When she opened the door, it took a moment to recognize the boy standing there with a burlap bag, and more minutes to go find a coin for his reward. He left the mess in the burlap, and she went ahead and jarred the jam. The metal lids (no wax, a real rebellion against Martha) were sealing in the background—pop pop pop —when she finally reached inside the burlap for the lost green bag, and into the green bag for her mangled eyeglasses and the lost green book.
It was more or less intact, but the spine felt full of gravel, as if the river had forced its way in, though she could find no hole. She didn’t know what strange African substance had been used to pad the cover, what kind of horse-hoof glue would coagulate back into something as hard as the source. She pried apart the wet pages, trying not to mind that some ink had been washed clean. The poppy petals from Salonica had dissolved, but left an imprint on the pages, and that was good enough: she felt as if she’d found her childhood. She carried the book up to her bedroom and left it on top of the bookshelf to dry.
Beware the fury of a patient man.
— John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel ”
chapter 21
The Fall
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At the end of September they went to Butte for the reckoning. She’d been tired for weeks, not ill, just sleepy. She’d stop in the middle of a task to curl up in her bed or on the couch or inside the hammock down by the greenhouse. She could be mid–row picking beans or halfway through a recipe. On her usual book–sorting day at the library, she fell asleep at the table, and she missed flagrant errors in Samuel’s purple prose.
She explained while Lewis was going up and down a ladder, loading the bookshelves Durr had helped them build in the Bluebeard room. “We saw the best doctors in London,” she said. “I had no reason to doubt them.” But really, had they been good? They’d saved her but they’d botched the surgery, and nearly killed her again. When she saw their faces, she remembered the general drift, rather than specifics: this thing had happened because she’d been inherently flawed, both physically and mentally. It had been enough to set Walton off on a rant about St. Augustine and original sin.
Now she hated them all over again, even as the whole warm notion they might have been wrong about everything settled in. Maybe she could have a child. Maybe having one wouldn’t kill her.
Lewis reached down for another stack of books; he was smiling. “Well?” she said.
“Hand me that last stack and I’ll come down and carry you around the house. It’s fucking wonderful as long as you’re happy.”
She thought she was happy. She handed up more books. “Or at least,” said Lewis, “this is wonderful news as long as we find a very, very good doctor.”
“Not here,” she said.
They sat across from each other in the lounge car for the ride to Butte, friends who happened to find themselves on the same train. She’d brought along an issue of McClure ’s and read an Ida Tarbell piece on what the Standard Oil Company had done to Kansas: bad pipelines, price manipulations. What should Kansas do? What could Kansas do? She watched Lewis sleep, scribble rants against quacks, stare out a window.
At the Thornton, they had a grand dinner. They had never openly shared a bedroom together, but there were many things they’d never done together. In the morning she made him wait at the hotel so that she could walk to the appointment alone. It was a nice practice, the kind where she was the only person waiting, very briefly, on an overstuffed couch. Once inside, she gave a bowdlerized version of what the doctors in London and Africa had said, of the sheer impossibility of what seemed to have happened. She couldn’t tell if the doctor, the young president of the hospital (Lewis had outdone himself) believed her or not, but he was clearly used to unraveling women, and he tried not to patronize: She had two fallopian tubes, and the one on her right was perfectly healthy; no idea why these men she’d seen hadn’t thought so. She was perfectly healthy—her ectopic mess had been chance, just chance. If Mrs. Blake feared a second ordeal, he wanted to reassure her. Chance killed people every day, but it wasn’t going to kill her this time, because she was—he said again—perfectly healthy. An April baby, he guessed. Perhaps she should take some time to think, but otherwise his congratulations to Mr. Blake, and please, they shouldn’t worry, and should continue to do whatever they wanted . Doing things kept couples fit—the doctor and his wife had three children, and a happy, perfectly healthy life. After the baby he’d give Dulcy some items to delay a second child.
Lewis was waiting outside; they had some fun calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Blake, which gave Dulcy a little time to let it all sink in. He said there was a fire downtown, and they walked over to gawk with everyone else. Though the city hadn’t yet filled with smoke, the color of the sunlight had changed to the yellow magnetic feel of a tornado, the whole nature of the world shifting as they passed through. The air gave everyone high cheekbones and a consumptive dark–eyed look, and Lewis watched the fire like a little boy, beautiful and in awe. Dulcy was sure she felt a vibration under her feet, not an earthquake but the buzz of the engines and pumps that kept people alive in the honeycomb under the sidewalk. The wind grew, the flames shot higher, and then suddenly the clouds opened to a drenching rain, dousing the fire and turning the sooty streets to rivers.
???
She didn’t argue about his proposal this time. “I’m not going to be the father of a bastard,” said Lewis. “It’s unkind of you to think I might, given my childhood. It upsets the hell out of me that you have a moment of doubt about this.”
“I don’t have any doubt about you,” said Dulcy. “It’s everything else.”
He called her “doom girl ” for a few days, and then they got back on a train for Fort Benton, which seemed out of the way enough. She wanted to sign her real name for this real marriage, but he talked her out of it; in the end she pruned her lies down to Maria Dulcinea Braudel . They had a nice night in a hotel—a second hotel—by the Missouri.