“Be my friend, Lewis,” said Grover, gesturing to Durr to help him set up the projector.
Dulcy ebbed to the back of the claustrophobic living room, thinking about her wet, cold feet. Samuel and Durr were wound up in the mechanics of Dewberry’s presentation—the white screening curtain kept wrinkling—and Rex honked on nervously about the weather, and what it might do to the trip he’d planned for the following week to Yellowstone Park, the one Grover intended to film. Everyone planned to go, if the weather improved. Dulcy heard her name, Margaret promising that they’d both pack furs and boots and treats for the train. She didn’t protest; she would back out later.
The snow outside made it difficult to darken the room, even with drapes as heavy as Mrs. Woolley’s, and Grover fretted about invasive beams. Dulcy stayed on a windowsill in the far corner. It was hard to see over the sea of plumed Easter hats, colors only slightly muted by the effort to darken the room, but the director gave a helpful narration: snippets from Cuba; British troops marching along an African river, chased by dust; zoo footage of elephants and giraffes; an automobile screaming past a crowd; a cannon firing. A volcano (Grover said it was Etna; Dulcy, knowing it was Vesuvius, and that he must have bought someone else’s footage, could say nothing), pyramids near Memphis, the Fuller Building going up (Dulcy squinted, trying to find a Remfrey in the crowd), bathers in the Fort Myers surf. The World’s Fair, the ocean, an acrobat, Constantinople.
Damascus, she thought, recognizing buildings. She wasn’t sure if she was seeing her own past, or Walton’s, or Maria Nash’s, but it wasn’t Grover’s. The projector crackled. Florence appeared, then Paris, but the gardens were Cluny, not the Tuileries, people promenading for a full, boring minute, long enough for Dulcy to think of how it had really looked and smelled, and how much better Henning might have done with the same film if the money hadn’t disappeared.
Lastly, Grover showed footage of the Galveston disaster, children climbing on ruins, bodies floating on the Gulf, bodies being piled in carts. Dulcy had seen photographs, but movement changed everything, and even in these scratchy images the stiff flop of ballooned bodies allowed you to smell the rot, the salt, the heat. Drowned Galveston would be all fresh wood and brick now, and the bodies from the 1900 storm had become shrimp shells and marsh grass. They were picnicking by Lake Erie the day the headlines reached them in September, and Walton worked even this tragedy into his private world. He’d stared at the waves and only heard the suck of the global undertow. Everything happened in concert. It was no coincidence that the Gulf was shaped like a volcanic crater. Dulcy wouldn’t have been surprised if Walton had tried to link August’s grasshopper infestation in Kalamazoo to tidal weight, or the radioactive core of the earth, or whatever variation currently monopolized his mind. Something bad was always happening on the planet.
Ah, but it’s a wonderful land, [ Yellowstone is,] with its snow peaks, its canyon, colored like the sunset; its burning geysers, its seething ponds, its mud volcanoes, its blow holes for steam that smells so like Long Island City... When you hear the crust crack and feel your heels suddenly growing hot and the panting and groaning of hell sound louder below and around, you almost instinctively go somewhere else—some quieter, cooler, dryer place, where you can think of a different set of thoughts. You never know where you’re going to be steamed.
—C. M. Skinner, Yellowstone Park: A Land of Enchantment That Even Caucasian Savages Cannot Spoil
chapter 16
The Rose-Pink Book of Verse
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April of 1905 had been so warm that Dulcy’s neighbor, the minister Brach, had announced that End Times had arrived—sin had tilted the earth on her axis (Brach said “his ”)—and that he would be holding a sort of exorcism behind his church, a tottery log cabin by the river. Samuel and the congregation showed up to find that Brach had quietly accumulated every image of a naked woman he could find in town—an old ferryman’s prized figurehead, a dress model, bits of a second-story frieze from a building on Main Street, pried off the night before, a treasured French oil robbed from the Bucket of Blood saloon—and now hammered them to bits and set them on ceremonial fire while the crowd watched.
Gerry was drinking, and couldn’t be bothered. The injured parties said they’d file suit against him, too.
Dulcy turned the page on Samuel’s story to see the italicized high and low temperature records on the second page of the Enterprise , and noted they went back only twenty years. At ten a.m. on April 29 it was already seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and she unpacked her shearling coat and found some linen for the Yellowstone trip. She was going because Margaret had begged her, and Samuel had begged her, and because she was lonely. Rex was desperate and needed to prove himself with this business venture. They must support him.
She’d spent the early morning making pasties. She began efficiently but quickly frayed, mismanaging her stove and overheating the kitchen. She opened the windows, which meant she had to keep paper over the meat to ward off an unseasonable hatch of insects; she put rocks on the paper to keep it from flying off when she propped the door open, too. The lard softened so rapidly that she had to keep the dough in the icebox until the last minute, and she threw so much of the disappointing chuck to Brach’s ratty terrier that she heard it retch into the shrubbery. The potatoes were hollow-hearted, half the onions had turned to slime, and she used all her new parsley. An hour before Samuel had said he’d swing by, she was red-faced, spackled with fat, dredged in flour, and filled with rage at the whole notion that she’d thought this was a good idea. Three of the pies broke on the sheet, and she finished shattering them when she crammed them into the overworked icebox, the ice block down to a four-inch square, the drip of melt as annoying as the flies ricocheting around the house.