The toebox of Samuel's left shoe begins to pinch as he climbs back down the slanted tenement steps at 95 Henry Street. He checks his watch - quarter past noon - and whistles a sigh of relief through chipped front teeth.
On paper the residents of 3B make for a sorry story: the 37 year-old Italian father, plasterer, illiterate, out of gainful employment, not naturalized. His 34 year-old wife illiterate, no English, flower-maker at forty cents a thousand with a nine dollar rent for two rooms with a bucked ceiling and oily wallpaper, and the five girls: 14, 12, 10, 6, 2 and one half. Also flower makers, the whole bunch, down to the little one unsticking paper petals from the bundle sent in by the factory. On a school day. No natural light. Bugs on the walls. Oldest girl with a cough. No license for home finishing work.
Frowning, Samuel sighs again and scribbles, "truancy officer", "dept labor", and "dept sanit" before closing his pad and stepping out into the street. The domino-stack row of tenements, shops, and synagogues along the intersection of Pike and Henry make his last half a block before lunch. With any luck, he thinks, this last place will be empty.
He had waited to enter the odd little church until the residents of the tenements and two flophouses had been neatly recorded. Something about its dark windows, its smallness and stillness amidst the bustle of the rest of the block unnerves him.
Even its name is alarming - The New Salem Philanthropic Society. Most of the families in 95 had listed themselves as beneficiaries of its soup kitchen, including the illegal sweatshop in 3B.
It's almost ostentatious in its modesty, Samuel thinks, with its sheet metal cladding.Hopefully nobody home. He peers inside.The windows are dark and lifeless as glass eyes.Sighing a third time, he knocks on the door.
The child that greets him looks like something out of an old schoolbook illustration of Puritan settlers, a pale face framed by an uneven square cropped haircut in an even smaller child's cord suit. He thinks briefly of the rag doll he had given his sister's eldest for her birthday with its scrapcloth jacket and shorts.
"Census," Samuel says. The little Puritan's eyes flicker across the pad and pen, and then he steps aside wordlessly, his chest caving inward as though to remove itself as an obstacle from Samuel's path.
"Your father or mother home, kid? Or whoever's responsible for you?"
This kid's entire body is lines - long, thin limbs like spider's legs and dark eyes - serious like the village kids back home. Refugees now, what's left of them. If the newspapers are anything to go by.
He checks his watch again as the kid gestures them down the plain entrance hall, past a bench of folded clothing and a line of scuffed boots.
"Yes, sir, Mister -"
"Kouramjian."
"This way, Mr. Kouram-jee-an."
The church looks older than it possibly could be. Its scratched wooden walls and floors creak and shift underfoot like ship's boarding, and the air smells heavy like after-rain. Three small girls sit with unnatural stillness around a massive table, shifting leaflets into piles. As pale as the first kid, their hair in neat braids. They look up with wide fixed eyes, return to their work.
Truancy officer, Sam writes.
The kid leads him past the table to a little cooking alcove where a woman in an old-fashioned black dress stirs soup in a pot the size of a small chair.
"Who is it, Credence?" she asks without turning.
"Census man, Ma," says the kid quietly, curves inward again as she straightens to face them. "Mr. Kouramjian."
"Mind the soup." Wiping her hands on a dishcloth, her voice losing its edge, she glances him over. Sweeps a strand of brown hair back into the bun piled loosely on her head. Nods. "I'll just be right with you, Mr. Kouramjian. One moment."
Over the course of the week's sampling, Samuel has been inside the filthiest tenement flats. He's stepped over roaches and rats, watched babies play on the greasy floors where parents and lodgers drank or worked or both. The Lower East Side is crowded with barefoot hollow-eyed kids on dirty floors, overworked and underfed and badly needing sunlight and sleep and a square meal. This is different, off. Uncomfortable in a way that needles under Samuel's skin despite the cleanliness and the girls in their linen dresses and stockings and boots.
Everything is shabby but proud, an aesthetic Samuel assigns automatically to Puritanism. Only the boy - Credence - is wearing clothes that don't fit. He scuttles like a pigeon over to the stove and the pot while his Ma disappears into an adjoining room that Samuel hadn't noticed.
"Say, ma'am -" His eyes linger on Credence at the stove. The boy has his back turned, stooped like an old man's. He jumps at the sudden noise and drops the ladle with a clatter, scrambles after it. "Say, ma'am, don't you know all these kids should be in school today? We got truancy laws -"
"These documents," says the woman as she emerges, "should give you all the information you need to complete your survey, Mr. Kouramjian."
She presses the documents, organized in a folio, into Samuel's hands and adds in a voice like a rap to the knuckles, "The soup, Credence."
Something about this place is wrong, Samuel thinks. There is no department he can report it to. Nothing illegal about kids sorting leaflets, as long as she gets them to school, but it's not the leaflets or even the truancy he feels like a douse of cold water down the back of his neck.
He sidesteps back into the center of the room, where Credence's eyes follow, wide and spooked like the bread cart horse without his blinkers, holding the soup ladle at a funny angle, pressed gingerly between thumb and forefinger. He ducks under his mother's look. Samuel blinks.
"Thanks, ma'am. I'll just look them over at the table here, if you don't mind."
"I don't mind at all, Mr. Kouramjian."
None of the girls stir as Samuel joins them at the corner of the large table. Their leaflets rustle, but there is no giggling or humming like he'd heard in 3B, or in any of the other tenements where families worked finishing shirts or coats or gloves or flowers, licensed or not.
He opens the folio to rifle through the stack of papers and frowns.
"There ain't nothing in here about the kids, ma'am - Missus, uh, Mrs. Barebone."
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."
"The kids," Samuel insists, gesturing the spider-leg boy at the stove and the pot with its thin vegetable broth. "These kids. These girls working here on a school day. And that kid shouldn't be stirring no soup pot at noon on a Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Barebone. All due respect. Kids oughta be in school learning ciphers and letters and all that. We got laws here, Mrs. Barebone. This ain't the Wild West."
She freezes with the dishcloth and a wet bowl in hand, but it's Credence he finds himself looking to again, standing stiffly and folded in on himself with the seams of the cord jacket taut around his shoulders; Credence's eyes are still wild, flickering between his mother's placid dish drying, the girls, and Samuel at the table.
"What would you like to know about my children, Mr. Kouramjian?" Mrs. Barebone asks finally. Her eyes, Samuel thinks, are uncomfortably blue. Midwestern cornflower. Mayflower. His fingers jolt reflexively around the pen, but there is no department for this.
Credence, at the pot, murmurs something quietly to his mother and drops his gaze.
What he wants to know - Samuel frowns again, rubs his mouth around the chipped front teeth. His questions are fleeing, water through an open drain, as soon as he can think of them. Do the kids go to school, he thinks. And why do these kids look like mourners at a wake, and then it occurs to him that the issue is not important. These are not his kids, nor his sister's kids. He shuffles the papers around in the folio, tapping his teeth, but his mind will not settle on any one question in particular.Credence's eyes are on him again, spooked horse.He wonders how long the kid has been looking and checks his watch. It's incredibly late. He had wanted to get lunch before heading uptown.
"You know, ma'am," Samuel hears himself announce. "I think I have everything I need right here." He shuffles the papers again under Credence's dark stare. The watchful refugee. Reports of fire and forced marches. No more cousins in Arapkir, survivors fled to Damascus and Constantinople. He feels dizzy.
"I'll get the door, Ma," says Credence softly. Samuel feels his body unfolding itself from over the table. The littlest girl (he thinks of 3B and 14, 12, 10, 6, 2 and half) returns the papers to the folio for him.
"God go with you, Mr. Kouramjian," says Mrs. Barebone.
Samuel tips his hat, thinks: Puritans. His shoe pinches.
"Wait," he says, tongue tingling like it fell asleep. Like it isn't quite his anymore. He reaches into his pocket for a small fold of bills and extracts one. "Here's five bucks." His hand certainly feels solid enough, slapping it flat onto the table. A small relief, although he can't remember why he should feel relieved. "Buy the kid a new suit, will you?"
He turns on his heel and strides back down the entrance corridor before the boy or his mother has a chance to follow. Lunch, thinks Samuel, and he feels lighter as each stride puts another foot of pavement between him and the little church.
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Ma's eyes are on his back as soon as they hear the hollow thud of the door swinging into its frame. Everything is quiet. The girls, the letterpress, the stove. Credence pauses, ladle in hand. To look up and catch Ma's gaze now, with the census man's five dollar bill lying on the table like an object of sin before them is too dangerous. He has to wait. He stirs the pot again and bites his lip against the sting in his hand, and Ma goes on staring. Saying nothing.
His fingertips itch for the belt at his waist, heart thudding in his chest. He wants to throw himself at her feet and beg for the beating now, just to get it over with. As much as the belt hurts, waiting is worse. Waiting makes his throat feel narrow, but he knows Ma will never raise a hand to him before the soup hour is finished, would never strike any of them in front of other children.
He wants to bolt out through the unlocked church door into oncoming traffic. Like a spooked cart horse or a derailed subway car.
He wants to plead his case.
Ma's silence hangs over him until the soup finally reaches a boil.
"Chastity." The pile of leaflets at Chastity's elbow falls askew as she scrambles to her feet. "Ring the bell."
Soup hour is a blur to Credence, a clang of tin bowls and outstretched hands, dirty fingers. The regular kids know enough to reach for their leaflets before their food. The others are guided by Chastity, a miniature Ma in double. Even Faith knows better now than to sulk in the corner and carries empty dishes to the sink where Abstinence stands ready with the cloth and soap.
Credence serves mechanically - dips the ladle, dumps broth into a bowl, dips again.Sometimes his body feels like a clockwork mouse, like it was made for simple motions. Arrange letters. Press leaflets between iron plates. Press leaflets into human palms. Palms in offering, take what is given. Scare out the pigeons. Dip ladle. Dole out portion. Not too much as to play favourites or encourage greed. Not too little as to be uncharitable.
He lets his eyes wander for the first time back to the empty spot where the census man had slapped his money into the table.
If he had moved more quickly, if he hadn't stood there like such a fool with his elbows tucked into the sleeves of his little boy's jacket like such a stupid frightened child; if he weren't such a dunce, he would have brought the census man to the door the moment he'd noticed his eyes clouding over.Maybe he could have avoided then whatever retribution is coming.Maybe he would have been lucky enough to have the five dollars in his own pocket instead of Ma's.
But to what use, anyway?Whatever had been done, Ma had certainly seen. Knew, as she always does. Credence has never been skilled at hiding it.Is it proof enough now? Enough to damn him?
Skirting the pyre from babyhood, every incident a needling of cold sweat down the nape of his neck. Old socks darning themselves and hair that grows back by morning. Until now, though, nothing that couldn't be excused away under Ma's watchful eyes, or else exorcised from him by the skin of his hands.Chastity had called him witch that night when he warmed the bed just by willing it, but Ma beat her too before she had taken the belt to Credence.
He scrapes the rest of the soup together into bowls for Ma and the others, jaw clenched until it makes his temples throb and his eyes water, and then he lets himself breathe.She hasn't said anything yet, is possibly not even angry.Mr. Kouramjian could have felt ill. As often as he had been checking his watch, he was surely late for something important, for the next family to record.
Lunch passes. Ma's continued silence is ominous but not unusual. Hope, on the other hand, will only make it hurt double when he ends up whipped after all, so he chooses dishwashing instead. Clockwork motions.
Ma catches him after with a hand on his shoulder.
"Credence," she says, and he knows.
"Please, Ma -"
Squeezing, so that he has to force his body not to lean into the touch: "Credence, I want you to take this money down to the grocer's. Give him this."
He takes the envelope numbly, without looking.
"Buy a pound of rice," she instructs, and he can hardly believe his luck. It feels like a trick as she pushes a fresh dollar into his hand. How many years it's been since Ma has sent him out shopping, trusted him enough not to dawdle or bring back the wrong change; his head feels detached from the rest of him, floating dangerously. It must be a trick. He knows it must. Please, he thinks, let it not be.
"I'm sorry," he says automatically.
Ma gives him an odd soft frown, her eyes darker in the afternoon shadow.
She turns, brushing her hands on her skirt as he ducks away in alarm. Nothing about this is normal. Ma sighs. Not harsh nor angry. Not gentle. "Credence," she says tiredly. "Just hurry up and do it. And don't take any leaflets with you. I want you back early before the evening meeting."
His shoes know how to get him down the block and back in minutes, even as the overstitched seems of his trousers start to strain against his pumping legs and the crooked hinge of his knees. Running has never been easy with a body as awkward as his, but today there is a purpose. A magic trick, though he hates himself for thinking it. If he can get to the grocer's and back in under fifteen minutes, he tells himself, nothing will happen to him. No belt, no empty belly. It will be as if the census man never came at all.Erased. Forgotten. Nothing to forgive.
Pike Street is dripping with sleepy heatsick people in the early afternoon sun. Old men at their dominos spit into the heystrewn sidewalk as he tears past, and a woman in a striped jacket curses him from under her sweaty upper lip for knocking her shopping basket. The air reeks of ripe fish and horse dung and fresh oranges.
Two minutes, Credence guesses, might have passed by the time he skids onto the cracked green tile floor of Mancini's grocery six blocks away. No time to catch his breath, he pants against the stitch in his side as Mr. Mancini takes the envelope from his outstretched hands.
"Kid, kid - what I'm-a suppos-ed to do with this, huh?"
The counter rocks a little behind his eyes."I need a pound of rice," he pleads.
Mancini shakes his head, but the envelope is slammed into a wicker basket behind the register as he knots an apron across his round stomach.
"You tell-eh your mother this place-eh is not a post office! Why she does not-eh take her own parcel like-eh everyone else, huh?"
Eight minutes left, Credence thinks desperately. Maybe only seven. He shakes his head, heart stuttering. Please, Mr. Mancini, he wants to say. Just give me the rice and let me go. Too much is hanging on this errand, this little pact he has made with god or the devil.
He shrugs in on himself as Mancini bustles past for a paper bag and the rice scoop.
"You tell-eh your mother, kid. I don't know -" A wave. Dismissive. Mancini drops the bag onto a little scale, muttering. "Here. For you I charge-eh only fifteen cents. Normally twenty-five. Come here. You still like-eh lemon sours? Take from the jar for yourself. Don't share it with-eh your sisters. And stop-eh slouching, kid. Porco dio la Madonna - you look-eh like an old man. Go, go out. You're welcome. Ciao, ciao."
Change and candy carefully buried in the depths of his jacket pocket, Credence takes the bag and bolts. Five more minutes, maybe. Or four. If he gets back and Ma is not angry, he'll know it worked.
Somehow the way back seems to stretch on infinitely. Carts and wagons and games of marbles appear where before had been an empty expanse of trodden straw and muddied cardboard. The heat bears down like a heavy hand on his neck, making his throat dry and his stomach heave. At the corner of Pike and Henry, Credence has to stop abruptly. His belly is full of the afternoon heat, the stickiness coating his tongue, pushing its way out. He stoops to vomit into a grate and wipes his mouth.
The rest of the walk is more a stumble. Capitulation.
Chastity and the others have all left by the time he shuffles through the double doors. Out leafleting, Credence thinks with a flash of longing that cinches his sore belly. He crosses the room on tiptoe, dropping the rice and change onto the table en route for the stairs and the fragile safety of his room when Ma's voice rings out from the depths of her own bedroom behind him.
"Credence - where are you going?"
Her tone snags at him like a nail in his jacket hem, stopping him short.Better not to lie entirely. Maybe she'll take pity, however unlikely.
"I was just - going to lie down, Ma. I ran too fast outside in the heat."
"Come back downstairs," Ma says simply. "Bring the rice with you."
He follows the echo of her footsteps across the floor to where she has set an open book at the base of the New Salem flag, his stomach churning. Not a beating. Beatings aren't usually a downstairs happening. Ma enjoys the drama too much, the way the whipping rings out from over the bannisters and through the rafters. Uncharitable thoughts. He scrubs a hand over his eyes as though to wipe them out with it.
"Credence," Ma warns.
Drop gaze. Unwind, let shoulders fall. A study in defence. Once he had watched two policemen beat an old drunk with their billy clubs until the man lie limp and bleeding on the curb.
"I'm sorry, Ma," he mumbles into the collar of his shirt. "I don't understand - "
She takes the rice from him, scattering it like pellets of chicken feed across the floor at his feet.
"When you are finished," Ma says, "you will clean this up. I would advise you to be efficient, Credence, if you want a full bowl of rice for dinner. I leave that for you to decide for yourself. Roll up your trousers."
Obedient as a wind-up toy, he rolls them up.
"Kneel."
He kneels. Beneath his knees the rice is rough and sharp.
"You'll stay here until the message has reached you, Credence. I want you to read from this passage aloud until then."
Her fingers appear and disappear like an act of witchcraft for a moment over the printed text of the book she had laid out. And then she leaves him, footsteps a faint scratch against the floorboards on the far side of the room.
"Angel or - spirit," Credence reads falteringly. "One of - you is a Devil. Our Lord Jesus Christ knows how many - Devils there are in his church, and - and who they are." His throat cracks drily over the syllables, eyes scanning the page. "There are Devils as well as - as well as Saints in Christ's Church. Christ knows how may - sorry - Christ knows how many of these Devils there are. Christ - Christ knows who these Devils are..."
"Read it again," Ma says as the sermon is finished.
Wincing against the ache in his knees and his stiff neck, he reads. And again, until the words begin to blur together in his mouth and the spit dries out of them.
"None - none are worse... than those who have been good and are naught, and might be good and will be naught..."
He loses track of the minutes.No matter how he tries to shift his weight, nothing takes the brunt of it off the raw skin and sore bone of his knees.They must be skinned by now. Inlaid with rice like the mother of pearl crosses in the Papist church.
"There are Devils as well as Saints in Christ's..."
If he runs, maybe the Papists will take him. The Italians or the Irish. It doesn't matter which. He won't be choosy. They all seem to love poor orphans and martyrs a good deal better than Ma.Maybe they'll let him sleep under the statue of the Virgin Mary. Maybe he'll die and be adopted by Her.In Hell.
"...Those who are good and are naught..."
Some witch he is.The only one who would have been burnt alive despite himself.And wishing for his end all the while.He bites his lip to temper the pain in his knees.
A clatter of footsteps.The stove has been rekindled, wood hissing in the grate. She always feeds them an early supper before meetings.
"You may excuse yourself," she says, closer than he'd realised. He jumps and bites his tongue against his own voice as the rice is ground even deeper into his bruised skin.
"Thank you, Ma."
Relief does not come from standing up. His knees creak stiffly, swollen and bloodied as he rolls the worn corduroy of his trousers down over them. Ma watches, unmoving. Choosing not to see the sting of tears that he blinks away - a small mercy for which he's grateful even as a part of him shifts towards her.
"I hope that this has given you clarity, Credence."
He flinches, head bowed. Not daring to look.
"Yes, Ma. Thank you. I'm truly grateful." His throat cracks over the vowels, but she is satisfied, pleased even, and he feels suddenly lighter. Not happy. He wouldn't know what to do with that. But relieved. Absolved, or something like it.
That is the thing about Ma - it strikes Credence as he bends to sweep the cleanest of the rice into his cupped hand, again as he hunches over the steaming bowl across from Abstinence, nursing her own sore hand - why he will never leave her church. Ma will never let him leave, and he will never try to. Will not want to dare, as long as she forgives him after. Always.
This thought, like a slap to the face or a douse of cold water, needles at him through dinner and cleaning and the meeting after on the yawning, airless corner of sidewalk in front of a little church on St. Marks. It feels weighty. Like something he doesn't know what to do with, so he does the next best thing and bites his lip as his leaflet is ignored by another barefoot newspaper boy and a man with a brown dog. He lets Abstinence hold his hand on the walk home, lets her tell him in undertones about the Jewish baker and the loaves of braided bread and the language curled in the underside of her tongue that still wants to come out, and he bites his top lip. He bites his bottom lip hard. Blood-letting hard.
That night he dreams himself engulfed in waves of black smoke.