To quote Herrick , he wrote:
I dream’d this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz’d to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way
Enthralled my dainty Lucia .
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv ’ lits were embrac’d
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock , than like a Vine ...
I hoped you’d enjoy the gardening allusions.
If you prefer food :
I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster
Fondly , M. Cope
She liked his handwriting, and she liked having a secret. She was a little stunned at herself: hadn’t she had a secret before? Why would this change so much?
•••
She neatened the Bluebeard room and installed a desk and chair under the window. She told herself that it wasn’t for Lewis, that she might write stories or draw, but she mostly watched birds and the minister’s sunken wife: whenever Brach left, his wife would sit on her back steps and stare straight ahead. Dulcy hid the notebooks deeper in the closet, and thought again about throwing out the medicine box.
It rained, another two inches in four days. It would have been nothing in Westfield or Seattle, but in Livingston the streets turned to soup again, and when the rain finally stopped, the world steamed. When Dulcy visited Samuel at the paper, a rancher with a Biblical beard was in to report on the coming catastrophe: trees tilting down the valley creeks, ice dropping in sheets, mud rolling down ravines. All during the next week, as her dresses grew paler and lighter, she watched spring telescope—yards that had just sported crocuses sliding toward tulips and lilacs, while peonies and rosebuds swelled and took on color. What took a month in Westfield began to happen here in days. When she walked near the milky, turgid river, she saw blue and green speckled duck eggs dotted in the brown reeds and wondered if they would hatch before they floated away. Bats darting on high, a whistle she couldn’t quite hear. A mosquito landed on her arm; the world was full of reasons to think about Lewis. She flicked it with a forefinger and thought she saw a pink mist, herself in midair.
Dulcy was helping Samuel with editing one or two days a week, working on boring, baroque profiles of local businessmen or the weekly social scroll, and he talked so much that she got very little done. She didn’t complain, because some of what he wandered through, what he stored and let dribble out in bits, was key to her existence. Some of this information: Eugenia may have never been married, Irving had survived a Polish pogrom as a child, Durr had killed people in China, Gerry and Hubie had beaten their male inmates but shortened female inmates’ sentences in return for sex; their father had beaten their mother, and they had standards. Samuel said that Lewis had nearly died of malaria twice in the last year, and that the reason that Lewis hadn’t written a great novel was that he’d fall in love, and fall sick, and by the time he was better he’d realize he was no longer in love with either the woman or the story. He’d lose his inspiration and he’d even lose his anger. No love, no rage—what was the point? Lewis only wanted to write about things that were mysterious, and he simply wrote too slowly.
“And what is he writing about now?” asked Dulcy.
“More about bad medicines, I think,” said Samuel, not noticing her relief. “There seems to be an endless supply.” He wanted her to go to Inkster’s execution, but he only wanted someone to stand next to, while he muttered about mobs. She wouldn’t, and he went alone.
The rain began again that evening, and when Samuel showed up on her porch that evening, soaking wet, it only took him an hour to drink everything she had in the house. He said a thousand people had watched; he’d helped Grover with his camera, because Durr had refused to attend. He said he’d witnessed too many executions and preferred to spend the afternoon replacing Margaret’s cracked attic windows.
She wondered what Durr had seen—deserter hangings in Germany? Beheadings in China? “Why would Grover want to film it?”
Samuel squirmed. “I did say to him, ‘Grove, hasn’t it been done? Those Japanese? Topsy?’” Topsy was the name of an elephant Thomas Edison had electrocuted on film. Henning had ranted about it: Edison was the animal. Dulcy watched Samuel smile at his Topsy joke, lose the life-and-death plot of the afternoon, regain it.
The short version: the hangman hadn’t arrived from Dillon, but Gerry, sober, announced that there would be no delay. He blamed the condemned man, Inkster, for a third murder, the girl whose body had toured the state, and he said that therefore Inkster had killed his beloved brother Hubert, who had wrongly been accused of desecrating the girl’s body, and who had thus taken a job with someone who was “criminally idiotic,” and ended up dead himself.
This unified theory of recent disaster left the crowd uneasy, and Gerry hustled Inkster onto the scaffold. He dropped the noose, forgetting the hood—Grover had been very excited (Grover, thought Dulcy, was beyond redemption)—but the crowd had wailed and Bixby had forced Gerry to use the hood. Only a second later, he pulled the lever: no warning, no last words. The trap opened and the body dropped.
And the rope broke. Inkster flopped around on the ground, one leg at an angle, sounds emerging from his crushed throat that made the crowd cover its ears, a cack cack cack like a sandhill crane. His leg bone thrust visibly through his pants, and Gerry bellowed for another rope, plunged down and hauled the man back up the scaffold stairs. Deputy Bixby spoke up and Gerry knocked him down and everyone else was paralyzed and Inkster was strung up again, gurgling and hacking in a pile on the trap door. This time the rope didn’t break.
“I did wish Lewis was here,” said Samuel, “to give me some phrases for this travesty, but he’ll be months.”
“June,” said Dulcy. “I think I remember him saying June.”
“That’s never how it happens. He likes his family more than he admits, and he’ll eat well, and he stays on good terms with all his old mistresses.”
Through the open porch door, there was still just enough light to see a new stream running between the garden beds toward the river. “We’re all going to drown,” said Samuel.
He spent the night wrapped in quilts on her sofa, and when he left at ten, after vomiting coffee and bacon by the gate, Dulcy turned to see Brach gripping the fence, ten feet away.
“Babylon,” he said.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “He stayed because he was ill. You just saw him be sick.”
“Harlot,” he said. “Vile crawling sin bag.”
She took two fast steps and smacked him hard with the kitchen towel she’d just used to wipe Samuel’s face. Which was funny, though the incident left her shaken. She wouldn’t be able to fully explain the story to anyone but Lewis.
•••
On May 26, her birthday morning, she woke up to a room full of beautiful light, poplar leaves shadowed and dancing on the new paint of the empty bedroom walls, the mountains to the south fixed and massive, clouds scudding high above. She was twenty-five.
She pulled herself up and out and bought a rosebush and another grape from the Scotsman on Ninth Street, who gave her a winterburned clematis “as a peace offering.” She almost liked Buchanan now, and bought two roses instead of one. She planted them all along the porch and ended up having dinner at the Elite with Samuel and Margaret and the Macalesters without mentioning the occasion or complaining about the food.
The ground dried, and she finished planting. Her skin sizzled and tightened. They could mummify anything here: Bozeman’s town fathers advertised neighboring Gallatin Valley as “Egypt in America,” talking up the wheat crop, but they had no idea how unflattering the similarities were. All that water in the river and none whatsoever in the air, no more English-style ra
in, no Midwestern waves to cool the eye and skin. From Martha’s porch, you could see just a sliver of Erie. From Dulcy’s porch, she watched the Yellowstone River turn into a lake.
The sun blazed, and she resorted to larger and larger hats in public. In private, she often skipped the hat and wore one of Martha’s comfortably indecent day dresses, and she was wearing the one with lilies of the valley on the last Sunday in May when Margaret showed up with Irving and the Elite’s buggy. Dulcy had forgotten that it was Decoration Day, and that she’d promised Margaret that she’d go along to the graveyard. Frank Mallow’s widow was wearing pink, dropping her annus luctus with a vengeance. “We’ll be quick,” Margaret said.
Dulcy looked down at her brown wrists and fingers: bug bites, scratches. Carrie wouldn’t recognize these hands. Maybe Dulcy could hide herself in plain sight by going entirely native, turn into one of the old Italian ladies at the produce store.
“You’re fine,” said Margaret, brushing pollen off the dress. Dulcy covered up with a black shawl, the wearing of which nearly killed her when they left the buggy’s shade. Margaret didn’t ask anything inane about graves Dulcy should have been visiting, and Dulcy didn’t comment on the brevity of their visit with Mr. Mallow, whose spot had greened over nicely. The cemetery was packed, and when news spread that the river was cresting and that the bridge to McLeod Island was likely to collapse, Irving packed the carriage and took all of them to the rise above Miles Park where a party had formed, flood watching as a sport.
Dulcy spread the shawl on the ground. They were just in time to see the small bridge give way, a faded cracking sound under the ongoing roar, bobbing rails sucked down in liquid that looked like hot chocolate. For once she approved of Grover, who’d propped his camera close to the edge, interested enough not to fret over facing a crowd with his substantial ass.
“Here we are,” said Samuel. “Look what I found on the three o’ clock train.”
She craned around from her spot on the blanket and peered into the sun. “Early, for once,” said Samuel. “He must be sick.”
“I’m not sick,” snapped Lewis, sitting next to her on the grass. “And I said I’d be back.”
“Looks wrecked, doesn’t he?” said Samuel.
Lewis was a little in front, and Dulcy’s view included the side of his face, the tight skin on his right cheekbone, the whorl at the back of his head, the tense neck. She curled her scratched hands under her legs, but Lewis was paying no attention, talking to Margaret while they all watched a fifty-foot length of cottonwood bounce off the far bank and twirl.
“Did you have a good trip, then?” asked Margaret, touching his arm. Margaret could make that kind of easy gesture. “You do look frail, you know.”
“It was an easy trip,” said Lewis. “And please stop saying that. This is quite a show.”
Samuel swatted a mayfly. They watched Bixby charge by in one of the police wagons. James Macalester muttered about automobile accidents, and what a Model A looked like after a driver hit a bull. Dulcy counted the trees that shot by, racing toward the Dakotas, and thought that it was like watching a long earthquake. She stretched her legs, then saw Lewis look down at her ankles. He reached out and brushed an ant off her skirt.
Her blood hummed into her face. She was a horrible actress, but there was nothing she could do. “I have something for you,” he said. “A silly thing, a late birthday present.”
“When was your birthday?” asked Margaret, surprised.
“A while back,” said Dulcy. “A busy day.” She couldn’t remember telling anyone in this town.
“We’re going to a play in Bozeman tonight,” said Samuel. “If anyone would like to come along.”
Lewis finished a bottle of lemonade. “I won’t be climbing back on a train today,” he said.
They watched Grover crouched by the bank, muddying his knees, crumpled and intent behind the massive black camera. “I’m sure he’d love to go,” said Margaret, climbing to her feet. “I’d love to go.”
“I need to go home,” said Dulcy, standing with her. “I was in the middle of a thousand things.”
Lewis pulled himself upright. “I’ll walk you. I’m done for the day.”
Dulcy started off, but by then the Macalesters had repacked their basket and joined them. James asked about Lewis’s trip—pleasant weather in New York, the siblings and father all fine, no compelling scandals or fashions to pass on—and then segued into the Hubie mess, and how Gerry’s wife had telegrammed Eugenia that he’d already abandoned the cure, and they would divorce.
James rarely talked this much, but almost nothing that Dulcy would have wanted to say to Lewis could be said, anyway. When the Macalesters remembered where they lived and turned north on Sixth, Dulcy and Lewis walked in silence as a line of carriages passed, with Nesser the realtor in the sole automobile. He turned, and Lewis stared back while Dulcy waved. When they reached Eighth Street, Brach was on his porch. He only nodded in response to Lewis’s greeting but watched them openly as they reached Dulcy’s gate. Lewis touched his hat. “Have a fine evening, Mrs. Nash. It was good to see you again.”
He walked away, not bothering to acknowledge the gnome a second time. Dulcy made her way to her back porch steps, where she waited to cry. It would take a bit: she could feel a wave behind her eyes, but the rest of her body was ringing. She tried to look up at the sky—it was hard to cry while looking straight up—but her eyes still filled. Brach had begun singing, badly, about God, and as she watched his chickens peck by her wall, she decided to kill them. A tortoiseshell cat watched them from the sunny top of the wall, flicking its tail like a metronome.
Dulcy looked down at her hands and tried to remember what she’d been doing when Margaret had pulled her out of the yard. A chickadee landed near her feet, but when she checked for the cat again, it was looking in the same direction as the chickens, all of them watching the alley. She turned to see Lewis drop into the yard from the wall. He landed, and pulled off his jacket, and walked toward her as Brach continued to sing.
•••
In 1899, Walton had been recovering from a flare in his illness and Copenhagen’s version of treatment when he managed this lecture: “The world is all about touch, Dulce. You don’t believe it now, or you only think about it in terms of food or plants, which is the only way your poor sour grandmother understands the concept, but you will know what I mean by the end. It’s all about touch, even if it’s the temperature of water or wind on your skin, and everything will truly change when you understand another human hand or mouth.”
At some point that night, Lewis said, “Old Ed Nash wasn’t much of a lover, was he?”
“No. He wasn’t.”
“What did he like to do?”
“Nothing,” said Dulcy.
The next afternoon Lewis slipped back to the hotel for clean clothes, and when he reappeared at dusk, he brought two things. Dulcy had not been belabored by gifts from men. Victor had been so consumed by anxiety that an offering became a test, fraught with pitfalls: bright diamond earrings, some careful books, the emerald ring she’d returned. But Lewis’s English nursery catalogue was like a fat bouquet in a secret language, like someone knowing you only liked one very particular kind of berry, or opals, or Turkish perfume. The other gift was a soft blue jumper of Afghan wool, and she wore it as a robe in the middle of the night.
Malaria: an Italian colloquial word (from mala, bad, and aria , air)... A single paroxysm of simple ague may come upon the patientin the midst of good health of it may be preceded by some mailaise. The ague-fit begins with chills proceeding as if from the lower part of the back, and gradually extending until the coldness overtakes the whole body. Tremors of the muscles more or less violent accompany the cold sensations, beginning with the muscles of the lower jaw (chattering of teeth), and extending to the extremities and trunk... Sleep may overtake the patient in the midst of th
e sweating stage and he awakes, not without some feeling of what he has passed through, but on the whole well... The paroxysm is followed by a definite interval in which there is not only no fever, but even a fair degree of bodily comfort and fitness; this is the intermission of the fever. Another paroxysm begins at or near the same hour next day (quotidian ague), which results from a double tertian infection, or the interval may be forty-eight hours (tertian ague), or seventy-two hours (quartan ague)...
—Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition
chapter 18
Lewis Braudel’s Black Book
•
Dulcy didn’t know whether Lewis’s illness was tertian, quotidian, quartan: it sometimes came daily, then not for months. He acted as if malaria were no worse than a cold, but she knew the illness tilted on people despite quinine, and luck ran out. He had two attacks in the first week he was back, but afterward he’d eaten, walked, talked, and he was at her again within hours. Walton would begin to echo in her head, and then Lewis’s clarity and youth and vitality would banish these thoughts. And who knew how long any of them had: in the last month, Dulcy’s forty—year—old butcher had dropped dead of a stroke, and Margaret’s second cousin died a week after her first child was born.
Lewis usually worked during the day at the Elite, but sometimes in the middle of the night he’d leave her bed and she’d find him sitting in the Bluebeard room, scribbling on the graph paper she’d used to draw out her garden. He had meant to continue two long projects from the year before—on immigrants and quack medicines, both topics that could go with him anywhere, but he said he was tired of thinking about illness, and didn’t have the mind for anything long. It was tempting to question Gerry about his abandoned cure, but Lewis didn’t want to think of alcohol any more than he wanted to think of illness. He’d fiddle with other topics, but he didn’t know where they might travel in six months, and he didn’t want to limit the future.
His notebooks—stationary pads, not fancy bound things like Walton’s—were all piled on the floor of his room at the Elite. Walton’s notebooks were buried in the Bluebeard room closet, and the tiny piece of tissue she’s used to mark the doorsill remained untouched.
The Widow Nash: A Novel Page 29