A Recounting

  When I tell people how my brother died, I start by saying how poor we were. Where we lived, of course, everyone was poor. We didn’t need to use the word. Who we were, where we were from - that (We were) condemned us to an eternity of scrabble, trying our best to summon a harvest from the little soil allotted to us. We received only schooling enough to count and weigh the crops that we plucked from the fields of the more fortunate. Once we had demonstrated numeracy enough, the schooling would be at an end. We would not receive a scroll, and no-one would invite us to wear a four-cornered hat. Our burdens, Buchan’s and mine, were made heavier again by our not knowing the identity of our father. We only knew that his name was Useless Bastard. We did not ask our mother for further details.

  There are many people who are poor and there are many stories about these people. I am not telling my story to convince you that my poverty is any nobler than yours. I am telling it because I can. That I have a voice at all is a sign that my poverty is at an end. I say this after a decade of relative comfort, nodding off to sleep every night, my muscles flabby and underused, my stomach burbling with simple contentment. I am now at three-score years - few persons in Jurckas see so many birthdays. Still, my youthful poverty hangs on my shoulders like an oversized garment. I have not entirely managed to wriggle free.

  They call me Gaffer. It was Largan’s name for me, but somehow it has become a title. There is a whole mythology around this place that has long made me uncomfortable. The title is only part of it. I really shouldn’t be writing this story at all - no-one knows the full truth of how we got here. Largan, may her mud be found, kept a sharp eye on the truth, never allowing it to escape. It is only because of her efforts that we have prospered here. Well, survived, anyway.

  Now that Largan has passed, I find I want to tell the story. Despite our growing population, I am lonely, with no-one to share my secrets. We have built something special here, whatever untruths lie at its foundation. I do not want to ruin everything just because I have become old and thoughtful. So, I am writing. Perhaps I will give it to Whistlebine and let him do what he wants with it. I would be surprised if he had lettering enough to read it. Someone will read it though. Hopefully, by the time someone reads this, we’ll be well enough established, so that no truth, however powerful, could separate us from the mountain.

  I’ll start then. As a young man, a boy, I was obliged to spend time in a prison camp. There, you are learning something about me now. Again, my instinct is to speak of the poverty that preceded the incident, rather than the incident itself. I want to forgive myself, I think. I want to say that poverty is what placed the shackles around my ankles. But this I cannot rightly do, for you see, I was burdened in my youth with a reckless nature unrelated to my impoverishment. It was - is - the Useless Bastard in me. That my mother had to suffer repeated heartache due to my inherited recklessness still pains me. It sits in my stomach like a jagged shard of steel.

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  Right. I killed him. My brother, I mean. There is no easy way to say it. I didn’t mean to, of course, but there it is. Buchan was better than me, wiser than me, luckier in his inheritances. He stood a better chance of pulling my mother from the cogs. But he’s dead and it was my doing.

  I was burdened in my youth with a recklesness unrelated to my impoverishment.

  It probably didn’t surprise the people who knew me. From fourteen years old, you could find me in the stoopy dens several nights a week, dragging deep lungfuls of reeky vapours into my still-developing chest. Both Buchan and I worked the farms with men much older than us and would eagerly accept the stupefying offerings from their nosebags. I struggle to remember a childhood at all, hurried as we were to reach adulthood. I can’t remember an interaction with Buchan in which we weren’t both puffing out our chests, keen to outdo each other in adult vulgarity.

  We did not know the exact dimensions of the uselessness of the Useless Bastard, but we knew that the stupifiants were the glue that kept the limbs stuck to the body. Not the reeky, you understand, but the stoopy juice. The hard stuff. The stuff that steamed days away from your consciousness. Buchan understood our mother’s aversion to the juice – although younger, he was more perceptive – and forswore never to let that substance scratch its mucky fingernail on his gullet. I was not endowed with the same good sense.

  If we hadn’t stuffed our cupboards with contraband from the farm, I might have stayed out of the prison camp. There had been no reason for the Order to search our lodgings. I had confessed. My story had made sense. No further information would have been necessary. The orderly upon whose desk my file landed would not have seen an easier case. But, being whelped on the wrong side of the swirling Fluck, the brown side, I was a potential suspect for any number of unresolved cases. Sure, hadn’t I already admitted to killing my brother? Ordinarily, they might have allowed the details of Buchan’s death to fall by the ditch. One brownsider had killed another – sure who gives a shite? But they had found a worn pluche on my blood-drenched person, one that I had taken from the Shelvu farm. A modest implement of little value, but not my property. Why did I even take it? What use did I have for a vegetable-scraper, here among the twilit vapours of the stoopy stills?

  Its discovery was justification enough for the Order to send a tumbling crew to the house. They were oath-bound, of course, to consolidate the rights of ownership. This they explained, their words denoting regret, while their knuckles aligned with relish.

  One of them – they always sent their brawniest carnivores this side of the river - hinged a beefy grip on my mother’s bicep as they guided her off the premises. She sobbed as she sat on the doorstep, between dips of her face into the nosebag. I was forced to watch, my ankles and wrists bound, as the belongings flew through the windows and doorways. Among the items were plenty that I had collected in my stints on the sites and farms, but nothing that I ever had cause to use.

  Once the house was properly turned on its head, I was submitted for process and then quicksmart sent into the hills to the Gangad Pokey after the reading. I never saw my mother again after that. The Pokey was almost a week’s journey on foot, although I was lucky enough to be conveyed within the prison caravan, rather than dragged behind it on a rope. I would be labour for the JPD Company, so I was treated with relative care. It would not do to damage company property. The oath, remember?

  The Useless Bastard, for all his uselessness, had never brought the orderlies to the house, as far as I knew. My mother had just lost the most sensible of her sons and, after this latest indignity, it would be a wonder if she could ever again lift her head.