The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  “You stun me,” said Samuel.

  “Bodies,” said Lewis. “Yellow fever.”

  “May I ask what happened to your hand?” asked Margaret. “Samuel says it wasn’t really a fireworks accident.”

  Samuel signaled for another pitcher of beer. “You should ask what happened to my head instead,” said Lewis.

  “Your head or your mind?” asked Dulcy.

  “My head,” he said, tapping one of the metallic freckles on his cheekbone. “Unless you have some fresh insight.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “But what happened?”

  “A man blew himself up a few feet away from me in Manila. I was on the other side of a pillar, reaching for a drink. Nothing heroic. My dinner companion was not so fortunate.”

  “Poor man,” she said.

  “Woman,” said Lewis. “A recent acquaintance, but she seemed quite nice. She was tasting some wine.”

  “Why do you tell people it was fireworks?” asked Margaret, after a moment.

  “If I’m trying to find out something, it’s easier if some people think I’m a fool. I’ll usually never see them again.” He smiled and pushed a plate of sweet wafers in her direction. “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”

  “I don’t enjoy you as much when you’re arrogant,” said Dulcy.

  “All right,” said Lewis. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  •••

  Livingston’s trees were either new and spindly or crippled and writhing in the wind, as tortured as the trees of what Walton refused to call the Holy Land. The dead gardens she passed on her walks were simpler, messier versions of Martha’s: wide rows, mounds for squash and corn, branch supports for cucumbers and tomatoes. The only thing that distinguished Livingston’s efforts was endless howling wind and the use of pretty red dogwood twigs for these supports.

  Nothing could look bleaker in March. Mrs. Whittlesby, the most aggressive gardener of the library women, liked a fancier, faux European variation, patterns of zinnias or petunias interspersed with ugly pergolas and statuary; she didn’t mention that this collection, and her garden soil, came from the monument business owned by her husband and the Protestant cemetery managed by her brother: the angel a couple couldn’t quite afford for a baby’s grave, the dirt overflow from an especially bulky casket.

  Dulcy’s garden would be different. After weeks of listening to the operatic wind spin around the Elite, she’d thought on new terms, anyway. The old cottonwood next door swiveled, and her neighbor, the minister Brach, swiveled too, lurking just beyond the fence when she was outside, plinking away at his piano until he heard her door. The Sacajawea ladies said Brach had a history of alienating his parishioners by sermonizing about a fast-approaching apocalypse with no mention of salvation opportunities or, say, Easter. Mrs. Brach, who would once have been a pretty blonde, seemed to exemplify the notion of I myself am hell without drama or arrogance. She didn’t speak, even utter a simple hello; she simply stared, a shriveled ghost. Her husband was openly malign: he dumped his stove ashes in her yard and talked loudly to himself about Rusalka being a prostitute. He kicked his dog, and probably did worse to his wife. Dulcy had taken to locking up, and she tested the lock by sliding a piece of paper at the top of the jamb, just as she had with Irina. It was there when she returned, but she didn’t feel like a fool for having done it, even though she imagined Henning would notice it from across a room.

  She did not think of this possibility often, but it never left her.

  From the north upstairs window, the Bluebeard room, Dulcy saw the minister pace his perimeter, and she thought: brick or stone. Another Irina relative, a spidery great-uncle named Abram, had been a mason in Trieste and had no problem with the idea of a six-foot garden wall, or any quibbles while Dulcy toured the corners of the brickyard for a shade she liked. “Like a blushing peach,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Dulcy.

  “A dozen cartloads, but cheap, all in all, for the privacy.”

  She loved watching the wall snake up from the old foundation at the bottom of the yard. When Abram finished a rough frame, she hopped up and down in her dirty garden skirt to see if she could see out. She couldn’t, but she had him add another foot. The garden beds were staggered down the slope, with a double line of stakes spaced for fruit trees along the east edge of the property, and the day they were filled, snow fell again.

  She walked around town the rest of that day, the last official day of winter, wide-brimmed hat collecting snow, and though it melted and ran down her back in gouts every five minutes, she did in fact see coverings in yards over patches that seemed planted, quilts and burlap and sail cloth pinned down with stones. Some people knew how to grow things here, but she hadn’t found a way to phrase her questions, and she didn’t knock on their doors.

  At the nursery on Clark Street, she hit another hiccup: the owner refused to order peach trees for her. “I am not a fool,” he said. “How could you think such a tree would be suitable? I would no sooner give you a gun if I thought you were going to use it against me.”

  She couldn’t speak for a moment, but he didn’t look up from a receipt for the indoor things she’d already selected: two nice figs, a lemon, a holly fern, a big jasmine and a melon abutilon. “The blossoms come out during a warm patch and then freeze,” he said. “Of all silly notions.”

  He was a Scot named Buchanan, not obviously dramatic. If he’d explained his reasoning with humor, rather than with condescension, she might have stayed sane; now she’d grind his bones to make her bread. “I see,” said Dulcy.

  “It goes warm, it goes cold, cherries and peaches and apricots explode, split right to the ground. You’d best give up on fruit. Raspberries, maybe. Strawberries.”

  Now he’d offered some information—she didn’t like the sound of this tree-splitting issue—but still in the wrong tone. “Strawberries,” hissed Dulcy. A small voice in the back of her head reminded her of Samuel’s jokes about people leaving after every winter, driven away by cold and wind. Some inner rationality whispered that this nursery was the only source in town: catalogues were good, but seeing was believing. Beyond the peaches, she’d intended to order apple, plum, pear, and apricot trees, she’d chosen four types of grape vines, she’d hoped to purchase gooseberries and currants, not to mention roses and clematis, peonies and iris. She needed this little gnome.

  It was hard, though, to see this nursery in April—empty benches, a small hut for bare-root storage, dirty panes on the small greenhouse—and feel a relationship was essential. Buchanan’s thin mouth twisted: he liked to win an argument. So did she. “I’m building a conservatory,” said Dulcy. “It should be tall enough for espaliered peaches, but perhaps I’d be better off with figs and quince, and I understand now that you’d rather I find another source, even for my plums and pears and apples.”

  “Well, now, apples. Apples I can get you through Krohne, out on the island—”

  “Perhaps I’ll ask my friends in England for cuttings. Are you using Spy for rootstock?”

  “I’ll ask,” said Buchanan, who’d lost his glow.

  “Any chance you’ll have any Adams, or Grimes?”

  “I can see if they’re available. He may have Wealthy, and Wolf River—”

  “Have a lovely year,” said Dulcy. “I’m off to order my grape trellis. Trellises.”

  She let the door slam, hoping that she’d hear a tinkle of glass. She’d given up on the wide-brimmed hat, and she pulled a wool knit cap down hard on her head. The sun was out, but the gusts were icy, and the street was covered with shattered branches from last night’s wind. She slid on a stick, and her rage deepened. She found Siegfried Durr at his studio, and he promised to build her a glass house.

  Spring (As defined from equinox to solstice, March 21 to June 20)

  March 23, 893, Ardabil, Iran, 150,000 dead.
>
  March 26, 1872, Lone Pine, 30.

  April 3, 1868, Hawaii, 77.

  April 3, 1881, Chios, 7, 866.

  April 6, 1667, Dubrovnik, 3,000.

  April 18, 1902, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 2,000.

  April 28 & 29, 1903, Malazgirt, Turkey, 3, 500.

  May 3, 1481, Rhodes, 30,000.

  May 8, 1847, Nagano, Japan, 9,000. A fire.

  May 19, 526, Antioch, 250,000.

  May 21, 1382, Canterbury, (the Synod earthquake).

  May 26, 1293, Kamakura, Japan, 23,000.

  May 28, 1903, Göle, Turkey, 1,000.

  June 3, 1770, Port-au-Prince, 300.

  June 7, 1692, Port Royal, Jamaica, more than 2,000. A wave.

  June 12, 1897, Assam, 1, 500.

  June 15, 1896, Tohoku, Japan, 22,000. (The greatest waves observed after such an event, 125 feet.)

  —from Walton Remfrey’s red notebook

  chapter 15

  Easter

  •

  On March 26, 1905, the thirty-third anniversary of the Lone Pine earthquake John Muir and Walton had shared, Abram framed in new walls on the old shed foundation, and Durr began the greenhouse. Dulcy sketched out what she wanted—glass on one end of the old shed and frame on the other, bowed metal ribs to give height and width (the peach trees, again)—but Durr brought up constraints of finance and timing, repair and venting. Above all, he brought up the question of wind, and in the end they compromised on a plain lean-to design against Abram’s building, tall enough for two dwarf trees to be espaliered against the back wall and two smaller plants like figs trained up string ladders at either corner of the front walls. Dulcy would buy some cane furniture, and she would go there to read books and daydream and nap; maybe she’d try to paint for the first time since she was nineteen. She knew she’d be better off getting a teaching degree, or applying as a secretary at the newspaper. Samuel thought she should apply at the courthouse, but only because he wanted a spy.

  Durr did not have much business now, anyway. Spring was the wet season—snow in the mountains, rain in town. During the slow, steady splatter, he photographed a few fraternal gatherings and school groups, but the tourists had not arrived yet, and poor people were always poorest at the end of winter. He talked while he measured for the metal frame and she worked on the new garden beds, Margaret giving prompts: about how much portraits differed in bad weather and good weather, about how when the wind wailed Durr’s subjects had a pinched look, as if they worried the glass of his studio would shatter onto their heads, about how little time it took to tell if a couple loved or loathed each other. If his subjects were farmers, they were preoccupied by temperature and rainfall, and if they were businessmen, they worried the summer wouldn’t save them. The children in class pictures were out of their minds with boredom, and old people were as fidgety as toddlers.

  “When are people at their best, then?” asked Dulcy.

  “Early summer,” said Durr. “Or almost anyone at their own wedding. You would think an infant, but with a child they’re too worried that a photograph will be all they have left.”

  Durr always brought the conversation back around to death. It was a character flaw, though his approach to the topic was never predictable: he could go from freezing to plague in a minute, then an hour later wonder aloud if different races of men rotted in different fashions. Margaret somehow felt comfortable enough to tell him everything of her husband’s every last moments, every fluid and sound that emerged. Durr confessed he sometimes fantasized, when walking through a city, that all the dead were walking with the living, which had been part of the reason he’d wanted to learn to capture faces. He thought, especially after his time in the army, that people should consider the alternative when they whined in the midst of their limited time on earth. Walton would have enjoyed him, especially given that all the macabre talk fizzled at the sight of food or alcohol or anything lovely—a painting, a piece of pottery, a girl.

  On the day she visited the studio to see glass and frame samples, Dulcy came in just behind a nervous couple, the woman a wash of violet water, the man stiff in a dusty suit. They weren’t dewy—the man was bald, and the woman windburned—but they seemed happy enough. Durr called them up, and Dulcy wandered around looking at the portraits on the wall. She recognized teachers, bankers, waiters from the Elite. The Fenoways brothers were posed with their mother, who had the stretched look of someone being eaten from the inside out.

  Upstairs, the couple laughed nervously, and Durr asked them to hold still. Dulcy saw the greenhouse catalogues on Durr’s desk in the corner, but she lifted two albums first. The first had a county stamp, and after the first page—a glazed-eyed wraith with the notation lost three children Feb 99, found wandering —she realized she’d stumbled on the album of the Poor Farm in town and closed it hastily. The second album held police booking photos: the inside docket sported Ger. Fenoways C of P in an inch-high flourish. She flipped through with a jumpy combination of aversion and fascination, like a baby watching a fire or a sheltered girl facing her first fig-leaf-free David. But on the last page she stopped breathing.

  “You cannot say what you’ve seen, you know,” said Durr, who’d come behind her. “You’ll remember this one. The man who stabbed Hubie Fenoways with my cane.”

  “But when did this happen?” Lennart Falk had been beaten—saying to a pulp didn’t do it justice. An eye was closed, a cheek split open. The aquiline nose was a bumpy squash, lower lip a pillow.

  “When he was in jail,” said Durr. “It happens to all of them, but usually they have me take the photograph before, or wait. This man needed to be released to his brother.”

  “And this is how he looked when the brother came to fetch him?”

  Durr looked at her; he understood. “You know the brother?”

  “I know of him,” said Dulcy. “I know the situation.”

  “I was there,” said Durr. “Mr. Fenoways should worry about that one. The one who came, he wanted to get his little brother well away, but he’ll not forget.”

  •••

  On April 7, she read that an eighty-four-year-old man from Denver named George Wilder, who’d never left home before, never seen tropical waters, mangroves, or hammerheads, had nevertheless traveled to Galveston, boarded a ship for Key West, and jumped overboard in the middle of the Gulf. He’d left a note: I am worn and tired out and I thought I would put this old frame where there would be no inquest save the sharks.

  This item was well inside the newspaper, because a huge earthquake had shaken the Kangra Valley in northern India, killing tens of thousands, even some of the English elite, destroying temples and bridges and livestock. Walton might have found the will to avoid the window if he’d known what he would miss. The mountains heaved and swayed for a full minute, and then three severe shocks, each lasting a few seconds, were felt in quick succession. Orthodox Hindus declare that the heinous sins of her children make Mother Earth tremble.

  Dulcy knew she’d have bad dreams about pinioned babies and the smell that floated out from under crumbled buildings. Maybe these dreams would displace the vision of old George Wilder dropping into the warm blue dark.

  •••

  The weather turned dry and warm. Her cabbages had come out fast, carrots and onions with hairlike slowness. She’d ordered from True Blue Seeds and L.L. May and started tomatoes inside—Magnus, Grandus, Stone, Aristocrat, Large Rose Peach—along with seeds she’d brought back from trips (a pink aubergine, artichokes, astrantia and eryngium, optimistic melons). The ones that germinated were a little triumph, a tendril of the strange past growing secretly in her very proper present.

  Dulcy’s trees arrived a few days after Irina’s crew left to plant hops in Washington State. Durr was in Butte, buying a new camera, and anyway had a crippled leg. Abram had pleurisy, and Irving, who weighed less than Dulcy did,
staggered when he coughed. Dulcy dropped a note at the newspaper, and Irving arrived wheezing with a response from Samuel an hour later. She studied him, and worried, and then forgot her concerns when she read: You’ve mistaken me for someonewho knows what he’s doing. Dulcy wetted down the burlap around the roots and dragged the trees to the shady side of the house, then wandered around, poking stakes into the ground to mark planting sites.

  Late the next afternoon, Durr was balanced on the greenhouse frame while Dulcy repotted tomato seedlings on the back porch. Her apron was covered with soil, and the cuffs of her blouse were filthy. When a figure came around the side of the porch, she gave a little shriek but did not drop her Peach Blow Sutton seedling.

  “We had a parade,” said Lewis. “Or a clown show.” He wore stained canvas pants, and Samuel was next to him, wearing stiff new dungarees, staring morosely at the river and the greenhouse and Durr suspended against the blue sky. He was holding his own shovel, and Irving appeared behind them with a wheelbarrow, still in half his bellhop uniform.

  She showed them the six marker stakes and the burlap-wrapped bare-root trees. Lewis scuffed the ground with his boot and sent Irving out for a pickaxe. He talked her into moving the two plums, which was a sign of how he’d rattled her, and she was very happy. She put a chicken in the oven, and sent Irving back out for some bread and beer and lemons, a bottle of whiskey, potatoes, and Margaret Mallow.

  The trees took nearly an hour, and though Lewis kept swinging the pickaxe, his sunniness cracked. Dulcy started some cheese biscuits and filled a wheelbarrow with manure. For an exercise devotee, Samuel was not very helpful, nor did he notice Lewis’s growing resentment. When they began to argue about a large rock, she asked Margaret to finish the biscuits and mix spiked lemonade and used the pick herself, working around the edge of the hole to loosen the soil. She should have shown them how at the outset.

  “You’ve done this before,” said Lewis, sitting on the freed rock.

  “I have.” She handed it back.