The Eagle Rock, a short distance up the valley, had given way, and I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders I had been studying so long, pouring to the valley floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime and beautiful spectacle—an arc of fire fifteen hundred feet span, as true in form and as steady as a rainbow, in the midst of the stupendous roaring rock—storm. The sound was inconceivably deep and broad and earnest, as if the whole earth, like a living creature, had at last found a voice and were calling to her sister planets.
Walton had brought Dulcy west when she was only sixteen. He had failed to regulate his medication during a trip the previous winter, and he’d been so ill that Martha had refused to let Dulcy go overseas with him again. It was a bluff, but Walton backed down, and wandered through California that spring like a bored dog, while Dulcy kept a loose, rattled hand on a leash. In July he abruptly decided that his real affliction was a brain tumor, and he made plans to visit a sanatorium north of Yellowstone Park. Dulcy didn’t ask how this diagnosis explained the wonderful things that were happening to the rest of his body; she assumed that he wanted to spend time staring into geysers or revisiting the idea of the failed magnometer.
In practice, the trip to Yellowstone meant standing on very fragile-seeming rock near very hot water, waiting to feel an earthquake. Dulcy saw her first elk and moose, geysers and hot pots. They visited Moran’s deep canyon and the waterfalls, and their guide gave her berries, and the venison was delicious at the lodge. An army officer told stories over dinner about earlier visitors who’d fallen into hot pots, eaten the wrong root, arm-wrestled bears. The park offered all sorts of novel deaths, and the officer’s wife looked worried.
The next morning they headed north for the clinic, which was tucked into the mountains near the site of a played-out gold settlement. Beyond the pleasures of a hot plunge, Eve’s Spring specialized in brain surgery. Walton normally preferred the sort of places with hot compresses and special menus, and when he took in the cadaverous doctor, the shiny steel equipment, the dozen men with bandaged heads sunning foggily by the steaming blue-tiled pool (rather than splashing happily inside it), he panicked. He’d been relying on coca and morphine, and it had been weeks since he’d made sense. Now he announced that there’d been a mistake: his poor daughter, who suffered from neurasthenia, was the patient. He was worried she might harm herself.
“But who would have recommended us to you?” asked a nurse, while the doctor walked away, the greatest insult he could possibly offer to Walton. “We don’t handle rest cures.”
“She also has seizures,” said Walton. “Fits and fevers.”
The nurse eyed Dulcy’s cheeks and correctly diagnosed her flush as humiliation. The next morning, after Walton had agreed to be examined and was once again marooned with his hopeless, shameful diagnosis, they hired a coach back to town rather than waiting for the train. The day was warm, the air shimmery with grasshoppers. Dulcy distracted herself with the dark blue river and yellow rocks, the smell of pine and grass; she counted cows and sheep, and came up with a tie. As they approached a large farmhouse, a vision: a hundred men on bicycles—black men on bicycles, in uniform—pouring out of an encampment onto the narrow dirt road, white bedrolls on their handlebars.
“The Twenty-fifth Infantry Bicycle Corps,” said the polite professor who shared the carriage. He was leaving for his home in Minnesota; his tumor was incurable. One eye was bandaged to hide the fact that it was bulging out of his skull, and the clinic had refused to try a trepanation. “Under General Miles. They’re testing this method for the army. I gather they’re bicycling to the Park.”
Dulcy looked at the faces of the passing men, their eyes veering away from her own. They were so close she could see strips of that morning’s lather on their necks, red dust from the road settling on their freshly shaven faces. They were pared down, grave, and beautiful. “It’s a mirage,” said Walton, his eyes yellow with jaundice; mercury had damaged his liver. “My God, if only there were roads in Africa.”
She was mortified: her fair-minded father had disintegrated. She wanted to beat him over the head, but she kept her voice quiet. “There are roads in Africa, Dad. You’ve seen them.”
“Bicycles,” whispered Walton.
???
Nine years later, there didn’t seem to be many people of color in this town, even natives, though the weather might be to blame for the lack of bicycles. Dulcy had never felt such wind. Before she’d even crossed the street in Livingston on January 28, her hair unraveled and one of her scarves swirled into the frozen dark. In 1896, when she’d come through this town with Walton, the depot had been tall and narrow; now it was massive, with a slate roof and wind-funneling colonnades. Maybe the old depot had burned like everything in the West—the buildings across the street were new, too, and she headed for one of them, a brick hotel named the Elite.
She wanted privacy, and she wanted her own bath; the Elite provided these things. The large, pink proprietress, Mrs. Knox, talked in puffs while they trundled to the third floor—the hotel had a new elevator, but there were issues with its motor. The tiny porter was only twenty or so, but he also wheezed audibly, coughing discreetly whenever he was out of sight around a bend on the stairs. “At this end of the hall, the train will be less likely to wake you,” said Mrs. Knox.
Dulcy had an image of a stalking train, a Cyclops headlight shining into a hotel window, looking for her. She aimed her eyes at the pattern in the carpet, fat ruby-colored roses. “And the newspaper’s on that side, too, though we ask that they not run their presses during the night,” said Mrs. Knox. “I’m very sorry for your bereavement. Your husband?”
“Yes,” said Dulcy. “Thank you. And I am here for precisely that reason, to rest.”
“Well, then,” said Mrs. Knox. “We’ll not bother you. You have family here?”
“No, we passed through here once, and talked of returning. And so, somehow, I thought...” She petered out, but she was tired. The explanation was both evocative and convincing, and she had successfully avoided dates or origins. Mrs. Knox twirled a finger, and the elfin porter deposited the suitcase on a marble-topped dresser. The marble was nice, but the dresser itself looked as if it had been made to fit, with a hacksaw.
“I’ll wire to have my other things delivered,” said Dulcy, and then she regretted saying it. She needed to avoid adding details. After they left, she lifted the window for a moment. She smelled Chinese food, and heard a piano, not a dance hall tune but poorly played Bach.
Never before in the history of the world has there been such a remarkable series of terrestrial disturbances as those which have followed each other day by day over the past three months over an area covering practically the entire surface of the globe.... From the original eruption of Mount Pelée to the present time there has hardly been a day when the record has not shown earthquake, tidal wave, or volcanic disturbance.... Thousands upon thousands of persons have lost their lives, other thousands have been maimed, towns and cities have been wiped out....
—From “Three Months of Earthquakes and Eruptions,” The New York Times, August 17, 1902
chapter 8
The Garnet Book of Theory