Read Online Church of Marvels: A Novel by Leslie Parry - Free Book Online Page B

morning newspaper. But now he might need some goods for the baby—fresh milk and diaper cloths, maybe a bottle of Bergoon’s cure-all.
    “Your name’s on the board.” No Bones wet the corner of his mouth. “You sure you’re all right?”
    “Fine.” Sylvan tensed. “I’m fine.”
    No Bones hesitated, folding his hat between his hands. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t fall into some kind of trouble.”
    Sylvan felt a prickly coolness on his neck and arms. “No.” He shook his head. “No trouble here.”
    “You sure about that?”
    There was a whimper from inside. No Bones tried to peer over his shoulder, but Sylvan just said, “I’ll be ready,” and shut the door.
    Back inside he lingered by the bed, breathing in the hot, dusty air that had grown faintly sour with milk. He reached out and touched the baby’s cheek. She was warm and listless. A familiar dread took root in his chest. He tried to imagine her here night after night, staring at these walls striated with mildew and candle smoke, listening to the pneumatic hiss and grind coming from the building next door, where a printer set and inked his anarchist dailies. How could he be the person to give such a life to another, when all he wanted himself was to run?
    He’d have to take her somewhere else, at least until the fight was over—leave her with someone he trusted. The only person he could think of was Ellen Izzo, the weaver on Cherry Street. She bought the better pieces of loot he gathered from the privies—the brooches and pocket watches, stray baubles and cigarette cases. She’d lived andworked above the oyster house for as long as he could remember, fashioning mementos for the bereaved from their loved ones’ hair. And she liked Sylvan—she invited him in for tea when she was lonesome, trusted him to read her letters as her eyes grew weak. She’d had a baby at one time herself, a son now grown and gone—Chester, whom an infection had left with only two fingers (making him the fastest shucker in the oyster house), and whom Sylvan had beat up over a pear one day when they were just boys (he hated to think of it now).
    A trickle of sweat moved down his forehead and panicked at the tip of his nose. All around him he felt it, the sickness moaning and reeking from the tenements, the stink of waste and the heat of fever. He remembered following the carts down the street in the winter. Frankie’s bag, the smallest of all, was chucked up on top of the wagon by those soot-dusted boys in black. He had watched the bag wobble as the cart turned a corner and disappeared, but all he could feel, when the rumble of the wheels had faded, was how relieved he was for it all to be over.
    When the Scarlattas died, Sylvan thought he might send Frankie to live with one of Mrs. Scarlatta’s cousins across town. They had children of their own, he knew. But Frankie was too sick, too weak to be moved. So Sylvan stayed with him in the apartment upstairs, made a little bed for him by the stove. Frankie, two years old, his hair wet with sweat and standing up on his head—how to explain what it meant, that his parents weren’t coming home? That crosses had been painted on all the doors? Such a faint little voice: Sylvan, I’m thirsty. Sylvan found he couldn’t sleep at night with the sound of that wracking cough. How could a tiny body, he wondered, make such terrible noise?
    For two weeks, while Frankie lay sick on a pile of gloves, Sylvan had broken into the apartments of other families who’d died from consumption, where even as his breaths crystallized in front of him, he could still smell the blood, warm and acrid, in thewallpaper. The families had long since been carried away on the shoulders of neighbors, but their homes, interrupted, still held a patient vigil: dishes in the sink, blankets mussed, food parched and shriveled on the cutting board. He’d say to himself, Take the bread, check the floorboards, but instead he found himself at the table,