The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  The motion made me almost giddy: it was something like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid.

  One wave-drowned village was still marked by the stubble of its cathedral and the shell of a boat deposited far inland, and as they walked through the ruins toward a northbound coach on February 21, 1868, the brothers felt the sharp tremor of a new event. The driver screamed and the horses bolted. The Remfrey brothers waited some hours, in the company of untroubled locals, before a fresh driver came by.

  The quake made an impression on Walton: the ruins glowed in the light of a moon he remembered as full, and this was the beginning of his obsession with a seasonal, tidal theory: he believed the moon exerted pressure on the bumpy skin of earth, pulling it like taffy. Christopher suggested coincidence, or God, and Walton called God lily-fucking-livered, and the brothers had an argument so profane and violent that the offended driver ordered them out of the coach, marooning them for a day with a flask of water and some corn flatbread.

  After a third coach found them, and they continued across the plain of the Atacama, they observed dried wrapped bodies, exhumed by the wind. Walton had a fever, and he assumed this was a vision (he assumed as well that he had consumption—he’d managed to talk Ellen into a show of affection before he left, arguing that she was leaving soon, anyway, in a more complete sense, and didn’t she owe herself all possible experience?), but the driver said these mummies did exist, and were in fact ancient. Though Christopher was a rational Methodist, he also had a fever, and the barren air beat at his reason. He fell to remembering horrible stories he’d been told in the Redruth workhouse: the bucca trying to mate you or kill you deep in the mine, Blunderbore eating you on the path out, piskies fucking with you everywhere. Christopher did a passable job of delivering these stories in Spanish, and they were once again put aside to await another coach.

  Sometimes Dulcy thought of checking the date of that earthquake, the phase of its moon, the notion that Chile had drowned cities or mummies or any of it. But if she looked into it, she might hate Walton more than a quarter of the time, and abandon him, and be left with herself.

  Walton and his brother spent the summer—the winter—at Cerro Blanco, helping Woolcock install hoists and man engines, playing cards, two of them whoring. When the Remfreys sailed north again in July, Christopher told Walton he’d decided to join up with a group of Cornish engineers in Mexico, and Walton said good-bye to his brother in Panama City. He boarded a Pacific Mail steamer named the Golden City and arrived in San Francisco on the evening of October 20 with 305 other passengers, 152 sacks of mail, and some 8,000 packets of fabric, food, and hardware.

  Walton found a rooming house and headed out for oysters and fried salmon, apples and whiskey and women. He was up at eight the next morning, having coffee and side pork and biscuits with a lucky double-yolked egg while he considered the street scene on Sansome and his plans. Should he make his way to Nevada, where he had a captain’s job with a silver-mining crew, or should he risk a delay for another happy night of love?

  Then every pigeon in the city flushed straight up, the air buzzed, and the shaking began. The street split, and the glass window by his table shuddered and dropped, and the frame grocery across the street folded like a piece of stiff fabric. People in the harbor swarmed uphill, screaming; people on the hill ran down. Walton stepped through the now-open window of the restaurant, walked up to the moving crevice in the street, and stared down at breathing rock. Until that moment he’d thought that his hangover had taken hold, or that he suffered from mal d’embarcation instead of mal de mer. He thought at first he would be sick—this all happened in forty-five seconds—but then he felt as wonderful as he had for a few glancing moments the night before, in the grip of a big blond woman. And he could talk about this experience, which he did on a daily basis for the next three and a half years.

  In early 1872, Walton left a captain’s job at the Mary Harrison mine in Mariposa County, California, and headed east with a group of friends to Inyo and a new silver claim. Two months later, on the night of March 26, they were well underground, but Walton was off shift, playing poker on a warm spring night, under a waxing moon. Their valley had begun blooming: redbud and poppies, wallflowers and shooting stars; they played on the porch of one of a half-dozen wood and adobe shacks in a wide clearing, surrounded by overhanging cliffs, and Walton was losing, having not yet gotten a feel for the game. He never would get a feel for the game, but on this occasion he was suddenly unable to feel the floor of the porch: he and the other men were spilled onto the dirt in front of it, and they watched as the surrounding frame houses hopped “like frogs ”—though unlike frogs they shattered on landing—and their adobe neighbors crumbled, and boulders sent down from cliffs grumbled by in a sudden game of giant’s marbles. Everything that hadn’t shattered or rolled had moved some dozen feet, including the town’s four trees, and Walton gained a tighter grip on his own version of God.

  Years later, in a spa library, Dulcy read John Muir’s account of the same night in the Atlantic :

  The Eagle Rock, a short distance up the valley, had given way, and I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders I had been studying so long, pouring to the valley floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime and beautiful spectacle—an arc of fire fifteen hundred feet span, as true in form and as steady as a rainbow, in the midst of the stupendous roaring rock—storm. The sound was inconceivably deep and broad and earnest, as if the whole earth, like a living creature, had at last found a voice and were calling to her sister planets.

  Walton had brought Dulcy west when she was only sixteen. He had failed to regulate his medication during a trip the previous winter, and he’d been so ill that Martha had refused to let Dulcy go overseas with him again. It was a bluff, but Walton backed down, and wandered through California that spring like a bored dog, while Dulcy kept a loose, rattled hand on a leash. In July he abruptly decided that his real affliction was a brain tumor, and he made plans to visit a sanatorium north of Yellowstone Park. Dulcy didn’t ask how this diagnosis explained the wonderful things that were happening to the rest of his body; she assumed that he wanted to spend time staring into geysers or revisiting the idea of the failed magnometer.

  In practice, the trip to Yellowstone meant standing on very fragile-seeming rock near very hot water, waiting to feel an earthquake. Dulcy saw her first elk and moose, geysers and hot pots. They visited Moran’s deep canyon and the waterfalls, and their guide gave her berries, and the venison was delicious at the lodge. An army officer told stories over dinner about earlier visitors who’d fallen into hot pots, eaten the wrong root, arm-wrestled bears. The park offered all sorts of novel deaths, and the officer’s wife looked worried.

  The next morning they headed north for the clinic, which was tucked into the mountains near the site of a played-out gold settlement. Beyond the pleasures of a hot plunge, Eve’s Spring specialized in brain surgery. Walton normally preferred the sort of places with hot compresses and special menus, and when he took in the cadaverous doctor, the shiny steel equipment, the dozen men with bandaged heads sunning foggily by the steaming blue-tiled pool (rather than splashing happily inside it), he panicked. He’d been relying on coca and morphine, and it had been weeks since he’d made sense. Now he announced that there’d been a mistake: his poor daughter, who suffered from neurasthenia, was the patient. He was worried she might harm herself.

  “But who would have recommended us to you?” asked a nurse, while the doctor walked away, the greatest insult he could possibly offer to Walton. “We don’t handle rest cures.”

  “She also has seizures,” said Walton. “Fits and fevers.”

 
The nurse eyed Dulcy’s cheeks and correctly diagnosed her flush as humiliation. The next morning, after Walton had agreed to be examined and was once again marooned with his hopeless, shameful diagnosis, they hired a coach back to town rather than waiting for the train. The day was warm, the air shimmery with grasshoppers. Dulcy distracted herself with the dark blue river and yellow rocks, the smell of pine and grass; she counted cows and sheep, and came up with a tie. As they approached a large farmhouse, a vision: a hundred men on bicycles—black men on bicycles, in uniform—pouring out of an encampment onto the narrow dirt road, white bedrolls on their handlebars.

  “The Twenty-fifth Infantry Bicycle Corps,” said the polite professor who shared the carriage. He was leaving for his home in Minnesota; his tumor was incurable. One eye was bandaged to hide the fact that it was bulging out of his skull, and the clinic had refused to try a trepanation. “Under General Miles. They’re testing this method for the army. I gather they’re bicycling to the Park.”

  Dulcy looked at the faces of the passing men, their eyes veering away from her own. They were so close she could see strips of that morning’s lather on their necks, red dust from the road settling on their freshly shaven faces. They were pared down, grave, and beautiful. “It’s a mirage,” said Walton, his eyes yellow with jaundice; mercury had damaged his liver. “My God, if only there were roads in Africa.”

  She was mortified: her fair-minded father had disintegrated. She wanted to beat him over the head, but she kept her voice quiet. “There are roads in Africa, Dad. You’ve seen them.”

  “Bicycles,” whispered Walton.

  •••

  Nine years later, there didn’t seem to be many people of color in this town, even natives, though the weather might be to blame for the lack of bicycles. Dulcy had never felt such wind. Before she’d even crossed the street in Livingston on January 28, her hair unraveled and one of her scarves swirled into the frozen dark. In 1896, when she’d come through this town with Walton, the depot had been tall and narrow; now it was massive, with a slate roof and wind-funneling colonnades. Maybe the old depot had burned like everything in the West—the buildings across the street were new, too, and she headed for one of them, a brick hotel named the Elite.

  She wanted privacy, and she wanted her own bath; the Elite provided these things. The large, pink proprietress, Mrs. Knox, talked in puffs while they trundled to the third floor—the hotel had a new elevator, but there were issues with its motor. The tiny porter was only twenty or so, but he also wheezed audibly, coughing discreetly whenever he was out of sight around a bend on the stairs. “At this end of the hall, the train will be less likely to wake you,” said Mrs. Knox.

  Dulcy had an image of a stalking train, a Cyclops headlight shining into a hotel window, looking for her. She aimed her eyes at the pattern in the carpet, fat ruby-colored roses. “And the newspaper’s on that side, too, though we ask that they not run their presses during the night,” said Mrs. Knox. “I’m very sorry for your bereavement. Your husband?”

  “Yes,” said Dulcy. “Thank you. And I am here for precisely that reason, to rest.”

  “Well, then,” said Mrs. Knox. “We’ll not bother you. You have family here?”

  “No, we passed through here once, and talked of returning. And so, somehow, I thought...” She petered out, but she was tired. The explanation was both evocative and convincing, and she had successfully avoided dates or origins. Mrs. Knox twirled a finger, and the elfin porter deposited the suitcase on a marble-topped dresser. The marble was nice, but the dresser itself looked as if it had been made to fit, with a hacksaw.

  “I’ll wire to have my other things delivered,” said Dulcy, and then she regretted saying it. She needed to avoid adding details. After they left, she lifted the window for a moment. She smelled Chinese food, and heard a piano, not a dance hall tune but poorly played Bach.

  Never before in the history of the world has there been such a remarkable series of terrestrial disturbances as those which have followed each other day by day over the past three months over an area covering practically the entire surface of the globe.... From the original eruption of Mount Pelée to the present time there has hardly been a day when the record has not shown earthquake, tidal wave, or volcanic disturbance.... Thousands upon thousands of persons have lost their lives, other thousands have been maimed, towns and cities have been wiped out....

  —From “Three Months of Earthquakes and Eruptions,” The New York Times, August 17, 1902

  chapter 8

  The Garnet Book of Theory

  •

  A follow-up article on September 28—after eruptions in Japan, Italy, Greece, and Mexico—ended with the phrase “what the immediate future has in store no one in authority pretends to say precisely,” but this wasn’t quite true. Walton, one of the authorities consulted, had been happy to say what he thought was going to happen next: more of the same. The world’s center was ripening and expanding, writhing in discomfort. The end was nigh, and they were all going to die. There was nothing Biblical about this: the earth was godless, unsympathetic, and a grand killer. She didn’t give a damn for her inhabitants’ physical suffering and puny offerings. Instead of blaming God for the earth’s sins, Walton blamed the earth for religion: natural disasters weighed on fragile minds, and fragile minds shattered and subscribed to the notion of an angry god. If people weren’t terrified, why, he asked Dulcy, would they be such idiots, over and over again? In Seattle, toward the end, another singsong: dynamism, dynamite, dice, die, diet, deity.

  But after the earthquake in Salonica in 1902, something seemed to slip in Walton’s brain, and he lost his ability to silence himself when a listener’s eyes glazed over. He’d always been a marginal man of science, strange but influential and somehow more authentic to reporters than those men who never left the university. He was one of the few authorities (and he loved the word authority) with true experience with the world below the earth’s surface. Now, though he maintained a competent business front on Victor’s behalf, he lost the line between theory and fantasy on his favorite topic, what he liked to call the “dynamic earth.”

  “A volcano is a pustule!” he howled into the Westfield telephone, home for a week and ten minutes into his last talk with a Times reporter. “It enlarges, and ruptures through thinning skin, and the infection spreads !” He now believed that some combination of the moon and the fermenting iron and uranium core of the world caused quakes and volcanoes just as they caused tides; the tides themselves caused imbalances that disturbed the thin parts of the earth, and storms—false tides—were also capable of waking fragile parts of the earth’s skin, areas that were already under pressure. But this liquid notion of quakes had been long discounted, and Walton’s attempt to ball up neptunism or plutonism with the new theory of radioactivity didn’t go over well. He had only a faint, selective grasp of the idea of radiation, and he couldn’t prove anything with his calendar, but he would not believe in a random universe. Why would Mississippi suffer a significant earthquake and not Switzerland? Why was Scandinavia so stable, and Alaska in constant movement? Given his knowledge of quartz and copper and schist, these questions were torments. He had a tightly folded map of the world, and he sometimes tacked it to cork, pressed in pins, and strung the pins together with different colors, seeking a pattern. Dulcy had seen a Micronesian island map that looked a little like this: a confused guitar, a drunken cat’s cradle. Sometimes he’d paste on colored dots for the samples he’d retrieved; sometimes he added little flags and squinted, deliberately blurring the picture to find a pattern. There were, in his mind, no true anomalies, just bad data.

  That fall, Walton returned to Westfield in the midst of a fever. Mr. Akif’s Italian clinic had failed to cure his syphilis, and on the boat home he’d taken massive doses of quinine for his newest, deliberately contracted illness, malaria. When they reached Manhattan, he gathered up news accounts of the eruption
in Martinique, the greatest volcano of his lifetime, and on the ride north to Westfield he raved on about how thousands of fer-de-lance-vipers—driven out of the mountain forests when their dens turned into ovens, had swarmed the streets of Saint-Pierre. He told Dulcy about how people had dropped, paralyzed, where they’d been bitten; how they had lain in the bubbling mud, snakes sliding over bodies; how this poisoned hypersensitivity might have allowed the dying to feel the presentiment of disaster, the quivering lava several strata below.

  Dulcy never saw this piece of reporting in the piles of paper around the farmhouse, and she was dubious. Walton knew she didn’t like snakes. She’d been tentative on their one trip to Egypt and later barely left a hotel in Ceylon, despite an intense curiosity about the food. She disliked snakes so deeply that she’d read quite a bit about snakebites, and she’d never heard of a snake outside of Australia capable of dropping a man in his tracks, but she let Walton unwind. “Where did the snakes go, when they were done?”

  “Soldiers shot some. The rest slid into the ocean.”

  Or died with the rest of Saint-Pierre a few days later. Had the seawater boiled when Mount Pelée finally exploded? This thought came out of her mouth as she held a steaming washcloth against the side of his face—gumma fear, again, but she thought he simply had a toothache. “Of course it boiled,” he snapped. “Boiled and evaporated. I imagine deposits of salt left behind, dusted with cinders.”

  While he slept—it was a humid eighty-degree Indian summer day in Westfield, and Walton lay on the porch daybed—she read about other things that happened in Martinique: boiling mud, overflowing rivers and a fog of ash, swarms of ants and foot-long centipedes. On May 5, a tidal wave. On May 7, La Soufrière on the island of St. Vincent erupted, killing off the last of the Carib natives, and neighboring Martinique spent a last night reassured that the internal energies of the Caribbean had turned on others. But the next morning, Saint-Pierre’s population burned to death almost instantly in a cloud of “pure temperature.”