Chapter 9: What a Porter Carries

"I took the wound," I said. "Your scar came with it."

"You took ten inches of my side."

"It's what the new mark does. I put my hands on it, and it moved."

She kept her fingers on my ribs.

"Does it hurt you as much as it hurt me?"

"Exactly as much."

"And it heals when?"

"When I heal. I'm thirty-four. Give it a month."

She took her hand away and pulled my shirt back down very carefully.

"You idiot," she said quietly.

Then she leaned her head on my shoulder, and she kept it there all the way back to Peckham Street.

In the morning I couldn't lift my left arm above my shoulder.

Marta taped the wound with gauze from the rectory first aid kit and said things under her breath the whole time.

It was Monday.

Ironworks was coming for the five kids at noon.

"Nine people and a rifle won't stop them," I said. "Forty people in a church is a different thing."

"Where do you get forty people?"

"The Market."

The Broadway Market was worse than Friday.

The bread was gone, and the generator had quit, and two hundred people sat in the dark between the stalls.

They knew who I was the moment I came in.

The ones who'd watched me carry Ray's right-hand man out moved back to let me through.

I carried a sack of the wholesaler's potatoes on my good shoulder, and Lou carried another one.

"There's a church on Peckham," I said. "It's got a kitchen, a yard and a stove. Anybody who wants to come can come."

A woman near the back stood up.