Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  That Hugh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  seven friars hugging a nun

  If Grif Smolders were to describe the material out of which his prison was made, he would have to say women. Women—their skin and arms and thighs—composed the walls and ceiling and floorboards of his room. How strangely papered it was, in pale cheek-pink matter flocked with warts and moles; how terrible the tooth-white paint, the chair built of limbs, the bed spate-boned and narrow as a back. He woke in the mornings with a woman’s spittle congealed on his face, with a woman’s icy hand slapped across his mouth, with the words he needed to say wound like a woman’s long hair around his tongue. And he felt sick, as if he’d been drinking urine—and blood, hot, thick and bitter. A woman’s.

  On the shock of seeing her, his wife, she had seemed to scatter in his eyes; she had leapt like a multiplied reflection around the room. With a scraping look, like a key twisting in a lock, she had turned his sanctuary into a cell, but one with a pressing feminine physicality. She was everywhere, his multiple mate, his terrifying harem, and yet he couldn’t lay his hands on her. What did she want from him?

  He knew it couldn’t be anything as straightforward as an explanation or an apology. She did not want to hear a confession of cold feet, an admission of inadequacy, of a failure of nerve, a mistake—a simple, forgivable human error. His sin against her was not venal, or even mortal; he had achieved a new level of transgression, a singular sinning apotheosis, the penance for which he did not want to consider. What would satisfy her? A pound of flesh, his right arm, his foreskin nailed on the wall? Plainly, she was going to make him pay for every mile he had put between them, a toll to cover the cost of the treacherous road he had built between his side of the marriage and hers. The road out.

  He knew that she was going to keep him trapped in this room at the Sun like an insect in a jar, so that she could peck at him. The woman was going to feed on him. Or—not. Possibly she only wanted to keep him off balance, destabilized (that was easy enough), suspended in a solution of uncertainty. Possibly she didn’t know herself what she wanted. Although, God, she had an air of knowing. She had been stunning, radiant with offense, glowing as if newly forged in a furnace before entering his room; her body a weapon, keen and dazzling. She had filled his eyes completely. Blinded, he could see nothing else. Not even after she had gone.

  Not a word. She said nothing while there, only cruised around, studying the room’s contents and the peculiar souvenirs of his long journey. She sauntered casually, comfortably, as if fully dressed, as if encased in one of the usual boned, frilled and wired outfits that women wear. (No bustle was needed, he couldn’t help but notice, no strapped-on horsehair pad, to draw the eye to her gluteal charms.) In her survey she took in the Reverend Bee’s jacket, over which she briefly paused, frowning; then Grif’s mismatched shoes, his gunmetal purse, the silver pen … his journal. This she fingered with an instinctive knowledge of its value. She wanted it, and took it. She would not have taken him, on the other hand, if he had been offered to her on a golden platter—or, in the cuisine of revenge, skewered on a stick. She had good reason, too, for Grif suddenly drew on an unexpected reserve of stupidity by saying, when she laid a hand on his book, “Amy, don’t.”

  Polly, Hattie, Amy … too many women. They thronged the room like her ghostly attendants, chill drafts that had followed her in. She might be cloaked with these invisible others, but he recognized his own wife when he saw her, and now that he was seeing so very much of her, he decided that yes, he wanted her. A mere slip of the tongue, even a slit in his tongue, had caused him to speak duplicitously, to see one and say the other—Amy glossing her, haunting her skin, so white and inscribable, with only that colophon of a bruise on her breast and that circlet of … what was that on her thigh, he thought, that so resembled teeth marks?

  His remark had stopped her as surely as if he had shown her the back of his hand, brought it up viciously against her jaw, slammed her face shut like a drawer. She had been about to speak, perhaps even to lay down the terms of his sentence. At the sight of him—did ever a man look so vulnerable?—a hair-thin crack had appeared in her resolve. Incredibly, she had felt moved to see the pathetic state of the shoes that had taken him so far from her. How they gaped with exhaustion and sadness: mismatched yet presenting two very similar faces. But Grif had healed her weakness and misgiving with a word. Amy? It clanged in her ears. She pressed her lips so tightly together, they might have been made of stone.

  She gripped the journal. The book seemed frozen to her hand, as if it were the missal of a crazed priest (albeit defrocked), and like someone possessed and driven by hectoring inspiration she immediately strode out of the room, her bare feet slapping across the checkered floor. The door clapped shut behind her.

  The silence she left him with was heavy. Suffocating. It seemed to plug every hole and crack in the room, caulking it so thoroughly that Grif couldn’t even hear the young proprietor of the Sun whistling as he swept the hall.

  He stared helplessly at the nut-headed doll that was still slumped in the chair, but her gaze was aimed askance, her tiny black eyes misfiring.

  Roland Avery knew that Grif’s room was not constructed of women, nor was it female-infested, unless you counted a few maternal roaches snug in the wainscotting, or the drift of slut’s wool under the bed, or Norma, the doll. He knew it was not a prison constructed of female flesh and bone because he had driven every nail into it himself and no one had screamed bloody murder. With his chubby boy’s hands he had mixed and poured cement, framed and sided, painted and shingled, decorated the rooms, and installed rain barrels on the roof in case of fire. Out front he had hung a shingle of his own optimistic design, upon which the sun danced with the buoyant and animate spirit of youth.

  Roland had scavenged and bartered for materials, rooting through the dump and hanging around outside the mills and on the dock. He worked, moonlighting at the cooper’s and the undertaker’s, and on long nights, when the moon itself rolled slowly across the sky, he played poker and blackjack in the smoky back room of the Mansion House, with men who took him for a boy but somehow were unable to take him for a fool, or a ride. He was a boy, but one of many parts that, when fit together, made him as round and industrious and capable as a beaver. While other boys were running free in the street, or leaping naked into the lake, or plugging stray cats in the alley with rocks, Roland was busy rolling carpet down his stairs, or scrubbing sheets, or feeding those clever, dodging strays saucers of milk at his back door. He had a back door—he’d installed it himself with his own trusty and trustworthy hands. Not only that, but it was a door through which he could come and go as he pleased. Unlike the liberties enjoyed by the other boys in town, his were absolutely his own, uncompromised and fully paid for.

  If Roland Avery’s hotel had a certain lilt and sway to it, that was most likely because he had raised it on the strength of his own voice. He sang as he went about his work, tunes like “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town” or, when the mood took him, songs from The Pirates of Penzance or The Mikado. He hummed and whistled as he hammered and sawed, mopped and polished. Even the day his voice broke, like the day he fell through the roof, he simply picked up where he had left off, a few octaves, and floors, lower. While most visitors to town preferred the other hotels—the Huron, the Royal, the Mansion House—the odd traveller was drawn irresistibly to The Dancing Sun. Its structural alignment might have been skewed, its colour scheme mismatched and overenthusiastic, but the place had a protective, sheltering charm. A warmth seemed to emanate from its walls, so lovingly constructed, and at times an almost audible tunefulness could be detected, as of rogue notes drifting high and free, detached from whatever lullaby they had been born in. Orphaned, as Roland himself was.

  His father lay encased in concrete in the Trent Canal—a functional tomb that Roland could at least visit if he were so inclined, or if his father, while living, had given him some reason to. As a baby, hi
s mother had kept misplacing him, and then finally she misplaced herself, ending a relationship that might have been pleasant enough had it endured. Roland could claim only a single day of schooling to his credit, but that one day had provided him with sufficient educational ballast to sail forth-rightly into the workaday world. Carpe diem, his teacher, a Mr. H.H. Fudger, had thundered from the front of the one-room schoolhouse in Bidwell Township, and Roland took him at his rhetorical word. Before that very day slipped like water through his fingers, the boy stood and walked out of that dank, sour-smelling room (spilled milk, wet woollen socks) and never looked back. He did seize the day, every day on its arrival; unpacked it like a box lunch and savoured every last radiant crumb. His hotel was his invention, his family, his investment and the theatre where he hosted each of his days, which never failed to unfold with entertainment and interest. He wore all of the hats in the Sun, not only out of frugality but because he genuinely enjoyed being the chambermaid, the desk clerk, the accountant … He had still been working on his books when Avice appeared, shortly after Grif.

  Her reputation preceded her, and after she had gone, it lingered, a cool, disturbing presence. It was as if a black bird had drifted ominously through one of the windows, stolen something indefinable in the Sun’s construction, a glittering filament or thread, then swept out again.

  The woman had not been in town long, and had given out her name as Smolders. Men went to her room in the Mansion House, he had heard, and didn’t necessarily come out satisfied or much inclined to go back in.

  “Have you a guest named Griffith Smolders?” she had demanded at the bar.

  “Yes, Ma’am. And you are—?” His sister, Roland guessed with a determined innocence. This would explain Grif’s arrival, come to rescue his sibling from depravity.

  Answers were not a service she provided, and she was gone up the stairs so swiftly she might have flown, her feet hardly touching down. Anyway, he didn’t continue to think her so sisterly once he discovered her heap of discarded clothing outside Grif’s door, which she must have shed with a breathtakingly immodest efficiency. A fine linen blouse, a black ribbed-silk skirt, silk drawers, lisle stockings, garters, no corset or corset cover, no rustling petticoat, no hat or gloves, but shoes of black kid with decorative steel beads and black bows. Roland folded each garment neatly, studying the make, running his hands over the materials—the beads on the shoes, the pearl buttons on the blouse, the lace that rimmed the high collar, even the yellow celluloid collar stays. He inclined his head toward the door. Not a sound within. He placed the shoes on top of the clothing and slipped back downstairs.

  When she charged past, not long after, he noticed that her skirt was on backwards and that she was carrying a book in her hands. He wondered if he should go back upstairs and check on the health of his guest. He dearly hoped that Mr. Smolders still possessed it, and that his visitor hadn’t taken more than her proper share of it with her. The song he had been singing quietly to himself, “Please Say You Will” by Mr. Scott Joplin, died in his mouth. He blinked his eyes like an animal peering into the dark. Despite his bold entrance into adult country, Roland still felt himself to be a distant and puzzled observer of much that went on there. Often he was amazed by the huge harm that the older and wiser seemed to inflict so avidly upon one another.

  He decided to go upstairs and sweep the hall, which might at least erase her passage through it.

  The book was cursed. She read it back to front, and thereby encountered first the anathema that was scrawled on the back inside cover. Latin, as much else, was no barrier to Avice, and she was able to translate it as easily as moving from one room to the next: Whosoever shall take this book from my household or damage it, let him be anathema maranatha. Let him die the death; let him be frizzled in a pan; the falling sickness and fear shall rage in him and he shall be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen.

  Nicely put, she thought. She wished that she had devised a similar hysterical warning for the books in her own library at home, her copies of Defoe and Thackeray that her sisters were so free with, giving them to their empty-headed friends who used them as props, devices left lying around their sitting rooms to impress prospective mates. A good strong curse this one was, hardy enough to travel undiminished through time and damn all those who dared touch the man’s nasty jottings. Even her, doubly damned.

  She next read Grif’s recorded misadventure at the Cormanys. She examined the hand closely: the aspirant serifs, the unclosed o’s, the dots on the i’s scattered carelessly on the page, as though even through his writing he were trying to escape. She deduced finally that, although it was very cleverly done, it was not his, not the same hand that had signed his marriage certificate, not the same that had penned the speech she had discovered in the pocket of his morning coat and had read about a hundred times before tearing it to bits, the paper trail, the ellipses, that had led her here. Nor did she believe a word of it, although she conceded it might be strategic to pretend otherwise. Only a gloating idiot would record such an incriminating act; it was ridiculous. But then she had married an idiot, a handsome fool. (Very handsome, annoyingly.) Perhaps he believed it. So self-deceived was he that he might not detect in that sly dissimulation of his own hand the mimicry of his character. What an obscene flowering of self it was, too, sprouting suddenly out of pages and pages of evasive, scribbled notes about … bugs, mainly. What, did he think he was some sort of natural scientist, someone completely different from the uneducated clerk she had taken notice of in Kingsmill’s? All he had done was de-feature an antiquity by trying to see his own face in it.

  She wasn’t quite sure yet what to do with the thing, how best to use it. She could feed it to Hugh, force him to eat it page by page, then make him shit it out, deposit it in thick quires back between the worn calfskin covers; a new, updated version complete with its own stinking review. In this revised form she’d be pleased to return it to her husband, a little gift.

  Avice!

  Who said that? It couldn’t have been Grif—he didn’t even know her name, apparently. Nor her conscience, she believed, for she had taken some pains to beat that into submission. She was determined to think what she liked and do what she liked. Hers was a discipline in disorder. There are fallen women, pushed over the edge by unfortunate circumstance, and there are those who willingly jump, plummeting straight into satisfying ruin. Her diary was written on her body. If Grif had been less stunned by her arrival (and less stunned generally), and more observant, he might have read the story of her days and nights with Hugh. Or did he think that all women came with ink black bruises and indentations as deep as the mysterious signages of the Lord? Ah, the visceral love letters that Hugh delivered. For Hugh did love her. He wanted to marry her. Marry her to the wall, at any rate. He wanted to open her up like a wedding present just to see how much love for him she concealed so deviously and quietly inside.

  What should have deeply frightened Avice, and made her wary, only served to make her more incautious. She should have gotten rid of Hugh, and fast, but like the journal she held in her hands—caressing its covers, riffling its pages with her fingertips—she knew he was potentially useful. He was even comparable to the book in a way—an artifact, a survivor from a bawdier and more riotous age—and she could read him as easily. And Hugh did have his tender moments, as when the scavenging nub of his nose snuffled the whole length of her as if she were a field scored with the erratic pathways of the small and hunted.

  Love—he got the worst of it, anyway. She had singed him from toe hair to hairline, given him a wayward waxing, by studying him too closely with a burning candle. (Jeezus woman!) Her affectionate punishments were usually more artful than his—but then it was not beyond her to give him a good swift kick in the backside, sinking the sharp toe of her shoe like an arrowhead into his buttock. He had been vivid with vermin, almost pixilated, and she had subjected him to the cruel indignity of a bath, shearing a crawling, fly-specked layer off him with a stiff bristle brush whi
le he howled and struggled and eventually rose from the tin tub raw-skinned, reborn, streaming water and potency.

  Glistening, slick as a baby, he was not the tempter in the garden, nor even the male bait, but the fruit itself, forbidden and delicious.

  Even her eyes were wet by the time he had taken himself off, back down to his job at the mill or to the tavern, where the other men no longer whistled and winked when they saw him, but stared at him in wonder. He might have left her feeling bluff and proud, but by the time he got to where he was going, he would have that same sense of diminishment, of being robbed, of being somehow less than he had been. He was deeply troubled with the discomfiting notion that soon there would be nothing left of him at all.

  Always as happy to see the back of him as his jouncy, pelted front, Avice would lay in the bed afterwards, reflective, sore in body and mind, mouthing her knuckles softly as a nuzzling colt. She allowed herself then to look ahead, and within—but not too far in either direction. Too far was more alarming even than Hugh.

  She now read some entries from the earlier part of Grif’s stolen journal (how else would he have come by it?) and found herself increasingly taken with the writer’s irregular occupation: