Malaria: an Italian colloquial word (from mala, bad, and aria , air)... A single paroxysm of simple ague may come upon the patientin the midst of good health of it may be preceded by some mailaise. The ague-fit begins with chills proceeding as if from the lower part of the back, and gradually extending until the coldness overtakes the whole body. Tremors of the muscles more or less violent accompany the cold sensations, beginning with the muscles of the lower jaw (chattering of teeth), and extending to the extremities and trunk... Sleep may overtake the patient in the midst of the sweating stage and he awakes, not without some feeling of what he has passed through, but on the whole well... The paroxysm is followed by a definite interval in which there is not only no fever, but even a fair degree of bodily comfort and fitness; this is the intermission of the fever. Another paroxysm begins at or near the same hour next day (quotidian ague), which results from a double tertian infection, or the interval may be forty-eight hours (tertian ague), or seventy-two hours (quartan ague)...
—Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition
chapter 18
Lewis Braudel’s Black Book
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Dulcy didn’t know whether Lewis’s illness was tertian, quotidian, quartan: it sometimes came daily, then not for months. He acted as if malaria were no worse than a cold, but she knew the illness tilted on people despite quinine, and luck ran out. He had two attacks in the first week he was back, but afterward he’d eaten, walked, talked, and he was at her again within hours. Walton would begin to echo in her head, and then Lewis’s clarity and youth and vitality would banish these thoughts. And who knew how long any of them had: in the last month, Dulcy’s forty—year—old butcher had dropped dead of a stroke, and Margaret’s second cousin died a week after her first child was born.
Lewis usually worked during the day at the Elite, but sometimes in the middle of the night he’d leave her bed and she’d find him sitting in the Bluebeard room, scribbling on the graph paper she’d used to draw out her garden. He had meant to continue two long projects from the year before—on immigrants and quack medicines, both topics that could go with him anywhere, but he said he was tired of thinking about illness, and didn’t have the mind for anything long. It was tempting to question Gerry about his abandoned cure, but Lewis didn’t want to think of alcohol any more than he wanted to think of illness. He’d fiddle with other topics, but he didn’t know where they might travel in six months, and he didn’t want to limit the future.
His notebooks—stationary pads, not fancy bound things like Walton’s—were all piled on the floor of his room at the Elite. Walton’s notebooks were buried in the Bluebeard room closet, and the tiny piece of tissue she’s used to mark the doorsill remained untouched.
In mid—June, he headed for Salt Lake to write a piece about the aftereffects of the second manifesto against polygamy, or the Mormon missionary program—he thought of calling the article “The Mormon Missionary Position ”—and Dulcy slept ten hours the first night he was gone, dead center in her bed. She declined invitations to a seasonal frenzy of parties and felt smug, but after a third night she missed him, and on the fourth she woke at midnight, knowing he was back. It was windy, and she didn’t so much hear him as feel the vibration of his steps, catch the sound of the cupboard or icebox, the scrape of a chair in the kitchen. She pulled on her robe and slipped down and he grinned at her, scrounged leftovers and a beer on the table. His shoes were off, his shirt was open, but he looked well. “It’s been hot,” said Dulcy.
“Not like Salt Lake. I’d douse myself in water, and dry myself, and be wet again by the time I hit the street. It was like being in Atlanta, or Toledo.” He handed her the beer, and she sat sideways on his lap while he finished his plate of smoked salmon and bread and beet salad, and then she swiveled around to face him.
This was what it was like, then. But Lewis said, no, this was only what it was like for them, and most people were never this lucky.
???
Rex reemerged, face still discolored but in a fine mood, sunny and calm. He’d spent the last weeks in a little rented house on the far side of town, so that his mother’s guests wouldn’t see what had happened to his nose. The bruising had gone from his eyebrows to his collarbone, and he joked (to Lewis and Samuel) about what had gone through his mind as the girl had headed toward his face: nothing but admiration. He’d been so well cared for during his convalescence, and read so much, that his view of the world was entirely changed. He’d read Greek plays that he’d lied about reading in college, Marcus Aurelius, Casement’s report on the Congo. He was renouncing God (in whom he had not, in all honesty, invested much effort) in favor of rationality and humanism. He would dedicate his time and surplus money to good deeds (schools, the poor) and rational plans: he’d scrapped together “the bits of his inheritance ” (more bits than most people) and doubled down on California land. He was done with water as sport, and all in on necessity—dams were the new thing, and he’d begun to eye the narrowness of the Yellowstone canyon just upstream of town.
They were all having lunch at Bacchi’s. It wasn’t very good—Bacchi served rubbery cheese and called raviolis tamales —but any attempt had to be rewarded. Samuel put down his fork. “Say all that again. The last two minutes or so.”
“I have decided that there is no just God. There is no solution beyond the better angels of our souls.” He smiled at Dulcy and Lewis, who sometimes forgot that they sat too close. “I haven’t organized my thoughts on charity, yet, though of course there will still be money to help the paper grow, Samuel. Eugenia tells me the Poor Farm is much in need of help.” He stabbed a noodle pillow and popped it in his mouth. “God hasn’t shown his face there, lately.”
“Is all this happening because God showed Her face to you when the girl dropped on it?” asked Lewis.
“Possibly,” said Rex, smiling.
Samuel finished a last chewy bite and put his fork down. “You’re a fool. Eugenia suggested such things because she and the Fenoways own the Poor Farm. He beats people until they’re feeble, and then the county pays him to put them up.”
“Well,” said Rex. “Something must be done, but in the meantime another charity, then. Would you cheer up if we bought another newspaper? Seattle’s for sale—are you ready for a city?”
“I like where I live,” snapped Samuel, in a foul mood. He’d planned to golf with Grover, but Grover was at the hotel, “coping ” with his newly arrived wife, Clara.
“Did he use that word, coping , or is that how you see it?” asked Lewis.
“He used it,” said Samuel.