3. SHATTERED

If the sad creature slumped in the padded chair in the corner alcove had been able to hear her, Mrs. Joe would have nodded in agreement with Biddy's conclusion. Joe had ample opportunities to throttle her dead throughout their years together and hadn't; the mere thought of it had horrified him. He had known she had been broken from the very start and took her into his life anyway, and his forge and house was the only place Georgiana Pirrip Gargery had ever felt safe and powerful in her life.

There had been no one to slap or punch her there, or label her worthless. Her tongue was sharp and her manner insulting there because she knew no other way to be. Her own parents had raised her with kicks and blows, after all. Joe understood this, even though Pip did not.

Biddy had been right. Mrs. Joe had been the keeper of the Order of Things in the blacksmith's life and he knew it. Now, however, she was silent and as useless to Joe Gargery as she had once been useful. She had been stuck into this little alcove off the best parlor so that she couldn't see the motion of her husband as he went in and out of their kitchen during the course of a day. If she saw him, she would begin her terrible keening for him and even at six feet four inches in height the burly blacksmith would burst into tears and go to her, leaving the work in the forge undone for hours at a time. Early on and before Biddy came to help, this had precipitated a small financial crisis in the family.

Pip had decided that it was easier to put his sister in the alcove and convinced Joe that it really would be for the best. Unfortunately she had yet another stroke the very next day and fell out of her padded chair, and neither Joe nor Pip saw her lying on the floor until before dinnertime. She had broken her nose and bled all over the floor and herself; Joe was of no help as he immediately lapsed into blind panic. "It's as she were when I found her, old chap!" he had cried over and over until Pip felt as if he would go mad himself. After the doctor left Pip took a stout piece of cord and tied it round his sister's waist and through the slats of the chair's high back. It would have to do until he and Joe figured out another plan. Biddy had shown up a week later and had removed the cord, threatening Pip with strangulation with it. Both agreed that it would be best not to tell Joe, who was rapidly becoming as big a wreck as his wife.

xxxxxxxxxx

Mrs. Joe had been happy to see Biddy but had lost nearly all her words. The only ones she remembered through the tangled mess inside her head were as simple and primitive as herself these days – cold – hot – hungry – thirsty. All she had left were snatches of memory and impressions that looked to her mind like pictures in a book.

However, she remembered the last four words spoken to her by Dolge Orlick before he killed her life: Now – you're – a'gonna – pay. And she had paid, and dearly. He had cracked her skull open and shattered her spine with his heavy and relentless blacksmith blows. She had no more feeling below her ribcage than a feedbag stuffed with straw.

She stared across the room, squinting due to her blurred vision; trying to make out the tiles she had scrubbed so endlessly, picturing glimmers of herself as she used to be – frantic and driven, her nameless desperation and bottomless chasm of anger fueling her need to scrub and re-scrub the same floor over and over and over again; the same harsh words from her father looping endlessly through her head: it's not clean enough you can't do anything right finish that soup and get it to your poor ailing mother useless girl you should have died instead of the boys

She moaned; this unwanted vision of her father had appeared as suddenly amidst her shattered memories as a weed in a field of daisies. Biddy thought it was another headache and jumped up, snatching up the bottle of laudanum and a spoon in case her charge needed it.

Biddy was kind and remembered her before she had become this silent wraith; back when she had been queen of this very kitchen. Mrs. Joe had once given Biddy four freshly-baked rolls wrapped in a clean tea towel when she and Pip had once come back to the forge after a lesson at the old dame-school years ago. Biddy had looked into her black eyes then and had known her as a woman of substance even amidst her poor kitchen and in her tattered clothing, long before she lost her speech and her hearing and her mind.

You knew me when I could cook and sew and put everything here to rights

Mrs. Joe brushed away the spoon, indicating to Biddy that she didn't want the laudanum. It gave her terrible dreams, but she could not tell Biddy that. Instead, she made a writing gesture and Biddy handed her Pip's old chalk and slate. She once again wrote the "T" shape that signified Orlick. Within a few minutes, he entered the kitchen – his eyes darting around the room as if to ensure that the policeman had in fact gone – and looked at the woman in the chair, careful to wipe every vestige of emotion from his face. Biddy handed him a glass of apple cider, the last Mrs. Joe had made before she had forgotten how.

Mrs. Joe smiled as he drank. With this gesture, she believed herself safe for one more day. She knew it was Orlick who had destroyed her, and retained just enough self-preservation to pretend that she hadn't remembered.

It would be all to easy for Dolge Orlick to slip into the kitchen through the forge door when Joe, Pip and Biddy were outside or distracted or upstairs or wherever their destinies took them during that moment. He could have slipped the pillow from under her poor smashed and addled head and pushed it over her face with his huge hand and finished the job he had started all those months ago.

Oh she's gone off at last poor thing finally her suffering is over sometimes death is a blessing for those caught in a trap so unfortunate for the blacksmith that she had to linger so

Mrs. Joe was not what she used to be, but she did not want to die. At least not yet. Sometimes – during her bad spells – she fancied herself taken away where she spent time in a large meadow with her five dead brothers – all of them dressed in white and in the form of young men – where they had asked her what had taken their big sister so long to join them.

She had asked them, during one of these sojourns, where their parents were; Tobias just smirked and shook his head. Were they in Hell? They wouldn't answer but urged her to frolic a while with them. She found that she could dance and move around in this place; the body she saw when she looked down at herself was well and whole. Was this Heaven? Wherever she was, it was a sight better than lying in a kitchen on the marshland outside of Cooling with no more sense than the bucket of metal slag which sat in the forge corner.

Her dead brothers had wound their arms around her, but each time she had pulled away. The thought of Joe Gargery pulled her soul back to the forge and back into the broken body in the cushioned chair. Right after she had been so gravely injured, he had lain across her weeping, pleading with her not to leave him. The Pirrip brothers were gentle and kind but Joe was kinder; he had been the only man she had ever known who had thought she was lovely and brilliant when she had been neither.

She could only sleep when she heard his heartbeat; stuck alone in this alcove off the kitchen she was even more separated from him. At the times when her inarticulate loneliness was most acute and the tears rolled down her thin face, neither Biddy nor Pip nor Joe could learn from her what the trouble was. It had been the doctor who had been responsible for that state of affairs, telling Joe Gargery that her bones had grown so brittle that even a hug could collapse her ribcage.

He had been the only man who had understood her and accepted her rage and hurt and isolation but loved her anyway, and now she was apart from him forever. Mrs. Joe sat in her alcove and wept, destined never again to hear the beating of her husband's heart against her face. She missed him desperately but had lost the words to tell him.