It rained, another two inches in four days. It would have been nothing in Westfield or Seattle, but in Livingston the streets turned to soup again, and when the rain finally stopped, the world steamed. When Dulcy visited Samuel at the paper, a rancher with a Biblical beard was in to report on the coming catastrophe: trees tilting down the valley creeks, ice dropping in sheets, mud rolling down ravines. All during the next week, as her dresses grew paler and lighter, she watched spring telescope—yards that had just sported crocuses sliding toward tulips and lilacs, while peonies and rosebuds swelled and took on color. What took a month in Westfield began to happen here in days. When she walked near the milky, turgid river, she saw blue and green speckled duck eggs dotted in the brown reeds and wondered if they would hatch before they floated away. Bats darting on high, a whistle she couldn’t quite hear. A mosquito landed on her arm; the world was full of reasons to think about Lewis. She flicked it with a forefinger and thought she saw a pink mist, herself in midair.
Dulcy was helping Samuel with editing one or two days a week, working on boring, baroque profiles of local businessmen or the weekly social scroll, and he talked so much that she got very little done. She didn’t complain, because some of what he wandered through, what he stored and let dribble out in bits, was key to her existence. Some of this information: Eugenia may have never been married, Irving had survived a Polish pogrom as a child, Durr had killed people in China, Gerry and Hubie had beaten their male inmates but shortened female inmates’ sentences in return for sex; their father had beaten their mother, and they had standards. Samuel said that Lewis had nearly died of malaria twice in the last year, and that the reason that Lewis hadn’t written a great novel was that he’d fall in love, and fall sick, and by the time he was better he’d realize he was no longer in love with either the woman or the story. He’d lose his inspiration and he’d even lose his anger. No love, no rage—what was the point? Lewis only wanted to write about things that were mysterious, and he simply wrote too slowly.
“And what is he writing about now?” asked Dulcy.
“More about bad medicines, I think,” said Samuel, not noticing her relief. “There seems to be an endless supply.” He wanted her to go to Inkster’s execution, but he only wanted someone to stand next to, while he muttered about mobs. She wouldn’t, and he went alone.
The rain began again that evening, and when Samuel showed up on her porch that evening, soaking wet, it only took him an hour to drink everything she had in the house. He said a thousand people had watched; he’d helped Grover with his camera, because Durr had refused to attend. He said he’d witnessed too many executions and preferred to spend the afternoon replacing Margaret’s cracked attic windows.
She wondered what Durr had seen—deserter hangings in Germany? Beheadings in China? “Why would Grover want to film it?”
Samuel squirmed. “I did say to him, ‘Grove, hasn’t it been done? Those Japanese? Topsy?’” Topsy was the name of an elephant Thomas Edison had electrocuted on film. Henning had ranted about it: Edison was the animal. Dulcy watched Samuel smile at his Topsy joke, lose the life-and-death plot of the afternoon, regain it.
The short version: the hangman hadn’t arrived from Dillon, but Gerry, sober, announced that there would be no delay. He blamed the condemned man, Inkster, for a third murder, the girl whose body had toured the state, and he said that therefore Inkster had killed his beloved brother Hubert, who had wrongly been accused of desecrating the girl’s body, and who had thus taken a job with someone who was “criminally idiotic,” and ended up dead himself.
This unified theory of recent disaster left the crowd uneasy, and Gerry hustled Inkster onto the scaffold. He dropped the noose, forgetting the hood—Grover had been very excited (Grover, thought Dulcy, was beyond redemption)—but the crowd had wailed and Bixby had forced Gerry to use the hood. Only a second later, he pulled the lever: no warning, no last words. The trap opened and the body dropped.
And the rope broke. Inkster flopped around on the ground, one leg at an angle, sounds emerging from his crushed throat that made the crowd cover its ears, a cack cack cack like a sandhill crane. His leg bone thrust visibly through his pants, and Gerry bellowed for another rope, plunged down and hauled the man back up the scaffold stairs. Deputy Bixby spoke up and Gerry knocked him down and everyone else was paralyzed and Inkster was strung up again, gurgling and hacking in a pile on the trap door. This time the rope didn’t break.
“I did wish Lewis was here,” said Samuel, “to give me some phrases for this travesty, but he’ll be months.”
“June,” said Dulcy. “I think I remember him saying June.”
“That’s never how it happens. He likes his family more than he admits, and he’ll eat well, and he stays on good terms with all his old mistresses.”
Through the open porch door, there was still just enough light to see a new stream running between the garden beds toward the river. “We’re all going to drown,” said Samuel.
He spent the night wrapped in quilts on her sofa, and when he left at ten, after vomiting coffee and bacon by the gate, Dulcy turned to see Brach gripping the fence, ten feet away.
“Babylon,” he said.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “He stayed because he was ill. You just saw him be sick.”
“Harlot,” he said. “Vile crawling sin bag.”
She took two fast steps and smacked him hard with the kitchen towel she’d just used to wipe Samuel’s face. Which was funny, though the incident left her shaken. She wouldn’t be able to fully explain the story to anyone but Lewis.
???
On May 26, her birthday morning, she woke up to a room full of beautiful light, poplar leaves shadowed and dancing on the new paint of the empty bedroom walls, the mountains to the south fixed and massive, clouds scudding high above. She was twenty-five.
She pulled herself up and out and bought a rosebush and another grape from the Scotsman on Ninth Street, who gave her a winterburned clematis “as a peace offering.” She almost liked Buchanan now, and bought two roses instead of one. She planted them all along the porch and ended up having dinner at the Elite with Samuel and Margaret and the Macalesters without mentioning the occasion or complaining about the food.
The ground dried, and she finished planting. Her skin sizzled and tightened. They could mummify anything here: Bozeman’s town fathers advertised neighboring Gallatin Valley as “Egypt in America,” talking up the wheat crop, but they had no idea how unflattering the similarities were. All that water in the river and none whatsoever in the air, no more English-style rain, no Midwestern waves to cool the eye and skin. From Martha’s porch, you could see just a sliver of Erie. From Dulcy’s porch, she watched the Yellowstone River turn into a lake.
The sun blazed, and she resorted to larger and larger hats in public. In private, she often skipped the hat and wore one of Martha’s comfortably indecent day dresses, and she was wearing the one with lilies of the valley on the last Sunday in May when Margaret showed up with Irving and the Elite’s buggy. Dulcy had forgotten that it was Decoration Day, and that she’d promised Margaret that she’d go along to the graveyard. Frank Mallow’s widow was wearing pink, dropping her annus luctus with a vengeance. “We’ll be quick,” Margaret said.