Hope

When she had arrived, it had been the middle of summer. Hope, the place was called, though it had seemed to her a desolate place, despite the better expectations she had had of it on her long journey here from Boston. Early June, and already the streets of the town had been continually shifting fields of dust, and the bed of the river that skirted its edge but a deserted, impassable stretch of cracked boulders and stones, a damp, dark ditch crawling down its middle. What the people here called the lagoon, below the body of the town, was just a shallow, reed-filled marsh, no more than a breeding ground for frogs and flies and mosquitoes.

During the brief summer months, after the thaw of spring, the river was dammed off up-stream and the water from the mountains diverted to the mines for the prospecting. In the fall, when the rains began again, the dams would be cracked open to keep the lower workings from getting washed away. Then the river would flow around the town again, and the lagoon would be a place where kids could swim and play. That was, until it froze over again for the winter. She had not been looking forward to the winter. She had been warned it would be hard.

Summer was bad enough. It was hot here, hotter than she would ever have expected so far north. Then there was the endless dust, and the flies and mosquitoes; the lizards that sat and watched you, cold-eyed and motionless, from the shaded angles between the ceiling and walls. Someone ought to take a gun too, she thought, and shoot the dogs that roamed the streets and alleyways, that shat and pissed any damn place they wanted, even on the boardwalks where people had to walk. She had lost count of the times she had come in trailing the stink of the stuff, the hems of her petticoats messed and browned. Without the dogs, without their shit all over the place, the flies wouldn’t be half as bad.

She had never been able to understand why these people had dogs with them here in the first place. Most had barely enough to keep themselves and their families alive, let alone feed some sad, mangy old mongrel that for everyone’s sake would be better off dead. It seemed to her anyway that most of the dogs were left to fend for themselves; they roamed the streets in packs, their yelping and baying kept folks awake throughout the night. She supposed though that they kept down the rats and coons and other vermin you could see all the time scavenging in the yard beneath her window. Which was worse, the dogs or the rats or the flies she could never decide.

Her room was on the top floor, in the eaves, at the back of the saloon. The single, small window looked out onto a bare face of rock. At the top of the rock two pine trees were growing, no more than shrubs really; their roots hung down like a thick fringe of hair on some craggy, weather-beaten forehead. She hoped that the trees, and the rocks were staying where they were until after her time here was done. The dense, spread branches of the trees and the wall of rock shaded her room through the worst of the heat of the day. But still, sometimes, the heat could be almost unbearable, and in the small hours of the night, when they were done working, she would stand naked at the window, bathing her skin with a dampened cloth, savoring the cool breeze that slid down the rock-face and crept in through the window, winding its invisible way around her body. Only then did she feel safe, that no one, other than the gentle wind could touch her, that no one could see her.

Invisible, like the breeze, that was what she wanted to be. Not to be seen. Here, she felt like a pinned butterfly, on permanent display. The men and the women here, they all knew what she was; they knew her story, had rehearsed its telling behind her back often enough. They watched her, the men; they wanted her, their lust hanging from their tongues like spit. Sometimes, she saw their hands move furtively in their pockets - searching for that elusive dollar, the last missed speck of gold dust? Or engaged in some more impoverished exchange with themselves?

They couldn’t afford her, but that didn’t stop the need in them, the wanting. And then there were the taut, straight-haired, iron-hard women they were married to, those cold-faced bitches who looked away from her disdainfully whenever she passed, who hated her for her softness, the possibility of desire she encompassed; her as yet unblemished youth. That, she knew, was the only reason they hated her. She reminded them too painfully of what they had lost, or had squandered, all they had sacrificed to the tarnished dreams of these sorry sons-of-bitches they had found themselves irredeemably tethered to in this living Hell on Earth.

She almost felt sorry for them - the men, not the women. She could understand the men; their dreams, and their lust. Their lust was simple, honest; it gave nothing and asked for nothing in return. A moment of counterfeit affection; the temporary gratification of an unknowable, fleeting hunger; a doubly begrudged dollar thrown onto the unmade bed.

“That’s the thing gets me, the way they resent you as soon as they’re done. Like you’re no longer good for anything else.” Belinda had said on one occasion, declaiming against an unjust world that defined her adversely whichever way it chose, and which she was powerless to change.

“Some of them are okay. Some try to be nice,” Lucy had added, revealing how misplaced she was here, in this town, in this occupation.

“Yeah! Like they do it to us for a favour.”

“They’re just lonely. They’re people too, just like you and me.”

“Don’t you dare ever say that! They are not like me,” Belinda had stated, glaring at Lucy, then she had added, “What do you think, Rosie? Are they just like you too?”

She had said nothing, though she agreed with Belinda.

What she had never been able to understand was the proud stupidity of the others, the married women - their bovine blindness to their own sorry state. The giving over of themselves to the weakness, the equally blind stupidity of another. True, she was herself given, exchanged - a semi-precious object to be lost or won. Her life here, like theirs, was an endless, one-sided transaction, but at least it was not a life she had determined for herself. Whatever else the sad bitches might say of her, her failings had not been of her own choosing.

It was not meant to be like this. She had made her way, alone, across those thousands of miles of wilderness that lay between here and Boston, in the expectation of being made respectable; to become one of those married women. Mrs. Samuel Bunney, an esteemed resident of the township of Hope. When she arrived, however, it was to discover she had already been given away to somebody else in a much less holy exchange of vows.

Her body, her soul, her possessions, even the clothes she wore, belonged to another. To a man she could not even claim as husband. The life she had hoped for, the one she had been offered, she had soon enough discovered had hardly been worth losing, and as far as respectability went, that had never been at stake. A respectable man was a thing her prospective husband had never been. Such creatures, she had soon come to understand, did not come often to a place like Hope.

Her heart had not been broken by this betrayal, only her pride, and with it her dreams of a respectable life. She and her intended husband had never met; she had never had the chance to love him. He had placed an advert, coldly stating the fact of his looking for a wife - a woman, young, preferably not unattractive, with a strong back and heart, and a willingness to work, the advert had asked for - in the papers back in Boston. She had written him a long, thoughtfully composed letter, and he had written back a few cramped lines itemising the briefest details of his life and supposed habits. With the note he had enclosed a photograph. In it he had looked like a bandit. He had said he was the owner of a grocery store. His eyes had looked dark and unfocused, as though he had not been able to hold them still for even the few seconds the picture had taken to make. His hair had been dark and long, parted in a straight bright line down the middle of his scalp. It had looked greasy, unkempt, once it escaped the confines of the parting, and had hung in tight curls around his face, spilling down onto his shoulders. His face had been long and gaunt, and his thin lips, like the eyes, had carried no expression. A thick black moustache had split his face in two, folding in waxy fingers around the sides of his mouth.

The more she had looked at the photograph the more certain she had become she could live with this man, even come to love him, bear his children. His apparent reluctance with words had not concerned her. He did not have to talk too much, and there had been something about the vagueness of those eyes that had drawn her. He had not looked anything like how she had expected a grocer to be. Instead, there had been an air of bravado, almost of danger about him. While she had wanted to be respectable, she had also wanted some excitement from time to time.

She saw him sometimes now, Mr. Samuel Bunney, no longer a grocer, just the loser and gambler he had always been. Most times she saw him he was staggering along the street, drunk and mumbling to himself, incoherent, or sprawled asleep in some muddy alleyway with the street-dogs licking at his face, lapping up his vomit. The times she saw him like that, she still thought he looked like a bandit.

She had tried to resist the fate imposed upon her, had refused at first to accept the role assigned to her. But Brogan Sullivan, her acquired master, had offered her a choice: agree to work off the rest of the gambling debt owed by her fiancée - as he called Bunney, blithely making it her responsibility - and he would ensure the men he sent to her were of the better kind; men who would treat her with respect. Otherwise, he could not offer any such assurance. He gave her a week to think over her situation and a room and keep on credit while she considered. Beyond a few dollars, she had no other means of paying for passage back to Boston. Menial work, if she were able to find any in this rapidly dying town, would pay for no more than her keep, and she would remain in thrall to Sullivan for a lifetime. No-one here would help her, that much she had quickly grasped; everyone knew what had happened, but none had challenged the claim Sullivan made on her. At the end of the week, raging against the injustice of it, but fearful for her survival if she tried to leave, and seeing no alternative, she had agreed.

Sullivan promised her she could leave, as soon as the thousand-odd dollars still owed him had been repaid. It did not seem likely that the man who had rolled up the debt would make any contribution. On her own she calculated it would take three years to pay off that sum. She managed to put a little something aside whenever she could, if the man she had been with had liked her, had given her an extra half-dollar. If she did get to leave, she did not want to be forced into selling herself in the next town she came to just to keep herself alive.

She had learned quickly what she had to do to make the men like her. Belinda was a good teacher. She knew the things men liked to have done to them, the things they liked to do. Lucy seemed reluctant to learn such things, or even talk about them. Sometimes, when some man less awful than the others had been especially nice to her, the buoyant child inside Lucy would rise to the surface, shaping her gestures, her spirit, enlivening them, but otherwise she was too sweet to be a whore. She did what she had to do, nothing more. She accepted docilely rather than performed; the likelihood was that she would be stuck here forever. Belinda, on the other hand, echoing her own decision, said that her reason for staying was because all other options open to her seemed far worse.

“What, I’d be better off making beds, cooking, dusting and ironing, slopping out bedpans? Working a hundred hours a week in a factory, poisoned to death before I made thirty, for a fraction of what I make doing this? Or breaking my back trying to coax out enough just to keep alive from some man’s precious, parched piece of dirt, getting humped and impregnated once a year to show his gratitude?” She had nodded as Belinda spoke; recognising the sparse options that had shaped her own reluctant acceptance.

By September it had become almost too cold for her nightly bathe at the window, but she braved it out as long as she could: her one consolation. One night she heard noises and talking in the yard below. Leaning out she saw Brogan down there, dressed only in his boots and long johns, burning what looked like clothes in the rusted oil-drum they used as an incinerator. He was talking to someone, though she could not see who it was, or hear what he was saying; it was too dark, and he was talking too low.

Then she caught glimpses of someone moving about in the shadows in the alley. They looked small or were only hunched up in the cold. Then she realised the person was naked, the white of their back and shoulders picked up by the flames. She wondered why they didn’t just move up closer to the flames for warmth. The fire took hold of the clothing, flared up for a few moments, and then began to die. Brogan cussed and raised his hand as though to strike the other person, then he threw the stick he had been using to stoke the fire into the flames and turned towards the alley. Then they were both gone.

She realised she was shivering. The night was colder than she had thought. She closed the window, quickly put on her nightdress, and crawled into her bed. The room smelled faintly of smoke.

In the morning, at breakfast, Lucy was unusually quiet, even more so than she normally was. She looked pale and drawn. The soft crescents of flesh beneath her eyes looked bruised and her long blonde hair, of which she was normally so particular, had not been brushed and was tied up in a loose tail at the back of her neck. She looked like she had been crying but would not say what had upset her. Belinda tried to comfort her, but Brogan came in and ushered her away, then led Lucy up to her room.

“This is none of your concern. She’s fine,” he said to them from the foot of the stairs but threw them back an agitated glance as though he doubted his own words. “You get on with your own business. She’ll be all right,” he told them, and continued to shepherd Lucy up the stairs.

The next few nights Lucy did not take any customers, and they saw nothing of her during the days. They knocked on her door a couple of times, but she did not answer. Brogan took up her food and locked the door to her room behind him. Then one morning she came down for breakfast, smiling sheepishly, and was soon talking again, in her usual clipped, apologetic way, as though nothing had happened. They asked her what the problem had been. She smiled at them, yet looking sad and distant, and shook her head and said nothing, fighting back a tear.

With the passing weeks she got as good at her job as she could want to be. She did not want to get any better. Then it would be something else - a giving in to something darker inside that she would rather stay hidden.

“It’s a test,” Belinda said. “You either fight it or you give in.”

“And if you can’t fight?”

“You have to. You have to tell yourself you’re better than that. If not, you’ll probably end up a lush, dossing with the other losers, doing the work in some back alley just to pay for whatever you find that provides a temporary release into oblivion.”

She decided she was going to be a fighter, not a loser. It was the only good thing about this place; it had taught her how to fight. If she could close out all that needed closing out, one day this would be over. This was not how she saw the path of her life unwinding. Away from here, maybe back in Boston, no-one would know what she had been. And then, one week, her monthly blood did not come. She waited another week, pretending to Brogan her time had come, refusing to take customers in case he was counting the days since she had last bled. Another week passed, and she knew she was not mistaken.

The thought of a baby thrilled and terrified her. How would Brogan take it? Would he let her keep it? She remembered his anger that night in the alleyway. The thought of violence made her nauseous. Or was that the baby, the changes she already felt taking place in her body? And if she did keep it; what would that entail? Another mouth to feed, another vulnerable body to clothe. She would not be able to work for weeks and would have to use what little she had saved just to pay for her keep even if Brogan allowed her to stay. She could see the possibility of her ever getting away receding like the thread of a tantalising dream.

Belinda had told her of the things that could be done. But she was scared; they sounded so primitive, and the thought of pain frightened her. And then there was the question of God. She hadn’t talked to Him much of late. There was no church or chapel here to encourage her to pray, and anyway, she was still angry with Him for what He had allowed to happen. But this was different. This would be of her own choosing. Would He ever forgive her if she took the life of a child?

Another two weeks passed. She did not tell Brogan or Lucy or Belinda of her condition; she did not know how, or what she should say. To ask Brogan for help seemed redundant, and to begin with an apology to any of them seemed inappropriate: she had done nothing of which she should feel ashamed. Instead, she felt scared and alone, and with every day more conscious of the other life growing inside her. She knew she would have to make a decision soon.

Then one night she was down in the saloon. It was quiet, and to pass the time she was watching the men playing poker. As she watched the cards turning, she experienced a flash of something like déjà-vu. Fate, a game of poker, a turn of a card: that was what had brought her to this state. A wave of anger and resentment washed through her. She made a decision, again ceding responsibility to the agency of something beyond her control. If Fate wanted to use her as its plaything, then at least she could write the rules they played by. She decided to let the turn of the cards determine what she should do. In the next hand, the first card dealt face-up on the table was the Black Lady, the Queen of Spades. The Death Card, as some of the players called it. That felt about right to her, an appropriate enough sign. Birth at one end, death at the other. From where she was, there was nothing else, other than however many years of hard stuff you managed to endure in between. Why pass on that struggle to another living soul?

Dense steam rose from the bath. She lowered her body tentatively into the water. It was so hot it hurt, and she quickly pushed herself up out of it. Her feet and ankles, the backs of her thighs had already turned red from scalding. She reached for the jug and poured half of the cold water it contained into the bath then lowered herself into it again. This time it was just about tolerable, although still too hot for comfort. But comfort was not what this was about. Her breathing came fast and irregular; she gritted her teeth, settled herself down in the water and picked up the needle that she had decided should be adequate for the situation. The steel felt cold in her hand. It seemed such a crude and ineffectual instrument. But a crude situation, she consoled herself, required no more than a crude solution.

She braced herself and inserted the needle inside her. It felt hot inside, having quickly taken on the heat of the water. She had no idea what she was doing, where she should direct the needle, how far into herself she should allow it to invade. She felt its point, suddenly sharp, scoring across the delicate linings of her insides - those unknown regions of which she had no comprehension. Trusting to intuition, she guided the needle where it felt like a man should go. The sensations she felt inside did not help. The needle did not feel anything like the same; it was too thin, too unresponsive. Outside, the lower half of her body had gone completely numb. Then she felt a sharp pain, deep inside, an acute ache spread out across her whole abdomen, and a few seconds later dark red, almost black blood began to ooze out of her staining the water. She pulled out the needle. It left a long, irregular trace of blood, like an inky signature testifying to a statutory fact.

She sat in the bath, not daring to move. The blood spread out around her until the water turned almost completely red. She sat, half submerged in it, staring into its ruddy depths in confusion, in disbelief. The temptation was there to just sit in the now comfortable warmth of the water and watch her life flow slowly out of her. That would not require any courage or strength, just her passive complicity, something she had learned to do only too well. Nothing would have changed if she were to simply give in. Just another absence, an empty space without a name that had not been there previously. An absence that, when seen from another point of view would be an escape.

She began to feel cold, and her body started to shake uncontrollably. Her teeth were chattering. Another flash of pain stabbed through her belly, into the tops of her thighs. She suddenly felt scared. She climbed out of the bath, rubbed herself down as best she could with a towel, though blood was still seeping out of her, and putting on her petticoat went to look for help. It was all she could do to make her way down and then up the flights of stairs at either end of the landing. Belinda would know what to do, she told herself, to keep herself going. Belinda would know. But, arriving at her door she could hear that Belinda was busy; there was laughter, female and male, both high-pitched and childlike behind the closed door. She hesitated, leaning on her arm against the frame of the door. She did not want Belinda to lose money on her account, so she turned and limped back along the landing and knocked feebly on Lucy’s door. When Lucy saw the blood in her lap and on her hands, she screamed softly and then started to rock back and forth, stepping agitatedly from one foot to the other, cupping her face in her hands.

“What have you done? How could you be…?” Lucy whispered, almost harshly at her. “I thought only I could be that…”

“Stop, Lucy! Stop! You have to help me,” she sobbed, and sank to her knees on the floor. “Go get the doctor,” she pleaded, kneeling on all fours now, panting and blooded like a hunted animal.

At the mention of the doctor Lucy seemed to come to her senses, as though she knew now what needed to be done. She straightened herself and rubbed the heels of her hands purposefully against the top of her thighs, saying, “Get the doctor. Get the doctor,” softly to herself, then edged past the bloodied figure in the doorway and backed out onto the landing. Her eyes were wide open, and her head was shaking in horror or disbelief. She turned, and the sounds of her feet on the steps faded into silence down the stairwell.

On her own again she no longer knew what she should do. Even Lucy’s panicked antics were better than being left alone. She could still feel cooling blood running down the insides of her thighs. She had to do something; she did not want to just stay here and bleed to death. She pulled herself up by the door handle, clutching her clothing to the wounded part of her body, staggered out onto the landing again and eased herself, step by step, clinging to the banister, down the stairs. She remembered the night with Brogan and the naked, elusive person in the yard, the way Lucy had been the following day. Now she understood. If only she had realised sooner, she could have asked Lucy for help.

At the bottom of the stairs, she became confused. She was beginning to feel light-headed. It had been her intention to make her way to the front of the saloon, to meet the doctor halfway, or to make her own way to him as quickly as she could, but instead she took the corridor that led to the rear of the building, her wet hands trailing dark bruises on the walls as she shuffled towards the door at the end of the corridor.

She opened the door and crawled out on all fours into the yard. Outside, snow was falling. Already the ground was covered to a depth of a couple of inches, though she did not register the cold on her hands, her knees, the tops of her feet. Her body was beyond such finer sensation. Pain racked her from her ribcage to the tops of her thighs, smothering everything beyond. It was all she could do to keep moving and breathing. Close by, a dog barked sharply. There was the scurry of padded feet, a short, almost stifled howl, and not long after, she heard the pad of the other street-dogs approaching through the alleyway. The pack began to gather in the yard. They milled around her, keeping an uncertain distance, testing the feral air that drifted from her, whistling quietly to each other in agitation.

She tried to stand, staggered, and fell again. She had never been in the yard before. She wanted to touch the wall of rock, to know, just once, what its surface felt like. She imagined it hard and cold, and rough to the touch, like frozen sand. The dogs began to whine and whimper, and to worry at the spots of blood seeping into the snow amongst her scattered footprints. They were as confused as she was by this encounter. Humans were friends and providers, not prey, they had learned, but an older, deeper voice was calling to them, one they could not help but heed. She shouted at the dogs to go away. They retreated nervously at the sound of her voice, then edged forward again into the silence that followed, drawn by that other voice, also silent yet more insistent. She raised her head, bared her teeth and growled at them, then barked, once, twice, and then started to laugh at herself, her antics, and finally rolled over onto her back in surrender.

Above her she could see the two pine trees cresting their scalp of rock, silhouetted against the clouds. The clouds were oddly bright. They had that orange glow clouds sometimes had when there was snow about, as though the steely flakes of ice were being forged deep inside them on some gently tempered furnace. The snowflakes continued to fall. They settled on her face like ash.

The last thing she felt as she slipped from consciousness was the gentle lapping of the dog’s tongues at her hands, her toes, the more urgent snuffling at the hems of her blood-stained petticoats.