Jed Adams nodded towards them, and blushed. His office was small and messy. There were pictures of bears on the walls. Books on zoology were piled on his desk. The room smelled of coffee, turpentine and animal droppings.
‘I’m interested in your wolves,’ her father said.
Beatrice, squeezing her fingers tight around her thumbs, tried to disassociate herself entirely from the conversation. She studied the bear pictures. Brown Bear with Cubs. Polar Bear on Icecap. Elijah stood looking at his feet.
‘The wolves?’ said Jed, taking a last bite of his sandwich. ‘Grey wolves are interesting creatures, though you sure can’t make a pet of them.’
‘I should think not.’
‘We have an information stand. It’s very good. You can purchase pamphlets inside the shop, and all at reasonable prices.’
‘It’s not that kind of query.’
‘No?’
‘Might I ask how long you’ve had them here?’
Jed looked puzzled. ‘A year. Fourteen months,’ he said. ‘They settled in well and they’ve never been a problem to us. They’re often restless, but that’s wolves for you; they seem happy enough, both of them.’
‘And what is their age?’
‘Are you an inspector?’ said Jed. ‘Is this some kind of test?’
‘Not at all. I was simply wondering how long you expect them to live?’
‘You don’t like zoos?’ Jed looked uneasy. ‘Are you one of those campaigners?’
‘I like zoos very much.’
‘You do?’
‘Sure I do. Who doesn’t?’
‘Then the wolves are five and six years old. I’ll be honest with you, sir, I’m a bear man, and I’m no real expert on wolves, but I’m expecting them to live another four or five years, something like that.’
‘Then what happens?’
‘Then we either acquire another pair, or we find something else to fill the cage.’
‘I meant –’ He coughed. ‘What do you do with the remains?’
Jed Adams scratched his head. Beatrice had a crick in her neck. Elijah pretended to be interested in a book called The World of the Captive Mammal.
‘The remains? We burn all the carcasses, Mr Lyle. Or the veterinarian takes them away.’
‘Seems such a waste.’
The man laughed. ‘What do you expect us to do with the remains, sir? Give them a full Christian burial?’
‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Elijah.
‘No,’ said their father, ‘not at all. You could give them to me.’
Jed Adams got up from the desk where he was leaning and walked around a little. He brushed against Beatrice, making her turn away from the pictures, her face flushing pink.
‘So,’ said Jed, addressing Elijah, who was just as flushed as his sister. ‘What does a man from – where did you say you were from?’
‘I didn’t. We’re from Normal.’
‘That figures. What does a man from way out in Normal want with the carcass of a wolf?’
Beatrice decided that she’d have to say something quickly. What must this man be thinking? She gave him a beautiful smile, blinked her wet blue eyes and stopped him in his tracks.
‘Mr Adams, my father is a skilled taxidermist,’ she said. ‘It’s a growing pastime, and something he is extremely serious about. So far, he has rebuilt birds and small animals. Now he’d like something bigger.’
‘Yes,’ her father said, nodding vigorously. ‘That’s it exactly. That’s the reason that I’m here.’
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing,’ said Jed Adams. ‘Rebuilt wolves?’
‘You’ve never seen a stuffed and mounted creature?’ her father asked, amazed. ‘Some of the bigger museums show collections in their natural history department. I myself have seen beavers, wolverines and turtles.’
Jed chuckled. ‘Have you seen the size of those wolves, Mr Lyle?’
‘The Museum of Natural History in Manhattan has an Indian elephant standing large as life in the lobby,’ he said.
‘So, where do you plan to show your specimen? Your porch? Now that would be a real nice welcome for your guests.’
‘I plan to donate it.’
‘You do?’ said Elijah.
‘Certainly. I would like to give the good people of Illinois the chance to see my art, and to observe the wild wolf without any fear or danger.’
Jed rubbed his forehead and swallowed. Beatrice and those eyes of hers were making him feel nervous. ‘Thing is, sir, I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation. I can’t let you have those wolves dead or alive.’
‘You can’t?’ Beatrice felt a sudden need to stick up for her father, though her voice began to waver a little towards the end. ‘Are you not in charge of these animals? Animals that will end up being burned?’
‘Miss, we are not allowed to give our creatures away, even when they’re completely demised. There’d be a risk of disease. It just isn’t healthy.’
‘Chicago is full of meat packers,’ said her father. ‘What’s the difference?’
Jed opened the office door. A beam of sunlight fell across his face, making him blink. ‘There are laws, Mr Lyle, and in four or five years’ time, when those wolves are dead, I doubt they will have changed.’
‘I don’t believe you. Why, if such a law exists then how do these museums get hold of their exhibits? And what about New York? Those big-shot curators and their taxidermists were allowed a fully grown Indian elephant.’
‘Perhaps they were friendly with a big game hunter,’ he said, showing them out the door. ‘Either that, or a circus.’
Beatrice was glad to be outside again. Above her head a lost red balloon shivered in the sky, then got caught up in some branches. She heard the gibbering of the animals, the high-pitched squealing and a slightly muffled roar.
‘Well, Mr Lyle,’ said Jed Adams, shoving his hands inside his armpits and bouncing up and down. ‘Say, you might have missed out on a wolf, but you’ve certainly made my day. This will do the rounds of the zoo for weeks.’
‘Who runs this place?’
‘A Mr Ephraim Colt.’
‘Then I will write to him.’
‘Oh, please do that. I wouldn’t want to stop you. He’s a hardworking man, and he’ll be awfully glad of some amusement.’
‘It will not be an amusing letter.’
‘Believe me, sir, it will.’
They were at the end of the path when Beatrice took a quick glance over her shoulder. Jed Adams had a hand in his hair. He was smiling and shaking his head.
‘It could have been worse,’ Elijah whispered to his sister. ‘Much worse.’
‘The impudence and the ignorance of the man,’ said their father with his teeth clenched. ‘He knows nothing.’
‘I agree,’ said Beatrice, ‘because, after all, if taxidermy is displayed in an important New York museum, then it’s a very serious business.’
Elijah looked amazed. ‘Sister, you’re forgetting. It’s one thing looking at those animals inside a museum, but we have to live with them, and the outhouse is hardly the right place to take a wolf to pieces.’
‘Chicken,’ their father said. ‘I can smell fried chicken.’
‘Are you awfully upset?’ she asked.
‘Not at all,’ he told her. ‘These ideas have to be explored. Anyway, Lincoln Park Zoo hasn’t heard the last of Ethan Lyle. I can be extremely persistent. Now let’s go and buy some chicken, I could do with a bite to eat, and it does smell uncommonly good.’
They strolled around the zoo for another half an hour, but their hearts weren’t in it. Gazing at the monkeys, their father looked sad. They were a nice size. They had a curl in their tails, and small, human-like faces.
‘I was reading about a man in Seattle,’ he told them. ‘He stuffed one of these little marmosets and he gave it to his wife to keep as a companion. Now she dresses it in soldier suits and takes the creature everywhere. When she visits friends and restaurants, she hooks i
t onto a chair by its tail. She once took it to the theatre. The play was by Mr Bernard Shaw. It was very popular. They made her buy the little stuffed monkey a ticket.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Every word is true.’
Chicago was wonderful, filthy and frightening. The air sloped. The wide crushing streets were full of steam and sweet oil, soapsuds, raw meat and wet metal polish, new money clinked, and girls with scarlet lips sashayed their way between street lamps, barrels and freshly slaughtered cattle. Walking back to Harlech Street, they passed bars with open doors, glimpsing men without jackets drinking straight from the neck of the bottle. Beatrice had never seen such a thing. Normal was dry. Outside a particularly lively establishment called Frankie D’s Saloon, Elijah stopped.
‘Keep up, keep up,’ their father shouted, battered by the crowds.
‘Wait!’ Elijah stood stock-still. ‘I can’t pass this by. It’s too good an opportunity to miss.’
‘What? Drinking liquor? Liquor just addles the brain.’
‘No. I’m a preacher, I’m going to be a preacher, and I’m supposed to practise my preaching. If I can save just one of those poor damned men from drowning in their sins, then it will be worth it.’
Beatrice felt faint. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, leave them alone, I want to go back to my room.’
‘I can’t walk away,’ said Elijah. ‘I’ve been called.’
‘We can’t stop him,’ said their father, shrugging and shaking his head. ‘The boy has found God, and who am I to say it’s a bad thing? The hotel is just around the block, do you think you can find it?’
Elijah nodded. He was rifling through his pockets for his sermon notes.
‘We’ll see you back at the Lemon Tree, a saloon is not the kind of place for Beatrice to be visiting, even if she is with Normal’s John Wesley.’
‘They’ll kill him,’ Beatrice said, walking on.
‘Sure they will, like a lamb to the slaughter, but the boy’s got to learn.’
Beatrice was exhausted. Lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling with its dusty yellow paint, and a crack that looked like a hand, she tried not to think of her brother in Frankie D’s Saloon, shouting out his sermon to men with bloodshot eyes.
Her father was napping in his room. She was tired, but she couldn’t sleep for five minutes in the Lemon Tree Hotel, where the man at the desk was reading about the Chicago Cubs, shaking his head and sighing at the week’s poor results, an old man in a striped collarless shirt was coughing in the backyard, rooting through the boxes, and in another room a baby was crying, and a woman with a creak in her voice was singing a song about her poor departed papa. Was this place ever quiet?
She pulled on her boots, now tight against her ankles; she took the thin silver key and pulled her door shut. Downstairs, the man with the rattling pages was drinking a cup of coffee. She could see the street through the plate glass in the door, its flat brown colours, splashes of crimson and the sunshine hanging like a rinsed-out piece of muslin was something you could slice through.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the man behind the counter.
‘Hmm?’ He didn’t look up.
‘Could you tell me where the nearest church might be?’
‘What?’
‘I said …’ she began, as the man lifted his head at last, biting his lip and then looking somewhere else. ‘Do you know where the nearest church is?’
‘What kind of church?’
‘Any church.’
‘Well, miss; I guess what I’m trying to say is, are you a Catholic, or Baptist, or a Jew, or something else entirely?’
‘I’m nothing,’ she told him. ‘I just want some peace and quiet.’
‘You’re nothing? You don’t look like nothing to me. St Pius,’ he said. ‘Will he do? He’s the nearest. Turn right out the door, take the first right and St Pius will be looking at you from his shiny white tower.’
The air pressed against her face while billboards advertising chewing gum flashed between billboards advertising shaving soap. A Tribune had been taken by the wind, its old news rising as she looked out for Elijah, her eyes aching. She took a right turn. A marble saint holding out his thin pointed hands balanced on a block of white stone. The bricks looked cool. Plants with yellow leaves were curled around the steps and the door was slightly ajar.
Inside, the silence was sudden and her footsteps were so loud she moved down the aisle on tiptoe. The church was almost empty. A woman in a black coat was kneeling near the front and a man was lighting a candle. Beatrice sat towards the back, closed her eyes and drifted. She pictured Joanna making a pudding, a vase of pink flowers, Cormac Fitzgerald twisting his cap in his hands, a breeze in his flame of red hair. He was laughing. He was always laughing. He had radishes in his pockets and shiny purple beans, like Jack before the beanstalk, and when she opened her eyes she was sure she could see him, standing by the font, his hands in holy water, but after she’d blinked a couple of times, it wasn’t Cormac, it was the woman in the long black coat genuflecting at the altar.
She felt better. Back outside, the wind caught in her hair and woke her. Through the forest of faces, she saw a red-and-grey muffler, and then Elijah stumbling with his hands in the air, as if he was calling for help.
‘What’s the matter?’ she breathed. ‘What’s happened to you?’ She looked him up and down, but there were no signs of any obvious bruising, no broken bones or bloodied lips. Elijah was intact, his hair still slick with the cream he now shared with his father.
‘I can do it!’ he shouted, pushing her towards Harlech Street. ‘I really can do it! The Reverend Malcolm Henderson was right. I can reach out and grab them, and if it wasn’t for the liquor they’d be saved.’
Back in the lobby, they sat on a worn overstuffed sofa, the same dirty green as the walls. Elijah was panting. There were vibrations in the air coming from his skin like static electricity.
‘They didn’t want to brawl?’
‘Not at all. Heck, they liked me. You know, I really think they liked me. But boy, it wasn’t easy. I had to shout to get their attention. I started telling them about temptation, and how it’s a weakness that brings them closer to the Devil, and how it separates their souls from their God, and how they can be saved. They laughed, but then they started slapping me on the back and finding me a stool, and then they started saying, “Hush up, hush up, let the boy say his piece. Can’t do any harm if we just sit right here and listen.” Of course, there were some who didn’t like what they were hearing, but they’d taken so much whiskey, they were swaying around like grass in a breeze, and what did they know anyway?’
‘So you saved them?’ she asked. ‘Your sermon worked?’ They were alone. The man behind the counter had vanished. She could smell tobacco smoke coming from the office.
Elijah shrunk a little. ‘I don’t think “saved” is exactly the word I’d use,’ he admitted. ‘But I certainly gave them all something to think about. We ended with a prayer.’
‘A prayer?’ she spluttered. ‘You actually got those men to pray?’
‘Beatrice,’ he said, getting to his feet and pacing up and down, ‘what is a prayer anyway? All right, so they might not have got down on their knees with their hands clasped and their heads bowed, but as I was saying the words, it seemed like they were listening.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s a start.’
‘Yes, it is a start, and it was certainly an unforgettable experience. I’d never been inside a saloon bar before, and it was like another world. There were ladies in there, you know, I could see them in the background. They were wearing frills on their dresses and their shoulders were bare. It was all so very immodest.’
‘Really? Perhaps you should go back in there and save them?’
‘You know, that’s exactly what I was thinking,’ he said.
That evening they ate in the hotel restaurant, a small L-shaped room, without a view of any kind, but their father had said that the
meal was included in the price, so why waste another cent and boot leather? Most of the other tables were empty. Their father, it seemed, had lost his new enthusiasm, he’d scrambled back in on himself, and as they went through the meal – the bowl of tomato rice soup, the tough piece of beefsteak, and the soggy apple pie – there were no more stories about monkeys dressed as soldiers, how Jed Adams was an idiot, or how wolves were his next big project. He was quiet, leaning on his elbows, looking down at his plate like the man Beatrice knew from Normal, who hardly left the outhouse. She tried to bring him back.
‘You’ll have to write a letter to the zoo,’ she told him. ‘They need telling, and who’s to say that Ephraim Colt doesn’t know all about taxidermy, and its benefits?’
He grunted.
‘I’m going to write about my preaching in a journal,’ said Elijah. ‘People like reading about these things. They find the words inspirational.’
‘Isn’t that a little premature?’ said Beatrice.
‘It has to be recorded,’ he said, picking at the meat that had caught between his teeth. ‘Because in ten years’ time, when I’ve had a little more experience and I’m writing a serious book, then I can look back on these humble beginnings and use them as a prologue.’
‘Where did it come from?’ their father said, suddenly looking up and scratching his hair, which was starting to look a little wild.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m talking about God. How did that happen?’
Beatrice put down her fork. The room was quiet. She was sure the woman on the next table was listening, while sawing at her steak.
Elijah didn’t say anything for a minute, his face had reddened, and his eyes were staring at the painting on the wall, an ugly-looking picture of a dog. ‘God happened like your taxidermy,’ he said at last, throwing down his napkin and pushing back his chair.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean,’ said Elijah, ‘is He came to fill in a hole.’
That night Beatrice slept badly. The room was too hot. Pushing open the window, she watched a handful of stars over the dark city roofs. She breathed in the cool night wind, listening to the traffic, the woman in the room above her head pacing up and down. Someone was laughing. A man shouted, ‘I’m on the late shift again! Would you look at this list! It ain’t right, I’m telling you. My lady friend will kill me.’ Beatrice wrapped her arms around herself. Lying on top of the bed sheets, she watched the curtains flapping back in the breeze like thin white sails.
Angel of Brooklyn Page 14
