You could only hope she’d tasted sweetness in some way.
Can we forgive him everything? Everything? Even the cats? He left them behind. They’re wild animals, he told himself, but if so they were wild animals locked in an octagonal house. Or: Margaret Vanetten’s let them go—it was she who fed them—but Margaret had been sent on the train with Minna, and her employment expired the moment their feet hit the train platform in Fredericton. Every time he remembered the cats—when Minna wrote to ask how they were doing—he thought, who am I to feel sorrow for a cat, when Bertha is dead.
He thought of the Mother Cat, whom he searched for, whom he found, whom he wept over, to Bertha’s disgust.
There is no animal like a cat for grief. They have the stamina for it, the disregard for convention. A dog would try to talk you out of it. The cats would have been a comfort to him. He could not bear to be comforted.
Bring me Donizetti when you come to visit, Minna wrote, and he wrote back, I could not live without him.
He planned to leave Salford only in his coffin, or in a sack of ash.
Bertha Truitt’s Afterlife
She was seen walking down Mims Avenue walloped and alive. She was seen walking along Atlantic Street but ectoplasmically, looking for her hat. She peered through the plate glass windows of Truitt’s, her jacket pockets paying out silver dollars like a one-armed bandit. Her body in the coffin was cast of molasses; she herself had swum through to safety. Her body lay in her old bed in the Octagon preserved in syrup. Her body had been torn into six pieces—head, arm, arm, torso, leg, leg—and was packed and buried in a round rubber ball. She had told her lady bowlers just the day before, If I disappear I will return to you in the Salford Cemetery: come look for me, no later than noon on March 1, by the Pickersgill Obelisk. Eventually so many people came looking for her there they had to keep the gates locked.
She ruffled the fenny weeds on the north side of town. She changed her name to Abigail Patrick and lectured on temperance on the streets of Nantucket.
She was the unnerving heat on your February pillow slip, the unnerving ecstasy that woke you at 2:00 A.M. pawing at the bedclothes, trying to find your way through the curtain and back into that humiliating, beauteous dream.
She flew through the sky naked on her back, using her enormous breasts— —yes, Earl, you said that before; we didn’t believe you then.
No, thought Leviticus, it wouldn’t take any time at all to accomplish, dying. Joe Wear was a rough man, without people or love. Naturally he wouldn’t understand what it meant, to be dying of grief. To want to die of it. To wait patiently. His publisher had turned down his book about Bertha with an irritated note: yes, yes, but to what end?
Most days he sat in the corner of Truitt’s Alleys. Other days you could only hear him rummaging in the basement among the old pins, the chipped vulcanite balls. He did not seem to ever go home. The Phantom of the Alleys, the bowlers called him.
They lived together in this way, Wear and Sprague. Upstairs, Joe moved his bed to the other side of his rooms, so that he could not hear the snoring—Joe suspected that Old Levi slept right on Bertha’s old lane, without blanket or sheet, only the memory of his wife to pillow him, the feel of her ball rolling down his spine. Other times Joe would wake in the night with the old certainty that he was the only person in the building: he felt strung in bed. I’ll die soon enough, Old Levi had said. Joe Wear worked hard not to wish for it. Nothing good could come of wishing for another man’s death. Why had he said it? Why had he put it into Joe’s head?
In the morning, he looked at Old Levi. “You make people uncomfortable,” Joe said.
“I know it.”
Joe Wear nodded. Then he said, knowing it fully for the first time, “I make people uncomfortable, too.”
Nothing would move Leviticus Sprague, who all his life had felt an odd sense of calm about his place in the world—his mother had instilled it in all of her children, and it had a religious underpinning that he most days ignored—which is to say, he cared very little about the opinions of other people. He was not sure he believed in them. People, yes, but not their opinions. He was patient. He could wait for anything, forever. He did not think this was a virtue. Why stay in godforsaken Salford? He still might move to West Hills, join the Baptist Church. Or get on a train to Oromocto himself, go home to Minna, to Almira, Benjamin, Joseph. He was the only one of the siblings who’d married. Now it was too late. (But why is it too late, Leviticus? Because it is. Because Almira would say, That’s all right, what counts is you’re home. As though they’d been waiting for him to be rid of Bertha.) Dr. Sprague sat at a table in the corner of Truitt’s and he drank. He’d closed his practice, informed the Plymouth Hospital. His friend Cornelius, who’d founded the hospital, tried to talk him out of it, but halfheartedly. Dr. Sprague had lost interest in the world and Dr. Garland knew that you could not practice medicine that way.
Soon enough his organs felt replaced with the implements of bowling, his blood balled up and rolling through his veins, his lungs full of wood. He sat at his table and watched the bowlers. The women still came, in their athletic outfits, which made them self-conscious, now that Bertha was not here to outdo them in sartorial strangeness. The bloomers, the middy blouses that had made them eccentric near her now made them feel dressed as children. The self-consciousness was a sign of decay: the memory of Bertha was falling apart.
Finally Dr. Sprague went to Joe Wear with his proposition. “I have a job for you, Mr. Wear. Might you be interested?”
“Already have a job. I work for you. You tell me what to do and I do it. So go on.”
Dr. Sprague thought this over. “No,” he said. “This is different altogether. I will pay you.”
“You already pay me.”
“More,” said Dr. Sprague, not kindly. “It’s a job I want done with care and I think you’re suited for it. I need a body.”
Joe Wear shook his arms out then hugged himself. “Unsuited—”
“Limbs is what I mean. Legs. Wooden ones. I have in mind a monument for Mrs. Sprague.”
“Your mother?”
Dr. Sprague was standing at the oak front counter, a position he never took up. He looked at Joe Wear with such consternation it was almost a compliment: he’d expected better. “No,” he said, “no—my late Bertha’s.”
“Oh, Truitt,” said Joe Wear.
“Just so.”
“I’m unfamiliar.”
“You just—”
“—unfamiliar with her limbs,” said Joe Wear, which made Leviticus Sprague laugh, a phenomenon with which Joe Wear was likewise unfamiliar. He would have thought that Dr. Sprague was anatomically incapable of laughter, like a friend of Joe’s from the Dolbeer Home who’d insisted he couldn’t cry because he’d had his crying glands removed after a childhood fever: previously Joe had thought all bodily waters—tears, sweat, spit, piss—were pulled from the same bodily well.
The laugh was silent and mouth borne, like a sneeze. His shoulders kept still but his stomach jumped. When he’d composed himself he said, “Yes, I imagine you are unfamiliar, Mr. Wear. I am building, as I say, a kind of monument. The head I will manage. The legs, her arms—well, I cannot get past the disappointment of anatomy. But I thought of your work with wood. You once made a cow for Minna, I remember. A little one, with a swinging tail. She has it still.”
“Does she?” said Joe. He had not thought of Minna since she’d left. She’d seemed like none of his business. “Well then. Sure.”
“Don’t make her out of bowling pins.”
“Bowling pins or nothing,” said Joe Wear, and Leviticus Sprague was about to argue except for the planning look on the man’s face, which suggested that he knew exactly how to solve this problem.