The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  “All right.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “I do,” said the boy, looking downstream.

  “Do you have a problem?” said Lewis. “Can we help you with something?”

  “Well, not really,” said the boy. “I was to get a hook and a rope and bring it back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back to the drowned man.”

  He said drown-ned . Lewis ran.

  •••

  Grover and Samuel had made it another quarter mile before they hit a rock. The barge with the Macalesters and Rex had tried to save both men but managed neither. Samuel had swum to the bank, and they’d stopped him from going back for Grover. Clara and the people in the other barge would now be almost to Livingston, still in ignorance. Dulcy could hear people talking, asking if Grover could swim, but swimming didn’t mean a thing in a world of boulders and branches, pressure and broken bones. Grover had anyway hit his head on a rock when the boat first tipped: everyone on the close barge had seen it, and no one thought he could have survived the blow, even if they’d reached him immediately. “Not a chance,” said Macalester, sitting next to Samuel on a rock, both of them soaking wet. Margaret and Vinca wept on the beach, and the others walked up the lane to wait for Gerry and the firemen.

  “Do they know where Grover is?” Dulcy asked. “Shouldn’t we be walking the shore?”

  “He’s in that hole,” said Macalester, pointing. “In a whirlpool. Every few minutes you’ll see his arm rising.”

  When Gerry Fenoways arrived, he asked—clearly knowing the answer—who had drowned, and then he said that he felt the world was just, and his brother was revenged: he couldn’t have made this happen, but he could be happy that it had. He watched from shore while Bixby and two firemen tied themselves off to the engine wagon and waded to the nearest rock, climbed on top, and pushed down into the pool with grappling pikes and a noose.

  A single arm rose high like a dancer’s, and then the body sank again. The second time they hooked Grover and dropped the noose around one of his arms and his head, and they slapped the horses to pull the body free from the pool. His right temple was dented and bloodless, and his eyes and his mouth were open. Samuel knelt down and tried to close both.

  Dies in Jail: John Kleinmittila Passes Away after Debauch

  ... But why should Park County’s citizens be surprised? Six men and one woman have died or endured brain injury while under Sheriff Fenoways’ care. Kleinmittila was a well-known character, often seen at all hours around the German Beer Hall. His death followed seizures on the jail floor over this last weekend, when even the other inmates, of necessity a heartless and dissolute lot, begged Sheriff Fenoways to call for medical assistance.

  Other incidents: Albert Inkster, executed last month, was rendered an idiot by alcoholic seizures and rumored beatings following his arrest for the stabbing of Lawrence Peck. Mervin Knaab, a former choir director who had also fallen victim to the demon rum, was imprisoned like Kleinmittila, and had treatment denied like Kleinmittila. He has spent the last six months, vacant and ruined, sitting on the porch of the Poor Farm. He is luckier than Myrtle Duncan, arrested following an illegal operation and held on a bond too high for her family to manage, who died of infection after two days of begging for a doctor. Sheriff Fenoways chooses now to prosecute her abortionist, rather than question if his dereliction hastened her death. Finally, Lennart Falk: we provide his full story, as well as a photograph taken before he visited our city, another taken while under Chief Fenoways’ roof, and as he appears now, despite the best medical care possible.

  —The Livingston Enterprise, August 1, 1905

  chapter 20

  The Peach Book of Lost Things

  •

  People drowned all the time in Westfield, mostly health-seekers on Chautauqua Lake and people doing stupid things that involved the Lake Erie breakwall. Boys would leap in and be trapped against the rocks, roll like a pebble in a polishing drum until they had no skin. The men who fished out of Barcelona Harbor had been in the habit of dying, too, especially when Martha and Elam had been young, and cargo and passenger ships had still moved between Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.

  Martha had been full of stories about dead boys before Dulcy’s brothers headed off to school. Philomela had been the world’s most luxuriant stepmother, but Martha never warmed to them, and they reciprocated. Her tales were elliptical, cagey, manipulative: stories for the boys about Chester who had jumped from the mast and hit that thing in the water... There was a girl watching on the dock in every story, which made Dulcy wonder what Martha really had seen. The strangest telling had a ghostly vision appear to the Dock Girl as she walked by the harbor alone one night: Naked, but smooth all over. No parts, nothing left like that, erased with his soul by the rocks.

  That got the Boys, at least until they stopped believing in anything but money.

  •••

  Samuel didn’t write the article immediately. The night of the drowning he tried to jam a butter knife into his chest, a half-hearted but nonetheless anguished effort, and Lewis and Durr took turns sitting with him. The next day they found that Clara, who had banished the town’s women and slammed the hotel room door on Eugenia, had packed through the night to load Grover and their things on an early train. She’d given Irving ten dollars to facilitate this and keep his mouth shut until she left town. She’d headed west, and she talked of Portland.

  Dulcy wouldn’t mourn Grover: she hadn’t liked or trusted him. She had a harder time about the green book. The fat tears rolling down her cheeks that night were for the symbolism of her small idiot loss: did this mean that her old life had disappeared?

  “I’m not going to dignify that with a comment,” said Lewis. He said it sympathetically, naked in bed, wiping her snotty face, being kind even though he’d had a hard time with Samuel, hiding guns and belts. “We’ll buy another book. You can write down everything you remember, and I’ll ask questions, and you’ll remember more.”

  “I think I’m better off just living,” said Dulcy.

  Samuel had been trying to alternate sensationalism with wholesomeness in the Enterprise (hopheads flanking baseball photos, accounts of historic murders above profiles of the town’s lovely unmarried teachers). He’d packed June with brides and stories of Chinese prostitution in Billings, and July with parties and William Clark’s newest sins, but now, in August, he gave up on balance. The world, lately, had been all about sensationalism, anyway. A week after Grover died, he published two stories, one a description of the Poor Farm scam, the other a detailed account of Lennart Falk’s saga and beating and failure to recover. Samuel had bribed the jail warden with a printing job and published a list of two dozen beating victims who’d gone on to spend time at the Poor Farm, with accounts of their damage. He described the female inmates who’d been forced to service the Fenoways brothers, though he had to be roundabout with details.

  “He writes about how Falk is doing now,” Dulcy said. “How would he know?”

  “He contacted the man who retrieved Lennart,” said Lewis, pokerfaced. They were having lunch with Margaret; Dulcy was quite sure Margaret knew they slept together. “Apparently one brother will be coming through soon. Not the one who came before.”

  She left town for a walk with Margaret and the Macalesters on the day of the visit. They made it most of the way up Livingston Peak, and they only gave up when they nearly became part of a landslide of scree. By the time they got back the story had spread: Lewis and Samuel had met Ansel Falk at the Elite, and walked with him down to the police station, where they found Gerry asleep on the floor behind his desk—he was off the wagon again, still celebrating Grover’s death. Bixby was on duty and recoiled, but Ansel Falk greeted him quite pleasantly, thanked him for having tried to defend his brother (Bixby admitted to Samuel that he’d put in only a token protest at the time of L
ennart’s beating, but Lennart had remembered some moment of kindness), and began to slap Gerry across the face, trying to wake him for a fight.

  Gerry, who retched blood between benders now, wouldn’t wake. He lay on the floor, mouth open, tilting his head from side to side like a carp looking for life outside the fishbowl. Ansel Falk tried a few more blows, then gave his own head a little c’ est la vie shake, opened his trousers, and urinated on Gerry’s face, into his open eyes and mouth.

  Falk buttoned up while they listened to Gerry choke. “He is bringing it into his lungs,” Falk said. “Perhaps he’ll die of pneumonia. Please send us a wire if this is the case, and otherwise let him know that one of us will be back. We’re taking our time, not forgetting.”

  Samuel’s life was filled with unprintable tales. Despite his account of Lennart’s beating, and the abuse of Gerry’s prisoners, the city fathers didn’t force the sheriff out of office. He gave up his Poor Farm stake—Eugenia’s part of it hadn’t been made public in the article, which Dulcy thought was cowardly on Samuel’s part—but Gerry still knew more about the mayor and town bankers than these men thought they could endure.

  •••

  Lewis bought a typewriter and took over the desk in the spare bedroom. He enjoyed watching Brach in the yard below, trying to understand the man and his constant noise, and while he worked, Dulcy pulled out the surviving notebooks and lay on the room’s small bed. She worried that the peach family book might make her resent Walton’s failures, and she started with the pink book of verse instead, flipping to the last pages she’d skimmed in Seattle, searching one last time for clues to Victor’s lost fortune.

  He’d been intent, near the end, on what money did to the soul. Dante, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Benjamin Franklin. Money has never made man happy, nor will it. In August, as Walton seasicked his way to Africa, he’d shifted to gold—Love is the only gold; A man who hoards up riches and enjoys them not is like an ass that carris gold and eats thistles—and then to diamonds: Nature has made a pebble and female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

  He’d always loved Hugo. Before the boil me, burn me note at the end of every journal, he reverted back to ominous generalities—Jewels being lost are found againe, this never, / T’is lost but once, and once lost, lost for ever (Marlowe)— and ended with Aeschylus, and the essence of the problem: Inscribe it in the remembering tablets of your mind.

  Perhaps he’d intended to move on to opals and emeralds. Dulcy had never known him to take an interest in a rock once it left the ground, and she wondered again if simply he’d gone to a Cape Town slum and given the money all away. He lacked religion, but not guilt.

  Brach’s refugee cat watched his owner from the half—roof, and Lewis lifted the window to let it in. The cat lay down next to Dulcy and purred, eyes like translucent aquamarines in profile, and she reached for the peach book to kill time and keep the cat close.

  She looked at the last real entry, made in Cape Town on September 22, 1904—The bookbinder’s wife, so beautiful in lapis silk, looked only at my right eye. She knows that it will fall out. Perhaps she could cure me— then toughened up and went to the beginning. She’d expected rants, but it wasn’t that way. A front section was given to short entries for people he’d never see again: the way a dead friend had looked after a cage accident in Ireland, his first sight of miners in Africa, the glimpse of a lonely little boy weeping with a nurse in Paris.

  People Walton loved earned their own pages, with new leaves pasted in when he ran out of space. He wrote about only remembering his mother’s long brown hair. He recorded the Boys’ growth and commented on their brilliance. He described Carrie as an infant, swaddled and wrapped and placed in points of honor like an ornament, a silver dish. He liked listening to her play piano when he was sick; he anticipated her loveliness and her laziness; he raged at her lack of interest in travel and the lack of balls in her beaux.

  Of Philomela: They should have named her Filamenta. There is nothing to her. What am I to do? I tried this joke on her, and she grew angry, then justas suddenly good fun. And later: Of course I am guilty. I have killed her, sooner or later. I have some relief in the notion that she has never really lived, anyway.

  Of his father-in-law Elam: My, how he’ll hate me when he knows what I’ve done to his daughter.

  Of Martha: Last night, watching her tease the girls on the porch about spiders, it finally occurred to me that we would have done much better together than I ever did with the daughter. Of course she lacks my kind of curiosity, but still I had a pleasant rest this afternoon imagining an awakening.

  Every time Walton saw Woolcock after an absence, he was sure that Woolcock’s nose had grown, and he’d pasted in a profile with penciled measurements: he thought his friend suffered from the same disease as J. P. Morgan. Dulcy’s eyes slid over her section, but one entry from the end of 1901 caught her. After the engagement was broken, after she’d hidden in Westfield, she’d returned to the city to sail to Southampton and Africa, as had been planned for months. Walton, still ignorant of the pregnancy, had been enraged—there was no way for him to disentangle his financial ties with Victor, and the situation was wretched and awkward. Walton and Henning met for a drink (and perhaps a ramble, but she’d have to cross—reference with the black book).

  I confessed my fears, not that he should feel sympathy; I said I wished to make her change her mind, but Falk said she should not, she was better off even if she ’s ruined. He maintains that M is an angry man, a violent man who has killed two others in fights, when drunk enough to erupt; after the break with D, he had Falk bring him a girl, and he beat her . He can achieve the mechanics of the act, but he cannot truly enjoy it, and Falk maintains that sooner or later he would lash out at Dulcy in this manner.

  At any rate , it ’s done.

  She left the notebooks out for Lewis to read. A few nights later, he said, “You have to get rid of these, Dulcy. You can’t have your father’s name everywhere in this house. Anyone you hired to clean, anyone with a nose who finds a way in while we’re traveling, will see that name.”

  But she couldn’t cope with the idea of destroying them, or even ripping Walton’s name out, and so the next morning they carried his notebooks and trunk out into the framed-in side of the greenhouse that Durr had vacated. They piled the trunk with pots and bags of soil and plant potions, the cane furniture that Dulcy planned to lounge on someday, but bits of Lewis’s new knowledge leaked out over the next weeks: Would she ever want to go to Constantinople again? Did she want to try making cassis that fall?

  They went to the fair and watched the horse races, and Dulcy, scanning the vegetable entries, felt smug. Lewis, in a period of literally rude good health, worked every day and came to the house every evening. She was sure she’d love him even if she didn’t get to see him climb a wall nightly for her benefit, but there was something wonderful about the way he crested the thing, dropped, and pulled off his collar while he was still walking toward her. Maybe this was the only point left to him keeping a room in the hotel: silliness, abandon. Let us unfetter each other, he said, moving down the buttons on her blouse.

  From the shady bedroom they could see the minister at his kitchen table, staring fixedly at Dulcy’s street-side porch, or sometimes watch from the bed while the couple tweezered leaves off their velvet lawn. “What’s her given name, anyway?”

  Dulcy had no idea. They lay across the bed on their stomachs and watched Brach’s cat as it traveled along the rock wall. “He likes me better than that old shit,” said Dulcy.

  “Of course he does. Did you have one when you were a kid?”

  “I did,” she said. “A gray longhair named Puck and a black cat named Bucca Dhu,” the only animal Walton had ever liked enough to name. “And I had a crow named Pixie and a turtle named Piss-Willie. And spaniels named Pearl and Earl and an Airedale named Maude.”

 
“Jesus,” said Lewis. “What’s a Bucca Dhu?”

  “A storm fairy. Did you have pets?”

  “My father had setters. I had good mutts and a cat. My sisters called it Percival.”

  “What did you call it?”

  He grinned. “Dick.”

  Lewis said he might write about Brach, if only he could bear the idea of inhabiting that brain. He’d thought about writing a series of interconnected short stories, profiles of real people. He showed her a few pages about Durr in Peking, during the Boxer Rebellion, trying to do the right thing, remonstrating fellow soldiers who killed on a whim, loving the food despite the ruin of his intestines. When the German ambassador was assassinated, and the odds of being hacked to bits became overwhelming, he’d stopped caring. Lewis said you could watch Durr’s eyes while he talked about it, and wonder what else they’d seen, and let your mind swivel about. A person could be in Africa or Asia as a tourist, and see awful things, and think they knew how bad it can be, but it was different to be there as a soldier, watching a bunkmate kill someone for amusement, or wondering what it would be like to be torn apart.

  He wrote a little about his father, trying to imagine how his father could have forgotten his world enough to fall in love with his mother. But the problem was opaque: Lewis barely remembered his mother, and this version of his father was unrecognizable. If he’d been a man who’d invited empathy, ever professed to have an imagination or shown love, something might have been possible. “I don’t want to write about an idea,” he snapped. “I’d wind up with something completely symbolic and idiotic. And I can’t imagine being someone like him.”

  •••

  On a rainy morning in early September, Eugenia Knox came down to the lobby in black and told Irina that her husband was dying, and that Irina should tell Gerry she’d return as soon as possible. She boarded a train for Utah. The ladies felt a certain relief. “Well, finally ,” said Vinca. “Maybe she’ll be fun again when she gets back.”