The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

While they ate dry bread and moldy cheese, Dulcy felt two more soft long tremors, but no one commented. Durr showed Margaret how to use one of Century cameras, and Dulcy kept her face averted and talked to the Englishwoman, who was packing to leave (“before we all die in lahhhva,”). Rex cranked up the Victrola, and Grover herded Hubie down to the water. He wanted at least one more jump recorded, but Samuel and Lewis wouldn’t budge, and Durr ignored him, and Rex apparently lacked the desired physique. Grover and Hubie weren’t natural companions, but Hubie was at least game, and so, Grover said, he would be the immortal one , the man to put droplets in air, into sunlight, on film.

  Lewis sat next to her and rubbed his eyes. “When we get to the springs I might hide in my room. Maybe they’ll have food there.”

  “How can Samuel bear listening to Grover?”

  Lewis gave her a look—in hindsight, disbelief? Amusement? Out of the corner of her eye Dulcy saw a jump, heard a splash, heard Grover bellow Great one ! And then screams, a hyena-like sound that popped through the melody of the phonograph, bled into the tinny violin; rending, echoing wails that bounced off both sides of the mile-wide canyon. They were on their feet as Hubie staggered, still screaming, out of the pool toward Grover. His skin was a new shade of pink. He knocked the camera over and fell to his knees. “Look out !” howled Grover. “Whatever is wrong with you?”

  “The water was fine,” said Rex. “It was fine.”

  “I’m not fucking fine,” roared Hubie.

  The men helped him down to the cold part of the river, the fresh melted snow flow, and the screams turned into whimpers when Hubie was submerged. But his legs and torso were a bad orangey pink, and he pawed at his privates but howled at everyone not to touch. “He needs to stay there until you know what to do with him,” said Stromberg, the little gray-haired Sanborn. “You keep him here until you have a way of keeping him cool, snow or ice.”

  Snow was miles away. Rex babbled: during the earthquake, something new must have come up from below. The burns might not really be that bad. Who knew what could happen to the earth’s plumbing after such a shake; who could know what might happen next?

  “What do you think?” Margaret asked Samuel.

  “I think it’s bad,” he said. The youngest Sanborn man ran down the hill with a thermometer and a jerry-rigged rod, a candle tied to its line. His first cast fell short, and the candle was intact when he reeled in. His second reached Hubie’s spot, and after a half minute he raised the tip. The wizened, melted candle slid out of its noose.

  The ground murmured, and a sliver of shale moved a few centimeters near Dulcy’s dusty slippers. When she looked up they were all watching. “These happen afterward,” she said. “For hours. We’re outside; we needn’t worry.”

  “We should if the cliff decides to drop on the road,” said Lewis.

  A decision was made to go to Eve’s Spring rather than waiting for the train to town. They soaked cloth scraps in cold water and loaded Hubie, but within minutes the keening began again. Even his face was burned, and they wrapped him like a mummy, with slits so he could breathe and scream. They found ice in Gardiner, and at dusk they reached the resort. Dulcy, pinned in a corner of the last wagon next to Durr and Margaret, saw a scurry of people in white, a stretcher, everyone disappearing into the building beyond the large plunge.

  They piled out and wandered past proper guests who were bemused by the frayed look of the new arrivals, a little alarmed, though not alarmed enough, by the noises coming from the man in the stretcher. A gaunt girl at the desk gave them rooms, and they found tables in the dining room and had indifferent food and big whiskey cocktails. Rex jammed biscuits in his mouth and said the doctor didn’t know what to think. The people at the next table began to mutter about the noise coming from the back and talked about the news of a quake in Yellowstone, geysers acting strangely. None of them had felt a thing.

  “Let’s swim,” said Lewis. “I’m worried that if I don’t try it now, I’ll never do it again.”

  They’d been given the last few rooms at the end of the old wing. A maid brought a selection of swimming costumes—wide, narrow, wool, silk, all bad stripes and polka dots. “I don’t want to do this,” said Margaret, who kept towels wrapped around any visible patch of flesh.

  “I think it’s a different sort of night,” said Dulcy. “Try not to worry.”

  When they crossed the lawn to the covered plunge—an ungainly white barn, nothing like the beautiful stone palaces she remembered from Budapest or Prague or Vienna—they could hear Hubie: Help me help me help me. And sometimes a higher note: Jesus . Dulcy tried to remember the soothing waters at Walton’s spas, the wonderful way she’d slept afterward. Maybe swimming would allow her to sleep through Hubie Fenoways’ wanting to die. When they entered and hit a wall of moist air and echoing laughter, she nearly turned around and ran, but she could hear the men behind them. It was time to disappear. She looked down at her grubby white feet, let go of the towel, walked to the cracked tile rim, and dropped off the side like an ungainly ladybug.

  When she opened her eyes, Lewis was sitting on the edge. “I admit to being surprised.”

  “I do, too,” said Dulcy.

  In the beginning, the men put on a show: cannonballs from the deep end, back flops at the middle. A war broke out, then became male-female, ungainly water birds at an elaborate dance, a ritual of splashing approach and pretty retreat, arm-waving and ducking, the woman finally seized and tossed through the air, passed around like a ball or towed along behind like a dingy. Dulcy’s brothers had done this with her when she was little, but she hadn’t gotten water up her nose since then, or paid attention to her brothers’ skin and what was underneath the woolen bathing suits. Now she felt hunted, and she panicked. “Stop !” she yelled.

  Lewis did, momentarily abashed by the whole transparent nature of the game. They caught their breath but watched each other. No one was nearby; no one paid attention. The dozen people in the pool had broken into distinct groups: Samuel and Grover had stopped quarreling to race, and Durr explained the sidestroke to Margaret.

  “Would you like to get out?”

  “No,” she snapped, holding the edge.

  He went under and headed straight toward her like a seal, twice as fast below the surface as he would have been above. He came up along her body, arms around her legs, and he lifted her. Dulcy started to scissor. “Lie back,” he said. “I’ll spin you. Just give it a try.”

  He kept a flat palm under her back, and twirled. She made herself relax and looked up at the rafters, the blurred moon through the dirty glass of the roof.

  Someone whooped. Grover and Samuel were swinging from the rope twenty yards away while Audrey and Beryl oohed, and Rex had found his way into the water, though he had his arms on the tile edge and his head down. “I’m afraid he’ll drown himself,” said Dulcy.

  “He won’t,” said Lewis. “He’s too worried. He just wired Gerry.”

  “I’ve heard the pain of a burn usually improves after a day,” she said.

  “Only if it doesn’t kill you,” he said. “The doctor thinks it’s already infected. He’s talking about gangrene, but where would you begin to amputate, or stop?” He gave her another swirl. “You don’t really know how to swim, do you? Do you want to learn?”

  Dulcy smiled. “Maybe later.”

  “We have time to kill.” He towed her a little deeper. “I can pry things out of your head while we’re at it. What’s your favorite poem? You must like something.”

  “Of course I like something . I like Yeats, these days.”

  “A love poem,” he insisted.

  “Why would I have thought of love poems in the last year?”

  “Jesus, Maria. I thought you liked to read.”

  “Jesus, Lewis. I thought you were a gentleman. How about ‘true love is mute’?”

  He smiled; he liked this
turn in the conversation. Audrey and Beryl ran by, and Lewis towed her further away from the edge. “It’s your turn,” she said.

  “Well,” said Lewis. “I like Yeats, and I like the loony French, but what’s wonderful about Donne is that he goes both ways. He can talk about air and angels, or he can say, ‘Enter these armes, for since thou thoughtst it best, not to dreame all my dreame, let’s act the rest.’”

  Dulcy focused on the back of his neck and thought about the strangeness of holding on to someone else’s arm this tightly. “Or,” said Lewis, “‘Licence my roving hands, and let them go before, behind, between, above, below.’”

  “Take me to shore,” she said.

  “It’s not a shore,” said Lewis. “It’s cement. Are you blushing? The water makes you look blue, and it’s hard to tell. Do you think, ‘Oh poor Lewis, he’s missing some fingers, no wonder he likes a hand poem. He must worry about his abilities as a lover.’”

  They were in the far corner, out of the ring of light. “No,” she said. “I don’t think you’re worried at all, and I can’t believe you’re saying this to me.”

  “Who else would I want to say it to?” He slid his arm around her waist. “And what else should I want? Not to waste my life? To be happy for a while?”

  “That’s all?”

  “Of course not,” said Lewis. “I want to eat you up. If you pull away, you’ll drown.”

  They kissed, then paused and looked at each other. He pushed her up against the edge and they kissed again before the door opened and they were flooded with cold air and the sound of Hubie screaming in earnest. Rex ran by without noticing them.

  Everyone left the pool and slipped off across the dark lawn. The towels were too small, and Dulcy was still wet when she ended up in a bunk above Margaret, who would not stop talking about all the bad things she wished she’d never said about Hubie Fenoways.

  •••

  In the morning, their carriages were delayed by a flock of sheep, and the train reached Fridley an hour late while Hubie cackled on a stretcher. They saw another casket on the siding, this one simple pine, but the sky was blue and the rocks above the mining town were cinnamon-colored. Dulcy had a corner seat against the window as they moved north, next to Margaret and across from Lewis and Samuel. No one had slept through the screams the night before, and now no one talked, not even Audrey and Beryl.

  Dulcy fell asleep and woke with a start at a bend south of town, roasting in the afternoon sun through the train window, sticky and parched, terrified by a dream she’d already forgotten. She could not place herself, and she looked for Carrie before she was back to the burned man and the plunge, the way Lewis watched from the facing seat as if he could track her alarm, as if he remembered everything they’d never talked about.

  Lewis handed her a flask. He’d gotten sun on his face. He had to be exhausted, but he looked younger and tighter, healthier, better in all sorts of ways. “Water,” he said.

  “He’s not leading you astray,” said Margaret.

  She was amused by everything, wrong about everything. Lewis watched Dulcy, and the expression was both sidelong and direct. “You’re an optimist, Margaret,” Dulcy snapped.

  “I am.” Margaret was hurt by Dulcy’s tone, and it was her turn to stare into space.

  They reached Livingston at four in the afternoon, and the thermometer at the station told Dulcy it was still eighty degrees. They’d arrived at the end of the May Day parade, and it looked as if both senses of the holiday had been celebrated: the streets were still full of banners and miners, clerks and laundresses and children wearing flowers, dressed in white.

  She faded away with her blue bag while the others sorted out luggage and the wounded man. At home she stripped off every pinching bit of polite lingerie, put on an old dress, and walked down to her garden, willing her mind free from what she’d done and seen in the last two days. She’d put on her muddy moccasins but kicked them free when they kept gathering pebbles. She thinned lettuce and radishes and nibbled on what she pulled; she loosened soil and drew a row for a second planting of peas, emptying the packet into the palm of her left hand, dropping them into the double furrow at two-inch intervals. It was a relief to concentrate, to be away from voices, to be alone.

  The wind swirled and caught the seed packet. She turned to reach for it and saw something white on her porch: Lewis, sitting on the steps, watching her. Dulcy scooped soil over the pea seeds, looked around for the moccasins, then gave up and walked toward the house.

  “Giving shoes up entirely?”

  “A nice idea,” she said. He had already been inside to find glasses and wine and a corkscrew, but was not so patronizing that he patted her own steps as an invitation. She dipped her dirty hands in the rainwater pail, sized up her options, and aimed for a spot on the far side of the bottle, wiping her hands dry on her skirt while he poured a glass. She kept the part of her mind that might jump into the future blank, and as a result the here and now was magnified: the birds in the river bottom, the coin-like fresh poplar leaves across the street, Lewis’s surviving fingers, sunned and practical, working the cork free from the screw and forcing it back into the bottle.

  “What were you doing out there?”

  “Peas,” said Dulcy, looking at her nails. “Not thinking.”

  “Because your thoughts are unhappy?”

  She took a long sip of wine.

  A pause. “Should I apologize?”

  “No,” said Dulcy.

  “Would you like to get married?”

  She hadn’t expected this. “No. I don’t want to be married. Do you?”

  “I didn’t think I did,” he said. “But in this particular situation, I felt I should ask. I want to do all sorts of things.”

  He flicked a piece of grass from her ankle, and she didn’t move, even though she felt as if she were about to blow up. “I like you,” he said. “I like seeing you, I like talking to you, I like touching you, and you seem to feel the same way. I’d like more of all of it, and usually, when people want this, they consider marriage.”

  “But Lewis, you don’t love me.”

  “I don’t know you well enough to know.”

  She wrapped her hands around her knees. He reached out and touched her arm. “Please look at me. What do you think?”

  “I would like to have everything,” she said.

  She watched him put down his glass of wine. Maybe she’d been about to say more; maybe she wouldn’t have thought of anything to say even if he’d waited.

  •••

  This was what people talked about. This was what the books were all about; this was why people did irrational things that had no relation to the violence of Victor. She wasn’t as divorced from the physical as many women: she’d walked in strange places, worked outside on hot days, eaten and drunk to excess, nearly died from a pregnancy. She knew intellectually that one kiss was not like another, and lovers had nothing to do with rapists, but this was not so much a novelistic blur but shock and joy and propulsion. This kind of immersion of touch and mood, skin to skin, using a mouth like a third hand—she felt stupid to not have understood. She went from being someone who hadn’t been naked in front of another human in twenty years to someone who would lie back on a bed in the daylight.

  All of it stunned her, but by midnight, looking for something to eat in the kitchen, she only wore a blanket because she was cold, and she sat on his lap while they ate it because he was naked himself, and cold. She had finally peeled off her old life, lost her ability to fret over secrets before this new one. Cheese, sardines, canned peaches, being carried back upstairs, snickering at the effort. Over and over, she was shocked: they were lovers. She hadn’t understood, and now she did; this was what the word meant.

  Widows, like ripe fruit, drop easily from their perch.

  —Bruyère

  chapter 17
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  The Dark Blue Book of Anomalies

  •

  Walton hadn’t seen fit to send her to university, but he did shove history down her throat. There were no anomalies, he said, lecturing always. With history, Dulce, you understood that every human, every living thing dies, whether or not it is or has food, whether or not it has a god, whether or not it understands how consistently this happens. He certainly hadn’t carried the no anomalies rule over to his own personality—he was sure that there was no one else like him, and he was probably right—but she hoped he’d found a universal ending comforting as he approached the window.

  Nevertheless: if something seemed anomalous, Walton maintained it was simply a matter of missing data, undiscovered or forgotten knowledge. To that end, he kept track of mysteries: at the close of every year after 1872, he picked one oddity that had outlasted others and flouted his theory, and added it to a list on the inside cover of the dark blue book, under the heading of Things Without Explanation :

  31 Dec 1879: Huachuca silver seam variations.

  31 Dec 1883: The disappearance of Krakatoa: the color of the air.

  31 Dec 1885: Praseodymium.

  27 Dec 1892: I need not wait for the last day of this year to know that my rarity will remain Isobel’s unimaginable cunny.

  31 Dec 1894: The patient in the next room last April. He had a third nipple and a third bollock and had survived our illness since 1863. Perhaps the manner of acquisition, reportedly a Hawaiian octoroon?

  31 Dec 1897: The bubbling springs and stones of Assam.

  31 Dec 1902: The eruption of Pelée or my daughter’s illness. Is this sort of difficulty really so common?

  And the last, two weeks before he died:

  31 Dec 1904: The strange gem middleman in Futter’s Wheal, or Victor Maslingen, a rich man who dislikes rich things, be they food or fucking or conversation. May he be troubled by his own mysteries.

  •••

  Three days after the trip to Yellowstone, as Lewis gathered his things for the train, waves of slush dribbled out of the sky. He would be gone a month, visiting his half-sisters and ill father, on a trip that had been planned for weeks. “Will you be all right?”