Remarkable Creatures. Tracy Chevalier
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Richard after Pa. Like all the past babies, this one were a cryer. He was never very well, and nor was Mam; she was cold and tired, with baby not sleeping well and feeding badly. It were baby’s crying – that and the debt – that sent Joe out into the bitter cold he hated, one day a few months after Pa’s death. We needed fossils. I wanted to go out too, even with the cold, but I was stuck indoors, jiggling baby about to stop his crying. He was such a squally little thing it was hard to like him. The only thing that shut him up was when I held him tight and jiggled him and sang “Don’t Let Me Die an Old Maid” over and over.
I was just singing the last lines for the sixth time – “Come old or come young, come foolish or witty/ Don’t let me die an old maid, but take me for pity” – when Joe come in, banging the door back so I jumped. A bank of cold air hit me and started baby crying again. “Look what you done!” I shouted. “He was just quieting and you gone and woke him.”
Joe shut the door and turned back to me. That’s when I saw that he was excited. Usually nothing stirs my brother – he has a face like a rock, with little expression or change. Now, though, his brown eyes were lit like the sun shone through them, his cheeks were red, his mouth was open. He snatched his cap off and rumpled his hair so that it stood straight up.
“What is it, Joe?” I said. “Oh, hush, baby, hush!” I put baby over my shoulder. “What is it?”
“I found something.”
“What? Show me.” I looked to see what he was holding.
“You have to come out. It’s in the cliff. It’s big.”
“Where?”
“The end of Church Cliffs.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t know. Something – different. Long jaw, lots of teeth.” Joe looked almost scared.
“It’s a crocodile,” I declared. “It must be.”
“Come and see.”
“Can’t – what would I do with baby?”
“Bring him with.”
“Can’t do that – it’s too cold.”
“What about leaving him next door?”
I shook my head. “They done too much for us already – we can’t ask them again, not for something like this.” Our neighbours in Cockmoile Square were wary of curies. They envied us the little money we made from them, while also asking why anyone would want to part with even a penny for a bit of stone. I knew we had to ask for their help only when we really needed them.
“Take him a minute.” I handed the baby to Joe and went to look at Mam in the next room. She was flat out asleep, looking so peaceful for a change that I hadn’t the heart to lay screaming baby next to her. So we took him with us, wrapped in as many shawls as would stay on the little thing.
As we picked our way along the beach – slower than usual, for I was clutching baby and couldn’t use my hands for balance over the stones – Joe described how he was looking for curies in the new rubble that had come down during the storms. He told me he weren’t searching the cliffs themselves, but when he stood up after scrabbling round in the loose rocks, a row of teeth embedded in a seam of the cliff face caught his eye.
“Here.” Joe stopped where he’d left four stones piled up, three as a base and one on top, the marker we Annings used to keep track of our finds if we had to leave them. I set down baby, who was barely whimpering by now, he were that cold, and stared hard at the layers of rock where Joe pointed. I didn’t feel the cold at all, I was so excited.
Straightaway I saw the teeth, just below eye level. They weren’t in even rows, but all a jumble between two long dark pieces that must have been the creature’s mouth and jaw. These bones met together in a tip, making a long, pointy snout. I ran my finger over it all. It give me a lightning jolt to see that snout. Here was the monster Pa had been looking for all these years, but now would never see.
There was a bigger surge of lightning to come, though. Joe put his finger on a large bump above where the jaw was hinged. Rock covered some of it, but it looked to be circular, like a bread roll sitting on a saucer. From the curve you might think it were part of an ammonite, but there were no spiral with spines going round. Instead there were plates of bone overlaid round a big empty socket. I stared at that socket and got the feeling it was staring back.
“Is that its eye?” I asked.
“Think so.”
I shuddered, one of them shivers that come over you when you’re not even cold but you can’t stop yourself. I didn’t know crocodile eyes could be so big. In the picture Miss Elizabeth showed me the croc had little piggy eyes, not huge owly ones. It made me feel odd looking at that eye, like there was a world of curiosities I didn’t know about: crocodiles with huge eyes and snakes with no heads and thunderbolts God threw down that turned to stone. Sometimes I got that hollowed-out feeling too when looking at a sky full of stars or into the deep water the few times I went out in a boat, and I didn’t like it: it was as if the world were too strange for me ever to understand it. Then I would have to go and sit in Chapel until I felt I could let God take care of all the mysteries and the worry went away.
“How long is it?” I said, trying to make sense of the monster by asking questions.
“Dunno – three or four feet, just the skull.” Joe ran his hand over the rock to the right of the jaw and eye. “Don’t see the body.”
Bits of loose shale tumbled down the cliff and fell near us. We looked up and stepped back, but nothing further come down.
I glanced at baby, wrapped up in his cocoon so he looked like a caterpillar. He’d stopped whimpering and was squinting into the grey sky. I couldn’t tell if he were following the clouds that scudded across.
Far down the beach at Charmouth two men were pulling a row boat down to the shore, out to check lobster pots. Joe and I quick stepped back from the cliff, like children caught eyeing a plate of cakes. The men were too far away to see where we were or what we were doing, but we were still cautious. Though few hunted the way we did, people were sure to be interested in such a thing as the croc. And now I could see it, it was so obvious in the cliff, with its forest of teeth and saucer eye, that I was sure someone else would soon spot it.
“We got to dig out the croc,” I said.
“We never dug anything this big,” Joe said. “Could we even lift four feet of rock?”
He was right. I had used my hammer to get ammos out of rocks on the beach, and out of the cliff, but most of the time we let the wind and the rain wear away the cliff and release the curies for us.
“We need help,” I said, though I did not like to admit it. We had already had so much help from the village since Pa’s death, and it were hard to ask for more without paying, especially when it was to do with curies. Fanny Miller weren’t the only one who hated fossils. “Let’s ask Miss Elizabeth what to do.”
Joe frowned. Like Mam and Pa, he had always been suspicious of Elizabeth Philpot. He couldn’t understand what a lady like her would want with curies, nor why she was willing to have anything to do with me. Joe didn’t get the same feeling when he found a cury as Miss Elizabeth and I did, like we were discovering a new world. Even now, with something as amazing as the crocodile, he was quick losing his excitement, and only seeing the problems. I wanted to go to Miss Elizabeth not only because she could help us, but because she would be as thrilled as I was.
We stayed a long time, chipping at the croc with my hammer and talking about what to do. We spent so long there that the tide cut us off and we had to climb over the cliffs back to Lyme – not easy with baby in my arms. Poor mite. He died the following summer. I always wondered if it weakened him, being taken upon beach in the cold. Of course, so many of Mam’s babies died that it were no surprise he didn’t last. But I could have stayed inside with him, and gone the next day to see the croc. That’s how fossil hunting is: