But only a moment after cutting through the envelope flap, before even lifting the letter out, I realized that August had not sent this. He would never have been so cruel, no matter how angry he was. He would never have scented his letter with Cecily’s perfume.
My dearest Ferret,
I’m here.
Yours always,
Cecily
33.
I READ THE LETTER, and I read it again and again and again. I picked up a pen and ran its dry nib over Cecily’s words—I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here—over and over, following the slants and dips of her cursive.
Even if it was only a hoax, I would let myself be fooled. I would play along. I could imagine Mrs. Margaret, or Wakefield’s sister, or Wakefield himself, weary of all the letters I sent to the house. I could imagine them wanting to taunt. Those three, they did love a dirty trick.
But I knew my way around the pitfalls of forgery. In my literary business, I’d been asked a time or two to mirror and mimic, to fake a wife’s handwriting or a husband’s signature, for seemingly deceitful purposes. If Cecily’s letter had been written by someone else, there’d be stops and starts. There’d be tremors and tracing. Letters would fail to connect. You’d be able to see past the words to all the toil and industry in it.
And this, with little doubt, was truly Cecily’s hand. I’d become an expert in her bad penmanship.
So, for a few hours in the night, my head not straight, I considered her death the hoax, not this letter in my hands. I closed my eyes and looked past logic. I returned to the funeral, lighting here and there like a fly in the room. How did he do it? I wondered as I studied the plot for its hinges.
Wakefield was a master of spectacle. Maybe Cecily’s death had been nothing but a week of theater. Had he spoon-fed Cecily a poison that only slowed her heart, that hid its fragile beats away long enough to convince the undertaker? Had he buried a wax wife and locked Cecily in a cellar?
I began to see other things I hadn’t seen at all. In my memory, Cecily appeared at an upstairs window of the Wakefield house as we left the memorial. She parted a drape, her breath frosting the glass.
In my response to Cecily’s letter, I gave no greeting. I didn’t sign my name. I wrote only, You’re cruel to deceive me.
34.
AM I CRUEL? she wrote in response, in a letter that arrived only a few days later. Am I deceiving? I don’t mean to be. I’ve read your every letter, and your every letter lifts my heart. I make a ritual of it all. Before sitting down with your latest, I pour some quince brandy in my little ruby-red glass from the Fair. You seal your envelopes with golden wax, and you stamp the wax with a honeybee. I cut the wax with a kitchen knife. The knife has a handle of whalebone, and carved into the handle is the tail of a whale. Your letters smell of tobacco and smoke, and I picture you puffing on a pipe as you consider what to write to me. I hold the paper to my nose. I’ve lost my spectacles, so I run a magnifying glass over your words. I study every scratch of your pen, I follow every curve of your every letter of every word.
I don’t get your letters until they’re gone. He gets them first, and he throws them in the fire. They burn away to nothing. And then they’re mine.
To all you who hate me,
If Cecily’s a ghost, why won’t she haunt me in my own house?
Yours truly,
Ferret Skerritt
My dear Ferret,
Burn this letter before you even lay eyes on it. I don’t deserve a single sympathy. I’m sorry to be such a puzzle. I won’t write again.
With all my love,
Cecily
Whoever you are,
Don’t stop writing.
F.
Dear Ferret,
I should never have written to you. Before you knew I was reading them, you wrote me such beautiful letters.
Yours,
Cecily
Dear Cecily,
How are you writing me at all?
Ferret
Dear Ferret,
How am I writing you? I can’t lift a feather. How am I reading your letters? I have lied, I confess. There’s no ritual. I can’t swallow a measly drop of quince brandy. I can’t smell the tobacco on the page.
I can’t pluck a string of the mandolin in the corner. My breath won’t fog the mirror. I can’t write my name in the dust. The room could be locked. Or not. I can’t turn a knob. I don’t come and go as I please. I hear Doxie when she cries on the other side of the wall, but she can’t hear me hushing her. How can I haunt the place? I can’t rattle a chain or knock the pictures off the wall. I’m not a ghost, I fear. I’m less than a ghost. I’m less than the words written on the paper in your hand. I didn’t write them. The ink in the pot is dry.
Cecily
Dear Cecily,
Tell me something only we know.
F.
Dear Ferret,
1. The day we danced a waltz hanging off wires.
2. The day you pressed into my palm a scent bottle made of shell, and when I twist its stopper, it smells of caraway seeds and flower petals.
3. On Sundays, those days the Fair was dry, our favorite waiter at the midway café served us our beer in teacups.
4. On the days Dox and me felt melancholy, you called us “colly-molly” and it cheered us up.
5. At the glassblower’s booth, you bought me my little ruby-red glass, etched with my name, almost—the old man hadn’t heard you right, so he left the y off. And you called me Cecil for days after. You pronounced it See-sill.
6. The shoes you gave me on the day it rained.
7. Mexican cigarettes.
8. Dandelion honey.
9. That place you kiss on my neck.
I am,
Cecily
January and February
1899
35.
EVERY DAY I DROVE Hester’s haggard horse to town. Some days there were two letters from Cecily waiting for me. Some days, three. Some days, I posted two or three myself. I got in the habit of reading the letters there at the post office, and I would write in response right on the page, my words twisting around hers, my script weeding along the margins and around the roses and posies embossed in the corners. I believed in her. If this is deception, I once wrote, deceive me.
When the wind bit too harshly, the librarian let me stay among the books. I curled up in quilts under the table, breathing in the smell of worn leather and glue, and the vanilla scent of old paper, just as I had on the nights of my childhood, when studying under Mr. Crowe. When I couldn’t sleep from the noise of the ice and snow, I read and reread Cecily’s letters at the window. In the thick of winter it never got dark—there was always that haze of silver and gray that bounced the moonlight around.
The librarian was a young woman named Eulalie—when I first saw it spelled on the plaque on her desk, I thought it was pronounced You-lay-lee. After weeks of my saying it that way, she finally said, “You-LAH-lee.”
Confused, I said, “I lolly?”
It was the very end of January, and a table was covered with lace and crepe paper, scissors and glue; she’d been instructing the town’s lovelorn on the construction of valentines and the composing of poems. “My name,” she said. “It’s Eulalie, with a la in the middle.” She raised her scissors and waved them like a wand, like conducting a choir, and she sang, “La-la-la-la-la-la-la.”
She twisted an expert poppy from tissue paper as she sat on the edge of the table. She crossed her thin legs, and I saw the heavy winter boots she wore, a farmer’s boots with buckles, lined in lamb’s wool.
Eulalie knew I was all caught up in letters from a lady friend, and she naturally assumed my love was a woman who lived. “When will you go find your girl?” she asked. She wired a stem to the bloom. “There’s nothing here to keep you, is there?”
“There’s nowhere to go,” I said.
“Hm,” she said, holding the flower before her, as if confiding in it, “what could he possibly mean by that?
”
“Do you believe in ghosts, You-la-la-la-lee?”
“I believe in the spirit,” she said. “I believe in the soul.”
“I’m talking about unholy ghosts,” I said. “The ones that aren’t in heaven.”
She held the paper flower to her nose. “The ones that rattle the windowpanes?” she said, as the windowpanes rattled. She smiled and stood from the table. “No,” she said. “I suppose I don’t.” She shrugged her shoulders. “No ghosts have crept up on me. But I trust others when they say that they’ve seen them. I believe in other people’s ghosts, I guess.” She took a book from the shelf, and thumbed through its pages. She finally found what she looked for, and she marked the page with the wire stem of the paper poppy. She handed me the book—Around the World in Eighty Days. “This made me think of you,” she said. “Read this instead of those.” She nodded toward the stack of letters I carried around with me everywhere. I helped Eulalie on with her coat, a threadbare thing that had already had a long life as a patchwork quilt. She lived only a few doors down, in a room above the drugstore.
Her flower marked a page with an illustration of a hot-air balloon. I read a little of the book’s middle, before backing up to the start. I sat by the library window and stayed up all night, reading front to end. When I got to the part about Phileas Fogg riding a sledge with a topmast and jib over the snowy fields and creeks of Nebraska, across the frozen Platte, catching a winter wind and sailing to Omaha, it seemed I could step out the door and into the story.
I finished the novel before morning, and I wrote Cecily a letter on one of the paper hearts, following the line and curve of the edges, turning the heart as I wrote, spiraling the sentences inward. I’ll rig a sail to a sled and get to you by nightfall, I told her.
36.
IN THOSE FIRST DAYS of February, it had never been so cold in all the history of writing things down. The temperature fell past zero, past minus ten, past minus twenty, past thirty, past forty. The numbers on our thermometers didn’t even go so low. And as the temperatures dropped, the drifts rose. Four inches, six inches, twelve. The snow closed the roads, slowed the trains. The coal ran out. A fire in town raged as the firemen watched, the water from their nozzles turning to ice and falling like hail.
I couldn’t get to the post office to collect my letters, but even if I’d made the journey, and even if I’d survived it, there’d likely been no delivery at all. Later, when we were able to see a newspaper again, we would learn that the blizzard hadn’t been only ours. The quilt of white spread out far past our fields. We’d shared the blizzard with much of the country, though we’d had no way of knowing so at the time. The storm had muffled our noise, trapping us in our rooms. No words reached us.
Hester, who wasn’t typically biblical, nonetheless now suspected I was a messenger of the Revelation. “‘And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud,’” she recited, as we high-stepped through the drifts, the two of us, on our way to a neighboring farm. “There are prophets who say the world will end when the century does,” she added.
The temperatures had finally begun to rise, the mercury inching back to zero. We’d covered our faces with woolen masks and buried ourselves in coats and scarves. We were off to help a farmer feed his struggling cattle.
“I’m no angel,” I said, my voice cracked from the cold.
“You are today,” she said. “We’re doing a good deed.” Hester was the closest thing to a veterinarian anywhere nearby. She often helped her neighbors contend with livestock illnesses—hog cholera, tuberculosis, swine plague. She’d picked ticks off other farmers’ pigs, led infected cattle through paraffin dips. She’d splinted the broken bones of horses. She’d committed herself to the animals’ well-being, even here, during the coldest winter of the century, even at the age of seventy something. And she even moved quicker than I did, springing her legs up and over the tall drifts like a hound after fox.
She then told me a story I’d already heard from Emmaline, but Emmaline had insisted I never tell Hester I knew anything of it. “It was too painful a mistake,” Emmaline had whispered.
“We only had cattle on our own farm once,” Hester said, the vapors of her breath so cloudy in the cold, I couldn’t see her eyes as she looked back at me. “Just a few summers ago,” she said. “I don’t know what possessed us. Has Emmaline told you about it?”
“No,” I lied.
They’d shot the sickest of their cattle during an epidemic of blackleg. The killing, Hester said, not of all the cattle, but the youngest, strongest ones, the ones that this particular fever found most vulnerable, had changed both the Old Sisters Egan, unalterably so. Emmaline had not allowed Hester to take on the assassination alone. “In all our years together,” Hester told me, “in a house of guns, Emmaline had never learned to fire one. So that one early Sunday morning of the slaughter, I taught Emmaline how the rifle worked.”
“I’m not an excellent student even in the best of situations,” Emmaline had told me. It took well over an hour for her to master the loading of the gun, the holding of it, the proper stance against recoil. Hester, slowly, in gentle voice, had exercised such a grave kindness, Emmaline had wanted forever to be under her instruction, in that awful, tragic dawn.
“But I’m the one who had nightmares after,” Hester said. “Every night, every hour, I’d scream and yell. I didn’t even wake myself up. But I sure as hell woke Emmaline. Every hour, every night, for two years, I woke that poor girl.”
“I’ve never heard you scream,” I said.
“The nightmares stopped when you got here,” she said. “And Emmaline got to sleep through the night again. And when she got to sleep again, she started dreaming up that language and that Emerald Cathedral.”
Emmaline hadn’t told me any of that—she hadn’t told me about the nightmares, and when they started, and when they ended. My legs grew even heavier, my steps slower in the snow. I belonged here. This farm had pulled me from the sky.
37.
THE MOMENT THE AIR was no longer so cold it’d kill you, the neighbors returned to our barn. They came to the farm in the heavy fur coats they’d stitched from the prairie wolves they’d shot. Sometimes the wolves’ legs and tails, still attached to their pelts, dragged in the snow behind them. The farmers wore hats made from the rabbits from their gardens, the rabbits’ ears sticking out from the men’s heads, and they pulled along children’s sleds, the junk piled on—rusted pump handles, chamber pots with cracks, tin buckets full of bedsprings, gas chandeliers with broken glass globes. They toiled for hours, reverent and purposeful, attaching these fragments to the Emerald Cathedral with great care.
The farmers had persevered through flood and drought and now the worst winter on record. Some came to the cathedral because they heard God’s voice in their ears, like Old Testament Noah, and they longed to be touched by divinity, for their faith to be restored by this inexplicable mission. Others came in defiance of the God they’d lost, the cathedral their own Tower of Babel, their own godless, renegade church. Regardless of what brought them, they left invigorated by the wonder of it all.
I watched from the window. All I could think about were the letters from Cecily, so I lost the thread of the cathedral—I could no longer sense where it was going. Whereas I’d once seen in it something taking shape, now I saw only shapelessness. I worried we’d gone too far with it—I worried we’d reached its completion weeks before, but we hadn’t known enough to stop. On the nights when the whole county converged on the barn, for a dance or a feast, I feared it would fall in on us all, wiping us off the map in one fell swoop, like the slap of a tsunami.
I would serve as oracle as I always did, a few hours a day, for those who came to the house, but the rest of the time I read and reread the notes from my ghost. I read them out of order. I read pieces from this one, pieces from that.
Did I already tell you that he buried me in an electromagnetic corset? she’d written once. Had she told me already
? I didn’t know, because I no longer read the letters in order.
In her death, Cecily wrote often of her health. Not only had she and Wakefield traveled to many hot springs in late summer, but they’d gone to hospitals and universities. They’d sat through seminars and experiments. She’d spent a week in hydrotherapy, swathed in wet shawls, stepping barefoot through wet grass and across wet stones. She’d had private sessions with a swami, who guided her on matters of truth and existence. Attached to her ankle she’d worn a cylinder meant to feed her extra oxygen.
Please understand, Ferret, she wrote. Billy was no villain. He loved me somehow. I say “somehow” because how could he love someone he knew so little? Why would he want to save a stranger? But when he saw me, he saw his dead wife, I suppose. I looked nothing like her, but she and me must’ve shared the same rotten insides. Beneath our skin, she and me were the same. Our hearts were little clocks ticking the same last minutes away. If he saved me, he’d save her, in a sense. And in a sense, he’d save the boy by saving Doxie, which may be the saddest story of all. They’d gone to the Chicago World’s Fair, him and his wife and the boy, and they’d gone home and they’d built their own little White City with matchsticks in the library. And after the train crash that killed the boy, Billy vowed to build a world’s fair in his memory. So he devoted himself to the New White City. He formed boards and committees. He hired architects. He built our Fair up from nothing but a field. And the wife faded away. And she died while he designed his memorial to his son.
The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 33
