“I’m not waiting for that.”
“Then what?” asked Dr. Sprague.
“Not waiting for anything,” said Joe Wear. “Waiting for the workday to be done.” Once the bowling started, surely, the man would be driven away, would go home to his own people up in Canada. “Heartfelt sympathy,” Joe said, then added, “to you. For your wife.”
He waited a while for an answer, then went to open the door for the women.
“Ladies,” he said, in a bitter voice, and he was overwhelmed with the smell of molasses. The women brought it in, slowed by it, by the sticky click of the gummy soles of their shoes against the alley floor.
The women—Mary Gearheart, Hazel Forest, LuEtta Mood—had read the paper every day for a funeral notice. Would it be at Cedrone’s Funeral Parlor? At the alleys? Not at a church, surely: Truitt had no use for church. She said so herself. They had to do something, even if it was just to bowl upon Bertha Truitt’s own lane. They had hung the wreath and the ribbon and had gone home to bowl in their sleep. Now they were here.
LuEtta Mood saw Dr. Sprague in the corner of the alley, and she thought about running. She had identified Bertha’s dead body; she should have gone directly to the Octagon to break the news. Instead she’d let the police do it. She had never written him so much as a note on the loss of his wife, when she should have been better, when she knew what a note or a word might mean to a person terrified and terrifying in grief. She had never understood Dr. Sprague but she had never tried.
Now she went to the table. “Dr. Sprague,” she said. He lifted his head.
He’d lost weight. His double chin, once curvaceous, nearly embarrassing, was gone; his mustache had taken on different, doleful angles. What happened in a marriage? Her own had fallen like a cake, if ever it had risen, and since Bertha’s death she’d been dreaming of escape, and only now realized it needn’t be a dream: leaving is something one might do. “LuEtta Mood,” she said of herself. Then, “I was a friend of your wife’s.”
Had she spoken to him in the past year? At the other end of the building, Mary and Hazel had begun to bowl quietly, which is to say badly, a pin at a time. Jeptha sat ready to set—now, when did he get here?—and neither he nor the women looked over. LuEtta knew she had to bring them back something.
“We were wondering,” she said, “if there will be a funeral.”
“Memorial service,” said Dr. Sprague. “Eventually. Not now.”
There was a carelessness to Dr. Sprague that alarmed LuEtta: he would attend to things when he got round to them and no sooner. He might not have done a single thing: the body itself, ant-sweet, caved in, glowing like a saint’s, might be stored in the house. Still, she thought, her loss of Edith gave her the right to talk to him about the loss of his wife. “And the burial?”
“Done,” said Dr. Sprague. “The Salford Cemetery.”
“Of course.”
He looked at her as though she had expressed an opinion on a dream he’d had.
“I’ll look for the stone, if it’s there,” said LuEtta.
“In a year, in the way of her people.”
“Her people.”
He nodded, said nothing more.
Then she sat down at the table. Why she hadn’t gone to see him after finding Bertha at the mortuary: because to do so she would have had to relinquish her own grief, fold it like a flag into a neat triangle and hand it over. She had not been ready then and she was not ready now. She tilted her head to see what he was writing; he turned it so she could read.
BERTHA in colored pencil, built not out of ordinary letters but something like architecture, ivy winding up the exterior wall of the B, and the R covered with pink roses and eyebrow windows, the A blushing peachily, alight with a sunset. She wanted to take it; he had it pinned to the table with his thumbs. He said, “Not lost but gone before,” and she said, “Yes. My condolences.”
He frowned. In his doctor’s voice, he said, “Not lost.” Then he looked at her, and more gently said, “Bertha said you lost a child.”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry.” He examined her face a moment, as though troubled by it. “You could still have another, should you wish. Should your husband wish.”
“Thank you,” she said, though—she told herself later, away from the alley, fixing Moses Mood’s dinner, chicken livers and buttered noodles—it wasn’t as though permission was what she lacked.
Leviticus watched the women bowl. He loved Bertha, his thoughts never wandered to the loveliness of the other women, but it did wander. Inattention: his sin, as ever. Whatever was in front of him, he’d rather think of something else. He woolgathered, dreamt—sometimes he was stringing spondees and iambs on a line of poetry, but often not. He was vacant. He was walking along a street in Fredericton he’d last walked decades before. Remembering poems he’d memorized years ago, his own and other people’s, like reading old letters found in a trunk: nothing new, and everything new.
If he’d belonged to a confessing religion, he would have gone to confession. Bless me father for I have—what were we talking about?
Instead, like many sinners, he devoted himself to his sin. He sat in the corner of Truitt’s Alleys. Flask in pocket. Eyes to ceiling. A memory of Bertha trailing in from time to time and then her crushing death.
You could only hope she’d tasted sweetness in some way.
Can we forgive him everything? Everything? Even the cats? He left them behind. They’re wild animals, he told himself, but if so they were wild animals locked in an octagonal house. Or: Margaret Vanetten’s let them go—it was she who fed them—but Margaret had been sent on the train with Minna, and her employment expired the moment their feet hit the train platform in Fredericton. Every time he remembered the cats—when Minna wrote to ask how they were doing—he thought, who am I to feel sorrow for a cat, when Bertha is dead.
He thought of the Mother Cat, whom he searched for, whom he found, whom he wept over, to Bertha’s disgust.
There is no animal like a cat for grief. They have the stamina for it, the disregard for convention. A dog would try to talk you out of it. The cats would have been a comfort to him. He could not bear to be comforted.
Bring me Donizetti when you come to visit, Minna wrote, and he wrote back, I could not live without him.
He planned to leave Salford only in his coffin, or in a sack of ash.
Bertha Truitt’s Afterlife
She was seen walking down Mims Avenue walloped and alive. She was seen walking along Atlantic Street but ectoplasmically, looking for her hat. She peered through the plate glass windows of Truitt’s, her jacket pockets paying out silver dollars like a one-armed bandit. Her body in the coffin was cast of molasses; she herself had swum through to safety. Her body lay in her old bed in the Octagon preserved in syrup. Her body had been torn into six pieces—head, arm, arm, torso, leg, leg—and was packed and buried in a round rubber ball. She had told her lady bowlers just the day before, If I disappear I will return to you in the Salford Cemetery: come look for me, no later than noon on March 1, by the Pickersgill Obelisk. Eventually so many people came looking for her there they had to keep the gates locked.
She ruffled the fenny weeds on the north side of town. She changed her name to Abigail Patrick and lectured on temperance on the streets of Nantucket.
She was the unnerving heat on your February pillow slip, the unnerving ecstasy that woke you at 2:00 A.M. pawing at the bedclothes, trying to find your way through the curtain and back into that humiliating, beauteous dream.
She flew through the sky naked on her back, using her enormous breasts—
—yes, Earl, you said that before; we didn’t believe you then.
No, thought Leviticus, it wouldn’t take any time at all to accomplish, dying. Joe Wear was a rough man, without people or love. Naturally he wouldn’t understand what it meant, to be dying of grief. To want to die of it. To wait patiently. His publisher had turned down his book about Bertha with an irritated note: yes, y
es, but to what end?
Most days he sat in the corner of Truitt’s Alleys. Other days you could only hear him rummaging in the basement among the old pins, the chipped vulcanite balls. He did not seem to ever go home. The Phantom of the Alleys, the bowlers called him.
They lived together in this way, Wear and Sprague. Upstairs, Joe moved his bed to the other side of his rooms, so that he could not hear the snoring—Joe suspected that Old Levi slept right on Bertha’s old lane, without blanket or sheet, only the memory of his wife to pillow him, the feel of her ball rolling down his spine. Other times Joe would wake in the night with the old certainty that he was the only person in the building: he felt strung in bed. I’ll die soon enough, Old Levi had said. Joe Wear worked hard not to wish for it. Nothing good could come of wishing for another man’s death. Why had he said it? Why had he put it into Joe’s head?
In the morning, he looked at Old Levi. “You make people uncomfortable,” Joe said.
“I know it.”
Joe Wear nodded. Then he said, knowing it fully for the first time, “I make people uncomfortable, too.”
Nothing would move Leviticus Sprague, who all his life had felt an odd sense of calm about his place in the world—his mother had instilled it in all of her children, and it had a religious underpinning that he most days ignored—which is to say, he cared very little about the opinions of other people. He was not sure he believed in them. People, yes, but not their opinions. He was patient. He could wait for anything, forever. He did not think this was a virtue. Why stay in godforsaken Salford? He still might move to West Hills, join the Baptist Church. Or get on a train to Oromocto himself, go home to Minna, to Almira, Benjamin, Joseph. He was the only one of the siblings who’d married. Now it was too late. (But why is it too late, Leviticus? Because it is. Because Almira would say, That’s all right, what counts is you’re home. As though they’d been waiting for him to be rid of Bertha.)
Dr. Sprague sat at a table in the corner of Truitt’s and he drank. He’d closed his practice, informed the Plymouth Hospital. His friend Cornelius, who’d founded the hospital, tried to talk him out of it, but halfheartedly. Dr. Sprague had lost interest in the world and Dr. Garland knew that you could not practice medicine that way.
Soon enough his organs felt replaced with the implements of bowling, his blood balled up and rolling through his veins, his lungs full of wood. He sat at his table and watched the bowlers. The women still came, in their athletic outfits, which made them self-conscious, now that Bertha was not here to outdo them in sartorial strangeness. The bloomers, the middy blouses that had made them eccentric near her now made them feel dressed as children. The self-consciousness was a sign of decay: the memory of Bertha was falling apart.
Finally Dr. Sprague went to Joe Wear with his proposition. “I have a job for you, Mr. Wear. Might you be interested?”
“Already have a job. I work for you. You tell me what to do and I do it. So go on.”
Dr. Sprague thought this over. “No,” he said. “This is different altogether. I will pay you.”
“You already pay me.”
“More,” said Dr. Sprague, not kindly. “It’s a job I want done with care and I think you’re suited for it. I need a body.”
Joe Wear shook his arms out then hugged himself. “Unsuited—”
“Limbs is what I mean. Legs. Wooden ones. I have in mind a monument for Mrs. Sprague.”
“Your mother?”
Dr. Sprague was standing at the oak front counter, a position he never took up. He looked at Joe Wear with such consternation it was almost a compliment: he’d expected better. “No,” he said, “no—my late Bertha’s.”
“Oh, Truitt,” said Joe Wear.
“Just so.”
“I’m unfamiliar.”
“You just—”
“—unfamiliar with her limbs,” said Joe Wear, which made Leviticus Sprague laugh, a phenomenon with which Joe Wear was likewise unfamiliar. He would have thought that Dr. Sprague was anatomically incapable of laughter, like a friend of Joe’s from the Dolbeer Home who’d insisted he couldn’t cry because he’d had his crying glands removed after a childhood fever: previously Joe had thought all bodily waters—tears, sweat, spit, piss—were pulled from the same bodily well.
The laugh was silent and mouth borne, like a sneeze. His shoulders kept still but his stomach jumped. When he’d composed himself he said, “Yes, I imagine you are unfamiliar, Mr. Wear. I am building, as I say, a kind of monument. The head I will manage. The legs, her arms—well, I cannot get past the disappointment of anatomy. But I thought of your work with wood. You once made a cow for Minna, I remember. A little one, with a swinging tail. She has it still.”
“Does she?” said Joe. He had not thought of Minna since she’d left. She’d seemed like none of his business. “Well then. Sure.”
“Don’t make her out of bowling pins.”
“Bowling pins or nothing,” said Joe Wear, and Leviticus Sprague was about to argue except for the planning look on the man’s face, which suggested that he knew exactly how to solve this problem.
“But wood don’t last,” said Joe Wear. “In a monument, I mean.”
Leviticus was silent a long time. Then—mockingly? in order to be understood?—he said, “It don’t last forever, but it don’t do badly. Legs first. When you’re done we’ll look them over and then discuss arms, hands, feet, and the like.”
“Life-size?”
That startled Leviticus. For a moment he imagined a figure Bertha’s size and felt the wrongness. No such thing as life-size: you’d always be fractionally off, and the difference would be heartbreaking. He drew a shape in the air. “Yea high,” he said. “Yea wide.”
“So smaller.”
“Smaller,” said Leviticus. “Has to be.”
Across Joe Wear’s table, old battered bowling pins, made of rock maple. He decided to go in calf first. He’d turned down Old Levi’s new wood but accepted a selection of artist’s tools, hammers and chisels, little planes, little rasps, sandpaper in various levels of irritation. The rock maple pins were hard to carve but strong as Truitt herself. Beneath the white paint, pale wood. It did not take him long to realize that the attitude of the leg would make a difference. Old Levi wanted the legs jointed at knee and ankle. He himself would work on the torso. That made sense. How would Joe Wear know how to make the womanly parts of a woman? Who would ask another man to make his wife’s body?
Begin with the lower leg. That seemed safe. He used his own muscles as models. A calf shaped itself one way standing, another sitting, another with its foot slung up on the table. What was this monument of Dr. Sprague’s he was building the pedestal to? He carved the curve of a calf, with just a suggestion of the shinbone. Gave it one comely ankle, lump of bone, notches in the skin up the Achilles tendon. He planed and sanded. Sprague had offered him an anatomy book but he did not like to look. God built bodies from the inside out. Only He could do it. Joe Wear worked his way in. He found he couldn’t stop. Wood and work had always mesmerized him. In the dark of the night he finished the ankle and wondered about a foot. How would it fit in? His own legs were knock-kneed, left more than right; his feet pigeon-toed, right more than left. His wooden legs he vowed to make perfect.
Joe Wear hefted the calf. Was it like Truitt’s? He wasn’t sure. Truitt’s calf. In actual life they had scarcely touched. She was The Great Handshaker, and no person at Truitt’s could entirely avoid her pivoting bustline, which came brushing by no matter what. She was bold with her body, always had been—never a hugger but a backslapper, an elbow patter. She might even tug your hair, if she were particularly fond. But she paid attention. Joe Wear was a tightrope walker. He balked at the hands of others. She left him alone.
Here was her calf, or somebody’s. He tucked it under his pillow when he went to bed. The next day when he saw Dr. Sprague, he lied without knowing why: “I’ll start tomorrow.”
All day long he thought about the calf: when he gazed at the b
owlers, when he was meant to keep score for the leagues. What next? Calf, then calf, then thigh by thigh? Or all one leg at once? How would he devise a knee that both worked and looked kneelike?
That night he made a left calf so the right calf would not be lonely. Later he would think, A right thigh might keep a right calf company, too, Lord, Joe Wear, you needn’t always go for the obvious companion. The second calf was harder, because it had to mimic not just life but its maple partner.
For a week he could think of nothing else. Would he carve a kneecap out of wood, to hide the hinge of calf and thigh? At what angle did upper leg meet lower? He wanted the legs able to support whatever weight they had to, though Dr. Sprague had given him nearly no specifications—legs for a monument; if those passed muster, arms for a monument; if those passed, feet and hands. He decided he would make the legs with feet straightaway. The Salford Half Nickels still bowled at Truitt’s. Joe thought if he got these legs right he might offer to carve a wooden leg for Martin Younkins, who got around with crutches and a pinned-up pant leg. Maybe then he could do an arm for Jack Silver.
He watched the Half Nickels as they bowled, to see how their legs worked, whole or abbreviated. He examined the women in their skirts and bloomers, their angles and inlets. LuEtta Mood was a terrible stand-in for Truitt except for the fact that neither of them cared what they looked like as they bowled. He felt he’d never been so aware of what other people looked like in his life. He took the information back to his room over the alley and worked.
Heel, toes, arch, instep. Bare, every tendon visible, though in his heart he knew that stout Truitt’s tendons would have been hard to see in her fubsy feet. He thought of making a portrait of Virgil, in negative: three wooden toes, two wooden fingers.
The thighs he did last, being the most personal territory. He had to get to know the rest of the leg before he dared.
You’ve done both legs.”
“I couldn’t understand one leg without the other, so. No paint or varnish yet. Wasn’t sure what you wanted.”
Bowlaway Page 10
