Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY - NINE

  IT STARTS THIS way, with Joseph’s great grandmother, Aurelia Guiteau, pacing at the bedside of her dying husband. It is 1928 turning 1929, three hours left before the calendar becomes a useless piece of scrap paper. Chintz curtains are pinned closed, and the sounds of joy and fistfights stream through the open window.

  Aurelia clenches her auburn hair, cursing god, as the house is riddled with specialists. The doctor at the foot of the bed shakes his head, and the Catholic priest hides in the downstairs pantry. Their boys sit on the staircase, biting and pinching and staring dazed the way children do when they are suddenly thrown into the wilds of adult panic.

  Aurelia bends over, registering her husband’s eyes, small, black orbs reflecting the room like mirror balls, and she sees a word coming across his lips. He’s trying to say something, but it just won’t come. Aurelia has the jittery streak known in redheads, clamping a wet washcloth to her own cheeks and then to those of her husband. He’s still breathing, but there’s no flash of recognition, no light that so often settled on her, that psychopathic look of violence, which she always mistook for love. She realizes this New Year’s Eve that she won’t feel his hands root across her back again. She realizes she is losing something forever that she had always counted on. Tyson Guiteau is a large man, just like his father, with bloated, hairy feet that hang over the edge of the mattress. Just like his father, she has been told, dying of heart failure at thirty-four.

  On the bed, Joseph’s great-grandfather, Tyson Guiteau, is somewhere else. Tyson’s last memory is also his first. It appears drained of color like an X-ray held up to the sun. He is six years old and trailing through a crowd of overdressed giants. He is not in Ohio but in New York—Buffalo to be exact, courtesy of an overnight train and two breakfasts packed in banded cigar boxes. His father, donning his best black suit, doesn’t trust the locals with their illiterate smiles and jacked-up prices and ruthless bargaining tactics. But he wants his only son to see this, as much as he wants to see this. It is the future. It is a thousand watt bulb.

  Tyson wouldn’t be able to remember the hour or the day of his first memory if it weren’t later marked in history books. Four in the afternoon with the heat firing down on the creamy, pastel-colored domes. So many people alive and curious on a three-hundred-acre stretch of parkland. Camel rides, bands playing rag on rickety stages, African emperors dressed in leopard-fur togas, a demonstration by the Life-Saving Service held at the lake on the latest advancements of shipwreck rescue. Everywhere the exhibition ground explodes with the strains of exotic flowers: pansies, delphiniums, cannas, rambler roses, cacti. But Tyson’s father pulls his son across the dirt by the arm, indifferent to the horticulture or the pretty girls under massive pompadours or the roar of distance organs.

  Sweat drips down his father’s chin, as much a sign of the dizzying heat as his growing irritation. As they walk, the music of one band drifts into another—a mournful pioneer folk song answered by a swinging set of banjos. His father explains that, as the sun sets, the lights will turn on. The Electric Tower is wired with thousands of colored bulbs, coming alive at night to liquefy the world.

  September 6, 1901. The Pan-American Exhibition. Not bad as far as first memories go. Tyson remembers peanut shells crunching like cockroaches under his feet. He remembers the Dutch chocolate that his father bought to keep him quiet and little boys sitting on gigantic stalks of cauliflower. But he won’t ever get to see the wonder of the Electric Tower. Nor will he visit Edison’s X-ray machine that his father is determined to find (foolishly thinking he can find the owner and put money down to help finance it).In a world exhibition, everything is a spectacle. But some acts are better attended. President McKinley, guarded by his Secret Service soldiers, shakes hands for ten minutes, as the crowds gather in line under the afternoon sun to touch the man who opened trade routes and conquered the Philippines. The future has arrived.

  Which catches fire first, a heart or a handkerchief? Not Tyson’s father suddenly going slack, letting go of his son’s sticky fingers and keeling off the path into a bed of pink geraniums. That must have happened second, because Tyson, stunned, frozen next to the invisible column of air where his father just stood, looks around for help from strangers, and already news is breaking over faces and men are running in one direction. Already Leon Czolgosz has blown two holes in President McKinley through a handkerchief that conceals a .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver decorated on the handle with an owl’s head. The President falls in front of the Temple of Music to the soundtrack of organ pipes. The handkerchief catches on fire. One bullet ricochets off the president’s breastbone and another plows through his stomach, pancreas, and kidney. Tyson runs, zigzagging and pointing, but no one pays attention to a little boy waving furiously toward the marvel of exotic vegetation, where, if a passerby examined more closely, two brown leather shoes in a desperate need of a polish stick out from miraculous pink petals.

  “Ma’am, ma’am,” he finally manages, as he grabs at the folds of the nearest skirt. The woman turns and dusts him off her dress.

  “Run for cover,” she screams at him. “They are killing people.”

  Frantic, he returns to his father, digging his knees in the damp soil, crying on top of him, panicking, trying to push his father’s body into public view with his scrawny arms. Two more women appear so close to Tyson, he could reach over and untie their bootlaces. Their mouths are gaping. “It’s a blessing,” one cries. “The president isn’t dead.”

  Neither is Tyson’s father. His eyes re-attain their hold on the sky, and he pushes his son roughly from his arm. He coughs, spits, and rubs his chest, while sliding to his knees in the dirt.

  “Jesus, Mother Mary. Like a stone passing. Like glass.” His father’s face is drained of blood, with terrified eyes lined in soft pink pollen. He can’t calm his fear, not even in front of his son. The fear of dying right there, in a city that isn’t his, in imported flowers, at thirty-four and a half.

  This is the future.

  They take the train back to Cincinnati that very afternoon, spending part of his X-ray investment money on seats in a first-class berth. Tyson’s father doesn’t talk. In fact, he doesn’t talk for the entire week after Buffalo, until early one morning, he collapses while stumbling out on the front porch on his way to buy a newspaper. A second strain rips through his heart and kills him outright, not bit by bit like the gangrenous blood that consumes McKinley one day later. This memory in mind, it’s no surprise Tyson developed a lifelong distrust in the wonders of technology only matched by his deep hatred of flowers.

  That first memory is the reason why the dueling bouquets of peonies (signs of health) and lilies (acceptance of death) that have been delivered to the house never travel up into the bedroom to decorate Tyson’s sickbed. Tyson’s first and last memory is the scene of not one man’s death but two: a president and a father. His eyes have lost their practical use, as his wife stands over him rubbing his forehead with a wet towel. But in place of her face, he sees African nobles with gleaming black nipples, enormous vegetables, and camels kicking up sand clouds. He feels his father dragging him through the tents and the music. Of course, there are no ticket stubs or park maps to document that the Guiteaus were anywhere near Buffalo in the summer of 1901. But they were because Tyson remembers it.

  That day hangs in his mind right now. Tyson has suffered far worse. Months of agony on this tiny rosewood bed as the tendons of his heart wrench in two across his chest. He shred the linens with his writhing fingers as he screamed, so much so that Aurelia ordered the bed fitted with quilts and army blankets, industrial strength, to make them last longer. Tyson punched holes in the wall, bloodying his knuckles, while Aurelia prayed at his side, first for a miraculous recovery and then, secretly, shamefully, for a kind of spiritual passing. She can’t be a widow. Not with two young boys. He refused to go to the hospital, no X-rays, none of those machines strapped all over him. Instead he relie
d on daily visits from a doctor who could do little more than drug him up in the evening and touch his stethoscope to his heart, saying, “Family condition. His father died the same way.”

  Tyson twisted and turned on the second-floor bedroom for months like a tornado that couldn’t find a farmhouse to crash into. The neighbors started to complain about his screaming at night. Aurelia went every morning to St. Mary’s, keeping up appearances. She wore her emerald clip earrings, two inset diamonds sparkling on her ring finger, and a mink stole that wrapped snugly around her shoulders. She sat in the first pew of morning mass and waited for her turn in the confession box. “Father,” she whispered tiredly through the iron grating, allowing the poise she carried on her long walks to the church to deflate in the safety of the dark closet. “How could this happen?”

  A good question, but arguably Aurelia knew the risks when she married Tyson Guiteau. God may not roll dice but her husband did, running the single casino and prohibition bar in downtown Cincinnati, buried in the basement of the St. Regis Arms hotel. Everyone knew that Tyson made a small fortune on the sins of the community, and they blamed Aurelia, who never once stepped foot in the casino, for it. She heard the rumors leaking from the porches on her way to church that her husband had women on the side, that every stickpin or pearl necklace he bought for her indicated another knocked-up debutante in the Northern Kentucky hills. Every shred of gossip that reached her clipped, sparkling ears made her love Tyson with more insistence, as if it were a test of her loyalty, her faith.

  Aurelia stands over the bed. Tyson can barely squeeze the tweed blanket in his grip. He’s vomited up everything he’s eaten in the last week. His eyes stare at the ceiling, exposing the soft creases of his bristled neck.

  “Ty, Ty, can you hear me?”

  The doctor at the foot of the bed shakes his head.

  It is time.

  She collects her skirt in her hands and runs down the hallway, the folds of her dress slapping the faces of her two sons as she descends the stairs. The youngest sobs, blocking out the noise with his knees against his ears, but Aurelia pays no attention, dashing down the oak staircase and into the kitchen where Verda, the cook, sleeps standing up next to the stove.

  Inside the pantry, crammed between the canned vegetables and the tangled spice branches that hang from overhead rafters, hides Father Murphy dressed in his most saturine attire. Murphy is the lean, tinsel-haired prefect of the St. Mary parish. He holds a gilded Bible over his heart and gives an expression that is simultaneously concerned and irritated by his confinement in the kitchen closet. She had forced him into the pantry that evening in the blinding fear that her husband, even unconscious, would magically sense his presence.

  Aurelia, with Father Murphy trailing closely behind her, races up the stairs, passing the two boys now collected around the cook who hugs them dreamily like she’s using their little bodies for pillows, and into the bedroom, as the clock on the wall strikes eleven. Laughter and cheers from neighboring houses fill the room in anticipation.

  Aurelia, who never cheated on Tyson once in their marriage, now betrays him for the first and last time. Tyson threatened to kill any priest who entered his house and warned her that if he were accidentally forgiven of his sins, he’d manage to crawl out of bed and commit new ones before his heart gave out. But Aurelia is now placing her own bet on the table. She stretches her hand an inch from Tyson’s broken nose to check that he’s still breathing. She then retrieves a crystal rosary from her jewelry box. Father Murphy begins the Prayer of Last Rites, assuring Tyson’s ascension into Aurelia’s one-shot constellation of everlasting life.

  “You think I’d let you go just like that?” she had replied quietly to Tyson’s repeated threats. She pinches the rosary beads, resting her thumb and forefinger momentarily on each crystal as Father Murphy drills through the Latin prayer.

  Tyson mumbles, his cracked lips moving through a word.

  Aurelia bends her head down to hear him, with her eyes flashing over to Father Murphy to speed up his verses.

  The doctor, standing by the window, cranes his neck to catch the dying man’s words.

  “Lia,” Tyson Guiteau utters before his last breath. A touch of romance, the name of his wife on the closing stroke of his tongue. Then this. “Leon,” he says. Not Aurelia. As clear as the ding of glass.

  Leon.

  Aurelia drops her rosary on the floor. Father Murphy closes his Bible. The doctor advances to measure the stillness of the wrist.

  The sound of death is ugly. Who knows what army of letters elbows its way through the cranium and marshals out of the mouth before the blood evacuates the brain? Aurelia avoids Father Murphy’s consoling arm and walks blindly down the hall. It is her turn to be the victim of the house.

  She opens the front door to the porch, where the Victorian houses around her glitter with lights through which shadows sway and dance, waiting to be thrown into the midnight of another uncertain year. Aurelia has entered the darkness an hour before they do.

  Leon.

  Leon Czolgosz. Twenty-eight-year-old assassin of William McKinley, twenty-fifth president of the United States. A self-styled anarchist and fiftycent attendee at the 1901 Pan-American Exhibition with his own business interests. Doomed to a short life of American alienation due to a hard-topronounce last name. Tyson’s first and last memory is of his father keeling into a grove of cultivated geraniums while a bigger man’s gutting took center stage. His father on the ground, and people crying into their hands for somebody else. They buried Tyson’s father while the entire country mourned, and even though the same funeral songs were playing and the same color adorned the banisters of the staircase at home and the downtown courthouse, he recognized the distinction in the deaths.

  Ghosts blame the men who take their places. The final name on Tyson’s lips is not Aurelia. It’s a change of heart that Aurelia now sees as a final betrayal, or maybe an indication of all of them.

  He left her empty, that’s all she knows. Tell me you love me. He never did. Tell me one last time so I can hold on to you. He chose someone else.

  When they take Tyson’s body from the room, Aurelia lies down in the sag in the mattress that the body has left. She wears the black silk dress she bought for his funeral. She refuses to move until her mother steps into the room.

  AT THE CEMETERY, Tyson’s mother walks up to her, grasping her by the arm and kissing her cheek coldly. For a moment, the old woman seems to be searching for a word just beyond her reach. Aurelia waits for it, frames all of her vision on those lips, cracked like the edge of a glass, like they might explain what was wrong with her husband, and then realizes that her mother-in-law is simply struggling to free her heel from a divot in the grass.

  The hay-brick Victorian draws more guests than the mass did, which is expected considering Tyson’s hatred of the church. But Aurelia doesn’t return to the house. She doesn’t go back for coffee and condolences. Aurelia goes to the one house that isn’t haunted by Tyson. She reenters the freezing vestibule of St. Mary and takes a seat in the last pew, breathing in the incense. She doesn’t kneel with her hands clenched toward the cross that hangs above the altar. She slouches, crossing her legs at the ankle and leaning her elbow against the armrest so she can chew on her fingernails. Finally, she gets the message. No amount of praying could have saved that man. His soul was weighing her down, and all she had done was fall in love with a liar who deceived her at every turn. You left me here without one last look. You didn’t even bother to say good-bye. “Leon,” she mutters out loud in the darkness of the church.

  JOSEPH WOKE IN his bed, gasping for air. The pillow and sheets were soaked in water, and he flailed his arms as if trying to swim to the surface. But the water was his own sweat, dripping down his back and legs. His heart pounded, and he couldn’t get air. His lungs were filled with fluid. A whistle blew in his chest when he tried to breathe. Clenching the damp mattress, he pushed himself up, slamming his shoulders against the wall.

&
nbsp; The last fragments of the dream drained through his ears and eyes, loud and jumbled against the darkness of the bedroom. He had told Aleksandra the story of his family, he had told her of every sad and perfect death. Maybe somewhere in saying it out loud, he had encouraged it along, resuscitated those starved facts with ferocious life. Joseph had waited for the sickness for so long, expecting it to burst like a seed deep in his body, and, now two weeks short of his thirty-fourth birthday, he couldn’t help but wonder if these symptoms were the first signs of that disease digging its roots in. A dull pain pulsed through his chest, and he pushed his palm over it to ease its beat.

  “Del,” he cried, reaching over to her side of the bed to find it empty.

  She came in with a confused stagger, rubbing her eyes sleepily. It took her a second in the darkness to understand that something was wrong, and her face lost its defensive guard. She covered his forehead with her hand.

  “You have a fever,” she said. “Oh, sweetheart. You’re sick.” He had not heard that loving tone in her voice for so long and missed it. He could live inside that voice. “Do you want me to call the doctor?”

  “No,” he said, catching more air sitting upright. His tongue was sandpaper. Del gently lifted his head and placed a pillow behind his neck. “No, I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Must be the flu.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not that.”

  Del sat on the edge of the bed, holding his hand and staring at his tongue as it fought to wet his lips. A long blue T-shirt dipped between her legs, and her newt-white skin collected the street light along her thighs. He had shared the apartment with her for almost ten months, but suddenly her body seemed so far way from him, as if placing his fingers against those thighs might be met with an instinctive jolt of resistance. Joseph wondered when their instincts had betrayed them, their immediate reaction being to drive each other away.