What was a memory, a dream, a headache? She couldn’t place the clinic—Walton had dealt with the little hammer in a dozen cities. She curled up and pressed on her temples, outwaiting the pain, and for his birthday, she let Walton come back, all the good parts, everything she missed: the weird sliding smile when he saw a pretty woman, the way his step shimmied walking over ruins, his humor, and the fact that though he had more illusions about science than he did about mankind, he stayed a humanist. “I believe in the individual,” he said. “We make our own way, and every man and woman is equal.”
He did not whine about his blighted childhood, despite having endured food riots and the Redruth workhouse. He’d had no education past the age of ten, but he’d read every fragment of Shakespeare and Jonson, every tedious essay in every magazine. He could parrot on about Roman emperors until he cleared a room or was stumped by a bigger blowhard, and he’d never given up on finding the struggle between the Aristotelian elements—earth, air, fire, water—in every geological event. He knew his modern physics, mathematics and chemistry. He did not lie about being fluent in other languages. That said, he believed some ludicrous things, like phrenology, and he had a weakness for tarot. He was curious about everything, even if he was incapable of admitting error, and he constantly synthesized: in the months before the last trip to Africa, when a loyal friend at Columbia made a study of famine and allowed Walton to compare notes, Walton came to believe he could prove that every period of starvation could be tied to an eruption, and every eruption to a previous earthquake.
He loved his children and his friends, without expecting them to celebrate every facet of his personality. He knew he was a mess and often managed to be self-deprecating. He had endurance, and a huge tolerance for suffering. He loved women to a fault, or to their death, and he acknowledged that this was his fatal flaw . Even his favorite deck of cards, purchased in London, showed naked women playing their own game, the deck broken down to blond diamonds, redheaded hearts, brunette clubs and spades, and each suit represented by a mishmash of rarities—Hawaiian, Sioux, Polynesian, Tuareg, Hottentot, Persian, and so on. The queen of spades was a geisha, the ace of diamonds an Amazon. Henning had tucked the deck into the coffin.
Sometimes, during a fever on a ship, Walton hadn’t been able to tell if he was on moving earth or moving water, and in his last week in bed he thought he was on both. She thought of how long that in-between had lasted in Seattle, memories and dreams, his childhood roaring up to greet him, air meeting the ground.
???
Every day was cold and wet. The healthiest thing in Dulcy’s yard was a rhubarb plant she’d found in a corner behind the mason Abram’s leftover bricks. The old grapevine had survived, and miniature clusters snailed out all along the fibery vine, toy bunches for a dollhouse, each grape the size of the dot on a ladybug, each cluster a fingernail. The new trees blossomed, and she watched for bees and dug in wild bursts despite the cold, wet weather, and a fretful Durr, who brought brides and students into the temporary studio. Rusalka had deserted him, and Dulcy watched him clean at night through a growing veil of plants.
As the rain continued, a sense of apocalypse deepened. The river bubbled up in lowlying areas, turning the bottomland below Dulcy’s wall into a marsh. An old man drowned on a dissolving riverbank, trying to pull a calf out of the water, and one of the bridges a few miles north of the park collapsed. The Sanborn survey men wore yellow stickers and glowed at a distance, splotches of color glimpsed down alleys.
Things the Sanborns found, while measuring Livingston’s hastily built foundations: a split cannon, a forgotten graveyard near the hospital, a petrified tree, and a surveyor’s chain that the youngest Sanborn, in a rare fit of enthusiasm, was sure had been dropped by William Clark on his return trek east ninety-nine years earlier. They found a stolen buggy, a lost rooster, a cache of coins buried in a chamber pot, and on May 15, they found the missing Mrs. Peck covered in maggots and straw in an unused stable, beaten and broken, stripped and splayed.
Inkster, the man who’d stabbed her husband, spent his time in either a frenzy or a stupor after being beaten by Gerry (“He’s not like a child,” said Samuel. “Children care. He just stares at walls and tries to bite ”), but he pled guilty in the hearing, and his sentencing was passed despite a diminished mind. His execution was set for May 24. This additional failure to extend or magnify the most sensational crime in years made Samuel miserable, and he was reduced to photographs and maps and hints.
On May 18, as Dulcy headed out of her gate, the postman handed her a letter from M. Cope, East 67th Street, New York, addressed to Mrs. Edgar Nash, 509 South Eighth Street, Livingston. She left her gloves dangling on the fence and went back inside to read.
To quote Herrick , he wrote:
I dream’d this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz’d to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way
Enthralled my dainty Lucia .
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv ’ lits were embrac’d
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock , than like a Vine ...
I hoped you’d enjoy the gardening allusions.
If you prefer food :
I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster
Fondly , M. Cope
She liked his handwriting, and she liked having a secret. She was a little stunned at herself: hadn’t she had a secret before? Why would this change so much?
???
She neatened the Bluebeard room and installed a desk and chair under the window. She told herself that it wasn’t for Lewis, that she might write stories or draw, but she mostly watched birds and the minister’s sunken wife: whenever Brach left, his wife would sit on her back steps and stare straight ahead. Dulcy hid the notebooks deeper in the closet, and thought again about throwing out the medicine box.