I had it in my head that the schooling was a thing with an end to it. That you are broken, and then you are broken, and the breaking lies behind you like a fever you have had and cannot take twice. I do not know now why I supposed it, unless because a man wants there to be a bottom, and will invent one where the place has not troubled to put one.
Boyd came back.
Not often. Twice in a year, sometimes three, and once not for eighteen months together, long enough that I had let myself think I was finished with him. There was never a warning and never a reason given. A handler would come along the boxes in the dark and say the yard, and you went, and it was the yard again. The same stones. The same rack of canes at the wall and the same trough. Boyd standing in the middle of it with the light coming up behind him as though not one day had gone by since he last had me on my knees there.
And it was harder every time.
I would have argued with that, before I had it done to me. I had thought the first season was the worst a man could be given, and that anything after must come lighter, out of mercy or out of there being nothing left in me to take. It went the other way, and the reason is plain once you have seen it from underneath. A made slave holds a posture longer, so he is held longer. A made slave does not need to be shown, so nothing is shown to him, only required. A made slave will go past where he believes he can go, because he has been taught that his belief on the matter is worth nothing, so he is sent past it, and then past that. In the first season Boyd was building a thing and had to have some care of the material. After that the thing was built, and he could put his whole weight on it to find where it gave.
He said the why of it the once, flat, and never again.
“A body forgets. Not the mind. The mind of you is no use to me either way. The body forgets, and the half-step comes back into it inside a year, and the beast does not know it is there.”
I knew it was there. I did not say so. I had worn the bit a whole day once for a word I let slip, and by then the not-saying was quicker in me than the saying.
It was everybody. That is the part I want set down plainest, because I had it wrong at the time and have been twenty years seeing how wrong. Not the slow ones, not the new lot, not the ones who had given trouble. Every soul on that estate the house meant to go on using went back through that yard on his own interval, and in twenty years I never heard of one exception.
Jack went. Fourteen years in, the steadiest man in that stable, a slave they could have stood in front of a buyer exactly as he was, and the handler came along the boxes for him the same as for anybody, and he got up and went without a word, and came back moving carefully, and never mentioned it then or ever.
And Milo went. That is the one that should have told me something.
Milo was head steward and house-bred. He had caned me at intake and shaved me and put the bit in my mouth and written me into the book. He ran that household. He stood at the Master’s elbow at table and had done since before the Master was a grown man. And once a year or thereabouts he came down to the stables in the dark like the rest of us and gave Boyd his turn of it on those stones, and went back up and poured the wine.
I saw him at it once, going past on my way to the mill, an old slave down on his elbows in the cold with the shake going through him, and that was the one who ran the whole house. I did not look twice, and what I thought, as clear as I am telling it, was that it was a fine thing about that place. That it was even-handed. That the highest of us was stock the same as the lowest, and nobody was let go soft, and nobody was spared. I took it for fairness and I went on taking it for fairness for years.
What I was looking at was a slave near the end of his usefulness, being measured. They were finding out what was left in him. It did not once occur to me to ask what they would do when the answer came back small.
I dreaded the yard gate and I wanted it, and I was a long time understanding that the wanting was the sane half.
A beast that is worth retraining is a beast the house means to go on using. There is a real cost in putting a made pony back through that yard. It is Boyd’s mornings, and days off the road, and marks that have to be let heal before anybody wants to look at him. No one spends that on stock they have done with. They do not retrain the ones going out to the field. They leave those to go slack and let them go.
So the handler in the dark was the worst news I ever got and the only news I ever had of my own standing. Twenty years, and no man ever once told me to my face that I was worth the keeping. I heard it in a gate opening before light.
What he did in there I will set down once and not go back over it. He took the postures first and held us in them past any use, an hour on the elbows with the cold coming up through the stones, an hour more, until the shaking is not a thing you are doing but a thing happening at a distance to a body you have been left in charge of. Then the drill at speed, the words coming faster than a man can think and having to be answered without thinking, the cane on the half-beat, and the half-beat measured finer every year, so that what had been quick in my first season was slow in my fourth. Then the loads. He would put a made pony under a weight and walk him and not say when, and the not-saying was the whole of it, and I have gone until the ground came up at me and been picked up and put back under it.
And the whip when I stopped, until I was moving, which is the same as it ever was and needs no more said about it.
I came out of the yard each time with my legs gone and my back opened and a fortnight of healing in front of me. And calm. That is the word and I have looked for a better one for twenty years.
I will try to say why, because it is the thing about that place that a free man will not credit, and it is true.
In the yard there was nothing to decide. There is no hour of your own to spend, so you do not spend one wondering. There is no fault that is not named the instant you commit it, and paid for on the spot, and then finished with and gone, so you are never carrying a debt you have not been told about. Out on the road, in the shafts, in the house, a slave lives on a long thin thread of not knowing: whether he is pleasing, whether a thing he did a week ago was noticed, whether the eye on him is a kind one. In the yard the thread is cut. You are told what you are the moment you are it. You are handled every minute, and being handled is being wanted, and being wanted is the only warm thing there is.
I went in each time hating it and came out each time settled, and the settling would last me half a year, and then I would start to feel the thread again and start listening for the gate.
It did not do that for everyone.
Boyd took men to the verge as a matter of course, because the verge is the only place a beast’s true size can be read from, and he had no interest in reading it from anywhere else. Most came back over it. Some did not come back over it clean. There was a man in the second string who went into the yard talking and came out not talking, and did his work well enough for years after and never said another unnecessary word to anybody. There was another who could not be got to eat for a fortnight and was fed by the handlers with a funnel, without any anger in it at all.
Nobody called that a failure. If a beast breaks at the verge, the place has learned the verge, and has learned it before some hour on a road when the breaking would have cost real money. That is the arithmetic and I have never found the flaw in it. I only notice that I can set it down without my hand shaking, which is its own answer.
Finch was a runner, and the fastest legs on the place, and had never in his life been given the hard version of the yard, because they had brought him in as a boy and gone easy with what they had.
He was twenty by then and looked less, so that a piece of a boy’s pride had survived in him that the rest of us had had taken off in our first month. He carried the Master’s letters and packages into the city on foot and came back with his chest going and his face lit, and told us what he had seen in the streets as though we had asked. Slight, smooth, not yet worked down. Not strong enough for the shafts and told so, a year or two yet, and he carried the a-year-or-two about with him like a promise instead of a sentence.
What he had that Jack and I did not have was hope, and he had it whole. He believed the thing they wanted him to believe, which is that a slave who pleases rises. And he had his evidence, and had had it since before I knew his name.
He gave it to me on my first night at Beauvert. He came over the half-door of the stall out of the dark, a boy I had known a quarter of an hour, and put his hand out to be shaken like a man met at a fair, and told me the thing he told everybody who would stand still for it: that the Master had sent down for him himself, by name, and had him before any of the others on the place. “Do you believe it,” he said. “Me.”
He was still saying it long after, in the same words, and it had never once gone stale on him, and it did not have to. The summons kept coming. Every few months a man would come down from the house at dusk and say his name, and he would go up, and come back with the whole thing new on him and tell it round the boxes for a week. Jack and I let him tell it as often as he liked, and neither of us ever said the thing we both knew, which is that the ladder he was counting the rungs of runs in a circle and comes out at the field.
Then a man came down at dusk and said his name, as they had a dozen times before, and Finch went up pleased, as he always went.
I should say plainly what he went up for, since I have been going round it. He went up to be fucked. That was the whole of the errand and always had been. The Master had him in his own rooms and in his own bed and used his mouth and used his arse and sent him down in the morning, and that was the rung, and there was nothing else on that ladder at all. The thing Finch had been counting, the thing he told a stranger in the dark inside a quarter of an hour of meeting him, was that the man who owned him liked the use of his body better than anybody else’s on the place.
He was two days up there. And when he came down he did not come down to the runners’ block. He came down to the yard.
Boyd had him. Not for a fault, and not for anything anybody had said at the house. His retraining had come round, that was the whole of it. Boyd kept a book with every beast on the place in it and a date written against each name, and Finch’s date had come up while he was two flights above it, and when he came down a handler walked him across the yard instead of back to the block.
Nothing was meant by it. He was a man grown by the reckoning of that place, which was the boast he had been making to strangers since the night I met him, and a man grown gets what men get. They had gone lightly with him while he was a boy. Now they did not.
I want to be exact about what that was to him, because it looks like very little from outside.
They did not beat him for it. They did not take a thing from him a free man would put a name to. He was a runner when he went up the stair and a runner when he came down it, and he would be running the Master’s packages into the city again before long, and did.
But he had been going up. That was the thing he had, and it was the only thing. Every errand into the city, every package delivered quicker than the last, every night he was sent for, had been a rung, and he had been counting them.
And then he came down off that stair and was walked across a yard to Boyd because his interval had come, and the two things were stood side by side where he could not help but see them. The bed and the yard. He had thought the one was a reward, and that the other was for beasts that wanted correcting, and they turned out to be the same office, kept in the same book, by the same men doing sums.
He had not been chosen. He had been maintained. There was nothing on the ladder he had been counting but the up-keep of a body that belonged to somebody, and he found it out standing in the cold hearing his own name read off a page.
He was in the yard, and he was bad at it, and I could not stop watching. He was quick in the legs and had nothing anywhere else, and the postures ate him. He was at that wall every morning I went to the mill, down on his elbows with his arms going under him and the cane finding him twice before the bell, and I would think, without meaning to and in Boyd’s own voice, that he was soft and had been let go soft, and that a year of this was what he had wanted for himself when he wanted to be worth more.
He came to us at night, over the half-door, as he had come the first night I ever laid eyes on him. They take the chain off a man’s ankles once he is made and can be trusted to stay where he is put, and mine had been off since my first season, and I had stopped noticing it was gone. Nobody sent him. He had two dozen boxes he might have gone to and he came to ours.
Jack had the wall side and I had the door side and Finch went down between us, and lay there saying nothing a long while, and then he started to cry.
Down the row the other boxes went quiet for a moment, the way a barn goes quiet when something in it is wrong, and then went back to their own low sounds. A man crying in a box is not a thing anybody comes for.
It was not weeping as a man weeps. He was trying to hold it and it was coming out of him in pieces around the holding, and between the pieces he was talking, and it was all questions.
What had he done. Whether he had displeased up there and not known it. Whether the Master had said anything about him after, to anybody at all. He went back over those two nights the way a man goes back over a lost coin, out loud, in the dark, in front of the two of us. Whether he had been slow getting to the bed when he was put to it. Whether he had made a sound he should not have made, or failed to make one he should. Whether he had been less glad of it at some hour than he ought to have been, or too glad, and shown it wrong.
Then he asked me. Me, who had never been up that stair in my life. He wanted to know whether a slave could be sent for, and used, and still have done it badly.
And then he said the thing that I have kept. He said: I was nearly there.
I did not know what to do with any of it. I had my own doctrine by then and it fitted me and I had never once had to hand it to another man. I could have told him that a beast has no business with reasons, or that whatever had been done to him he had earned, which was the sentence I lived inside. It would have been like handing a drowning man a stone.
Jack sat up.
He did not say anything to me first. He put his hand flat on the boy’s chest, in the dark, the way you would put a hand on a horse that is about to go through a fence, and he held it there, and he said, “Enough now,” not unkindly and not gently either, and the boy went on.
Then Jack said to me, across him: “Hold his hands.”
“What for.”
“Over his head, on the stone. He will fight it a little and then he will not.”
I understood him then, and I did not move. The boy was crying between us with his face wet and his breath coming in pieces, and he had two days of being used behind him, and I said so. I said he had had enough of that. I said, and I can hear the free man in my own mouth saying it even now, that what he wanted was leaving alone.
“That is what you would want,” Jack said. “He is not you.”
I said I would not do it.
He did not argue and he did not raise his voice by a hair, which was the whole trouble with him. He waited a moment in the dark.
“He is going down,” he said. “I have watched it before and you have not. If he goes the whole way down he does not come back up, and then he is the one they feed with a funnel, and you have seen that too.” He put his hand back flat on the boy’s chest. “You can lie there and be decent about it if you like. It costs you nothing at all and it costs him the rest of his life.”
I lay there.
“Hold his hands,” Jack said.
I want to put down what I did and not decorate it.
I took Finch’s wrists and put them up over his head and set them against the stone where the straw had been kicked thin, and he did fight, and it lasted no time at all. He was slight and I was what the place had made of me and there was never anything in it. I knelt in the straw above his head with the whole weight of my arms on his wrists and could feel the fight go out of them by degrees, the way water goes out of a thing.
Jack came in from the other side and pushed the boy’s knees apart with his own and began to work him with his hands, hard, no coaxing in any of it, and I felt it come up the length of the boy and arrive in his wrists under my hands, the whole body going tight and then starting to come apart along a different seam from the one it had been coming apart along a minute before.
Jack hit him across the face, open-handed, not hard enough to mark. The crying stopped like a tap.
“That is it,” Jack said, to him, not to me. “That is right. There you are.”
And then, over the boy’s head, in the same voice: “We all do our job. His is this. Get on with yours.”
He slapped him again and the boy made a sound I had not heard out of him before, and Jack got his hand into the boy’s mouth and Finch closed on it and sucked at his fingers like an infant at a rag, and Jack let him, and worked at his chest with the other hand, taking a nipple between his fingers and pinching until the boy’s back came up off the straw.
“He wants it hard,” Jack said to me then, in the same voice he used for everything, the voice that had told me once that he would inform on me and would do it as gently as he gave the warmth. “There are boys that want it hard. He is one. Do not be soft with him, it does nothing for him, it leaves him where he is.”
“Let his hands go,” he said, and I let them go, and the arms came down and stayed where they fell, which told the both of us more than anything the boy had said all night.
And he turned him over onto his face and put him up on his knees with a hand in the small of his back, and said, “Go on.”
I said I had not.
“I know what you have not,” Jack said. “Go on.”
Nothing had ever been asked of me in that place that I had a choice about, and this was not the same. I could have said no to Jack. He was a slave beside me on a stone floor and had no cane and no word from any free man behind him, and if I had said no he would have done it himself and thought nothing of it.
I did not say no.
I want the reason down plain, because I have had twenty years to find a better one and there is no better one. I knew what the boy needed because I had needed it myself, in a yard, on my knees, with another man’s piss drying on me and nobody to thank. It is not being hurt that unmakes you. It is being passed. It is being a thing that nobody is troubling to want. And what was going to put Finch back inside his own skin was not a kind word from a man who could not give him one that was true. It was being used, hard, at once, by somebody, so that his body could tell him he was still a thing worth the doing.
So I did it. First time in my life inside a man, and I have been unable, ever since, to lay that first time down next to anything else in my life and have the two of them fit.
He was tight and it hurt him and he made a noise into the straw and I stopped, and Jack said, “No,” flat, and put his hand on the back of my neck, the only time in all our years he ever put a hand on me that way. “Not slower. He is not asking you to stop, he does not know how to ask for anything else yet. Go on.”
I went on.
There was no oil and nobody looked for any. I spat and went in on it and the whole length of him came up off the straw and Jack put him back down with one hand between the shoulders, without hurrying.
He had Boyd’s week on him. I could feel it under my hands the entire time, ridges laid across the seat and the backs of the thighs, half-healed and standing proud, and my grip came down on them every time I took him by the hip, and he made a sound at that which he did not make at anything else. So I did it again. I am setting that down because I did it deliberately the second time and every time after.
I learned what he had in him by the sounds. It frightened me later. I did not notice it happening at the time. When I slowed he went quiet and started to come apart again. When I went at him harder he took it and the noise came back and it was not the noise of a man being hurt past what he could hold. I got a fist into his hair and held his face down into the straw and went at the pace that kept it coming.
Jack got underneath and took his mouth, and between us we had him at both ends on the floor of a stone box in the dark, and I slapped his backside because Jack told me to and because the sound of it went through him and steadied him, and every hard thing we did to him took him further down out of the crying and into somewhere quiet.
And it worked. That is the thing. Inside a few minutes there was no boy in that box asking why, only a body being handled, and the body was easy, and it went where it was put, and it made small sounds that had nothing broken in them.
I felt him come, with my hand under him. And I finished in him myself, which I had not meant to and could not have stopped, and that is a fact I set down because leaving it out would be a lie of the kind I have spent this whole account trying not to tell.
Afterwards it was very quiet.
He slept almost at once, between the two of us, with his face turned into Jack’s shoulder and his back along my chest, and Jack drew the sacking up over the three of us and did not say anything for a long while.
And I lay there in the dark with my heart going and I was afraid.
Not of what we had done to him. He was warm and slack and breathing like a child and he was better than he had been an hour before, and I knew it, and knowing it was no help at all. I was afraid of how easy it had been. How I had known, from the inside, without one word of instruction beyond Jack’s, exactly how much was too much and how much was not enough. Of the moment when I had stopped listening for whether he was all right and started attending only to the doing of it well. Of the sound of my own hand on him and what had gone through me at it. I had come into that box a man who had been used for two years and I had found out in twenty minutes that the other side of it was in me too, sitting there whole, needing no schooling at all.
Boyd had had to work a season to make me a good beast. Nobody had needed to teach me this.
And there was another thing under that, and I will put it down because it belongs. Lying there with the boy asleep on me and Jack’s arm over the both of us, I felt closer to Jack than I had ever felt to any man in my life, and it was not gratitude and it was not the warmth he had been giving me in that box for two years. I wanted him. Not newly. I had wanted him the whole of those two years and had never once done anything about it, and had taken his warmth every night the way you take a fire, without any thought of what the fire is. What was new that night was what the wanting had in it. It had the day in it, and my own hands, and what they had turned out to be for, and I lay awake with that and would not have dared put a hand out.
It was near morning when he spoke.
“You did well with him,” he said, into the dark, over the boy’s head. “He will be up and running the barrow tomorrow and he will not speak of it.”
I said something. That I had not liked it. Which was true and was also not true and he let it stand.
Then he said, “Promise me a thing.”
I said what thing.
“If it comes to me,” he said. “You will do the same for me.”
I did not take his meaning. I said something foolish, that it would not come to him, that he had been here longer than anybody and there was nothing left in this place that could get at him. I meant it as a kindness. It was the only kind of thing I had.
He was quiet a moment. Then he said it plainly, without any weight on it at all.
“I have been at the edge of it twice. You did not see. Nobody saw, because I did not let it out where it could be seen, and that is the whole of what I am good at.” He shifted the boy a little on his shoulder. “If it comes again I will not be able to ask you properly. I will be past the asking. So I am asking you now, while I can put it in words. If you find me like that, do not talk to me. Do not be gentle with me. Put me down and use me, and do not stop for anything I say, and do it harder than you did it to him, because I am not a boy and it will take more.”
I lay there with the boy’s back warm against my chest and could not answer him.
“Say it,” Jack said.
I said it.
He was asleep inside a minute, as he always was. I was awake until the handler came along the boxes.
