Joe Wear knew two people who died in the Molasses Flood: Bertha Truitt and a Scotsman named Virgil Fraser who (according to the Salford Bugle) had been working in the navy shipyard as a builder. It was Virgil who’d taught Joe Wear wood; it was Virgil’s death that devastated him. When Joe Wear saw the name listed among the dead in the afternoon paper he took to his bed, sick with longing. Not for Virgil as he was—they had not seen each other in twenty years, the math was astonishing—but the young Virgil, the younger Virgil, with whom Joe Wear had shared a bed for some days when they were on the razzle (as Virgil had called it), drunk as newts (as Virgil said). Joe was sixteen. Virgil might have been twenty-three, or thirty-two, or forty-five. (His age was in the paper: he died at fifty-two. So thirty-six, when he and Joe had known each other.) They’d met when Virgil’d come to the Les Miserables house to repair the maple approaches for the alleys, and Joe was a teenage pinboy. The first night they’d drunk and slept and woken up in the same bed, that was all. Virgil’s room was at the top of the building, made smaller by a mansard roof and larger by a dormer window that overlooked Scollay Square. The second night Joe woke up in the dark to that question of young love, but in Virgil’s burled voice: Are you awake? Beneath the slant of the eaves Joe was not sure what the right answer was—neither which answer was true (was he awake?) nor which might lead to what he wanted to happen, which was for Virgil to take: what. Liberties, or Joe himself. He wanted Virgil to take. Virgil put his mouth to the back of Joe Wear’s head. Joe thought it was a kiss though it was slipshod. Then Virgil bit him on the shoulder: wake up. Well. Joe turned over. “There you are,” said Virgil, reaching down, taking hold of Joe matter-of-factly, “and there you are.”
Virgil kept his thinning hair cropped so close you could only see what he had left—a magnificent head, a pair of rococo ears—not what he had lost. Days, Joe went to work and set pins. Nights, he took drunken inventory. The staves of Virgil’s ribs were prominent in his barrel chest. He was missing two fingers, half a thumb, and three toes. It seemed rude to ask where they’d gone, and Joe—leaning back off the single bed, peering at the elevated train tracks, Virgil’s incomplete hands clamped on his shoulders—was holding on to what manners he had. He’d always laughed at his Irish aunt’s clinging to the scraps of linen that had come over with her (handkerchiefs, soiled napkins), but now he understood that you clung to what survived. If it had survived, it was durable enough. It might be the making of you.
Virgil never asked Joe, either, the cause of his rolling, irregular walk. People always wanted to know, as though they could not make sense of Joe himself, could not hear a word he said, without that piece of information. As though he were a different person depending on the timing of the event: before birth, at birth, childhood, last year. Depending on the cause: in utero shock, a violent father, a runaway horse, an act of bravery or cowardice, fate, luck, fault.
“Don’t worry, lad,” said Virgil in the morning, seeing Joe’s stunned face. “You’ll outgrow it, you’ll be fine.”
Then came the afternoon of his monthly appointment with his maiden aunt Rose, who’d visited Joe in the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children but had never taken him home. They were the last of the family, she liked to remind him, she too old and he too odd to marry and have children. An old maid and a cripple: the family would wither. In the meantime she lived in a round room at the prow of a pie-cut building near Copley Square. “My turret,” she called it, though it was on the second floor, and instead of a moat she looked down into the triangular interior of a Rexall sign.
Monthly they met at Shaw’s cafeteria, where Rose liked the chop suey and Joe got the chipped beef. She was not so very old, not even forty, though she had the high color and querulous voice of a woman of eighty. He thought she had been married once—her name was Rose Friant; he’d been told his mother’s maiden name had been Daisy Crump—but like Virgil’s digits the missing Mr. Friant seemed a subject too personal to broach.
“An appetite!” said Aunt Rose, watching Joe eat. “You’re usually such a persnickety fellow.” Her eyes were bright and teasing. “Are you in love?”
It was true that he ordinarily extracted his chipped beef shard by shard from the cream sauce; it was true that today he ate with so little attention to anything that his shirt cuff trailed in his plate and painted the table. Now that she’d called attention to it he saw that he’d eaten the lot. She was still ferrying bits of celery, ribbed like her stockings, to her careful mouth.
Love: what a thing. To kiss a man and grab a man and to give yourself over to a man—that was something (as Virgil said) that was perfectly normal. Plenty of it at the Dolbeer Home in his childhood. A game you’d outgrow, and, like all games, sometimes childish fun and sometimes overwhelming fun and sometimes unasked for, awful, shameful. But love: that was the perversion, he understood. That is what would keep you out of Aunt Rose’s heaven. Joe shook his head and gnawed at the side of his thumb.
They sat near the plate glass windows by the street. The world was bright. Joe despised it.
“One day, Joe,” said Aunt Rose. “Here—what goes on? Your thumb.”
He took his thumb from his mouth and examined it. “A splinter,” he said, surprised to see it. He showed her.
“Well, don’t use your mouth,” said Rose, “your mouth is filthy.” With one hand she took hold of his thumb, and with the other she rummaged through her purse. Maiden aunts have supplies in case of shipwreck, sewing kits, horehound drops, dry socks, so that they might earn their place on the lifeboat. She produced a needle and, without asking, began to coax the splinter from the side of Joe Wear’s thumb.
“Be brave,” she told the thumb.
“I will,” said Joe himself.
“You always are.” She did not look at him. “There.” She wiped the splinter away on the ivory napkin on her lap, then turned his hand over and gasped. “Riddled with them. Joe! Didn’t this hurt?”
He wasn’t sure.
She moved her chair closer to his. What did other people see? A woman old enough to be the boy’s mother holding his hand, a boy too old to have his hand held. A gypsy reading a palm. A man and woman joined in some sort of serious enterprise. A good woman praying for a sinner’s soul. A sinning woman asking for absolution. Joe Wear felt flush with guilt, not for what he had done with Virgil Fraser in a rented room near Scollay Square but for bringing it here, into the lap of Rose Friant, now fishing splinter after splinter from his hand with such care you might think each a relic of the true cross. One by one she dug them out—“now the other,” she said, “the other hand, Joe”—and set them on the napkin and clucked. His hands were so calloused it mostly didn’t hurt, though every now and then she dug past the armored skin to the layer where he lived. Where did the splinters come from? The pins, the balls, the approaches; the bedrails, the dormer window frame, the bentwood chair, the tiny desk, the boardinghouse floor; swapped over direct from Virgil Fraser’s own splintered body. All of those places. You could not tell which splinter came from where. You could not keep them apart and you could not tell them apart. He wanted to wrench his hand away from his aunt and run from Shaw’s and back to Scollay Square: he later thought it the greatest act of bravery that he stayed put.
“You could build a boat,” she said at the end, but she didn’t let go of his hand. What would she have done, had she known where those hands had been? Had he even washed them? She patted the inside of his wrist and looked at him with those very blue eyes, bluer because bloodshot, and said, “It’s all right, Joe. You might meet a girl who doesn’t care. Shake my hand!”