A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Viv shifts her legs and observes her movement’s registration on Cromwell. It is subtle but still there, and must show on his face. He wonders if his self-contempt also registers.

  Parker, a legend. Viv purses her lips, in anticipation or nervousness, he cannot tell. Parker, the folklorist who went mad, who drank himself to oblivion, on the trail of some legendary song. She brushes a strand of hair from her neck. They sit looking at each other, leaving everything to be conveyed wordlessly, with twists of ring and shifting of legs. There is no part of Vivian that does not leave him ashamed. She is eye-sweet and soft to observe, but the guilt that comes with her is an erosion.

  “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Vivian stands and hesitates. She wants to touch him, he can see, but it would not be wise here. He wants to touch her too, but he feels as if his wife would appear in the door, white and openmouthed in silent accusal, gasping for air, holding their son, bleached of all his color. They were chalky white when he found them.

  Now. He can’t tell if she knows he’s hard just talking to her. It has been weeks since he’s had any release. He feels terrible for the desire, but he still feels it. But he will never sleep with her again. He can, at least, be faithful in his wife’s death better than he was in her life.

  “You’ve been through a lot, Rob,” she says. “It’s gonna take time.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Of course. Thank you.”

  “I should go,” she says. “I’ll let Hattie know you’re here.” She leaves an invisible eddy of scent churning in the still air.

  Cromwell closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, settles himself. He deletes emails, reading some, but mostly trashing automated reports, internal memos, department bulletins. He lets the fascination of work lure him away from the scent of Vivian.

  Hattie appears shortly after. She sits in the seat Vivian just vacated. Is it warm still? He thinks of the uncomfortable experience of finding a toilet seat still warm from some other man’s use. Women probably wouldn’t find the warmth of a chair disgusting. They might find it pleasant. He might find it pleasant. His mind shifts, curiously; he’s aware of its present disjointed state but can find no way to correct it. Is the seat still warm? Cromwell considers the differences between the two women’s posteriors. Of course, he’s examined Vivian’s quite closely and with more than just eyes—alabaster and lunar, seat of pleasure, framed by rougher hands, worshiped by pink lips and tongue—but he can only imagine what Hattie’s must be like. She’s trim, though not fanatical about fitness; he sees her eating salad more often than sandwiches in the Library deli, but she joins in when they go drinking and seems to enjoy pizza as much as the next person. Whatever prolongs his callipygian rumination, it was never their bottoms that drew him to either of them. Though he’s thinking about it now.

  “How are you, Crumb?” Hattie asks. “You worried me after the funeral.” She passes a hand over her face like a mime wiping away an expression.

  “It’s a lot to work through,” he says. A single sob comes out of him, and then he stifles it. Where did that come from? Hattie rises and puts her hand on his, her darker one on his pale skin.

  Contrast her smell to Vivian’s. Easy to parcel out, really. Cinnamon on her breath from candy canes and Christmas so recent, perfume at her neck and lotion tinged with lilac on her hands. Why is it that he can sort out her scent so easily and Vivian’s remains a jumble? And Maizie’s? He’s smelled her clothes, his son William’s, trying to take in that molecular residue of them, to keep it with him always. He wasn’t sure it worked.

  Standing by him, she says, “You know we’ve got to stick together. I got you, Crumb. Whatever you need.”

  “Thank you,” he says. In all ways but one he’s more accessible to Hattie than he’s ever been to Vivian. It doesn’t make him feel better.

  She sits back down.

  “So, tell me about Matilda Parker’s estate,” he says.

  “Oh, hell, Crumb,” Hattie says, her face transforming. Work is the tether that holds them close. “This job is going to be crazy.”

  4

  Cromwell: Springfield and the Parker Estate

  They fly in to Saint Louis to rent an SUV for Hattie’s gear. Cromwell watches the land pass beneath them through the airplane’s window, the Gateway Arch a raised eyebrow of surprise at their approach, growing closer, and then diminishing as the plane lands at Lambert field. At the baggage claim, he helps Hattie with her Pelican cases full of microphones and cables, cameras and lenses and tripods. There is a problem at the rental car place, and Cromwell argues with the rental car attendant—a kind of centered wildness propelling him—until eventually they wheel a black Chevy Suburban around and load the cases and their luggage.

  “This is so us. Feds,” Hattie says, patting the hood before climbing into the driver’s seat. When they first began working together at the Library of Congress, she was surprised when Cromwell insisted on taking the passenger seat, leaving her to drive. “Most men won’t let a woman touch the wheel of their ride,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I’m your superior. I’m not going to chauffeur you around.”

  “That’s racist,” she said. “And still somehow chauvinistic.” And then she laughed at his surprise and stammered apology.

  They head south, watching rolling hills dusted in snow pass stoically by. Hattie searches the radio for music but, finding none to her tastes, eventually drives on in silence. Finally she says, “Thank god the woman didn’t live in fucking Ferguson, Crumb,” and he agrees with her. Though southern Missouri won’t be any better, he tells her. She grunts, an obstinate look on her face, and keeps driving. Cromwell reads Harlan’s World War I memoir and German songbook. He remembers mostly Parker’s West Africa to New Orleans: The Story of Jazz. He’s not read them in fifteen years, since he was working toward his doctorate. Miles pass; they are comfortable in each other’s silence. Or each other’s personal sounds. Hattie sings along lightly to some internal rhythm pounding within her like a dynamo. Cromwell raps his fingers on the back of his iPad as he reads, an unconscious movement. He might have put music aside, but it creeps in, unbidden.

  In Springfield, they check into their hotel, an aging Holiday Inn off the interstate. In his room, he calls the executor of the Parker estate, who agrees to meet them at her house in the morning. They walk to a nearby Waffle House and order food, after he gives Hattie her per diem.

  In the morning, the executor waits for them at the curb of the Parker home. Hattie wheels the Suburban into the driveway aggressively, grinning, and when they exit the vehicle, the surprise is clear on the executor’s face. Yes, Cromwell thinks. Feds. He wishes he’d worn his sunglasses.

  The executor gives a nervous smile as Cromwell introduces himself and Hattie. Her handshake is light, weak, shrinking. This is a strange job, a job where the government is the client and she doesn’t know exactly how to act.

  The woman—Sarah—leads them to the house. The yard is neat, flat. The house itself is old, small, and possessed of a certain dignity that only old and well-maintained homes exhibit. The wraparound front porch has been painted in the last decade, as well as the façade. The roof is a stylish red metal, a newer sort that Cromwell has noticed even in his neighborhood in Alexandria.

  Sarah unlocks the front door and lets them in and begs off for an appointment. Cromwell holds out his hand for the keys and after a moment’s pause and an explanation of the alarm system along with the numeric code, she turns the keys over to him and departs. They enter. It’s warm inside. The foyer smells fresh and clean. Sarah informed him in their correspondence that Matilda Parker died of pancreatic cancer, and was a youthful woman in demeanor and outlook, just turned sixty. She had never wed and had no progeny—the last of Harlan Parker’s line. But Cromwell isn’t concerned with the Parker descendant; the woman who died does not interest him in the slightest. It is her ancestor Cromwell’s after.

  “What do you bet that
if she had an HD television, it’s already gone?” Hattie asks him. They’ve made assays of bequeathed estates before, a handful of times, and there is always something missing once they arrive. A television, a radio or phone, a blank and unweathered patch on a wall. Jewelry, money, pharmaceuticals. Cromwell and Hattie are never the first on-site, and invariably, the baser aspects of human nature become manifest.

  He doesn’t take the bet.

  Hattie sets up her camera and takes three-hundred-and-sixty-degree photographs of each room, moving from the foyer inward. One of her innovations, a photographic record of estates, has proven invaluable when cataloging. Hattie even promises, if they allot her the money for more gear, she can create a virtual reality record of estates, though Cromwell thinks that a bit excessive.

  Cromwell wanders through the house. He finds a small downstairs library full of Grisham, Patterson, Evanovich, Connolly hardbacks, some leather-bound classics—Dickens, Faulkner, Hemingway, Maugham, Mitchell, Ruark, Steinbeck—and a nice set of encyclopedias. I thought the Internet killed the encyclopedia business, Cromwell thinks. But those look brand-new. He opens cabinets, bemused, looking for anything that might be related to Harlan Parker. In a living area, with a bare space on the wall where some sort of HD television used to be—Hattie will be pleased her low opinion of humanity has been confirmed once more—he finds what, when he was a child, his parents would have called a hi-fi cabinet. A long credenza-like bit of furniture, bracketed at the ends with tweed speakers, with a turntable seated in the center of the lush-stained wood, a long row of vinyl stored beneath. He flips on the power switch, and the console lights up in a lovely seventies-design user interface—glowing radio tuner, shining indicators for volume and record speeds. The speakers buzz slightly, then subside. He turns it off again, extinguishing the lights. Squatting, he riffles through the vinyl, looking for anything interesting, either personal or professional, but finds neither. He stands, dusts his pants, and moves on.

  In the master bedroom, he stops. It’s here he feels the weight of the house, its history. A simple enough room, queen bed with a lush, puffy comforter, bedside with elegant if not expensive lamps, a comfy divan in the spill of light from the windows that at Cromwell’s house would probably be strewn with laundry but here is empty. It would be empty now at his home too, he realizes. Even a thousand miles away, he can feel it. That thin connection: a breach, an expansion, like gold beat into airy thinness. Mourning. His house stands empty and cold and silent and that’s something he’ll never be able to surmount. He feels as though he’s shrinking, collapsing under the weight of Maizie’s and William’s deaths.

  And the guilt that comes in the shape of a nude woman in a hotel room.

  The closet is full of a woman’s clothing, from T-shirts to formal wear, coats and sweaters, slacks and skirts and long dresses. In the chest of drawers, underwear and socks, nightclothes and scarves. On the carpeting, he sees the vacuum marks. A sense of dislocation. He’s done this before, and recently, the sorting and taxonomy of the belongings of the dead. For Maizie’s things, her sister collected almost everything he did not want. And of his son, William, all of his things remained. That was a separation Cromwell was not ready to face.

  She lived and died in these rooms, he thinks. The smell of the space is fresh, but there’s a hint of decay underneath. Maybe, when the cancer worsened, they moved her to hospice. Or hospice came here to wait breathlessly for her to die. In the trash, there’s an empty pill bottle. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet has been emptied. No one has disturbed her jewelry box on the chest of drawers; its insides glint gold and silver. Behind the bathroom door, a robe, a whiff of rosewater.

  Eventually, he’ll have to deal with the estate sale planner, to turn all of this, a woman’s life and clothes and house, into money for the Library. For now, he moves on.

  The kitchen is plain, if well loved. A cacophony of pans and skillets hang from a suspended cast-iron rack over an island butcher block. Potted herbs crowd the windowsill—thyme, oregano, sage. Cromwell plucks a sprig of thyme and rubs it in his hands, letting the smell of spring and warmer times expand in the still space of the kitchen. He closes his eyes, holds his hands to his nose, inhaling deeply. Once when William was five, Cromwell remembers, they passed a towering summer bush of rosemary during a walk through the neighborhood and Cromwell plucked a sprig and rubbed it between his palms like a man using a stick to start a fire and then placed his hands under his son’s nose and watched the perception of the scent creep into his boy’s expression, a blooming wonder, followed by joy. William held his hand as they walked and kept drawing it to his face, breathing it in. His sweet boy.

  Cromwell keeps his eyes closed for a long while. When he opens them, he lets the mangled sprig fall to the floor.

  He unlocks the door from the kitchen leading to the backyard. He moves to stand on the grass. Behind the house, a thicket of trees, all denuded of leaves, and beyond, a neighborhood creek. There’s still snow on the ground under the bare branches. In summer, Cromwell thinks, the air would be full of noise—the creak and cascading hiss of foliage swaying in the breeze; crickets; cicadas; cardinal songs; the cries of boys playing Wiffle ball in the street, maybe, or touch football, bright voices calling victory or outrage; dogs barking in the distance; the whir of a leaf blower; the diminishing roar of a plane full of people flying far away.

  There’s a separate garage. More than a shed, less than an outbuilding. Cromwell finds the key that opens the side door on the ring he was handed. An unstained and relatively new lawn mower and Weed Eater, two brooms, various rakes and hoes, a snarl of bungee cords, empty liquor-store boxes, milk crates. A workbench with a toolbox; mason jars full of nails, screws, nuts, and bolts; green nylon rope; a glue gun; shears; hedge trimmers. A Subaru station wagon is in the garage, well maintained but at least twenty years old. His hands find a light switch, illuminating the space. There’s another door, with many deadbolts, paint scaling in tessellated patterns, leading to what seems to be a back room.

  He opens the door, revealing an empty space with an old desk, an office chair ringed in moldering stacks of handwritten sheet music, yellowed and illegible. On the walls, a guitar, a dulcimer, a banjo. All gray, weathered with time and the corrosive effects of a drafty, uninsulated room. Cromwell takes down the banjo, finds there are no strings, and the fretboard is rough to his touch.

  Someone has spent time here, he knows, long stretches of it. Maybe years. But that was many decades before. It has the haunted feel of a living area, forgotten and repurposed to something else.

  The desk is empty, covered in dust. He doesn’t trust the chair enough to sit, and it would besmirch his trousers, anyway. The far wall is packed high with old newspapers and the offal of an old house. Broken wicker chairs, empty crates, plastic tubs full of moth-eaten clothes, bags of mulch, empty pots, broken and shadeless lamps.

  His phone chirrups. Hanging the banjo back on the wall, he shrugs the phone from his pocket and looks at the text—Found smpin. Upstairs.

  Phone in hand, he snaps a picture of the bare room and goes back inside.

  “Crumb, this is a straight trip,” Hattie says when he finds her upstairs. “Look at this.” She points to a looming armoire of dark-stained wood near flush with the ceiling. Cromwell opens the doors and looks inside. The reek of mothballs overwhelms him. Winter coats spanning decades of styles.

  “She didn’t have good fashion sense?” he asks.

  “Around back,” she says.

  Cromwell moves to the side of the armoire and places his eye to the gap between the dark, massive furniture and the wall. There’s a glint of metal and hinges.

  “I was taking three-sixty-degree photographs of these two bedrooms and realized something was off. Looked in the hall for a closet or maybe a door or stairwell to the attic to explain the space between rooms. I’m good with figuring out spaces, you know?” She raps the wall with her knuckle. “There’s a void back there with no entrance.”

>   5

  Cromwell: Introducing Stagger Lee

  It takes both Cromwell and Hattie to move the armoire. The effort leaves gouges in the stained hardwood floor, a negligence Cromwell would normally feel great shame for. But this is why he’s come, for whatever is back there.