Free The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson Page A

at me. “Don’t worry, son. I’ll wrap them in a clean cloth first.”
    I swallowed hard.
Lift a coffin? Touch a dead body, even through a sheet?
    The man leaned forward and put a large, rough hand on my shoulder. As if reading my mind, he said, “You
can
do it, laddie. These are your neighbors, ain’t they?”
    Still, I hesitated.
    “I’ll give you two shillings if you work till sunset,” he offered.
    “All right,” I agreed. “But … I might have a weak stomach too.”
    “Just don’t fall down flat in a faint,” the man said, pleasant as ever.
    I
did
feel sick to my stomach at first. And then I didn’t. It wasn’t that I got used to it, nothing like that. It was more that, sometime in the first hour of walking into those hot, shadowy rooms where death had been, I found a way to change my thinking around.
    Instead of looking with my eyes, I decided to see with my heart. I tried to remember that the corpses were just people. People like Mr. Griggs, or neighbors I might greet on the street.
    And so, rather than thinking about my own queasy feelings, I thought about them. I started to believe there was something important and noble about what we were doing. It made me want to be different from the men who’d come to get my own pa. And this coffin man, whose name was Charlie, seemed to feel the same way.
    “I don’t hold with jokin’ around corpses or not bein’ respectful to them that’s left behind,” Charlie had told me early on as we carried a plain wooden coffin into a house. “We’ll all be going into the ground one of these days. And it might be sooner than we know.”
    That coffin was a small one. I swallowed hard. I didn’t meet the gaze of the child’s mother, who kept hold of her little son’s hand, not able to let go.
    “You ever lost someone close to you, lad?” Charlie said softly as we loaded the small, plain box into the cart.
    “My parents. First my pa. When I was nine.” I didn’t know why I was telling this to a stranger. “I didn’t even know he was sick at first. But he kept coughing and coughing till he got so weak.…”
    “The consumption.” Charlie nodded knowingly. “I had a cousin went that way. How ’bout your mum, then? She gone too?”
    “Less than three years after my father. Last September. Just about a year ago now.”
    “Broken heart, was it?”
    I didn’t answer. Though that wasn’t a bad guess. Not a bad guess at all.
    Charlie and I loaded coffins onto the cart all that long, hot day. Once the cart was full, we headed over to the undertaker’s to unload and to pick up more empty coffins. Charlie was careful to mark each coffin with the name of the dead person.
    “Don’t want to get ’em mixed up, though some would say it don’t matter,” he remarked. “But I don’t hold with that. If I go to visit a grave, I want to know that I’m talking to the right person.”
    The sweat ran down my face. I’m not ashamed to say that it got mixed with tears more than once. The cholera had struck Broad Street hardest of all. But we also went into houses on Poland Street, Hopkins Street, Peter Street, and Berwick Street, where Florrie and her family lived.
    It was dusk by the time we stopped. I felt worn out and sick at heart. I barely had strength to move. Charlie gave me two shillings for my work, and said he guessed he had a cousin who’d be able to help him the next day.
    I looked at the shillings greedily. I’d already spent the pennies I’d gotten yesterday on a roll and a bit of cheese. I hadn’t felt much like eating all day. But now, suddenly, I was ravenous. I imagined biting into a hot meat pie or a piece of bread spread thick with butter.
    No
, I told myself.
I should save these shillings to give to Mrs. Miggle
.
    “You done good,” Charlie was saying. “You’re such a thin, shadowy lad I feared you might scare the little orphans. But when you smile, you light up, like moonlight. And the kiddies took to you, they did, after all.”
    He