“Early summer,” said Durr. “Or almost anyone at their own wedding. You would think an infant, but with a child they’re too worried that a photograph will be all they have left.”
Durr always brought the conversation back around to death. It was a character flaw, though his approach to the topic was never predictable: he could go from freezing to plague in a minute, then an hour later wonder aloud if different races of men rotted in different fashions. Margaret somehow felt comfortable enough to tell him everything of her husband’s every last moments, every fluid and sound that emerged. Durr confessed he sometimes fantasized, when walking through a city, that all the dead were walking with the living, which had been part of the reason he’d wanted to learn to capture faces. He thought, especially after his time in the army, that people should consider the alternative when they whined in the midst of their limited time on earth. Walton would have enjoyed him, especially given that all the macabre talk fizzled at the sight of food or alcohol or anything lovely—a painting, a piece of pottery, a girl.
On the day she visited the studio to see glass and frame samples, Dulcy came in just behind a nervous couple, the woman a wash of violet water, the man stiff in a dusty suit. They weren’t dewy—the man was bald, and the woman windburned—but they seemed happy enough. Durr called them up, and Dulcy wandered around looking at the portraits on the wall. She recognized teachers, bankers, waiters from the Elite. The Fenoways brothers were posed with their mother, who had the stretched look of someone being eaten from the inside out.
Upstairs, the couple laughed nervously, and Durr asked them to hold still. Dulcy saw the greenhouse catalogues on Durr’s desk in the corner, but she lifted two albums first. The first had a county stamp, and after the first page—a glazed-eyed wraith with the notation lost three children Feb 99, found wandering —she realized she’d stumbled on the album of the Poor Farm in town and closed it hastily. The second album held police booking photos: the inside docket sported Ger. Fenoways C of P in an inch-high flourish. She flipped through with a jumpy combination of aversion and fascination, like a baby watching a fire or a sheltered girl facing her first fig-leaf-free David. But on the last page she stopped breathing.
“You cannot say what you’ve seen, you know,” said Durr, who’d come behind her. “You’ll remember this one. The man who stabbed Hubie Fenoways with my cane.”
“But when did this happen?” Lennart Falk had been beaten—saying to a pulp didn’t do it justice. An eye was closed, a cheek split open. The aquiline nose was a bumpy squash, lower lip a pillow.
“When he was in jail,” said Durr. “It happens to all of them, but usually they have me take the photograph before, or wait. This man needed to be released to his brother.”
“And this is how he looked when the brother came to fetch him?”
Durr looked at her; he understood. “You know the brother?”
“I know of him,” said Dulcy. “I know the situation.”
“I was there,” said Durr. “Mr. Fenoways should worry about that one. The one who came, he wanted to get his little brother well away, but he’ll not forget.”
???
On April 7, she read that an eighty-four-year-old man from Denver named George Wilder, who’d never left home before, never seen tropical waters, mangroves, or hammerheads, had nevertheless traveled to Galveston, boarded a ship for Key West, and jumped overboard in the middle of the Gulf. He’d left a note: I am worn and tired out and I thought I would put this old frame where there would be no inquest save the sharks.
This item was well inside the newspaper, because a huge earthquake had shaken the Kangra Valley in northern India, killing tens of thousands, even some of the English elite, destroying temples and bridges and livestock. Walton might have found the will to avoid the window if he’d known what he would miss. The mountains heaved and swayed for a full minute, and then three severe shocks, each lasting a few seconds, were felt in quick succession. Orthodox Hindus declare that the heinous sins of her children make Mother Earth tremble.
Dulcy knew she’d have bad dreams about pinioned babies and the smell that floated out from under crumbled buildings. Maybe these dreams would displace the vision of old George Wilder dropping into the warm blue dark.
???
The weather turned dry and warm. Her cabbages had come out fast, carrots and onions with hairlike slowness. She’d ordered from True Blue Seeds and L.L. May and started tomatoes inside—Magnus, Grandus, Stone, Aristocrat, Large Rose Peach—along with seeds she’d brought back from trips (a pink aubergine, artichokes, astrantia and eryngium, optimistic melons). The ones that germinated were a little triumph, a tendril of the strange past growing secretly in her very proper present.
Dulcy’s trees arrived a few days after Irina’s crew left to plant hops in Washington State. Durr was in Butte, buying a new camera, and anyway had a crippled leg. Abram had pleurisy, and Irving, who weighed less than Dulcy did, staggered when he coughed. Dulcy dropped a note at the newspaper, and Irving arrived wheezing with a response from Samuel an hour later. She studied him, and worried, and then forgot her concerns when she read: You’ve mistaken me for someonewho knows what he’s doing. Dulcy wetted down the burlap around the roots and dragged the trees to the shady side of the house, then wandered around, poking stakes into the ground to mark planting sites.
Late the next afternoon, Durr was balanced on the greenhouse frame while Dulcy repotted tomato seedlings on the back porch. Her apron was covered with soil, and the cuffs of her blouse were filthy. When a figure came around the side of the porch, she gave a little shriek but did not drop her Peach Blow Sutton seedling.
“We had a parade,” said Lewis. “Or a clown show.” He wore stained canvas pants, and Samuel was next to him, wearing stiff new dungarees, staring morosely at the river and the greenhouse and Durr suspended against the blue sky. He was holding his own shovel, and Irving appeared behind them with a wheelbarrow, still in half his bellhop uniform.
She showed them the six marker stakes and the burlap-wrapped bare-root trees. Lewis scuffed the ground with his boot and sent Irving out for a pickaxe. He talked her into moving the two plums, which was a sign of how he’d rattled her, and she was very happy. She put a chicken in the oven, and sent Irving back out for some bread and beer and lemons, a bottle of whiskey, potatoes, and Margaret Mallow.
The trees took nearly an hour, and though Lewis kept swinging the pickaxe, his sunniness cracked. Dulcy started some cheese biscuits and filled a wheelbarrow with manure. For an exercise devotee, Samuel was not very helpful, nor did he notice Lewis’s growing resentment. When they began to argue about a large rock, she asked Margaret to finish the biscuits and mix spiked lemonade and used the pick herself, working around the edge of the hole to loosen the soil. She should have shown them how at the outset.