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A follow-up article on September 28—after eruptions in Japan, Italy, Greece, and Mexico—ended with the phrase “what the immediate future has in store no one in authority pretends to say precisely,” but this wasn’t quite true. Walton, one of the authorities consulted, had been happy to say what he thought was going to happen next: more of the same. The world’s center was ripening and expanding, writhing in discomfort. The end was nigh, and they were all going to die. There was nothing Biblical about this: the earth was godless, unsympathetic, and a grand killer. She didn’t give a damn for her inhabitants’ physical suffering and puny offerings. Instead of blaming God for the earth’s sins, Walton blamed the earth for religion: natural disasters weighed on fragile minds, and fragile minds shattered and subscribed to the notion of an angry god. If people weren’t terrified, why, he asked Dulcy, would they be such idiots, over and over again? In Seattle, toward the end, another singsong: dynamism, dynamite, dice, die, diet, deity.
But after the earthquake in Salonica in 1902, something seemed to slip in Walton’s brain, and he lost his ability to silence himself when a listener’s eyes glazed over. He’d always been a marginal man of science, strange but influential and somehow more authentic to reporters than those men who never left the university. He was one of the few authorities (and he loved the word authority) with true experience with the world below the earth’s surface. Now, though he maintained a competent business front on Victor’s behalf, he lost the line between theory and fantasy on his favorite topic, what he liked to call the “dynamic earth.”
“A volcano is a pustule!” he howled into the Westfield telephone, home for a week and ten minutes into his last talk with a Times reporter. “It enlarges, and ruptures through thinning skin, and the infection spreads !” He now believed that some combination of the moon and the fermenting iron and uranium core of the world caused quakes and volcanoes just as they caused tides; the tides themselves caused imbalances that disturbed the thin parts of the earth, and storms—false tides—were also capable of waking fragile parts of the earth’s skin, areas that were already under pressure. But this liquid notion of quakes had been long discounted, and Walton’s attempt to ball up neptunism or plutonism with the new theory of radioactivity didn’t go over well. He had only a faint, selective grasp of the idea of radiation, and he couldn’t prove anything with his calendar, but he would not believe in a random universe. Why would Mississippi suffer a significant earthquake and not Switzerland? Why was Scandinavia so stable, and Alaska in constant movement? Given his knowledge of quartz and copper and schist, these questions were torments. He had a tightly folded map of the world, and he sometimes tacked it to cork, pressed in pins, and strung the pins together with different colors, seeking a pattern. Dulcy had seen a Micronesian island map that looked a little like this: a confused guitar, a drunken cat’s cradle. Sometimes he’d paste on colored dots for the samples he’d retrieved; sometimes he added little flags and squinted, deliberately blurring the picture to find a pattern. There were, in his mind, no true anomalies, just bad data.
That fall, Walton returned to Westfield in the midst of a fever. Mr. Akif’s Italian clinic had failed to cure his syphilis, and on the boat home he’d taken massive doses of quinine for his newest, deliberately contracted illness, malaria. When they reached Manhattan, he gathered up news accounts of the eruption in Martinique, the greatest volcano of his lifetime, and on the ride north to Westfield he raved on about how thousands of fer-de-lance-vipers—driven out of the mountain forests when their dens turned into ovens, had swarmed the streets of Saint-Pierre. He told Dulcy about how people had dropped, paralyzed, where they’d been bitten; how they had lain in the bubbling mud, snakes sliding over bodies; how this poisoned hypersensitivity might have allowed the dying to feel the presentiment of disaster, the quivering lava several strata below.
Dulcy never saw this piece of reporting in the piles of paper around the farmhouse, and she was dubious. Walton knew she didn’t like snakes. She’d been tentative on their one trip to Egypt and later barely left a hotel in Ceylon, despite an intense curiosity about the food. She disliked snakes so deeply that she’d read quite a bit about snakebites, and she’d never heard of a snake outside of Australia capable of dropping a man in his tracks, but she let Walton unwind. “Where did the snakes go, when they were done?”
“Soldiers shot some. The rest slid into the ocean.”
Or died with the rest of Saint-Pierre a few days later. Had the seawater boiled when Mount Pelée finally exploded? This thought came out of her mouth as she held a steaming washcloth against the side of his face—gumma fear, again, but she thought he simply had a toothache. “Of course it boiled,” he snapped. “Boiled and evaporated. I imagine deposits of salt left behind, dusted with cinders.”
While he slept—it was a humid eighty-degree Indian summer day in Westfield, and Walton lay on the porch daybed—she read about other things that happened in Martinique: boiling mud, overflowing rivers and a fog of ash, swarms of ants and foot-long centipedes. On May 5, a tidal wave. On May 7, La Soufrière on the island of St. Vincent erupted, killing off the last of the Carib natives, and neighboring Martinique spent a last night reassured that the internal energies of the Caribbean had turned on others. But the next morning, Saint-Pierre’s population burned to death almost instantly in a cloud of “pure temperature.”
Dulcy imagined this as steam from a kettle, the blinding puff of an opened oven. She had just opened an oven for a chicken pie, flavored with some of the items she’d smuggled home from Italy. None of the articles Dulcy ever found mentioned the fer-de-lance invasion, possibly because the larger details—three humans alive, thirty thousand dead—took precedence, and possibly because Walton made things up.
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