Yes, plenty of people would be distressed at that. I am the wrong boy to threaten with such losses, for I hunt and forage; I like the old ways. I kept myself fed and healthy for a full four months, exploring up the glacier last spring—healthier than were most folk when I arrived home, with their toothaches and their coughs. But others, yes, they rely wholly on those stores that Phillips brings through the year. When he is due, and they have run short of tobacco, they go all grog and temper waiting, or hide at home until he should come. They will not hunt or snare with me and Tray and Pa and the others; take them a haunch of stewed rabbit, and if they will eat it at all they will sauce it well with complaints and wear a sulking face over every bite.
“And no food coming up, for all those extra mouths you’d have to feed,” says Phillips softly and still smiling, “that once were kept on mulberry leaves alone. Think of that.”
What was I imagining, all my talk of undoing? The man cannot make mulberries back into men, and if he could he would never teach someone like me, that he thought so stupid, and whose folk he despised. And even if he taught us, and worked alongside us in the unmaking, we would never get back the man John Barn was going to be when he was born John Barn, or any of the men and women that the others might have become.
“You were starving and in rags when my father found you,” says Phillips, sounding pleased. “Your people. You lived like animals.”
“We had some bad years, I heard.” And we are animals, I nearly add, and so are you. A bear meets you, you are just as much a meal to him as is a berry-bush or a fine fat salmon. What are you, if not animal?
But I have already lost this argument; he has already dismissed me. He draws on, as if I never spoke, as if he were alone. Good silk is coming out now; all the leaves we’ve been feeding into John Barn are coming out clean, white, strong-stranded; he is restored, apart from the great hole in him. Still I feed him, still he chews on, both of us playing our parts to fill Phillips’ hands with silk.
“Very well,” says Phillips, “I think we are done here. Time to close him up again.”
I’m relieved that he intends to. “Should I lie on him again?”
“In a little,” he says. “The inner parts are nerveless, and will not give him much pain. When I sew the dermal layers, perhaps.”
It is very much like watching someone wind a fly, the man-hands working such a small area and mysteriously, stitching inside the hole. The thread, which is black, and waxed, wags out in the light and then is drawn in to the task, then wags again, the man concentrating above. His fingers work exactly like a spider’s legs on its web, stepping delicately as he brings the curved needle out and takes it back in. I can feel from John Barn’s chest that there is not pain exactly, but there is sensation where there should not be, and the fear that comes from not understanding makes Phillips’s every movement alarming to him.
I didn’t quite believe that Phillips would restore John Barn and repair him. I lie across Barn again and watch the stitching-up of the outer skin. With each pull and drag of thread through flesh Barn exclaims in the dark behind me. “Oh. Oh, that is bad. Oh, that feels dreadful.” He jerks and cries out at every piercing by the needle.
“He’s nearly finished, John,” I say. “Maybe six stitches more.”
And Phillips works above, ignoring us, as unmoved as if he were sewing up a boot. A wave of his hair droops forward on his brow, and around his eyes is stained with tiredness. It feels as if he has kept us in this small cloud of firelight, helping him do his mad work, all the night. There is no danger of me sleeping; I am beyond exhaustion; Barn’s twitches wake me up brighter and brighter, and so does the fact that Phillips can ignore them so thoroughly, piercing and piercing the man. And though a few hours ago I would happily have left Barn to him, now I want to be awake and endure each stitch as well, even if there is no chance of the mulberry ever knowing or caring.
Then it is done. Phillips snips the thread with a pair of bright-gold scissors, inspects his work, draws a little silk out past all the layers of stitching. “Good, that’s good,” he says.
I lever myself up off Barn, lift my leg from his. “He’s done with you,” I tell him, and his eyes roll up into his head with relief, straight into sleep.
“We will leave him tied. We may as well,” says Phillips, casting his used tools into the pot on the fire. “We don’t want him running off again. Or getting infection in that wound.” He strips off his horrid gloves and throws them in the fire. They wince and shrivel and give off a few moments’ stink.
I feel as if I’m floating a little way off the ground; Phillips looks very small over there, his shining tools faraway. “There are others, then?” I say.
“Others?” He is coaxing his fire up to boil the tools again.
“‘Careful practice,’ you said, by your father’s side. Yet we never saw you here. So there are other folk like ours, with their mulberries, that you practiced on? In other places in the mountains, or in the town itself? I have never been there to know.”
“Oh,” he says, and right at me, his eyes bright at mine. “Yes,” he says. “Though there is a lot to be learned from… books, you know, and general anatomy and surgical practice.” He surveys the body before us, up and down. “But yes,” he says earnestly to me. “Many communities. Quite a widespread practice, and trade. Quite solidly established.”
I want to keep him talking like this, that he cares what he says to me. For the first time today he seems not to scorn me for what I am. I’m not as clear to him as John Barn has become to me, but I am more than I was this morning when he told Pa, I’ll take your boy, if you can spare him.
“Do you have a son, then,” I say, “that you are teaching in turn?”
“Ah,” he says, “not as yet. I’ve not been so blessed thus far as to achieve the state of matrimony.” He shows me his teeth, then sees that I don’t understand. Some of his old crossness comes back. “I have no wife. Therefore I have no children. That is the way it is done in the town, at least.”
“When you have a son, will you bring him here, to train him?” Even half-asleep I am enjoying this, having his attention, unsettling him. He looks as if he thought me a mulberry, and now is surprised to find that I can talk back and forth like any person.
“I dare say, I dare say.” He shakes his head. “Although I’m sure you understand, it is a great distance to come, much farther than other… communities. And a boy—their mothers are terribly attached to them, you know. My wife—my wife to be—might not consent to his travelling so far, from her. Until he is quite an age.”
He waits on my next word, and so do I, but after a time a yawn takes me instead, and when it is over he is up and crouched by his fire. “Yes, time we got some rest. Excellent work, boy. You’ve been most useful.” He seems quite a different man. Perhaps he is too tired to keep up his contempt of me? Certainly I am too tired to care very much. I climb to my feet and walk into the darkness, to relieve myself before sleep.
I wake, not with a start, but suddenly and completely, to the fire almost dead again and the forest all around me, aslant on the ridge. Dawn light is starting to creep up behind the trees, and stars are still snagged in the high branches, but here, close to me, masses of darkness go about their growing, roots fast in the ground around my head, thick trunks seeming to jostle each other, though nothing moves in the windless silence.