Did a child need secrets? Yes, Bertha believed; everybody needed dark thoughts, they were the lime in the mortar of your head. They held up the good thoughts. She knew now that phrenology was not real. It wasn’t true that your connubial love resonated from one side of your brain and your jealousy from another—but even now she could feel those thoughts, the good and the bad. Hear them, too, her brain a gyring xylophone that rang when struck.
She loved her child entirely, perfectly. Her husband, too. She had never intended to marry the way some people never intend to go to sea. It struck her thataway, something you couldn’t change your mind about for months if you didn’t like it. Marriage to Dr. Sprague was an ocean—one of those peculiar foreign oceans so full of salt it buoyed the leaden. She was in the middle of it. She could not sink if she wanted to.
They were happy, that is, until the flood.
Overtaken
1919. All around them candlepin houses had closed because of the war. Bowlers had been drafted; pinbodies, too. Truitt’s Alleys had survived, welcomed back the wounded Salfordians, Freddy Pearlman who’d gone deaf in an ear, Pinky DeMuth who’d lost half his jaw and hid it with a kerchief, Martin Younkins who’d lost his left leg, Jack Silver who’d lost a hand and part of a forearm and bowled with the ball tucked in the crook of what was left. They formed a team, the Salford Half Nickels.
The same year, Bertha Truitt bought a Stanley Steamer. The Stanley factory was six miles away from the alleys, run by the Stanley twins. Machines! You shouldn’t love them, but Bertha did. The controls with which you lit the boiler, let the steam go; the hissing noise of it. Mechanical Bertha, who had loved her bicycle, loved her motorcar better. She was steam powered, too, all human beings were, some set to simmer and others to boil. Listen to Bertha Truitt percolate! The things she would do, with her steam-powered notions. Doubt her? Feel: there’s her boiler. Why she never corsetted: she’d been built by her inventor particularly, she wasn’t going to choke her source.
Leviticus wouldn’t get into the thing. He mocked her for her superstitions, but he had his own: he thought cars of any sort about to explode, with malicious intent, at any time. “Internal combustion!” he said. “A terrifying thought.” Bertha insisted that a steam car was the safest sort, being water powered, but he wouldn’t believe it.
Dr. Sprague favored nature, Bertha liked the works of man. She had a love of factories and shipyards, of railroad lines and cemeteries. Cemeteries particularly: she had been delivered to Salford in a cemetery, had married because of one. She was, really, a Victorian, though it was 1919, Victoria long dead, and Bertha never her subject anyhow. She still dressed in her old-time togs, divided skirts and waistcoats, and was a curiosity on the street. It was a form of armor, a way to get men to do business with you.
This morning she wore a green vest and one of her many-sided hats, a dark blue one that made her look like a minuteman or like a medieval sorcerer, depending. Some couples grew to look like each other, but Truitt, getting ready for her drive on a January day in 1919, looked like her house: octagonal, indomitable. She was going to Stearn’s Warehouse to investigate some rock maple for new and bigger pins. The new pins would have a groove in the middle, Joe Wear’s idea so pinbodies could grip them better.
“Come with me,” she said to Leviticus that January morning. She had just started the car. It was a complicated procedure: you lit the boiler with a little torch, then got in the car to pump the steam from the boiler in the back of the car to the engine in the front. Later Leviticus would not know whether to be glad or destroyed that he had not gone with her. At any rate he had never ridden in the steamer and never would.
“In your motorcar? Bertie.”
“I’m an excellent driver.” Pump.
“So you say. No, thank you. An explosion will be the death of me, but not today.”
He believed this and also he had a bottle of whiskey in the belvedere. Prohibition was coming: only one more state needed to vote the Eighteenth Amendment in, and it would come any day, and the law would go into effect a year later. The way he drank would be his undoing. He knew that. He told patients who drank less that they had to stop; his organs were half-unraveled with drink. Meanwhile he had bottles sent down from friends in Gaspé, the finest Canadian whiskey.
Finally the car was ready to go. She drove off. Once she was gone, he ascended to the belvedere and looked for her car on the street. She had already turned toward the river. He lit a cigarette and doused the match with water. He was terrified of fire, poor man. That’s what everyone said later. Poor man, to go that way: he must have been terrified.
In Boston, Bertha parked the car on Commercial Street and went for a walk in the Copp’s Hill Burial Ground. Cemeteries reminded her of bowling alleys, especially Copp’s Hill and the Old Granary, with their tilted stones, the various projectiles sailing between them (tourist children, birds, genealogists). Dead wood: one of the differences between candlepins and tenpins. In tenpin bowling the dead wood, the knocked-over pins, is cleared between balls, spirited away by the pinsetter. In candlepin the dead wood lays where it has fallen for the whole frame, laced between the upright pins or flat out in the gutter. Dead wood can help you, if you know where to strike it, to knock it into standing pins. If you hit it wrong, though, it can absorb all the momentum of the ball, send it spinning in place out of reach of all other pins.
She’s not dead wood yet, Bertha Truitt. She’s moving through Copp’s Hill, looking at the names on the stones. Shem, Goody, Increase. Plenty of Williams and Sarahs, too. In cemeteries she feels like herself, whatever that is, without hearing the voices of other people like an electrical charge that makes her act otherwise. People who report seeing the Salford Devil describe, variously, a flying badger, a mammoth skunk, a mass of bats shaped like a bat. She believes wholly in the Salford Devil, and the shifting is evidence. It is a reactive animal.
Her, too. She is the Salford Devil—like the Salford Devil—a different person depending on who finds her, matronly or alluring, a chatterbox, a silent thoughtful woman, funny, humorless, shy, bold. Not on purpose: that is the charge pulsing through her. She feels no long story in her soul. She has a serial self. First one person, then another. Boxcar Berthas, one after the other. Once she had been an heiress to a factory that made boots for the Confederate Army; not anymore. Once she had loved an Italian. No longer. Once a man who believed in God. So long, so long, say goodbye, see you later, tomorrow, soon, around.
Bertha walked in Copp’s Hill. She thought of Minna’s thewy golden brown hair, a shade lighter than her skin; the careless length of Minna’s legs overlapping her own on the davenport; the hot breath with which she filled Bertha’s ear when whispering into it. Minna was twelve and it took all of Bertha’s will not to treat her like a baby, carry her down the stairs and tuck her into bed and feed her from a spoon, sing nonsense to her, nibble at her neck. She still believed that she owned every inch of Minna. She was her author, her inventor. Out in the world, everyone said, Oh, isn’t she her father’s daughter.
Well, she missed them. She needed to go home. Tomorrow she would send Joe Wear to talk to the foreman at the lumberyard, sort everything out. The things she did, just to prove that a woman could! Honestly: the intricacies of maple bored her. Joe could talk about maple, how it was different in the floorboards than in the pins. He could touch lumber and know its character and history, water damage, tendency to splinter or warp. Bertha could only look at the man selling the wood and judge him. She was good at this but not infallible. Joe, with wood, was infallible. Send Joe.