A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston Page A

about the Carsons.
    “You were born three months after your father was lost at the seal hunt. Your mother died less than a year later. She held out hope for months that he’d be found alive. ‘He is still out there,’ she wrote to me, ‘and he may yet come home.’ ” But he came home only in her dreams. Cruelly joyous dreams which she struggled not to wake from, in which he simply showed up at her door as if no time had passed since she had last seen him.
    “She’s in my Murk.”
    “That’s right.”
    “But mostly in the Tomb of Time.”
    Landish said that Deacon was a “gauntlet,” a smaller version of a “gaunt,” which was a gaunt-looking grown-up. He said that he was a “brawnt” and so was Deacon’s father. He said Deacon’s mother had been a “plumpling.”
    “So there’s no accounting for you,” Landish said. “I hope you won’t be a gauntlet much longer, but you’ll never be a brawnt. ‘Ungaunted’ might be all that we can hope for.”
    A wing of a Cornish hen should have done Deacon for a week, though Landish had yet to encounter the amount of food that would do him for a day. The boy was always flushed from hunger. His body didn’t so much digest food as destroy it in the blast furnace of his belly.
    Landish told the boy that even though Deacon Carson Druken had three names, he had the appetite of a boy with many more, so he called him by twelve names: Deacon Carson Bacon Touton Onion Mutton Capon Chicken Lemon Melon Cinnamon Druken. But that didn’t work. So Landish took Deacon Carson Druken to a puniatrist, a doctor who specialized in “robusting” puny babies. But Deacon did not robust in spite of all the doctor did. The doctor told Landish not to worry because the boy would probably “spontaneously robust” when he was older. He said that cases of spontaneous robustion were not as rare as most people thought.
    “Deaconian measures are called for,” Landish said. He explained to Deacon that he was named after Deaco, who was the brother of Draco, the first legislator of ancient Greece who imposed, and wrote down for the first time, the laws of Athens. Punishment for the smallest crimes was severe, he said, usually death. But under the less stringent, less exacting Deaconian system, Deaco granted an instant pardon to anyone who misbehaved. Then he granted universal pardons in advance and therefore made it impossible to break the law. Not even Draco had been able to accomplish this.
    But Landish—though he joked about it with Deacon—knew that there was something wrong with the boy, not an illness per se but a seemingly innate weakness of body that nothing, so far, could rid him of, something at the very core of him that could not stand up against the world. Landish wondered if the grief that Deacon’s mother had endured during the last months of her pregnancy had so weakened her body that it also weakened her soon-to-be-born child. Perhaps the grief itself had somehow seeped into Deacon while he was in the womb, into his very bones where it still resided, an enervating agent for which no one could find the antidote.
    There was a library called the Athenaeum in which Landish had spent much time as a boy. Not long ago, it had been damaged in the fire that destroyed much of the city. It had been partially restored and Landish took the boy there some afternoons. They could not afford the small subscription fee but the librarian let in them in anyway, telling him she had fond memories of watching him with his face pressed to within inches of books that he could barely lift. Landish told Deacon her name was Library Ann—even though Ann was not her name. He said that she worked for the rights of the poor and encouraged the poor to vote. The poor, he told him, were known as the Scruff. The Clout were on the top and the Scruff were on the bottom. He said Library Ann was a scruffragette.
    Library Ann said almost no one went there anymore because it smelled too smoky from when they had