The Scullery

Lyrics

Down the Back Hall, the floorboards keep the beat. Heel-toe. Heel-toe. Past the quiet gleam of the Butler's Pantry, silver sleeping on green felt, a promise I never kept. Avert the eyes. The Kitchen breathes its heat under the door, a blast of onion and orders. But the rhythm pulls left. To the cold spot. The stone heart.

Arrival. The air is wet stone and memory. The only clock is the copper tap's iron beat on the drain. Drip. Pause. Drip. The soap, a yellow block, smells of lye and the patience of saints. Your hands know the cold before they find the water. A hundred years of meals baked into the mortar. This room remembers every single plate.

The brush finds the pot. And the circle finds the circle. Wrist and wire, scraping the black away. The rhythm of the dinner, the rhythm of the day. This is the engine that doesn't get a say. The circle finds the circle. Come what may.

Her hands were here in 1901, the girl from the census page, a name worn down to an age. The sink was built six inches low to teach her young spine its place. Now a plastic rack sits where the wooden pail was. But the back still learns the same ache, the same unwritten laws.

The sound of the brush on the copper bottom, that shhhh-shhhh-shhhh, isn't just a sound. It is the precise, flat grey of the 5 a.m. window light. I scrub the pot and the curve shows not my face, but the grand Dining Room, set for a feast that never took place. I scrub the pot and see this room again, with a smaller man scrubbing a smaller pot, and in that pot, another, down to a point of perfect black.

The brush finds the pot. And the circle finds the circle. Wrist and wire, scraping the black away. The rhythm of the dinner, the rhythm of the day. This is the engine that doesn't get a say. The circle finds the circle. Come what may.

The work is done. The work is never done. The stack is clean. The slow water runs. The rhythm is in the walls now. In the bones of the house. The drip. And the drip.