Chapter 3: Peaches in Syrup

Master Charles got both forearms around him at the waist, which was as high as they went, and squeezed, and made a noise into his shoulder that was meant to be affection and came out like a hinge.

“My precious,” he said. “My poor little precious. Sit, sit down, now. There. Fever’s off him at last.”

The voice was thin to begin with. Charles wrung it up until it went into the ear like the sound of a wet finger round the rim of a glass, and held it there while he patted Rook down — shoulder, ribs, shoulder — the way a man pats a coat he is thinking of buying.

Rook sat.

Sitting still and keeping his face empty had turned out to be the whole of his education in this place. Six had given him the rules for free, because Six was eight or thereabouts, and at that age a child will say a thing he only imagined in exactly the same voice he uses for a thing that happened. If Six went out and told the yard that the famous idiot had started talking in whole sentences, somebody would pat his head and send him back to the pen.

The master was a different matter.

Up close, the skull came nearer to a rat’s than anything else Rook had to compare it with, but flatter over the top, and the small patch around the eyes and the moving nose carried no fur at all, only skin, and under the skin a set of muscles that pulled the whole mask into shapes — pleasure, grievance, patience, threat — quicker than a man could do it. Whatever else he was, the master was a reader. Everything Rook’s face did went into him like a coin into a slot. And the paw was worse than the face: pink, clever, four fingers and no more, but one of them swung around to meet the others and could take hold of a pencil, a key, a hem, and Rook was fairly sure it could make the shape of a heart if the occasion ever called for it.

He kept his own face doing nothing and let himself be patted. Behind his eyes he ran the inventory. Shoulders half again too wide. Head too low. One corner of the mouth held open for the tooth. Four fingers, one of them worth something.

The master had come every day since the first one. Rook could not have counted them; the room gave him nothing to count by except his own sleeps and the matron’s rag, and he had stopped trying.

“Matron,” Charles said, without turning around. “A can for my big baby.”

She was already there, at the shelf. Rook’s hopes went up. There was a barrel of soft biscuit in the corner with four flavors mixed into it at random, and he had been living out of that barrel for days. A can meant meat. A can meant corned beef, or tuna, or something with a pig in a chef’s hat painted on the front.

What she put in his hands was a squat glass jar with a paper label wrapped around it, and through the glass the halves floated yellow and soft in a syrup the color of weak tea.

Peaches. Peaches in syrup, on account of a fever.

He tipped the jar to the light and looked at the label a while. A woman with yellow hair rolled up off her neck and a face like poured cream, her lips pursed at a peach half, in a manner that suggested she and the peach had an arrangement. She ought to have been selling shampoo. He did not know how he knew what shampoo was. The word had come in with the rest of the sentence, the way words did, out of wherever the missing part of him was kept. He turned the jar around and read the small print out of habit, understood perhaps a third of it, and got the lid off, because the master was waiting.

He wanted to say something first. He wanted to stand up in the middle of the room and make a declaration of it, in the clean ringing shape the words arrived in: I don’t eat sweets. It wasn’t a preference. It was a position, and it went down through him further than the sickness went, further than the missing years, all the way to whatever was holding his bones together.

He put a small piece in his mouth, meaning to swallow it whole and be done.

It was not what he expected.

The syrup came at him and every taste bud he owned stood up at once, and before his brain got a word in edgewise his hand and his mouth — two traitors, working in perfect accord the way they never did for anything else — had put a second piece in and swallowed it.

Rook sat with the spoon in his fist. He was outraged. He drank some of the syrup.

His soul and his body were filing for divorce over a jar of peaches.

It occurred to him, somewhere under all that, that this was by a wide margin the softest work he had ever done. No quotas. No performance reviews. A man came once a day and told him he was precious and fed him out of a jar. Whatever he had been before, it hadn’t been this.

Across from him, Charles sat down on the stool with his feet turned out — broad flat feet, turned out at the toes, with nothing on earth made to fit them — and watched Rook eat the way a farmer watches his own wheat.

“Better,” Charles said. “Fruit’s the only thing that gets a second mouthful into him. Cat’s teeth, though. Topsiders like them sickly, but this one’s a full-time job. A draft under the door and he’s down. Yesterday he was down.” He sighed through the nose. “Old Hans wanted to borrow him. Put him over one of his dams, get a litter out of him, share the get. I wouldn’t say yes, and I’ll tell you why I wouldn’t.”

The matron stood where she was standing, with the rag.

“I’m not having him go in the night before the balance is paid,” Charles said. “No. I’ve seen it happen, and I won’t have it happen to me.”

Rook chewed, and swallowed, and put the next piece in, and thought about the shape of the thing.

He had been sold as a wreck. That was plain enough. The buyer wanted a wreck — wanted the look of one, the ribs of one, the sad eye of one — and the seller wanted a living wreck, delivered, warm, with the balance counted into his hand. Which left Rook sitting in a small room between a buyer and a seller who wanted opposite things out of the same animal, and neither of them had asked him for so much as an opinion. He filed it.

Charles put his foot into the matron’s hip.

“Cat’s teeth, you great dumb lump. Your own get. Your own get, and you can’t be bothered.”

She took the kick and went half a step and got herself back upright again without ever putting out a hand to save herself, and then she was standing where she had been standing, with the rag.

“Piteous,” Charles said, in the voice of a man who has reached the good part of a complaint. “Piteous and useless. Both at once. Your kind can hardly breed as it is — half the litters never come, and the ones that come are half the size they ought to be, and I pay for feed that goes into a dam who won’t take. Then you’re stupid on top of it. Off the teat, and you don’t know your own young.” He sucked his teeth. “Other folk’s dams would take your hand off over a pup that isn’t theirs. Yours. Yours, and you wouldn’t cross the yard for them.”

The master swore by cats’ teeth, and Rook had never seen a cat, and had no picture to put behind the word. So he worked at it from the outside in. A rat’s head sat on five feet of shoulder and gristle; a rat that size would not be forever naming a small animal every time he wanted to curse. The thing he cursed by was big, then. Or there were a great many of them. Either way there were rat-heads, and there would be cat-heads, and worse besides, and nothing at all to say where a thing like Rook fell on a list drawn up that way. He had no common knowledge to check any of it against.

The matron said nothing. In all the days, Rook had not heard one word out of her — not to the master, not to Six, not to the wall. It was not the silence of a woman with nothing to say, and it was not the silence of one who had been struck dumb. She stood there with her rag and waited him out.

Charles made a wet clicking noise with his tongue and his teeth, which was for Rook, and Rook gave him back a low sound with no word in it.

The little eyes lit.

“Eat, then. Eat up, my little cash cow.”

He got up off the stool, and went to the door, and stood in it, and pointed one short finger at Six, who had been sitting so still against the wall that Rook had half forgotten him.

“Now, that one. The expert’s said his piece, so call it cleared and have done with it. Take him back to the pen after.”

Six’s face came up like a lamp being turned on.

“Matron! I’m cleared!”

Charles went out across the yard with his feet turned out. With him in the room she had been furniture; the moment he was through the door she came back on, and what she came back as was cold.

Six got one knuckle of height off the floor and came down, and went around her in a wide happy circle, and reached for the hem of her coat. She looked at him. That was all she did. She looked at him the way she looks at a wall when she is finished with it, and his hand went back down to his side without any fuss at all, as though he had never intended to lift it.

Then he came around the other way, to Rook.

She went back to the floor with her rag, and the room went quiet except for that, and Rook watched her work and she did not watch him back.

Then she did.

It came up out of the dim by the door the way a fish comes up out of dark water, without any hurry: her eyes, resting on him, and staying. Big eyes, deep set. Complicated. More complicated than the list of what was in the jar — and no offense to the peaches, which had been nothing but good to him.

He held still and let her look. She took her time, and then she took it back.

Matron, he thought, was a job and not a name; nobody had used a name on her in all the days he had been in this room. And the name they had for him was not a nickname either. He had assumed one — a yard joke with a reason in it. Now he understood his position better, and the name with it: it was what they had written down.

She was not old enough to have a son his size. So they started the stock young here, and dropped them young, and that was as far as the arithmetic went.

“Hey,” Six said. “Hey. Rook.”

He had come around and sat himself down on the floor by Rook’s knee with a grunt of effort, and he smelled like the biscuit barrel, and he was already talking.

“You want to get big,” he said, “you eat, and then you don’t move. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. If you walk around it burns off you in the night and you come out behind. So you eat, and then you lie flat, and you let it work. If you get up, it stops working. Don’t chew fast. Don’t get cold. Cold’s the worst one, cold takes it right out of you.” He nodded, several times, at his own wisdom. “And you sleep whenever you can. Sleeping’s the same as eating, near enough.”

Rook looked at him.

“He’s big,” Six said, jerking his head at the door, meaning the master, “and he says it all wrong, but he says that part right, because he’s the one who weighs us. He’s got the scale.”

All of this was delivered to the middle of the room, more or less, and then delivered again with emphasis, and then Six’s eyes came around and settled on the jar in Rook’s hands and did not come off it.

He kept talking. The talking got slower. Then it got quieter and wandered off the point.

“I remember you don’t like sweets,” he said, to the jar.

Rook did not move his face.

He thought about asking. The matron was six feet away with a rag in her hand and her back to them, and a fat child caught passing news between pens was not a thing he was willing to find out about today. So he didn’t ask. He left it there.

The jar was still two-thirds full. He had eaten enough to be ashamed of, and Six’s whole face had gone quiet and hungry and eight years old.

Rook put the jar into his hands.

Six looked up, quick, checking it.

Rook nodded at him, once, and made a small shooing motion with his fingers, and that was all the permission the child needed. He got the last of the fruit out with his fingers and then put the mouth of the jar to his lips and tipped it up and drank the syrup down in one long go, and came off it gasping, with his eyes shut, and licked the rim, and set the jar down by Rook’s foot like it was worth something.

The matron’s rag stopped. She came over and got Six by the back of the coat, without hurry and without roughness, and steered him to the door.

He went, twisting to look back, walking sideways to keep Rook in view as long as he could, and he got a hand up and waved it.

The door shut.

Rook could hear him going away down the yard, one small flat thump and then another, further off every time, and then a gate, and then nothing but the master’s house noises and water moving in the pipe in the corner.

He sat with the empty jar in his hands. There was syrup on his fingers. He licked it off, one finger at a time, and then he turned the jar over and started the label again from the beginning.