by Terry Griggs
Haveril In Suffolk, January the 6th: 1643 Wee broke down about one hundred superstitious pictures and seven Fryars huging a Nunn and the picture of God & Christ and Divers others very superstitious and two hundred had been broke down before I came. Wee toke away two popish Inscriptions with Ora: pro: Nobis & wee beat down a great stoneing Cross on the Top of the Church.
At St. Gregory’s, January 9th Wee broke down Ten Mighty great Angels in Glass and about seventy small ones.
Feb: 3rd Wee were at the Lady Braces House & in her Chapel there was a picture of God the Father of the Trinity of Christ & the Holy Ghost the cloven Tongues which wee ordered to be taken down & the Lady promised to do it.
The iconoclast’s approach was remarkably businesslike for a zealot, and Avice felt she would do well to emulate it. She did not want her own potential sources of comprehension, sympathy, tolerance or pity to undermine her intentions—but rage was such a surprisingly difficult and costly emotion to keep stoked. She had to keep feeding it and feeding it. Loss of conviction was inevitable, fury burned itself out. Her aim had been so pure, so true, and yet somehow she had not been prepared for the fact of him. Theirs had not been the confrontation she had long imagined. She had meant to strike a blow with her guise of wantonness; she had meant to be seen as ruined. His most grievous fault. She had wanted him to recognize the shade of his own death in her pallor.
She had only to snap her fingers and Hugh would smash him to pieces like a pile of sticks, and, conveniently, be the one to pay for it. Grif had certainly stood there as secure as a pile of sticks, trembling and uncertain. Her very appearance before him should have been enough tinder to ignite him. He should have been consumed with contrition, widowing her on the spot. But no. Instead he had called her … Amy. That name had whistled straight through her like a bullet, and might even have grazed her heart. She knew it was a mistake, that he hadn’t taken her for someone else; but how do you flash your identity in a man’s face and afflict him with the revelation of your wronged self when you are nothing, and told so—only part of some female jumble in his mind? Her nakedness, worn as boldly as armour, had been revealed to her then as only nakedness, pitiful and imperfect, her threadbare suit of humiliation. Even her exit from the room had been disgraceful, ungainly, for the damned floor seemed to tilt and she had to take the door on the run, her bare arse waggling like a clown’s cheeks.
So. She resolved to stick to her original vow, cleave to it with the closeness of a religious infatuate. Let him die the death. Let him be frizzled in a pan. He shall be broken on the wheel and hanged. The Lady promised to do it. Amen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
rue
What Grif had thought was only a word, a compact summary of his state of mind, his woeful, melancholy funk, he now consumed in liquid form. At The Dancing Sun he imbibed a quotidian cup of regret, a daily measure of remorse to wash down his daily bread. This, naturally, was not how Roland Avery saw it, as each morning he carried to Grif a cup of pale greenish tea, an astringent infusion, that sluiced over the edge of the Spode cup and into a Wedgwood saucer. Spilled over as did “Buffalo Gals” from the boy’s own plump lips. Rue was indicated for nervous headache, giddiness, spasms, palpitations, earache and jail fever. In the past it was also used in rituals of purification. Priests at one time sprinkled holy water from brushes made of rue before the celebration of High Mass. As an infusion it made a sharp, cleansing drink, as spiritually medicinal at least as confession. And, not incidentally, it was said to be very handy for warding off witches.
Roland gave his guest’s door a brisk one-knuckle salute, then entered the room without waiting for an invitation, proving that a door is just a door after all, and nothing to get hysterical about and hide behind for the rest of your life.
“Morning, Mr. Smolders. Beautiful day.” Roland walked over to the bed and offered Grif the cup. “‘There’s rue for you’ …” The herb of repentance and grace.
“Mr. Avery,” said Grif, “I cannot.”
“It’s very good for you. The name comes from the Greek reuo, to set free.”
“I don’t trust Greeks.”
“They say it gives you second sight.”
Grif would have been grateful for first sight, a cure for opacity and dim-wittedness. He shook his head. “Too bitter. The stuff tastes terrible.”
“It will protect you from serpents, scorpions, spiders, bees and wasps.”
“I haven’t encountered too many serpents in your hotel. Or scorpions.”
“And fleas.”
“Those I have encountered.” Grif sat up, baring a shoulder, and revealed five flea bites, red as buds, dotted across it. He regarded his hovering landlord, dapper in his double-breasted suit, his glossy black hair parted in the middle and slicked down. “Which goes to show that your medicine doesn’t work at all.”
He was well aware that Roland’s doctoring was working, though, for what this capable youngster brought him every day was really a cup of common sense, every sip a curative for a fevered imagination, a brain that sizzled in his head, cooking up a seven-course meal of doom and disaster, none of which he had so far been served. After all, the law had not come to clamp him in irons or string him up. Nor had his wife returned to bait or torment him, or simply to finish him off. On the contrary, she seemed to have forgotten him.
“Don’t scratch them.”
“I can’t help it.”
That was the problem. She had bitten him. Her poison was in him, and how could he not worry it and make it worse.
“They say it will drive away nightmares.”
Grif held his hand out for the cup. “Sold,” he said.
He couldn’t understand why Roland had taken a liking to him, why he bothered. A few other guests had signed in, which had to be keeping the boy busy enough, but he still brought Grif this godawful tea every morning. He made him meals besides, and let him do odd jobs around the hotel in return for his room and board. Some of those jobs were more odd than others. Carrying down the slop pails and chamber pots in the morning, Grif had the opportunity to ponder the correlation between a man and his excrement, his signature in the pot. It was a subject that invariably brought to mind his wife’s satellite, her pet man-ling, the hairy vassal who trundled by her side. Standing in the bar, hard by the frame of the front window, motionless as a curtain and peering out, he had watched them parading up and down the street. Where had she found him? In what backhouse, workhouse, asylum? You had only to look at the creature to tell he was not in his right mind. Only the day before, having been handed a broom and gently shoved out the door, Grif had been toiling away on the stoop when they walked past. Avice had appeared suddenly, out of nowhere (a style of arrival she seemed particularly skilled at), and with her, a few steps behind, came her hulking companion. Her Caliban, her leering Rumpelstiltskin. Grif had been forced to step back abruptly or she would have marched right overtop of him, her face perfectly composed, head averted, his existence not an issue worth considering—or so her manner implied. Her stumpy friend caught Grif’s eye and grinned, and flicked a cigar butt at him. It hit his shirt front and bounced off, soiling it with an ashy smudge, a demon’s thumbprint.
This incident Grif recognized as being colder than a snub, and more troubling than an insult or a challenge. He was sure it didn’t signal his dismissal or indicate that she was finally done with him. Basically, it told him that he was still in trouble, submerged in it about as far as he had imagined, and that there was no escape. He knew, insofar as he knew anything, that if he were to flee to another town, or another country, or even halfway around the world, she would be there at his back, or hanging menacingly over him, but never at his side.
He drank his rue.
Roland was running his hand over the wallpaper, humming to himself, completely liking the way one pattern barked up against another.
“She’s not my sister,” Grif said.
“No,” Roland replied, “she’s everyone’s sister.”
; At this, Grif was surprised to experience an unexpected stab of loyalty. He felt he should defend her, as he felt he should protect her from that orange-haired gnome she’d picked up. That fellow’s eyebrows met in the middle—a sure sign of simpletonism.
“Speaking of sisters,” Roland said, “there have been some unusual happenings on one of the farms outside of town.”
Very carefully, Grif replaced the cup in the saucer.
“What do you make of it? One night the eldest son in the family was discovered tied up in the barn—not a moment too soon either, for it had been set on fire. And two other family members, daughters, were missing, along with a wagon and the brother’s horse.”
“Two daughters, you say?”
“I wonder what his crime was.”
“His crime? It was a game.”
“Attempted murder? Some game. But that’s not all. There was a guest staying with the family when this happened, a young man who also went missing.”
“They think he did it.”
“And abducted the daughters. Obviously. Although, who knows, maybe they abducted him—there were two of them.”
“The police are looking for him.”
“I don’t think they even believe in his existence. Old Wilkin, our town copper, was here asking questions. Not the most reliable crew out there, I’ve heard.”
“What does he say, the one who was tied up, the brother?”
“Nothing. Refuses to speak. Anyway”—Roland smiled—“you don’t fit the description Wilkin gave. I don’t think so, that’s what I told him.”
Grif stared into his empty teacup, so relieved he could have refilled it with tears. But then, “No one missed the baby. Did they say?”
“What’s that?”
“Wait a minute.” He sat up straighter, looked around the room. “That doll is gone, the one that was on the chair. What happened to it?”
“Norma? I’m afraid she moved into Room 4 with that travelling salesman from Sprack’s Flypaper Company.”
“The guy with diarrhea? This is hard to bear, Mr. Avery. Why do I have this effect on women?”
“Not on some of the ladies in town, I bet, if you’d only give them a chance. Why don’t you go out for a while and look around. No one will bother you. We only have old Wilkin to keep an eye on things, and he’s also the truant officer, the dog catcher, the street commissioner and the fire warden. The law is stretched so thin, you can step right through it without even noticing, or being noticed.”
It was possible, Grif reasoned, that he was wrong about Avice. (Wasn’t he usually?) She could be done with him for good. This might be the single, artless point she’d been trying to make with her new friend and her withdrawal from their marital contest. If only he could do the same. Roland’s exorcising libation might yet sweep her out of his own head, purify it like a chapel.
“All right,” he said, handing the cup and saucer back to his young friend. “I will.”
During the time that Grif had spent holed up in his room, he had formed an aural acquaintance with the town that he presently stepped into with all his senses open. During the night he had often enough listened to rowdies cursing beneath his window, to fights and scuffles, drunks bellowing or retching, occasionally a woman’s rough and bawdy cackle. He heard snags of conversation, more intriguing for floating up to him incomplete, out of context, and more revealing as such. His rod … a straw in a cow’s nostril … d’ye hear, Mrs. Coat poisoned her husband … touched with the slime of animalism … Julius Caesar with a Scots accent? … it’s alive, I say … so when her eyebrows vanished, she pasted on black felt strips … the divine spark … it’s a question of affinity. In the early morning he wakened to the sounds of the town cows lowing, ready to be milked, a rooster crowing, a horse pounding down the street, the leather of its harness creaking. Once he’d heard the clamour of an escaped team, people shouting and running, then a tremendous crash, the noise of glass exploding as the team went through a storefront window.
Outside now at midday, he wasn’t sure if even this had prepared him for the vigour of the place, its full sensuous immediacy, the medley fleshed out. It was no longer the silent and empty street he had at first walked down, or the same underpopulated one he had dipped his toe into the other morning when Avice had swept by with her nose in the air and her animal at her heels. This day the street was thronging with people, shopping, milling around, lounging, gossiping, going about their business. Up near the Merchant’s Bank a crowd had gathered, some spectators hooting, others shouting encouragements or disparagements, while a bald man wrestled with a bull.
Grif struck out in the opposite direction, leaping aside as a shower of water shot out of the open doorway of the Bargain House, followed shortly by the tin bucket itself which bounced clanging into the street. He saw a man with a jerk to his head, and another one wearing a Turkish fez. Breathing more confidently, he trailed after a tendril of lavender fragrance coiling through the air, and found himself walking directly behind a woman who had a mayfly riding on her back, perched on the narrow isthmus of her shoulder blade that stretched against the cotton cloth of her dress. Here was an insect that Ned had described as being “uncommonly delicate and graceful.” In the height of their season, abundant in their brief lives, mayflies papered whole walls, or lay thick as carpet on streets and walks; you could slip on them and break your neck. As Grif reached out to pluck this one off, to hold it by its fragile, transparent wings, to watch its tail twist and its legs writhe before letting it go, he sensed the woman’s back stiffen. She quickened her pace, and soon both she and her passenger had moved far ahead of him. He then stopped to look at a petrified foot that was on display in the window of Carruthers’ Drugs. A wicker pram was parked beside the store, and he glanced into its blue velvet interior to tip a wink to its occupant and saw that it was a crow, dressed in a bonnet and christening gown.
“His name is Handsome,” said a voice at his side.
Grif turned to a girl of about eleven, who was wearing a white dress, a straw hat, black stockings and shoes. With her composed expression and perfect pale skin, she reminded him of a statue, a particular one in fact, that had been in the church of his boyhood, the church he had polished with his hide.
“His parents were shot.” She shuddered.
“That’s dreadful,” Grif said. “He is very well named.”
“Are you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I have two pet muskrats at home, Muriel and Fern, a beaver named Mr. Woods, an albino deer—that’s Ambrose—and a freak calf that looks like an owl. It was born with its nostrils beneath its jaws. I haven’t decided what to call it.”
“You could exhibit your animals and make some money.”
“I could. Do you know that Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in a coffin and has a python for a footstool?”
“I’ve heard that, yes. An unusual woman.”
“Women are.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more.”
“Can you say this as fast as me? Try it, it’s not easy. ‘A canner exceedingly canny one morning remarked to his granny a canner can can anything that he can but a canner can’t can a can can he?’”
“No,” Grif laughed, “I can’t.”
“You shouldn’t drink, then. It’s pure wickedness.”
“But I don’t. Not like that fellow over there, anyway.” Grif indicated a man near them, propped up against a post, sleeping it off.
“Goodbye, then.” She gripped the handle of the pram and began moving off.
“Are you well named?” he asked after her.
“Yes. My name is Rae.” She kept going. “That’s short for Raewyn.”
“Good day, Miss Rae. Goodbye, Handsome.”
At about ten feet away she called back over her shoulder, “I’d watch out for that person who is following you.”
Grif didn’t turn to look. Nor did he try to feign indifference by sliding his hands casually into his pockets and continuing his nonch
alant progress down the walk. What he did was bolt. He sprinted straight across the street through a moil of dust raised by a passing buggy. He skimmed by the undertaker’s (crossed himself—habit), ran by Boyter’s Shoe Repair—two men inside playing checkers paused to watch him fly past—then scurried down a narrow alley between the Post Office and the Royal Hotel that led to the dock. Given this, it might have seemed that his goal was to hurl himself into the lake, to bury himself in its depths, to drown himself once and for all; or, if he could only stretch the tale of his life taller, to swim all the way to the States. He didn’t know what he was doing, outside of reacting instinctively. Balanced on the very edge of the dock, he searched around anxiously for some clue, some salvation that might rise out of the water itself. All he saw were thick, clotted patches of sawdust floating on its surface and, further out, log booms that stretched far into the channel. Some boys were streaking across them, chased by a man who was shaking his fist at them and wielding a grappling hook.
Not a sound behind him. No footsteps approaching, however stealthily. The girl had been mistaken or teasing: no one was following him. As Roland had declared, it was a beautiful morning, and Grif could see that it was free of menace. The lake was calm, the air pure, every stone and blade of grass articulated with a clear wash of sunlight. It was all of a piece, every sight and sound and smell woven together in a way that, for once, Grif, by the scrawl of his presence, did not feel he was ruining.
He had to stop running, he thought. He had to make some sort of peace with Avice, if only in his own mind. He wanted her, yes; he didn’t want her, also yes. But his budding affection for this town was unequivocal. He wondered, can you marry a place? What he should do was adopt Roland and settle here. Or more realistically, Roland should adopt him, and then Grif would have the singular advantage of a thirteen-year-old father.
He stared at the floating islands of sawdust—what the fish ate for breakfast, or what they choked on. It was a sight that shouldn’t make a man hungry, but he immediately saw himself with knife and fork in hand, tucking into a big greasy platter of bacon and eggs and fried bread. He glanced up, realizing that he was being observed. A man with a bushy black beard was standing on the deck of a sidewheeler moored nearby, studying him. The boat Grif recognized. It was the Northern Belle, the same he had seen while idling on the dock in Owen Sound, shortly before Amy shanghaied him. The man, apparently the captain, had an air of recognizing him as well, giving him a shrewd look that gradually turned into one of alarm as his eyes focused on something just beyond Grif, some darkness condensing in the background. A black form taking shape.