The Boys in the Trees

by Mary Swan

  Street led him next to the back room, the one looking over the yard, bare patches picked by the chickens, he supposed, although there were none to be seen. Along one side was a roughly fenced section that looked like it might have been a garden, and he knew there was something about that, something Lucy had heard, but he couldn’t remember what. It felt like he spent a long time noticing these things, while his eyes moved to the shape lying wedged between the end of the bed and the plain wardrobe, and though he knew it already, something lurched when he recognized the faded blue fabric of the dress Lilian usually wore. He felt for her pulse, though it was clear there was no need, thinking of all the times he’d done that. Thinking of the feeling of her fragile life beneath his fingertips, gone now, as if it never had been. What in God’s name happened? he said, and Street said, There’s more, clearing his throat to get the words out.

  Downstairs, Naomi lay by the pantry door, and she looked so small. A bowl had smashed on the floor, maybe fallen, maybe thrown, some kind of batter in hardened blobs and streaks on the wall, on the table and the stove. Heath? he said, and Street said, Gone.

  • • •

  Later, much later, when Heath had been found and brought back to town, when Eaton had gone, white-faced, to bed, and Marianne’s door had clicked shut, Robinson walked through the rooms of his house, turning down the lamps, and remembered the night horses. Marianne’s mother had told him once, over the soup, of a night when she had woken with a start at the very moment that her own mother had died, something they learned only days later. He thought about his long drive back to town, the way Prince snorted and shook his head, the eerie way the moonlight stroked the trees and the silent horses thundering past. That was hours before the shots, but perhaps the very time Heath lay in the dark with open eyes, planning, deciding what he would do, and how he would do it. Though there was no reason he could think of that he would have slipped into Heath’s world.

  • • •

  Prince slowed as he lifted his tail, and Robinson thought how far he was from the life he’d assumed would be his. The life that would still have been his, at that moment when he lay on his bed with his hand held up before him, reciting the names of the bones. Lunate, hamate, triquetrum. That moment just before the tap at the door, when he couldn’t have known how everything would change. He thought, in the days and weeks when he did nothing but think about it, that it had clearly been a test, and that he had failed. Not the test he thought it was, not a test of his compassion, but something else. There was a tap at the door, his landlady saying, A young lady to see you, and he picked up his jacket from the chair, smoothed his hair, looking in the crooked mirror. He assumed it would be Marianne, although she had never come to his rooms, but when he walked into the parlor Faith turned from the window and he was surprised at the sound of his voice, saying her name. I need your help, she said, looking past him to the half-open door.

  Outside the air was dense with rain that had fallen, would fall again, and in the pearly light she stood out sharp beside him. But at the same time she was all softness, her pale brow, the pink of her cheek, and the beads of moisture that clouded her hair where it showed beneath her brown hat. As he walked beside her there seemed to be time to notice each small detail like that.

  I need your help, Faith said again, and it was the usual story she told him. A young girl taken advantage of, a young girl in trouble. A good girl, a girl who worked hard, who would have a chance to find a good position, to have a decent life. Can you say that it’s right? Faith said. Can you honestly say that it’s right? This girl’s life ruined, while the man carried on with his own, without even a pause.

  He was persuaded, and he told himself it was by what she said, nothing to do with the misty look of her hair, with the fact that he was the one she had chosen to ask. The next day the note came with the address and he could have changed his mind, but he didn’t. Remembering the way Faith had looked when he said yes, said he would help. The girl was thin and frightened, her small white teeth chattering. She held on to Faith’s hand and there was blood, but not so much, not while he was still there. He never knew how the Professor learned of it, but that didn’t really matter. Summoned to his office, Robinson felt like a schoolboy, braced for the whipping to come. The words fell hard, each one a dull thud landing, another piece of the golden path gone, a scatter of faint sparkles in the air, until they too disappeared. No question of the law, the Professor said, providing he left the city, set up somewhere far away and stayed there. A terrible mistake, the Professor said, with what he had been prepared to offer him. Robinson heard the trembling in his own voice as he made his brief responses, despised it but couldn’t stop it. Even out in the street the blows continued, thudding with each beat of his heart, with the unbearable knowledge that he had only himself to blame.

  He didn’t tell Marianne any of it. An adventure, was what he said instead. An opportunity, a new start for their new life together. She thought he was teasing, at first. And when he made it clear that it was not a joke, that they would not be taking the house near the lake, that they would be living in a landlocked small town miles away, she wailed and stamped her pretty foot and told him he was hateful, told him that she never wanted to see him again. But the wedding was in two days’ time, the house filled with flowers and the hem already finished on the dress. He sat on a chair on her front porch until it was nearly dark, and when she came out to him, he held both her hands and told her he would treasure her forever.

  • • •

  He woke to the sound of a shout, a cry, but the horse was standing peacefully, no sound but a distant bird. The reins were looped around the trunk of a sapling by the edge of the road; he must have done that, although he had no memory of it. Only the strange thought of his daughter’s light skull cupped in his hand, nothing in him strong enough to bring her back. He pressed his fingers hard into his temples before he climbed down from the buggy, loosed the reins, stroked the horse’s soft nose and looked into the dark pool of its eye. The sun was still high but its light had softened; he had misplaced his watch and had no idea how long he had slept. No idea if anyone had passed by and seen him there, what a man might be saying to his wife as he eased off his boots by the kitchen door.

  • • •

  The Marianne he first knew had the bluest eyes and a way of holding her fingers over her mouth when she giggled. She asked his opinion on everything. Once, near the time they first met, she touched the sleeve of his jacket and said, You must be very brave. He had been speaking of the surgery he’d observed that morning, trying to describe it without offending, but at the same time enjoying her shivers, as she herself seemed to. There was no reason to think of that now, but he did, and knew that it had never been true. He thought of the wrinkled face of Miss Burns, the first to tap at his office door, and what it must have cost her to unlace, unbutton, to bare herself and show the shameful swelling under her arm. What she must have gone through before he’d even heard her name, alone in her little house, deciding.

  And he thought of those times the diphtheria swept through, the parents whose children were carried off, sometimes every one. Watching at bedsides night after night, hardly able to stand, yet wiping at their reddened eyes and thanking him for his trouble, for all he’d tried to do. He remembered the man with the crushed leg, at the factory, conscious until he died and making jokes about the dance he was going to miss. Reverend Toller standing tall in his pulpit, but moving through the laneways at dusk, tapping at back doors to return some glittering object he’d found in one of his wife’s hiding places. Even his own son screaming in his bed, his hair all spiked and the lamp throwing terrible shadows on the wall. Sometimes screaming louder when Robinson stood in the doorway, saying, Hush, hush. It was only a dream. Marianne lost in her powdered sleep, making him wonder how it was those nights he was away from home. Or how it was for Lilian, who could barely speak, barely meet his eye, yet came to him week after week, trusted him. Even Heath in his cell hearing the hamme
r blows ring out, knowing the exact hour of his death. Robinson knew that even the vows he had made as a ragged boy had nothing to do with bravery.

  • • •

  The music stopped for a moment when he opened the back door, then started again. A piece Marianne liked to play, although he couldn’t just then put a name to it. The slow sad notes wrapped around him and he thought about stepping into the room, sitting down in the armchair, and listening to the end. He thought of touching her hair. Standing in the doorway he saw her rigid back and the way her skirts flowed over the piano stool. He carried on past, up the stairs, poured water into the bowl, dipped his hands and splashed. The slow sad notes still repeating and he dried his face more roughly than he needed to, had to smooth his mustache with the special comb Eaton had given him for Christmas. When he came noisily back down the stairs the music had stopped and the parlor was empty.

  There was a folded paper on the polished hall table, a note from Lett, inviting him to supper at Blyth’s Hotel. He went to the kitchen to tell Lucy and felt a little spurt of anger at the way she set her lips, dropping the potato she was peeling back into the mounded bowl. Another when she asked about Eaton, still quiet in his room. Let him sleep, Robinson said, his hand rough on his office door. He sat down at his desk and opened Beard’s book but after a time realized that he hadn’t really read anything. Stray sentences snagging his attention, dragging it down to a place far from the desk, the chair, the fingers turning pages. Lightning never kills or even hurts unless it finds resistance in its path … They are without past or future, and only a dull present … What patients confidently expect to happen will be very likely to happen.

  He rubbed his face, gave his head a shake, and flipped forward to the chapter of illustrative cases, hoping to find something of interest. Beard’s Illustrative Case XI was a man of thirty, troubled by weekly emissions, by sweating hands, red spots on the forehead, by catarrh of the stomach. He reported that as a boy of seven he used to climb trees, and on so doing experienced sexual sensations, mingled pleasure and pain. He told Beard that he was so much annoyed by this that he gave up the habit of climbing entirely, although it had been what he had most loved to do. Case XIV was a gentleman who suffered from attacks of intense pain and heat behind the ears, and who also experienced palpitations of the heart when playing a game of cards or billiards. He could not bear the touch, even the thought, of flannel to the skin, and was afraid to use a public or a private privy or water closet. This gentleman was successfully treated with a course of bromide of potassa and tonics of quinia, strychnia and iron.

  Robinson turned the page, but the ticking of the clock began to interfere. It sat on the corner of his desk, black and heavy with a porcelain face, a bronze figure on top. A man with an old-fashioned frock coat, knee breeches, one hand on his hip and the other held straight at his side. The clock was Marianne’s gift on their wedding day; she’d had a brass plate fixed to the base, engraved with the date, and Always. He had given her a necklace on a delicate gold chain. Stood behind her doing up the clasp, dipped his face to her scented neck. That was in the high room in the grand hotel near the station, Marianne astonishing him with her delight, now that it was permitted. Making him laugh, her tangled hair tumbling down her back.

  • • •

  He closed the book and placed it on the little pile of journals not yet read. Wiped a few smudges from his desk, polished the face of the clock with the soft cloth he kept in the bottom drawer, with the bottle and glass. It was time he left, but he was thinking about other cases Beard’s methods had cured, women living in misery until they walked through his door. Thinking of women in beds and on couches, women sitting on the hard chair in his own office. So many women, their eyes rimmed red from crying; there was a time when it seemed that Marianne’s tears alone would be enough to sweep him away. At first it was some slight in a shop or an invitation not given; Robinson was all sympathy for as long as his patience lasted, trying to understand how a cold look from a woman she hadn’t yet met could be a tragedy in her world. From her sobbing sentences he came to see that she had pictured herself arriving in Emden like royalty, stepping down from the carriage in her dress of the latest fashion, bringing her knowledge of concerts, of entertainments, of how to live a civilized life. Certain that she was just the person the town had been sleepily waiting for, that her opinion would be eagerly sought, that cards would pile up on the new silver tray. But the town was neither as backward nor as biddable as she had assumed, the order already firmly established, and all he could think of was to give her money for new dresses, for a dining table shipped from England, a new set of dishes painted with tiny pink flowers.

  More tears with the gouts of blood that were their children, refusing to stay, and each time more days, more weeks in the darkened room. He worried about her not eating, told the girl who worked for them then to make up sweet, rich things, cakes and pastries, airy loaves of bread that could be thickly spread with butter. He carried up the silver tray with its scatter of visiting cards and she stirred them with her pale fingers, closed her eyes again. At some point he had moved to the room across the hall, so as not to disturb her when he was called out at night, and somehow he never moved back to their high, carved bed.

  • • •

  He felt a gritty tiredness in his eyes as he moved down the street, thought briefly of sending an excuse to the hotel, of lying down on cool sheets and sinking into a deep, dreamless sleep. He thought of Eaton, who would still be in his bed when the sun was high if Lucy didn’t climb the stairs to waken him, and with that thought remembered that he had meant to look in again before he left the house. There was a baseball game sometime soon, he would take him to that; they would sit side by side and cheer for the Maple Leafs. It would be good for Eaton, a noisy crowd, fresh air. It would be good for both of them.

  As he passed the corner of Powell Street he met a group of men coming up the hill from the factory, nodded to their greetings, and thought about the fact that he knew almost every face in Emden, that he was part of the town in a way he never would have imagined when he first shook Dr. Poole’s hand. He had hoped at that time that it might still be a temporary banishment. Some years, maybe five years, and then surely all would be forgotten, forgiven. Not the end of his golden road after all, but a side track that would join up again. It wasn’t a hope that he remembered setting aside, but he was quickly busy, long days and nights and drives through the countryside, until he was enmeshed in the town, tangled in other lives. Some years ago he had read the Professor’s obituary in the city paper, read that he was survived by his daughter, Faith, and for days he had thoughts that he had to tamp down.

  Behind him he could hear the men needling someone who was going directly home, most of them veering off to Pond’s tavern, or Malley’s. No doubt giving a saucy greeting to Sarah Barnes, who would be stationed outside the door, her eyes fierce behind her spectacles, leaflets in her clenched hands. He had been called often enough to the factory to know what kind of day those men had spent, but they walked with easy steps, some with arms about each other’s shoulders. Robinson knew almost every face in the town; there were men he talked with, shared a cigar with, men he was glad to run into on the street or at a meeting table. But he realized there was no one he would ever walk with in that easy, unthinking way, maybe never had been. He and Smith had been close for a time, with their shared trials and aspirations, but only for a little while. Smith was in Montreal, maybe had been for years, something Robinson only knew from reading the articles on contagion he occasionally contributed to the Medical Record.

  He thought of Eaton and the O’Neill boy, sticks clattering in their rolling hoops, and the way he sometimes saw them running and whooping through the long waving grass in Badgers’ Field. He must have had friends like that, when he was a boy in that other place, but he couldn’t summon a memory of any. All that came was a picture, the rough bark of a tree, up close, lit by blazing sun. A slender caterpillar, an inchworm, bright gr
een like the color of new leaves, making its slow, deliberate way upward. Pausing at each gnarled spot, the front part of its body flailing free in the air until it adjusted to the different surface, came down flat and continued on its way. A boy’s hand reaching, grubby, broken fingernails, flicking it away, and he didn’t think it was his own hand, but he didn’t really know.

  • • •

  How could he not know if it was his own stained finger or someone else’s, flicking the caterpillar away to be crushed beneath a cracked boot sole, or maybe for the pleasure of watching it start again, watching it struggle again and again. The kind of casual cruelty that Robinson saw everywhere, some days of his life, along with the more calculated kind. The way of a man like Lett, with his ruddy cheeks, his booming laugh. The very picture of jovial good nature, but ruthless in ways that Robinson knew, and ways he’d heard about. Married to Marl’s plain-faced daughter, Lett ran the factory, owned property in all four corners of the town and half the center block, sat on every committee there was. A finger in every pie, he liked to say, bullying and pushing through his scheme for a competing railway line, which was good for the town, in the end, but better for Lett, better for Marl, who stayed in the shadows in his big house on the hill.