Thrust: A Novel

In place of a mother’s love, I felt an embodied responsibility to reflect their exquisite worth back to them from the inside out. A girl known as Ruby wrote with her left hand, since her right hand was missing two fingers. An eight-year-old called Cammy, long employed picking cranberries in a New England bog, had fingers curled like those of an old woman with arthritis. The boys who had been cutters in canning companies had the faces of shrunken old men and hands that had been hacked to pieces. A boy named Hiram, who’d been paid five cents a box to pack sardine cans, though he could manage only four boxes a day, could no longer extend his fingers from their bent positions without pain. Before being sent to the cannery, he’d worked full nights at a spinning factory; he was so young and small that he had to clamber up the sides of the spinning frames to work the threads and bobbins, and he’d lost most of one foot in the process. A girl of nine named Mary had a scar running all the way down her cheek, ending at her collarbone. When a man tried to rape her, she’d used the considerable blade of a sardine knife to stab him at the jugular. Before he died, he got off one slice that disfigured her face forever. One seven-year-old boy’s wrong move at a glassworks left him with no hands at all.

What I gave them was witness: You exist. You are not nothing. Take your life back.

—

One day, in the midst of a history lesson — and when I say “history,” I mean showing the children of Room 8 the paths of global commerce and migration and immigration overlaid on the paths and lives of the original inhabitants, the national and local trade routes, the pirating routes, not to mention the laws surrounding individuals and their bodies and movements, the arc of geologic time, and the myths and stories people have created to track and remember themselves — the girl named Ruby, an eight-year-old former oyster shucker, was asking me, Please wait, I can’t keep up, when a noise cracked through the air, so loud that it shook all the desks and even my own vertebrae. A great flash of light, then another, larger explosion. The window glass quivering, the floor briefly buckling, my jaw clacking so hard that I drew coppery blood from my own tongue. The children held on to the sides of their desks. More than one crawled underneath.

When the shock passed, we all ran to the windows and looked out toward the water. With our faces pressed against the glass, we must have looked like immigrants lining the hull of a ship.

Just three buildings away from us blazed a furious fire.

Twenty women, mostly girls under the age of fifteen, perished that day when they could not get out. The doors and windows had been locked.

I took in the deepest breath of my life, held it, thought about shirts and collars and corsets; odd, the images that come into the mind during a crisis.

Aurora and the Want of a Child

To anyone who inquires earnestly, I explain that my business involves bodies.

Beyond the separate undertaking that fills Room 8, I rent rooms. The rooms I let are not residential. I have… rearranged the aims of the building my beloved cousin purchased for me. My clientele are men and women of means, and I curate my rooms based on their wants. In return, along with the customary consideration, they never cease to provide me with good stories — as if they were all characters, I sometimes muse, in a novel or stage play.

Sometimes their occupancy makes the walls vibrate.

For example, some years back, a man walked into my building, introducing himself as the owner of a very successful preserve manufactory, a company that produced canned tomatoes, jellies, fruits, vegetables, meats, and soups. At the time, I gave little thought to his tiny empire; it was enough for me that he seemed able to pay his bills with us. He was a frequent visitor, which meant he did not lack an imagination, and in time, I came to admire him.

During the war that took my leg, many of us had been saved from starving by eating food from cans, and during the intervening years, I had amassed a small collection of these “survival soups,” as I liked to call them. More than once in my life I had to rely on the survival soups, to help others or even myself survive. But I always restocked them when times improved. I became fond of their presence. They were an antidote against fear, and a reminder that scarcity and wealth are no distance from each other. Once the preserve canner became a client, I hired a local finish carpenter to design a special blue cabinet, with sixty little square caves only slightly bigger than the cans, and displayed it in a place of honor in my business quarters. The cabinet of gleaming and colorful cans was a frequent topic of curiosity and conversation with other clients.