Unless we convince ourselves of an unseen reason, why go on?
Was this what Mary saw in those final moments?
He understands his wife now more than he ever did in their time together.
She saw this truth too.
Tried to find God in the squalor, tried to reap hope from disarray.
And like him, in this moment, no matter how hard she tried, to which her final act stood as testament, she must have found nothing.
No great eternal being that embodied love.
That promised fairness, deliverance.
That by its very presence assured her the scales of the universe tipped inexorably toward the good.
