by Jeffrey Lent
She spoke his name.
If he heard her there was no indication.
Her raised hand was burning. Just beyond Blood were the kegs of powder and shot he’d hauled up. She had spied this place before. She calculated her throw.
Her hand was burning.
She cried his name. This time loud, a harsh indictment of him. All of her condensed into the single word. Even as it came out of her she recognized it to be some uneven twin to his own song.
This time he heard. He turned slow and saw her. His face twisted and burned. An awful smile for her.
She threw the burning stick. It went away from her, turning over and over in the air, rising to strike the rafters where it angled down hard, away from the kegs, toward Blood himself. She did not wait to see it strike. She lifted her feet from the rung and held the sides of the ladder and went down fast. Now she was crying and her hand still burned, was only beginning to burn.
In the kitchen the wall behind the chimney was on fire. The smoke so thick she wrapped her head down into the crook of her arm. The smell there fear. And the death of all the place, all those who ever had entered, had even so much as passed by.
She went into her room, pausing to look at her hand—the pain so great she expected to see flame in the flesh. And then was floating. That room also a murk of smoke but she looked to the narrow high slit of fresh blue sky and lifted herself and floated toward it.
She was sprawled on the grass behind the tavern. Then she was up and running for the barn, reaching as she ran, snatching up the leaning empty rifle. Useless at the moment but she knew not to leave it. And the pain had left her. As if it would remain behind. A mystery and a wonder. Don’t even think about it she told herself. Running.
Then the tavern exploded. The roof and loft and the fire was blown open to the richness of unimpeded air which the fire ate and towered and she was running toward a pair of shadows peeling away before her in the grass. Then the fire broke through into the storeroom and the entire building blew apart. Pieces of logs spinning through the air easy as swallows. Great splinters, white as flesh.
She was struck and went down. The grass back here frost burned but still green at the roots. Life itself. The smell and taste of the earth. Noontime of a fall day.
Postlude
The Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred & Ninety-Six
He was an early riser. He always had been but the women slept late and so what had been pleasant habit became compulsion: the desire for those few hours when he was alone in the world and might fashion it any way he liked. It didn’t matter that he only had to suffer his way through breakfast and could escape to his office and then his rounds. Her silence, her implacable silence offered up as judgment upon him followed him throughout his days. Each day, each the same. As if she read through him, through the three-piece suit and the light phaeton and the matched pair of fancy gray driving horses, through the leather grip so respected by everyone else, respected and feared, which was an attitude he liked. It was not just his profession but a calling, a thing near holy. Other people saw it, others accorded respect to him. How she could deflate him with her silence was something of a mystery. There had never been the first unkind word between them. None even passed along from his wife, her daughter. And yet before the old woman he felt stripped, as if he were a boy dressed up in a man’s suit. Not an impersonator so much as a thing not yet mature. A man with gray at his temples, a veteran of the Civil War.
A lovely morning in July. The house and gardens on the hillside above the lake outside of Geneva, high enough so he could stand on the broad front lawn and see the rooftops and steeples of the town. Or could turn to look straight before him to the broad width of Seneca Lake, this early a silver flashing surface of light waves with a broad swath of the rising sun reflected over the water, too bright to look at. From the town the lake stretched south twenty miles, widening only slightly. A finger of a lake, one of half a dozen that ran north to south across the ripe fertile band of western New York State. People spoke of the Finger Lakes as if they were simply lovely bodies of water there for the people to live around, to enjoy, to fish from or boat upon, to have summer cottages against their shores, to enjoy the moderation the water provided throughout all the seasons of the year, but every day after his morning office hours when he drove his team out on his rounds through the surrounding farm country—farms of richness and wealth, dairy and grain and orchards of all manner of fruit and the great vineyards that were strung on the temperate clay hillsides overlooking the lakes—every day of this he recalled exactly whose fingers these lakes represented. The hand of God laid down upon this land, a hand blessing all that lay around it, as if God had seen this land and loved it and wanted to impress upon it His love. No matter that Jonathon Astor knew the lakes were glaciated striations. For who can say how the hand of God moves?
Surely not he. Who had been a student of medicine when the war emptied the college and he ended up spending four years sawing limbs standing it seemed either in cold mud or under a canvas that accelerated the summer heat, his apron and arms stained with blood, the cauterizing iron held waiting by one young slightly wounded orderly after another, the iron an extension of his hand as were the saws. For the most part the men he did not disfigure were the ones he saw die, eaten slowly up from their wounds as their flesh turned yellow then green then brown then black as the gangrene ate past all efforts to check or halt it, so much so he could smell a man stretcher-borne and know if he would live one day or five. The other, lesser wounds, the ones he repaired, he did not praise himself for. For all but a fortunate few of those men were sent back into the campaigns that all gained names that seemed someway burnished but to him were only a long trough of blood and limbs and death and more than once, more times than he could count, some face peering up at him as he brought the saw down for that first awful rip, that face was a face he’d repaired someway the week before, the month before. Until he stopped looking at faces, no matter if the wounds were slight or mortal. All the faces of boys. Even the ones older than himself. Mere boys.
After the war he returned to the village of his youth. Two days after he returned he presented himself at the home of the doctor that had birthed him. Doctor Warren was a man in his sixties, with a wife a decade and a half younger and of so many tales told. And the late-born daughter, the single child. All Jonathon Astor wanted at that time was the remembered quietude of his youth. Which he knew he would never regain. But the old doctor was the place to start. Jonathon was not the sort of man to come back into his town and become a rival to anyone, even one gaining in age and with a reputation for silent work and little attention to late bills or any payment made at all. Especially such a man. At that time Jonathon cared nothing for the stories of the doctor’s wife. He’d seen all that man can pitch against other men and rightly thought that every town needs something to talk about. And it was simple partnership he sought—there was no thought or intention or reason to expect any greater union. What both men understood was that each was vital to the other. Vital to the town and the outlying people. What the doctor saw was what the young man expected—a link, a succession. Not for himself so much as the people he served. And the young man, who was not so young as he liked to think and certainly not how others saw him, he also wanted that sense of continuity. That there were places and times where the world made sense. Where he might birth children and then later birth their own. Where he might even bring some calm to those same people he once birthed as they lay dying. He had no great notions of the measure of any one person’s days. Old age and slow death were aberration and not the other way around. As the old man knew. So they made good partners.
What he hadn’t counted on was the doctor’s daughter. The daughter of their September, a child born to the doctor and his wife when they’d given up on children. So much younger than he that he hadn’t considered her at all—a ragged child wearing out good clothes in rough play when he left for the war was how he recalled her. So was unprep
ared for the day just less than a month after he began working with her father when at the end of the day they had driven up to the house in the doctor’s buggy, still discussing the farmwife who had gone mad and was speaking in tongues and eating earth and they sat in the yard before the cobblestone house as they determined to return to the remote farm again first thing in the morning. Then the younger man climbed down from the buggy to walk the mile into town where he stayed not at his parents’ home but in a boardinghouse where he might stay awake as long as he liked reading journals and medical books, some even imported from Europe. He stepped from the buggy and bade the doctor a good evening and in the swift early autumn dusk turned to see her coming around the house, through the white painted gate that led to the back of the house where he’d never been but where he’d stretched his neck more than once to admire the flower gardens. And there she was.
Seventeen years old in an indigo dress with her red-blond hair worn loose and thick onto her shoulders and carrying a nosegay of cultivated deep purple asters and with rose-waxen light over her she stopped and looked at him and boldly said, “It’s one thing to be serious and another to be gloomy. Put these in water and they’ll cheer your room.” And thrust the flowers at him and before he could respond beyond reddening she turned and went up the three stone steps and across the porch with its narrow columns and into the house. Without looking back.
Estelle Warren. Twice that fall he sent notes inviting her to attend social events and twice she responded, denying him without dismissing him. But also both times filling additional pages with her thoughts, a scattering of thoughts upon books she’d read or things she’d observed, notes of the everyday. As if some part of her turned to him even as she hesitated. Both times he went alone to the events and neither time was she there with someone else. He did not speak to her father of her and the doctor never mentioned his daughter and neither did his manner or treatment of the younger man change—toward favor or not—but remained constant, professional, occasionally ruminative over some diagnosis and always solicitous of the younger man’s opinion. He’d not met the doctor’s wife, had only twice glimpsed her from a distance and both times she was hurrying away, as on some errand of sudden and terrible urgency.
The following spring he opened his small hoard of savings and purchased a lapstrake catboat, a thing of great beauty and a craft of ways all unknown to him. He felt he’d taken a deep breath that would never be released again. But had spent portions of those long winter evenings regarding the long-since dried flowers and her brief message to him and concluded she was right. Was it a coincidence of the season that she gave him flowers that matched his name? He decided it could be but he could rightly guess Doctor Warren had at some time mentioned in passing the name of his new associate. What he pondered with greater gravity was her message to him. Even in doing so he guessed that he was failing her in some vital way. What he arrived at was that it lay only within his own hands and will to effect his future. So he bought the boat.
He paid for half a dozen lessons and then spent another month of evenings and weekends out alone on the water until he could handle the boat in all but the worst of weather. He had no desire or intention of being a foul-weather sailor. To sail, for him, meant relief from sullied things, past and present. He was not after testing himself but rather mastering a pleasure. It seemed enough.
In late June he sent a third note. He invited her nowhere but simply stated that he would call for her on Saturday afternoon at one-thirty and suggested she attire suitably for the water.
He rented a gig and was sweated through his shirt under his white suit when the horse trotted up the drive of the cobblestone house. He feared himself a fool but she was waiting on the porch, dressed also in white, with a broad-brimmed hat that tied under her chin. She did not smile but greeted him gravely and stepped up into the gig even as he was hurrying around the horse to assist her. When he came up beside her she looked down at him from the seat and smiled at him.
Estelle walked back and forth on the marina dock looking at the catboat and then turned to him and said, “She’s beautiful.”
Jonathon stepped down into the cockpit and reached a hand and this time she let him assist her onto the decking. Then she turned and said, “The word is, that you sail with a passion. Most every evening.”
He said, “I guess I’m the talk of the town then.”
“Oh no,” she said. “I had to ask to find out what you were up to. What’s her name?”
His throat was thick. Stowed earlier was a basket of lunch and bottles of fresh spring water and one daring bottle of wine hidden under the napkin lining of the basket. He wanted a swallow of the water. He said, “Violet.”
“Violet?”
“After the flowers. The color.” He was shaking and half turned and bent to cast free the mooring lines, thinking if he could only get the boat underway, wondering if he would be able to sail at all or if they would wobble helpless and stranded.
“Of course,” Estelle said. “Violet. People would’ve misunderstood Aster. Thinking yourself grand is what they’d have thought.” She seated herself on the decking and lifted first one foot to her knee and then the other and removed her shoes. He was loosening the sheets and eyeing the pulleys to make sure all ran clear and the sail flapped loose against the mast. He took up the single paddle to push off from the dock. All the time seeing the undersides of her thighs as she snapped the lacings through the eyelets of her shoes. She dropped one shoe into the cockpit and went to work on the other and then looked up at him just as he was looking at her.
She said, “Do you care if I go barefoot?”
He reached for the tiller and begin to pull the sheet to tauten the mainsail and said, “I like to go barefoot myself, once I’m under way. It feels right, my feet against the boat, against the decking. And, if there’s much breeze at all, water sprays in. So your shoes get wet anyway.”
They were out away from the other docked and moored boats and he was letting the sail fill more and more. They began to move crosswise to the wind toward the open water of the lake.
She said, “I don’t care a thing about my shoes getting wet.” And reached down and plucked them both up from the cockpit and held them in one hand, ankle-high white calfskin shoes. Her eyes on him, her eyes laughing but her face serious, as if she expected him to know her intentions, she swung the arm holding her shoes out over the catboat and dropped them into the water.
Now he smiled at her and pushed the tiller hard and brought the sheet in so the sail snapped tight as the boat came around into the wind. There was the brief lovely moment when the boat shuddered and then it leaped forward. Water began to sheer up both sides of the bow and all that lay ahead was the long expanse of lake water and both sides the gentle even-rising hills speeding by.
She reached and caught a side rail and with her other hand tore free the knot under her chin and her hat flew lost behind them. Her hair flailed her face. She called, “Oh my. Jonathon Astor. What’re we doing?”
“Sailing,” he called. “We’re sailing.”
Five years later they married, little more than a month after they buried her father on a cold but lovely spring day. Clouds in high fleets fleeing the sky. It was the day he first met her mother. A woman wrapped in a thick black shawl over somber old dark clothing. The woman would not take his offered hand and stood with dipped head through his brief burst of condolence and testimony. When he was done, Estelle beside him, he stood a long awkward moment in the silence that lay over all of them, off to the side the huge clump of townspeople and farmers come to bury their doctor. While waiting in the silence that fell after his outburst he had the strange thought that it was a true act of faith for so many to come, so many that trusted the man now dead and buried to keep them from the same fate. Then the woman raised her head and looked upon him. Her face lined and wet and shriven. She studied him, a gaze that ran into and through him. At the time he thought it was the circumstances. He felt Estelle beside him
. He felt he was capable of anything. He even believed that was what the woman looking at him saw. So he bent and kissed her cheek. His lips had hardly swept her skin when she turned her face back down, away from him, denying him.
She did not attend the wedding. Which was not a wedding but a civil ceremony of official brevity and then followed by another ceremony also sparse in the church of his parents. Some measure of respect for the so recently dead father of the bride. He did not mind—he’d had his fill of spectacle. But wished it were otherwise for Estelle. Not that she indicated desire for anything otherwise. And by that time he knew her so well as to know that even if her father still lived this was how she’d have wanted it.
Should he have questioned their going from the church and quiet supper afterward to the cobblestone house? Could he have questioned it? Could he have asked his wife to leave her mother alone at such a time? It certainly wasn’t about sex—they long since knew each fold and twist the other was capable of. It wasn’t about privacy—the cobblestone was three stories of rooms of which they might take their choice—the mother slept alone now in the groundfloor bedroom—the room where she and her husband had always slept and since his death unchanged. But there was this as well—he wanted to live there. From most any point in Geneva a person might look out at the western ridge above the lake and see the house. It was the house of the doctor. So he happily drove his bride back to her house. Where he moved in with her.
Jonathon and Estelle failed also to produce children, the romping merry band of children that had filled his mind. It was not for want of trying. It was a mystery. She struck him as an exceptionally healthy young female in every respect and after several years he surreptitiously examined his own seed on a glass slide and there certainly was an amplitude of life striving beneath the eye he pressed to the eyepiece of the microscope. So they went along. It was not a question of failed pregnancies, of miscarriage. There just were none at all. And so over some years they determined without ever speaking directly of it that theirs would be lives twinned and nothing more, and oddly or not neither seemed sad over this, at least not to the other. In a way they both seemed to hold their youth. Although he would ponder sometimes, out riding the dusty roads of summer, the phaeton gliding behind the team, the story Estelle had told him, once and only once, of how her mother and father came together, and he would turn this over in his mind and wonder if it somehow fell through the woman, this lack of conception. And Jonathon Astor came to believe that this barrenness was a thing passed from mother to daughter, something of the blood, some fragility of constitution. As if his mother-in-law had exhausted in her one late bout the ability of the women of her line to produce children. An anomaly of biology but he’d seen his share of these. And it fit somehow with the tight caustic woman who unfailingly referred to him as Mister Astor as if she would not admit more than one doctor in her life. A woman who could not read nor write but managed her finances with no help and in secrecy. Not so much as if she were hoarding but as if she trusted no one. Although he carried the financial burden for everything that he could see, everything that the household and grounds consumed. The very house and grounds that were not even his but owned wholly by the old woman. Estelle would inherit these upon the woman’s death and he knew Estelle was not the way her mother was. Still, he had as much pride as any man, and it was a bitter spot held deep within that while the people of the town might see him as a man outstanding and respected, under the roof that was not his own roof he felt always as if he were a vague nuisance.