kitchen range
Kitchen range, Beamish Museum
Chapter 3 — Section 5
 UKUS-hUS-p
Pages 86-8982-8473-75
POVJim
WhereMacks' kitchen
WhenFriday night, May 7 1915

The glow of the Sacred Heart gained slowly before him. Its flame swayed the shadows on the wall. Once in the night he had put his hand in that flame, but his courage had failed him. He had to pray then that God would not call him for a martyr. For if he failed again, the flames would be for ever and unconsuming.

Gordie used always blow out the lamp, bringing another day’s bad luck that only Jim’s frantic litanies could abate:

Jesus, meek and humble of heart,
Make my heart like unto Thine.
O sweetest heart of Jesus, we implore,
That we may love Thee ever more and more.

The flame flickered on the gold crosses of the Sunday beads that hung from a shelf where the missals were kept, whose gold tooling flickered in flame. It played on the statue of the Blessed Virgin, dancing on her starry nimbus, then solemnly stained the golden corpse of the kitchen cross. The campanulate shade of the gas-lamp it found and the brass handles of the bread-box that was the table’s centrepiece. On the pans that hung like haloes over the sink and on the winged girandole by the stairs it shone. And just level with his eyes as he lay, it kindled the knob of the box-stairs door.

altHERE
Goya, "Two old people eating soup" detail, 1819-23

If you stared long enough at this door, you’d see it opening. Gordie had told him that. He told him Aunt Sawney came down in the night to steal his breath.

“What does she want with my breath?”

“Have you never watched in the day? She daren’t breathe at all. Only by night. And it has to be from a boy’s babby mouth, else she’ll die.”

“Why’ll she die?”

“’Cause she’s a witch in league with Old Horny and she feeds on a young ’un’s breath. Be careful, else she’ll catch you.”

“She’s not a witch.”

“That’s all right so. Nothing to fear.”

He told him about the Protestant church by the railway bridge up Adelaide Road that played hymns on its bells on Sundays. “Folk have got it wrong, you know. You don’t have to walk three times round to make the devil appear.”

“No?”

altHERE
... bless yourself as you pass and

“Not at all. Just bless yourself as you pass and Old Horny’ll come.”

That was all right because it was easy not to bless yourself, you could do that just forgetting. The cunning was too soon revealed. The cross was your sole protection, yet by signing there under the shadowy trees you invoked the enemy. The panic of those journeys past the Protestant church was with him still, a blink away.

He stretched his legs to the end of the sheet. How wide the bed, how still without his brother’s dominant breath. The face of Our Lord reproached him. I promise you in the unfathomable mercy of My heart ...

Pal of my heart. Wished I hadn’t seen that. Wished I hadn’t delayed in the road.

altHERE
New York Times, May 8 1915

Mice in the shop. Outside he heard a shrill voice calling, Stop Press! Stop Press! Jim thought of a baton coming down on a newsboy’s leg. Why would they do that to a newsboy?

Lusitania, he was calling. Another place he had never heard of. Tomorrow they’d mark it down on the map. Soldier in the mud with his legs missing and he turns with Gordie’s face to say, When are the other boys coming?

altHERE
Velázquez, "Immaculate Conception", 1618

Our Lady clothed with the sun and the moon at her feet and the twelve-starred crown atop the Muglins. No clear idea what a socialist does. Oft in the stilly night.

Upstairs, Aunt Sawney coughed and creaked in her cot. “She’s on her way,” Gordie had said on his last visit, his embarkation leave.

“Her way where?”

“Young ’un,” he said and cuffed Jim’s neck.

That night, lying head-and-tails as of old, Gordie had said quietly, “Do you never think of girls, young ’un?”

“What about them?”

“Nancy’s a bit of ”—jam, he called her. “I take her out the odd time. Picture palaces together.”

“What do you see?”

“Matter a damn what you sees.” His toes nudged Jim’s ribs. “Dark as be damned in the picture palace.”

altHERE
David Hockney, "Diver", 1972
altHERE
... old horny
Tarot card, 1909

He wished it was dark as be damned in the kitchen. He wished it was dark as he was damned. He shifted on his side and a hand reached under the sheet to the hole he had cut in the ticking and felt its way through the lumps of horsehair till it found the rag he kept stolen there. He shut his eyes from the gaze of Our Lord and the reddening gaze of King George and Sir Redvers Buller, and he crossed out the image of Brother Polycarp’s face and squeezed the mimosa from his mind, and he wondered what would it be like to swim in the sea, to swim in the sea off the Forty Foot, while his shirt lifted and the sheet began to move and the smell came up of the glue-pot.

Old horny.