TEARS OF THE FOOT GUARDS

SCHERZO - STAVE XL

S T A V E

XL

Sleet against the window awakening Obedience – like the Beating of the Bounds. She stretched – a long and lazy reach. No need to obey the Drum. Clean sheets and blankets and she, like a queen, splayed on a bed completely hers. Rain pestered the sill. You shall not come in.

The room was small, barely enough for the post bed and highboy that looked taller than it was for the low ceiling – a grenadier might knock his head especially where the roof sloped. But she liked the odd angle, particularly the single dormer where she could nestle on its window seat and look out to the Brooklyn Heights – her private view and countered any deficits. No deficits to her way of thinking, not even the wall crack near the highboy. Patina, she reasoned, wholly dignified of a New York granddame and would be so placed as an embellishment – a beauty mark to give the lady character. And it was hers with its furniture and fireplace, procured and paid for by Colonel Howard, but hers all the same. She worked for it. And to think, she had nearly turned Howard down. Sex – her first conclusion; the singing and the lessons pretence, an elaborate ruse by a Peer who in '74 got a spinster in the Family Way in a barn and pressured to marry . . . And all men want to swive with her eventually. But he showed no interest other than her voice – that, it was clear, he wished to own. That, he can have, or rather she let him think he could have so long as he paid for it. An acceptable kind of whoring. And certainly not objectionable with a pregnant wife at home. But it was Jaruesha's death convinced her.

She came back from her performance that night, still in make-up but in her own clothes, and made straight for the women's barracks, not the summer kitchen night with Geordie she'd promised. Bess greeted her smoking a pipe and sitting on the landing, unable to stay in the same room "as them Bitches".

"We've got work, you and me," Bess said with a bucket of water, lavender soap and rags.

"Where is she?"

The cellar made for a cool, dry morgue, and Jaruesha on a table of rough cut boards that would have pestered any living body. Bess had combed her hair into a single slick braid and secured her jaw closed with a cloth tied at the top of her head. Lividity already with her face turning purple.

"They had tossed her in a corner," Bess said. "So I put her here."

Obedience, stolid behind the white mask, pressed the corner of her eye with a knuckle.

They undressed her, caringly, respectfully, but for all their care, violated what Jaruesha hid – great stretch marks and one breast considerably smaller than the other, lying lifeless and flat like their own dead beings. A frightful old burn ran from the top of her buttocks to the blades of her shoulders and another on the tops of her thighs.

"She had children," Obedience said and washed Jaruesha's fingers with an intimacy not granted in life. "Where are they?"

"Dead – two from the crib, one in a fall out a window, two in a building burned down."

Obedience nodded. "Poor wretch – that explains it."

"That she was a harridan? No, she was that to begin with . . . She was that . . . Maybe not so much if life been different."

"You knew her long?"

"Our husbands joined the same year. When Mrs. Tree was your age, she was very pretty – the handsomest woman on the ration. Look what it did."

"The drink killed her."

"She couldn't stand the feel in her own skin and benumbed it. Some people just born that way – born to do the things they do with no say. They just think they have a say . . . They try to have a say. And then Life comes down hard and they bend the way they naturally go, even if they don't want to. And then beauty's gone – worn out and tired of fighting. What else is there but drink? Everyone their Weakness."