A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  “But why would Browning drain the lake in the first place?”

  “He said it was to prevent malaria. Nobody knew what caused malaria but they thought it had something to do with stagnant water and moist vegetation. But Bill says that he thinks it’s really because Browning was from an old patrician family, and he wanted to drive away the poor immigrants who were moving to Akinville to work in the factories.”

  “What a dick.” He kisses the top of my head. “Want some food?”

  Cooking is one of those activities from which I have been walled off, like a tipsy infant gated from hazardous areas of the house. In New York, my specialties were asparagus quiche and lobster ravioli with vodka sauce. Never particularly skilled in the wifely arts, I felt proud to stake out that one little corner of domesticity. In the wake of my collapse, Owen cooks every Sunday, brewing a cauldron’s worth of food that sustains us through the week in microwaved rations.

  This is only one of the ways in which I have been subtly unsexed. I don’t wear dresses or skirts anymore, but rather have assumed a uniform of shorts and boxy T-shirts that hang loosely in the places where my figure has hollowed out. And although our sex life continues its accustomed rhythm, I feel particularly distant in the act, like I am being projected into my body from another place. If Owen minds that he has been having sex with a hologram, he hasn’t said anything.

  After dinner we settle awkwardly onto the antique couch, our feet propped up on a nineteenth-century ottoman, and Owen says that he wishes that I could be more open with him. I feel like his internal clock must be running a bit fast. Usually this conversation pops up every two to three weeks, but it feels like only days since I was last subjected to it.

  I reply with my accustomed answer, that I’m working on it. And aren’t I? I see the therapist once a week. I do my exercises, guiding my mind through a series of mental gymnastics that are supposed to gradually reconfigure the way that I engage with the world. And I take my medicine, even though it has diluted me into a watery version of myself. I already told him that I was unhappy, that my projects seemed to be going nowhere, and I was afraid my life was collapsing before it had properly begun. What else does he want me to tell him—that sometimes I think our marriage was a mistake? That I worry constantly that he’ll leave me, despite having no reason to think so? That I think he could have had—could still have—someone else, one of those small, peppy, uncomplicated blondes who are native to the local natural-foods store and the gym? Are those things that he really wants to hear?

  A part of me believes, with a deluded religiosity, that if I never tell Owen that I’m imperfect, he’ll never know. I’d do anything not to break that spell of adoration that manifests on his face when he looks at me, the kind of pure, unselfish love that I guiltily suspect I am incapable of matching.

  So I resort to my tried-and-true strategy, pivoting the conversation by telling him about the forest, the factory, the wooden angel, and its mysterious give-and-take offerings. He seems satisfied by this, even touched to be allowed entry to this minor episode of my private life. This is how I keep his expectations low—first denying him everything, then parceling out superficial anecdotes like they are treasures. In the moment, I can even fool myself into thinking that this shallow representation, this tissue-paper person, is me.

  For the rest of July, a new gravestone emerges about once a week. Among the weeds beside the stone wall, Sarah Green/Born March 7, 1789/Died August 19, 1856. In the section in which I am preparing to plant cauliflower, Katharine McKinney/Wife of Thomas McKinney/who died/September 16, 1867/Ae. 40 years 3 months 2 days. Beneath the pansies, which I have torn up in pursuit of more gravestones, Michael O’Brian/Died January 4, 1869/Aged 35 years and Mary Drummond/Born May 1, 1862/Died October 11, 1871.

  Louisa and Bill—and Owen, on weekends—have volunteered to help me in systematically desecrating our yard, scraping through dirt and roots and worms and stones in pursuit of its telltale heart. One murky Saturday, we uncover the stones of Thomas McKinney, Joseph Leggett, and Alice Leggett. I have mapped the property on a piece of graph paper, where I record the coordinates of each marker before we prop it up against the side of the house. By the end of the month our collection numbers twelve. We have matched two to obituaries in the local paper, The Tattersall Recorder: Thomas McKinney, who died after his arm was mangled in a textile machine, and Michael O’Brien, who drowned in Akin Lake. We suppose that these deaths were reported because they were accidents, while the majority—struck down by mundane afflictions—weren’t considered newsworthy.

  In August, the bones come. The first is a white nub, just a few inches long, that could easily be mistaken for a chicken bone. Owen cracks open his old osteology textbook to confirm that it is in fact a human metatarsal. A talus bone—part of the ankle—follows shortly after. When the tibia emerges, slicing out of the dirt like a machete against the force of Louisa’s trowel, Bill puts down his shovel and announces that it is time to call the cops. The law, he says, requires the discovery of human remains to be reported to the local medical examiner.

  It is in this conversation that I discover that Bill is the village’s former chief of police. Dr. Sarles—the slim, middle-aged woman in a navy jacket and brown corduroys who arrives at the old white house several hours after a pair of officers have cordoned off the area—greets him warmly, inquires after his family, and responds with quiet effusion when he inquires after hers. Then she briskly sheds her social persona, dons a pair of blue latex gloves, and squats beside the square meter of ground where the grass is peeled back to reveal the sparse array of cracked bones.

  While she works, I pepper Bill with questions. Can Dr. Sarles tell how old the person was and how he or she died? Might she be able to tell where the person was born or looked like? My mind dredges up vague recollections of a National Geographic article featuring a bleached white skull from some distant epoch, smothered with clay to reconstitute its features.

  Bill shakes his head. “All she cares about is whether the bones are forensic—whether they show evidence of a crime.”

  A few photographs are taken, and the handful of bones plucked delicately and placed into a plastic box—disturbingly similar in appearance to a takeout container—to be brought back to the laboratory. I conjure an image of overhead lights gleaming lushly over scrubbed metal surfaces, rows of beakers and test tubes, the melody of centrifuges whirring softly in the background. Despite what Bill says, I hold out the hope that Dr. Sarles will be able to help us match the remains to a name.

  Two weeks later, a police officer arrives at my door with a formal-looking letter, which states that the bones were deemed to be historical, not forensic, belonging to nineteenth-century cemetery documented by village historian William Keating.

  Under his arm, he holds the same white takeout box. Its contents rattle dully as he hands it to me.

  “What am I supposed to do with these?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “It’s your property.”

  Throughout August and September, I continue my weekly ritual, beginning with a walk through the village, which my research is gradually rendering legible. I begin by passing Washington’s Rock and cross the ruins of the old mill dam. I cut through the park, the squelching of my feet in the long grass bearing noisy testimony to its former life as Akin Lake. I pass the succession of churches on Main Street, the line of oaks outside the library that were planted to commemorate the village’s World War I dead, and the Tattersall House, a slanted edifice that once claimed a basement speakeasy. My course reiterates a mile and a half of the journey taken by Rochambeau’s troops in July 1781 as they marched from Newport, Rhode Island, to Yorktown, Virginia, where they secured the Patriots’ final victory.

  As I cross the bridge over the railroad and onto Mortimer Avenue, I notice a marked shift in the demography of the village. The hills and outskirts of Tattersall are colonized by the lily-white bourgeoisie, the Patagonia-clad exurbanites who drove their Volvos out of the city to buy three-bed
room houses and raise packs of children and Labradors. In the center of the village, however, where the valley bottoms out, the residents are primarily Latinos: teenage couples strolling hand in hand, mothers shepherding flocks of small children, young men in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots standing with their backs slanted against the outer walls of downtown stores. It takes two weeks of hashing out the correct phrasing in my head, and then two blustering half attempts, before I ask Louisa about it.

  “You thought Westchester was all upper crust, didn’t you?” she says. “Well, who do you think does the landscaping and cleans the houses on those big estates? They started coming here in the last few years, and I’d guess that most of them are illegal. You know, I don’t mind them, but I wish they would at least try to have their children learn English. They have them all in separate Spanish classrooms in school, so they don’t assimilate like the Italians and the Irish did.”

  I open my mouth in a reflex of rebuttal that I quickly realize I have neither the words nor the energy to defend. So I marinate in the awkward silence for a moment, then suggest we continue our work on the census. We now have a folder on each of the people of the cemetery, in which we collect the trickle of details as they emerge. Thomas McKinney and Michael O’Brian worked in factories. Joseph Leggett was a farm laborer. The McKinneys had five children, the Leggetts eight. Sarah Green was blind. All but two were born in Ireland. None owned any real estate.

  Every so often I ask myself why I walked the miserable humid miles to the historical society in the first place, at a time when I cared barely enough to run a comb through my hair or to shower more than once a week (Louisa and Bill must have really loved me in those early encounters). The only explanation that seems to fit is that it was the expression of an instinct, something more deeply hardwired than the grinding tasks of daily living, because it was entwined with my identity. And even as that identity seemed to be wasting away, my muscle memory guided me through its primordial motions, my mind doing hardly anything, and suspecting nothing, as I was compelled back to life.

  The Catholic Church, built in 1932 to replace the one that burned in 1914, is a looming gray stone fortress that occupies a central corner of the village. After weeks of deferring my requests, Father Lowry has agreed to meet with me in its adjoining rectory. His small wood-paneled office overlooks the garden, freshly planted with zinnias and concentric loops of that wrinkly greenish-purple ornamental cabbage.

  I was raised by an ex-Catholic and an ex-Presbyterian in a casually atheist household tinted with ancestral Quakerism, and spent my childhood and college years among secular Jews. I am acutely aware that I lack the social template with which to engage with Father Lowry. It seems unbearably strange to call him Father, but as the alternative is the willfully incorrect Mr. Lowry or the mortally familiar Bob, I manage to eke out the words.

  Though I feel like I have discharged three job interviews’ worth of sweat and have had to excuse myself to the bathroom two mortifying times before we even reach his office, the meeting is bluntly anticlimactic, lasting no more than five minutes.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mitchell, but I’m afraid I can’t offer you much help,” he says, tenting his fingers ceremoniously on his desk while his eyes pulse out a granite disinterest between the white flashes of light on his glasses. “No one in my congregation knows about any Catholic cemetery before Oakwood. I even called Father Neal at the nursing home—he was the priest here before me—and he didn’t know anything.”

  “Do you think anyone in your congregation would like to help the historical society? We’ve been discussing it, and we’d like to put the gravestones back where they were, you know, standing upright. We’ve been talking about enlisting a professional archaeologist, if we can find one—someone who could use a technique, a kind of radar, to find the rest of the gravestones and map the locations of the graves without digging. We don’t want to disturb any more bones.”

  “Yes, that sounds like a good plan,” he says, his words vacant of both feeling and an answer to my question, so that I am forced to grind the conversation onward.

  “So, um, if your congregation would be interested …”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Heading back to the old white house, I complete my habitual loop: walking up Newberry Avenue through the dense golden sunlight, then slipping into the welcome respite of the cool, dark forest path. It’s the first week of October, and although the point of the thermometer still sticks obstinately in the eighties, the woolly edges of the air are starting to sharpen. Over the past months, the wood-carver and I have faithfully maintained our exchange. I have left a jade hair barrette, a smooth freckly stone from our trip to Acadia, a vintage edition of Jane Eyre, a small oval box from Hancock Shaker Village, crates of my homegrown tomatoes (carefully sealed to prevent the ravages of squirrels), an Egyptian cat figurine from the Metropolitan Museum, a Fair Isle scarf that I knitted clumsily from a pattern, and a milky-blue soda bottle bearing the imprint Rudolph Boehmer/ Tattersall, NY (one of three we found in the attic, dated by Bill’s research to the 1870s).

  In return, the wood-carver has given me an otter, a bear, a turtle, a bobcat, an owl, a raven, an opossum, and a turkey—all species, Owen points out, native to the local forests, though I have seen hardly any in person. Bound by my own generalized apprehension and, to a degree I don’t like to admit, Louisa’s enigmatic warning, I have never strayed off the path—but my curiosity about the wood-carver is growing.

  “Do you think it’s someone who lives in Akinville?” I ask Owen. “A reclusive artist, maybe?”

  “Maybe. You could try asking some of the artsy people around town.”

  As I discover, Tattersall does have a sizable artist community, and at a reception for one of the historical society’s public programs, Bill introduces me to two of them: Jane, the president of the village Arts Council, and Laurie, who owns an art gallery on Newberry Avenue. Do they know of any local wood-carvers? As their heads shake, Bill suggests that the carver might be the Leatherman.

  “Who’s the Leatherman?” I ask.

  “Oh, he’s an old local legend. No one knows where he came from, but he’s been walking the same fifty-mile circuit through the Hudson Valley every week for years. And you know the name, Leatherman—that’s because he wears a handmade suit all of leather, with a leather hat, boots, and bag. A strange character—no one’s ever heard him speak, except for a few stray words of French.”

  Seeing the fascination dawn on my face, Louisa cuts in, slapping Bill lightly on the shoulder as he breaks into laughter.

  “For God’s sake, Bill,” she says, “would you stop yanking her chain?”

  “I get it,” I say. “The Leatherman’s just a myth.”

  “Oh no, he’s real,” says Louisa, “but he died over a hundred years ago. They’ve got photos of him and a pair of his old boots over at the local history museum.”

  One Saturday afternoon, Owen and I visit the museum, housed in an annex of the village hall. The Leatherman is just as Bill described in a photograph dated to 1885: a hulking figure in a patchwork leather suit, a wrinkly leather hat that he holds in one hand, a wooden staff in the other, and a leather satchel by his side. The slabs of leather are lashed together with stitches the size of shoestrings, like a crudely made Frankenstein. His thick, dark curls and dense beard form a nest of hair that encloses his rutted features. His slanted eyes, caught inside a cat’s cradle of creases and lines, convey an enigmatic combination of hardness, vigilance, and intelligence.

  “Maybe it’s the Leatherman,” I say, “leaving carvings for me.”

  “It’s not the Leatherman.”

  “Maybe it’s the ghost of the Leatherman.”

  Owen gives me a droll smile, then slings his arm around my shoulders. I have learned to resist the urge to yank myself out of my body as soon as he does so. Instead, I try to lounge in the moment, to feel the weight of his touch and the weight of my bones and the blanketing sensation of the air-condition
ing that courses around us in the dark little room. In these inching ways, I have started to repopulate my skin.

  One Saturday in late October, five of us are huddled around a gravestone. Louisa and Bill hold the stone in place as Eduardo and Delfina pour the cement. We watch it spill in like thick gruel, then wait for it to settle.

  Eduardo and Delfina are two of Father Lowry’s congregants who have answered our call to reconstruct the cemetery. They have no ancestral bond to the people buried here, as they immigrated from Guatemala just a few years ago, but they both said they felt a calling to help.

  There are others, about a dozen in total, forming a different constellation of faces every week. Some are older residents with Italian or Irish surnames, quilted faces, and surprisingly agile limbs. The younger ones are mostly Guatemalan. Some bring their children, who regard me with a kind of creeped-out deference as the Cemetery Lady and fulfill my requests to fetch a trowel or a bucket of water with exhilarated obedience.

  Eduardo lives on Mortimer Avenue, just a few houses down from the historical society, and works as a waiter in a Greek restaurant on Main Street. His head barely rises above my own, but his limbs have an iron muscularity, and he hoists the marble grave markers as though they were made of cardboard. When we find a bone—as we do, every so often, in the process of setting the stones—he traces a cross over his chest and says a mumbling prayer before we rebury it. His son Luis, too young to help, toddles around the perimeter of the flower bed that I have replanted in a circle around the first stone that we reset, that of Alexander Rooney.

  When the cement has hardened, I hear Eduardo and Bill laughing about something Louisa said earlier—a throwaway remark about the Mexican border that made me cringe, though I said nothing. While Louisa generally regards Eduardo and Delfina with a wan friendliness, her eyes narrow whenever the two of them speak to each other in Spanish, as though sensing the blossoming of a conspiracy. Delfina acts as though she doesn’t hear Louisa’s comments, most of which are strategically oblique, allowing for plausible deniability in the event that she is challenged (which she never is). But Eduardo likes to repeat what Louisa says when she’s out of earshot, mimicking her voice in a singsong falsetto. He regards her with a wry affection, calling her abuela.