Washer Bathsheba was really a nice person. She was one of the people who washed the dead, and was avoided, and it made her upset and tricked her into snapping at innocent by-standers. Fortunately this corpse was fresh, and it was alone. The niece who'd called the neighbor who came in through the unlocked door and found him dead on his silk fainting-couch had been witch-like in her prescience, and Bath was grateful for that. There wasn't any festering, for once, and there weren't any maggots. She still screamed every time she saw one, useless over-reaction but for the release. It was unusual for a Washer of the dead to stay sensitive to maggots, but she remained that way and she never apologized even when her washing and the quiet sing-songing and the stitching was in front of a big crowd.
This one was a relief both ways. No crowd, no bugs, just the empty flesh that retained some little specks of the person who had died, and that would be sallow or flushed or blocked up depending on the life the dead one had lived. Washer Bathsheba could see the specks, which were like flakes of dandruff or dead skin that floated around the body while she cleaned it. Nothing about it was magical: there were no sparks or colors or tiny voices of any kind, and really the sing-songing she produced in the back of her head (only a little better than humming) was a way for her to soothe herself while the flecks of soul that were sticking around settled in an oval on the floor or table or, in this case, a silk-covered couch. They would fade into the colors of their surroundings by the time she was done with the eyes, which was the last thing. She might hurry or move abruptly if she was tired or surrounded, but the eyes took care and she stitched the lids together better than any Washer in the county. You couldn't see any stitching at all- it was if the dead person's eyelids were linen and she was making the hem of a great lady's summer dress. No matter how long the eyes took Bath never stuck around to see if the flecks did anything else, like metamorphose into crystals or be swept up by mice in waistcoats. She was uninterested past a certain point.
While she worked on the uncle, a solitary man who looked younger than his reported age and never had any of his own daughters to find him dead on his treasured couch, she thought about Bag Boy. He was a nice person, she thought, like her; he could become crabby because of his work, like her. He didn't deserve snappishness in return (she truly and fully believed that wars happened because people were testy with each other and it became inescapable that they revved up their threats and implied threats to a point where they must include artillery.) Anyway: Bag Boy was her age, or younger, and was avoided because of his job as well, though there was little rationale for society's squeamishness in his case. He bagged purchases, that was all. He jogged from one stall to the next, taking the objects or food or long bottles of colored liquids from the hands of the merchants and putting them carefully in the customer's net bags. He'd wrap the bottles with tissue paper that he carried with him in his satchel, and he'd wait for a tip, not speaking. He was quieter than even she was at her work, and he walked like a cat, and had the knack of knowing which sales were imminent and which were a lost cause. He'd take his feline feet toward the next sale that he knew was thirty seconds away from happening so that he was simply available whenever the merchandise in question needed a bag, and he'd ignore the doomed negotiating that had every appearance of being about to climax. He was the weathervane, and it was creepy to the marketplace hawkers. They barked at him to get away when there were no customers.
That people were easily spooked was another of Bath's truisms.
After she was done with the solitary but beloved uncle, she left without ceremony. The prescient niece had come in halfway through the ritual, but she'd said nothing and had pressed some coins into Bath's hands as the Washer had gathered herself to leave. Bath never looked at the money she was given until she was well out of range of the grieved- to do otherwise would have been irredeemably rude, to her mind; other Washers didn't feel that way and would haggle right in front of the newly anointed body if they felt they were being underpaid- and she decided this time she would find Bag Boy and talk to him. They had spoken before, mildly and about the weather, but Bath was so much in need of someone who would understand her isolation that she wanted to risk something. She had no idea what speaking to Bag Boy would risk, but she was willing to believe there was risk in speaking to him just so she had something to hang her misgivings on. What would be the risk? What can happen? She thought, a little Soother in the rough. Bag Boy was there and she walked up to him.
"What is your name, anyway?" she started.
"Roy," He answered. "Bag Boy Roy." He smiled as he said it, and she had the impression that he'd been waiting to say his name to someone so that he could introduce the rhyme of his name and title instead of waiting for the asker to make the inevitable tiny joke about it and then laugh disproportionately. Washer Bath could relate to the feeling, if that's what it was.
"Well I'm just going to call you Roy." She had said that in a tone of exasperation, as if it had been a debate they'd been toiling over for weeks instead of the first three personal sentences they'd said together. Then they talked about dying.
Roy was curious about her job, and didn't mind that she wasn't curious about his. He'd said it all: "They think I can predict all kinds of shit just because I can predict which sales are about to go and which ones won't. It's just paying attention." He'd shrugged and asked her about her work, which was fine. He wanted to know how it was that you got into the business of Washing; how you chose what things to wash them with, a sponge or cloth or was it a sponge-and-cloth tandem method; what part of the body you started with and if that every varied and why. She hadn't thought about much of it: she found her own silences lengthening, and sounding distressing to her own ears despite the fact that she was used to silences. "I have to talk to you tomorrow. I'm tired now, but I can tell you the answers probably after I sleep."
He took it well, and they parted. She did sleep- she slept deeply, since it had been tiring in a deep way to think about how she spent her days as if they were a map instead of a slop of feelings- but she wasn't any closer to some narrative that would describe her experience with corpses.
When they saw each other the next day, Bag Boy Roy just looked at her and folded his arms, waiting for her prepared speech. She said: "You have to come with me." He looked at the marketplace- it was quiet that day, there had been no ships full of tourists with strange currency burning a hole through their tucked-away coin purses- and said "Uh-huh." Bath took his hand, as gently as she took the hand of a heartbroken client, and took him outside their town. They walked hand-in-hand for two miles and stopped at a shack. There was a woman inside it, sitting in her chair (it looked comfortable, with quilting and a footstool; it was incongruous with everything else about the derelict shack) who'd died only an hour before Bath had gotten the message. Again, it was a relief, because this job was similar to the last: no audience, no town sounds, no worms. She let go of Roy's hand finally and moved to take the woman under the armpits. Roy came around to her feet, pointing his palms down, ready to take direction.
"I have to move her myself. She's light and I'll be fine. She's light." Bath was lifting, and the woman was light. Her flecks of soul moved with her in a small cloud. Roy just stood and watched, unsmiling for once. Bath asked, "Do you see that?"
Roy looked around. The shack was one living area and a toilet in a closet, built into the back of the space for that purpose. There didn't appear to be any bed. "See what?"
Bath could see it, this floating city of specks, forming around the dead woman and staying there in a way that was unlike regular dust. It was obvious. "That cloud around her."
Roy squinted- it was dark inside the woman's house. "No. A cloud?"
"Never mind" Bath said. She'd never thought to ask if anyone else, a non-Washer, could see the cloud when she was in her Training. She learned the strokes of cleansing, and the appropriate aromas for every kind of death: lavender for fearful, verbena for comatose, tuber rose for any child, and she taught herself how to sing-song, which was proper. She was only eight when she learned, so...no questions about non-Washers, and now she was at a loss. She wasn't supposed to bring someone who didn't have a personal interest in the dead person's death, but she hadn't thought it through (she was only eighteen.)
Bath started washing the woman. It was lovely. The woman had obviously had some kind of peace, on her incongruously comfortable chair: She'd been smiling, and her face was relaxed. Bath used tuber rose, a first for an adult under her hands. There was no precedent for it as far as she knew, but she couldn't imagine someone being offended. She thought about it and decided that she would take offense if anyone was offended, most likely putting an end to it right there since no one argued with a Washer. Roy watched her from the chair that Bath and the woman had vacated for the floor. It was the weirdest thing about this weird day, because he wasn't bothered by the fact that the woman had died in that very chair a small time before. He sat in it with his arm slung over the pillowed back: he wasn't easily spooked.
Bath finished, and stood. There wasn't anyone waiting, which happened sometimes: some people were outside of the regular shoal of society and it was part of the written contract when a Washer took the Oath (it involved five or more people witnessing to make it official. It could be anywhere, including in a tavern or a bathroom or in your own bed, if someone needed you and there weren't any other Washers around. Bath had been woken from a dream of washing a young woman with the same coloring as herself, so when she was roused to take the Oath and get herself immediately to the farm of some town bigshot who'd had a heart attack she felt like she had just moved in her dream and never woken up) that they clean those who had no family, for free. The woman she'd just finished seemed to be one of those, though you never knew: occasionally a fee would show up for her out of nowhere, sent by her usual messenger. There was never a note with these. She wished there was a note for everyone she touched. Sometimes-a-note-and-sometimes-not wasn't enough...writing, she felt (how she could tell this was impossible to say since she was fully illiterate.)
She looked at her work, and Bag Boy Roy looked with her. There were the flakes, the scales, the tiny leftovers of soul that were hovering just above the floor now, not cloud-like. Bath looked at them and they seemed brighter in the gloom than she remembered any others looking. Roy looked around her, still not seeing, trying to see.
"Are you done? Is there anything else?" He wasn't impatient. He waited for the answer even though he wasn't even a full arm's length from the door.
"I am. Nothing else" Bath said, but didn't move. She watched the bits of soul drift, brighter and bigger than before. Roy opened the door and went outside, and in a moment- newly interested: her first moment as a Watcher- she joined him.
