When I finally arrived, the Sisters Egan were eating a late supper. Hester threw a quilt over me fast, like dousing a fire, and Emmaline held a jelly jar of whiskey to my lips.
“You’re blue,” Emmaline said.
“I am,” I said. She could see my sadness. It felt so good to be known so well. I began to cry.
Emmaline dabbed the tears on my cheeks with the cuff of her sleeve. She wiped my nose with her hankie. And Hester said, “She means your color. Your skin is blue.” She covered me with another quilt, and led me to the stove.
They stayed up with me as I slept. They kept touching my head, hoping for warmth. I would wake every time to their whispers. “Feels a smidge warmer to me,” I heard Emmaline say. Then Hester would test my temperature with the back of her hand at my cheek. “Wouldn’t you say so?” Emmaline said. But Hester wouldn’t. She’d offer no hope.
“We’ll know he’s better when we stop worrying,” Hester said.
Hester fixed a pot of a chilblain’s cure, to rub on my red, frozen feet. She recited the recipe, like reading a poem or singing a lyric, and I fell back to sleep to the sound of it—“oil of sweet almonds, lanoline, beeswax, Venice turpentine.”
But in the morning I had to leave my place by the fire. Detectives had been by the day before—in my letters to Cecily’s ghost, I’d spoken of the Sisters Egan. The detectives had been rude. They’d made Emmaline so sick, she’d spent the day in bed. We feared the detectives would be back, again and again, and they did return a few more times. But I was hiding within the Emerald Cathedral. I was able to burrow in like a pack rat, to build a nest of my own, at the risk of sending the whole shrine crumbling by shifting, unknotting, shoving. I hammered and dismantled. I lived in the narrow quarters of a monk. I mined my chamber with booby traps. If someone were to try to get in uninvited, they might be crucified, a nail in a foot, a hook in a hand. They might be knocked in the head with a hot-water bottle filled with cement. They might be kicked in the groin with a steel-tipped boot on a spring.
I learned how to worm in and out without tripping any of my wires. It became instinct, my wriggling around the triggers.
Mr. Crowe once gave me a book about wolf boys; and when I’d been eight or nine, whenever I’d had a wish coming (from blowing a fallen eyelash off my fingertip or from seeing a newborn calf), I’d begged fate that I’d be snatched from the orphanage by wild dogs and kept in a cave in the country. Some nights in my bed, when I’d closed my eyes tight, I’d felt myself go lupine, my skin tingling with hairs sprouting on my cheeks. I had run my tongue over my teeth, certain the edges were sharper than before.
I lived now like the wolf boy I’d longed to be, leaving the barn only to squat in the dry creek and to piss in the patch of Russian thistle. The neighbors cooked, and they left their pots and casseroles at the foot of the shrine, like offerings to the beast. I gorged myself. I licked the pots clean and sucked the marrow from the bones. I worried my pants had shrunk, but they hadn’t been washed for days. They didn’t fit, because I was growing fat. I imagined myself getting too fat to fit through my tunnel.
Instead of leaving food at the door, Eulalie, the librarian, brought books. She brought novels at first, but I sent them back out with a note stuck in, requesting texts on spiritualism. She brought me back a stack of ghost stories, and I returned those unread too. The facts and fallacies of spiritualism, please, I wrote in my next note to her.
She brought me The Spirit World Unmasked and Spiritualism and Nervous Derangement. I read each one three times, by the light of a lantern, writing page numbers on my hand and observations on my cuffs and sleeves. I wrote names on my trousers. Madame Blavatsky, Eusapia Palladino, Annie Eva Fay.
I didn’t quite know at first what I was looking for. But I came to realize I wanted to learn all the tricks, so I could convince myself I’d not been tricked at all. I’d not been fooled by fishing line, by a hankie made to float and wave farewell, by a self-squeezing accordion playing a sad polka behind a closet door. I read the books so I could dismiss their explanations.
And now that the letters from Cecily had stopped, I considered her presence in everything else around me. In my hovel, I had much time to watch the things that didn’t move. I lay back on my mattress situated in the shell of a broken grand piano, and studied the rusty spigot, waiting for a tear to drop. I caught sight of her step in a peg leg, the rise and fall of her breath in the breasts of a corset form.
• • •
I LIVED IN the Emerald Cathedral for two weeks, until the manhunt was called off with little fanfare. I was no threat, it seemed. There was no longer any warrant for my arrest. Wakefield, always the gentleman, would not have me hanged after all.
I liked to think he was afraid of me, that he was scared of ghosts and of retribution. He could’ve killed me a thousand times over, but he feared what I’d do when I was dead. Once I was a phantom, there’d be no end to the grief I could give him.
Though I moved back into the house, I rarely left the farm. I became a deadbeat nephew, not even lifting my head from my book to eat. I’d sit at the kitchen table, a book in one hand, a fork in the other, to the gentle annoyance of the sisters.
Hester said, “Who knew this rabid tomcat would cook up so good?”
Emmaline said, “Ferret, don’t you love it with the mouse droppings baked right in with the rat gizzards?”
“Mm-hm,” I said.
Eulalie tracked down books for me, and pamphlets and articles, borrowing them from other libraries and ordering them from publishers. And August sent some from his bookshop, along with long florid letters, mostly in defense of his own psychic, Mrs. Bertha Long, who helped him dig up memories of the lives he led before he was born. His favorite self was a spirit guide, a girl-boy who grew up to be a woman-man, whose kiss could promise a warrior victory.
August also sent a clipping—Wakefield to Marry, the headline read. It was to be a long engagement of nearly two years, the article said; the wedding was scheduled for December 31, 1900. On the night the century turned, Pearl would become the third Mrs. Wakefield. And I prayed she became the first Mrs. Wakefield to live.
Somehow, I wasn’t shocked by the news. I did worry about Pearl, but I was pleased for Doxie. Pearl would be a good mother.
What somehow struck my heart harder was news of August’s affection for a wounded soldier of the First Nebraska Regiment. Despite peace treaties and cease-fires, our wars still raged. A man named Maddox had been shot in the lungs by insurgents in Manila, and he returned to Omaha, and lived in a boardinghouse around the corner from August’s shop. He visited the shop every day to read about the war he’d just fought. And he studied maps of the places he’d been, and books about the Philippines.
Stuck into the pages of a book August sent—The Witchcraft of the Planchette—was a letter he’d written me about his new friend, and how the friend had no family, and how this friend’s best girl from before the war had married another. So August gave him a job in the shop. And the soldier lived there now, in a room in the basement. He looks like how an artist might illustrate a soldier in a children’s book, August wrote, innocent and plucky, with apple’d cheeks and little dimples when he smiles, and hair that won’t stay combed. A forelock, a rooster’s tail, a cowlick. But the lad had seen some horrors, it seemed, and on the nights he couldn’t sleep, he wandered up the stairs to August’s apartment. August owned a penny-in-the-slot phonograph machine he’d bought from the back room of a saloon; its cylinders didn’t play music, they played actors performing lewd limericks and dirty prayers, and the soldier never tired of its jokes about bedsprings in whorehouses and old ministers defiled. And then he does sleep, the darling boy, but I don’t. I sit up the whole night watching him. I’ve never seen anyone so at ease as this soldier when he sleeps in my bed.
And from then on, August stopped begging me to return. I’m happy about your new friend, I wrote, but if you
r new friend ever gets unfriendly, and breaks your heart, I’ll become unfriendly too, and he’ll wish he’d never left Manila.
And August wrote, Don’t worry your pretty head. You were, and will always be, the only one who can break my heart.
Spring and Summer
1899
46.
EULALIE BROUGHT ME Phantasms of the Living and The Death-Blow to Spiritualism and The Weakness of Muscle-Reading, but only after she’d read them herself. When the library closed for the day, she would bring me the books and we’d have our discussion. Together, we became scholars of flimflam.
As winter thawed away in April, Eulalie and I sat on the back porch drinking the dandelion wine she’d jugged the summer before. After analyzing whether The Report of the Akrakoff Commission on the Occult proved skeptical enough, I went into the house for the letters I’d received from Cecily’s ghost. I hadn’t looked at them for weeks. As I explained to Eulalie how I’d fallen victim, how convincing the fraud had been, as I ran my fingertip along the slopes and slashes of Cecily’s handwriting, I felt myself falling once again. I believed. Here were her words before me, familiar and bewildering. And beautiful, despite her poor penmanship. The crosses of Cecily’s t’s had never, ever pierced the t’s at all. They had scattered around the words, like arrows on the lawn of an archery range.
Eulalie ran the tip of her pinky along the words too, commenting on the sharp points of the m’s and n’s, the curls of the p’s and q’s.
I took Eulalie’s hand in mine, twining my fingers with hers.
I asked her to marry me. I was surprised by the question myself.
When she didn’t answer, I asked again.
“I heard you the first time,” she said.
“Then why won’t you answer me?” I said.
“Because for all your fussing,” she said, taking her hand away, “you still believe in ghosts.” She took a sip of wine.
It was true. For all I knew, it was Cecily’s ghost who’d put the idea of marriage into my head. “I don’t,” I lied. “I have no ghosts.” I shrugged. “I don’t.”
“Has this been a courtship?” she said.
“Has what been?”
“Exactly,” she said.
“Say again?” I said.
“This,” she said. She lifted her glass of wine, then gestured widely—at the porch, at the books on the table, at the landscape in front of us—this, has this been a courtship, as if to imply deception rested everywhere around us.
“Yes,” I said. “Hasn’t it?”
“I certainly hope not,” she said. “You haven’t asked me anything at all about myself. For all you know, I may be betrothed already.”
“Are you?”
“No,” she said.
“This is a very frustrating conversation,” I said.
“It’s not a conversation,” she said.
We drank our drinks, and rocked in our rocking chairs.
After a silence heavy with the sense that someone should be speaking, Eulalie said, “Ask me again.”
“Will you marry me?” I said.
“I don’t mean ask me now,” she said, with a gust of exasperation. “Because now my answer is no. But when you ask me again, some other time, I’ll say yes.”
“When will that be?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe never. How will I know until you ask me at the right time?”
“Maybe I’ll never ask again,” I said.
“Oh, I’ll be devastated with regret,” she said, grabbing at her heart sarcastically. We then rocked and stewed in silence.
And this was how things would be between us. I’m not sure I ever did propose to Eulalie again, but somehow we married only a month or so later.
Eulalie quit her job at the library and moved to the farm in spring, and like a goddess she brought the land to life. She was a professor of everything. She knew, from books, the technology of seeds and the secrets of cultivation. She studied soils and root systems. She consulted almanacs and meteorologists, but learned the most from farmers’ wives who, unlike their husbands, weren’t afraid of confessing their mistakes. She kept good accounts, managed our money.
Myself, I couldn’t even keep a vegetable garden. The watermelons burst before I picked them from the vine. The sweet corn grew tart and tasteless. The radishes were woody to the tooth and the green beans freckled with rust.
So I tended to the Emerald Cathedral instead. It did a swift business itself that summer, drawing pilgrims and the downtrodden from miles and miles around. People hung framed photographs from all the cathedral’s stray hooks and points, from the legs of chairs and the handles of skillets. These were pictures of the pilgrims’ dead, old and young, and strung among them were wreaths of twisted vine and dried roses tied round with ribbon. These people left donations in a coffee can in exchange for votives to burn.
I became the shrine’s sole custodian and priest, but I no longer prophesied or spoke on behalf of the dead. If people came seeking comfort or healing, I only listened. August sent me tins of tea made from the petals and thorns he grew in a greenhouse on the roof of his father’s building. I dragged an old tufted sofa of matted-down velvet into the barn, and a table, and I would sit with visitors, in the shadow of the leaning shrine, and we would drink the tea. I would tell them about the history of the Emerald Cathedral, and how it had saved many lives already, not the least of which was my own. The mystery and magic of it had given people faith, and the faith had healed wounds and stitched broken hearts. For many of us, the cathedral salvaged a childhood sense of wonder.
I would tell them they should trust in their belief in ghosts.
With the farm under Eulalie’s management and Hester’s oversight, Emmaline and I had the leisure time to become professional saints. We would take the donations we collected in the coffee can and dole them out as we saw fit. We weren’t inclined to be anonymous. We announced our intentions to newspaper editors, dressed in our best, and posed for pictures as we distributed our wealth. With our money, we afforded legitimate cures for the sickly, we shoed the shoeless, we shingled the poorhouse, we filled the library with storybooks. And we were patrons of the arts. At the Bonnevilla Opera House, our money electrified the old gas chandelier. Emmaline and me, we got called angels daily.
Emmaline sewed a new suit for Oscar, from the scarecrow’s pajamas, and we found him a new golf cap in a shop that sold clothes for dapper babies. We tore the pages from a book on papier-mâché and used the paper to paste and patch his broken head. We oiled his hinges and spit-polished his eyes. I then performed in hospitals and orphanages, with a repertoire of mild and inoffensive comedy. These were the most grateful audiences I’d ever encountered. I memorized their laughter.
47.
IN A FIELD IN LATE AUGUST, a carnival parked. They strung up a tightrope for the high-wire artists, and flew flags, and raced horses with pink plumes in their manes. Girls in short ballet skirts of tulle did handstands on the saddles, and clowns conducted and wrangled trained birds that circled and dove in the sky. The birds seemed tethered to the clowns’ wrists with strings. But most of the amusement was confined to the shadows. A circus barker in a candy-cane vest would lift a flap, and if you did so much as peek into the dark of the tent, you then likely stepped in to see more.
The folks that lurked there on those slapdash stages—a woman scantily clad and wrapped in a python, a skeletal man napping on a bed of nails, a contortionist, a fire-eater, a cancan dancer, and others—spent a great deal of time at the Emerald Cathedral during their week in Bonnevilla. They came seeking wisdom and courage. They had questions about love. They came late in the night after the carnival closed, and early in the morning before it opened again, still in costume and in makeup streaked from the sawdust that stirred in their tents.
They instantly felt like old friends, and it was good to be amon
g them. From the books about spiritualists, I’d learned about tea leaves and cranioscopy. Though I didn’t claim to be an interpreter of anything cryptic, I did tell these visitors what a seer might see. They seemed, by nature of their perversity, more likely to have a healthier skepticism than my usual pilgrims. So I would shuffle the dregs of their tea, seeking symbols in how the wet leaves clotted. If I was a reader of leaves I might see a bat there, I might say, pointing my pinky at the line of the wings. And maybe here I’d see a teacup.
When a tattooed lady sat with me one afternoon, in the last days of the carnival’s stay, I thought of Doxie’s real father. Or, at least, I thought of the man that Cecily had described to me. His name had been Mercury, and he’d been a showman too, and had tried to convince Cecily to do as this woman had—to get covered in ink from forehead to foot. Inclined toward coincidence, I asked the woman her tattooist’s name.
“Luther,” she said. Most of her skin was hidden by her high-collared shirtwaist and her long skirt. The pink tentacle of an octopus twisted up from the lace of her collar and snaked around her jawline. On the back of one hand was an anatomist’s sketch of the bone and sinew that would be under the skin. On her palm was a patch of lucky clover, in reference to her name.
Clover tugged at her skirt and stuck out her leg, but revealed none of the tattoos beneath her white stocking. “Luther was an old sailor,” she said. “When Luther had a leg, he had a tattoo of a pirate ship on it.” She tapped at her calf. “So when he lost the leg, and got the wooden one, he had somebody carve the same ship in.”
I looked at the leaves in the cup, studying how they’d snaked into a perfect serpent. Or a river. Or the letter S.
I showed it to Clover. “The letter S mean anything to you?” I asked.
She shrugged one shoulder and squinted one eye to think. “I have an uncle named Stanley,” she said, with little faith.
The Swan Gondola Page 40