Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  To his surprise she preferred to make her assignations in the morning hours, when the sun was well up but she had not truly roused from the bed in her cheap room. He was the only man she saw and he paid her well enough to ensure this. Twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday mornings he would visit her, on the weekday arriving late at the office claiming he was needed at home and Saturday having to say nothing more to Betsey than just once telling her it was a time he could work undisturbed. And Molly would still be abed waiting him, her hair tangled with sleep and her eyes slow but her breath sweetened from the night by a tin cup of milk. She had small teeth, perfect but for one canine that gaped and jutted a little forward. When her lips shut over it, it appeared that she was concentrating hard upon some unknown thing. That same mouth would astonish him each time with the ferocity of her appetite, her lips firm and flicking against him at once, the small point of her tongue running the inside of his mouth as if it would run down his throat and into his belly if it could.

  She had very small breasts, nipples the color of her tongue and only enough body hair to know it was there. The one time he saw her by candlelight it could not be seen at all. It was only after he was forever done with her that he understood something of the significance of his attraction to this woman as child. And would recall that evening by candlelight when he was dressing and she lay curled, her hip jutting a shadow, the rest of her pink, when of a sudden she said, “How long do you think, Mister Bolles, before you come to despise me?” Her tone placid, no different than if she were asking when she would be beaten. He stood a moment, stopped. Then more tender than he knew he said, “It’s myself I’ll despise.” She turned her face away and was quiet. He finished dressing and was about to leave when she spoke again, her face to the pillow, words all but muffled. “I guess that’s right. I guess I ain’t even worth your spite.” He went to her and sat on the bed, gathered her and held her. Later, going from the boardinghouse, his heart was terrible and dark. Not knowing better, he believed himself fully lost.

  And so he was with Molly the late summer Saturday morning following the spring stillbirth when Betsey had taken the older boy Hazen for her first sail since her confinement and it may have been the urgency she felt to grasp what was left of the summer’s rare weather or it may have been just bad luck. Or, Micajah Bolles would later think, it might have been some wisdom in the blood that some way she sensed where her husband was. Because the one old man out handlining on the Bay swore later that when the squall line bloomed out of the horizon-fallen and gloomed cumulous and built out toward the open ocean beyond the reach of the Bay and held there as summer squalls would do, livened with lightening and the dark gashes of rain visible but offering nothing more inside the Bay but a freshened breeze, it was then, the old man testified to all willing to listen, that Betsey Marsh Bolles turned the little dinghy into the wind and sailed out toward the swells and dark water and heavy storms of the squall. Kneeling on the seat with one hand on the tiller and the other stretched to hold taut the sheet at the end of the boom, her face lifted so the wind drove back her hair and her mouth was cut open in broad unheard laughter. He also said the boy Hazen was not then in sight, likely hunkered low against the decking over the bow.

  They were missing three days. Micajah Bolles sat silent and unsleeping through this time in his house while his mother and mother-in-law tended Sarah Alice and Cooper, and whatever other arrangements the household needed were conducted silently, without his knowledge or caring. And the men of both families came in groups or as the days passed one by one to sit with him and speak to him and he would answer not the least query and they accepted this as his right. Not knowing they were dealing with a man who had abandoned all rights that might have once been his. The only time he spoke was when his grandfather was led in to see him, the two of them left alone and the old man dug through the air between them until Micajah Bolles lifted one hand and the old man held it between both of his and was silent a long time, long enough so Micajah Bolles believed the old man understood all that was appropriate was silence. But then his grandfather spoke.

  “God,” the old man said, “is a manure heap.”

  “No,” the grandson said. “He’s fair.”

  The grandfather removed his hands and pushed himself from his chair to stand looking where he thought the younger man was seated. He said, “He relinquishes us all, all creatures in our hours of need. We desire Him so, yet He repudiates without hesitation. I’ll have a word with that son of a bitch soon enough.” Then turned and began to call the name of the nephew who had led him in, his voice shaking as if to tear the house down around them.

  The bodies were found Wednesday dawn, thrown up by a deserting tide. Bloated, feasted upon by fish and crab, the boy naked but wrapped in kelp as if the sea at the last moment had taken some measure of pity upon his innocence. They were carried up by fishermen and laid out on planks supported by ladderback chairs while the women washed the bodies and a younger Marsh brother was sent for the cabinetmaker to come for measurements. The Congregational reverend was in the house, had spent time seated praying beside the silent Micajah Bolles until the bodies were brought and then went to attend the women. And so left him in the rush-seated chair that over the days and nights intervening had burned blisters where the sides of his thighs rubbed back and forth as he swayed with the awful rhythm of his heart. The rhythm of his guilt.

  And then Sarah Alice came timid through the door, her own face swollen and discolored but a young woman nonetheless and bound to the duties of the house, mysteries he no longer understood. As if he ever had. She was the spit of her mother, even in grief. Perhaps even more so right then than ever before: almost the girl he had married—now, because it was what she understood she must do, assuming responsibility. As if she could see the future more clearly than he.

  “Father,” she implored. “They’ll be removed soon. Won’t you view them a last time?”

  He could not refuse her. As if she knew best. Engaged in a dream, he allowed her to take his hand and lead him to the matched coffins where the powder and rouge and new clothes cut large did nothing to disguise the bleak corruptions before him.

  He fled the house.

  And went off in the shattering daylight where he had never been before, into the southwest end where the lanes were uncobbled and narrow, twisting between the shacks of fishermen and sailor’s widows and those useless with age or crippled and unable to work, to where if any soul recognized him they would not speak his name and where a man such as himself would not be safe after nightfall from the hungry roving gangs of young men who cared nothing for his name but only for the wallet the cut of his clothes would announce. Strode hard upright through the middle of the day, looking not left nor right and meeting no eye but cutting through the ragtag crowd, each bootfall hard as if digging forward into the earth. The last time he would walk this way as the man he then was. Those who saw him shied away and it was not from the implausible presence of a man such as himself but his oblivious strident purpose. He passed by several gin-houses because he was not far enough away into this bowel of the town and then turned a corner into another ragged lane where a great sow lay blocking the way as her dozen get tumbled at her upturned teats and here he paused and looked about him and entered a poor public house with no name but a signboard swinging in the shape of an hourglass and he thought there could be no more propitious augur and later he would recall this and know he was indeed seeking all that would befall him. Almost, guilty heart and soul, as if freed.

  Benches lined the walls and a pair of trestle common tables were set out in the small room and behind that was a plank bar set across a barricade of hogsheads with a rack of tin cups on the wall behind. There were no windows, what light there was came from cheap ill-made tallow candles, the room bleared with smoke from the burning wicks. This time of day the room was but half-filled, with young and old alike and none did more than glance at him. It was quiet, nothing like the noise of the tavern public rooms he
was used to. He took coins from his pocket and stood at the plank bar and drank his first-ever cup of Holland gin and then another. And after that another. It was common lore that gin offered illumination unlike any other kind and the joke among his own sort was that it must—the gin-sots otherwise so miserable in appearance and health there must be some gain not otherwise obvious. It was for the very poor.

  A boundless time passed. Later, he would reckon it in some number of days but would never seek greater accuracy for he needed none—it was a hole he stepped into and once out again it was into another life altogether. At some point he moved from standing to a bench at one of the tables. He spoke only to the proprietress, a toothless ancient with miserable rheumy eyes. The room filled and emptied and filled again around him. He woke once, face turned sideways down in a pool of curdled vomit that might have been his own or another’s. There was no way to know. He wiped himself with his pocket handkerchief and waved for more gin. He ate nothing—there was nothing offered and even if there had been he wanted only the hot breath of oblivion within the gin. He woke a second time curled under one of the benches and found that his wallet was cut from around his neck and his pockets emptied and his watch stripped from his waistcoat although the thieves had somehow missed a single gold piece in the very same watch pocket—likely having jerked the watch out by the chain last thing.

  That gold piece bought more gin, enough this time to send him down into the hole, a blackness so complete he would never know its face, or his own within it. It was not sleep this time but some walking condition of gone. What brain peered from his eyes throughout this time was a brain forever again not available to him. There were no splinters of light, no half images recalled afterward. It was as if he had entered the realm of the dead, although it was only later that he would comprehend the blackness that way. Only later when he wished it had indeed been that very thing rather than the living vacancy he occupied for those unknown hours.

  He woke to a piercing crackling and crazed summer dawn with the open-window birdsong great jabbing probes into his brain. He woke in his own house in a bed other than his marriage bed. He was alone but the furniture was tumbled and the covers torn off the bed save for the sheet on which he lay, naked from the waist down. The room of his daughter. Of Sarah Alice.

  The house was quiet that very early morning he escaped New Bedford. He made his way swiftly to the harborside and found passage on the first ship with a captain he did not know, the ship only bound for New York. Which it turned out was the farthest he went from home. He spent a year in New York mopping barroom floors in exchange for green cheese and stale crackers and buckets of flat beer. And busting heads of sailors or piece-work tailors or whoever was fighting in the bar every night. And there was always a pallet to sleep on during the hours the bar was closed. He was better than a watchdog and, whatever else they saw when they looked upon him, the men he worked for knew he could be trusted. He was badly beaten twice but his hard fare and harder life soon replaced the physical man with a version suited to the otherwise new man; he lost no weight but grew hard and thick-muscled as his soul did not heal but annealed. His mind became inured not only against himself but all humanity—concluding all efforts otherwise, by anyone, were delusions of the self. That the exercise of free will was a mere mask for destiny or fate. He doubted the hand of God but did not discount it—discarding only the God of the pulpit and the pious.

  He left New York on foot with a hand-drawn peddler’s cart in the fall a year later and went into the hills of western Connecticut and Massachusetts, calling on the backwoods forlorn farmwives, taking what they had for what they needed. The cart was fully loaded when he acquired it and so that first winter of hard hauling was pure profit. The only cost the curses of the old peddler, beaten and robbed of his purse, who had thought Blood his savior as the first light of day smoked through the mist off the Hudson and rats overran the streets. Blood pausing only long enough to assess the opportunity before dragging the old man to a slumped heap against a coal chute, paying no mind as the mutter of thanks grew to mingle and include Blood with the cutpurses and thieves, a mewl easily left behind. The only sound then the trudge of hobnails and the faint creak of the wheels. The cart was well made, balanced so with a full load a man could walk easily all day between the shafts.

  So began seventeen years of cycles and half circles, all radiant from New Bedford as the hub of unseen spokes, the opposing magnetic pole he could neither approach nor leave altogether.

  When he wearied of peddling, of haggling over pins and tea with those too poor to afford such goods, he gave it up and for a number of years was a drover for the Boston or New York markets, hiring local boys eager for a time off the farm to attend the herds of cattle, swine, sheep, turkeys—whatever was in season or demand or supply. Then, sick of this he made charcoal for a year but did not like that either for although solitary it meant being in one place. He needed to move. Motion was the only thing that would still and steady his mind. For a brief period he traded in cowhides and was left alone, dealt with quickly when there was a dead or dying cow, his oxcart swarmed with flies and about him was the putrescence of decay but the market was poor—the tanneries wanted fresh hides and it took him weeks through the countryside to build a load. He had roughened to his true nature but even such has limits. He went back to driving livestock but no longer could tolerate such close company as that of the boys and down-at-heels men he had to hire.

  More than once he regretted giving up the peddler’s cart. Of all things it seemed to suit him best. Even, as he grew older and more solid within his new self, his true self he believed, he thought now he would not mind so much taking what could be had from those who could not spare it. It was not for him to judge another’s desires. And so was up in Maine when he heard of the Indian Stream country from a man who had a cartload of goods ready to make the journey and a broken leg that would journey nowhere soon.

  It seemed to Blood it was the time in his life for a new venture to strike someplace fresh and see what yield might come. And it was not whim that led him to the bawd-house and the game of careful calculated cards that won him the girl he’d glimpsed once the year before. For in the intervening time she had come to him in dreams, and while he could scorn her silent pleading gaze for he did not know her, he could not ignore the dreams themselves. For they were the only dreams he woke from, ever, that did not leave him sweating, abject, enthralled with terror and humiliation and hatred of his own flesh, his relentless pumping heart, the very life that carried him forward. Once, briefly, waking from a dream of her, he considered she might be placed before him as some possible redemption, a notion he rid himself of before even rising that day. He regarded the girl as a prospect, an investment not pure and only momentarily simple. There was no purity and simplicity was always a disguise for something not yet understood.

  Sally found him on the log by the stream some time later. It was still full dark although off in the brush a sparse few birdcalls trembled as if the birds were just trying them out. She had her shawl over her shoulders and came and stood without speaking beside where he sat. He did not glance or acknowledge her and she stood looking down into the water as well. He had nothing to say to her and did not want to hear what she would say to him. But he could not send her away. She had heard him and waited and followed him out. She had something of him no other being, living or dead, had. He wondered if she realized that yet or when she would. And what she would attempt to make of it when she did. His wrists and hands and ears ached with cold.

  Finally she said, “After I got used to whoring there was a time when every man that looked old enough, when I took him in the bed, I told myself this could be my father. I never questioned one of em, not like I did you when we first started out. And so what I done was, each one of em that seemed like they might be it I worked extra hard for em. It wasn’t all that many, not just ones that might be old enough. There was ways I picked and chose. You know I don’t favor my mother much. I look
ed for men with fair or reddish hair. Or hair had once been that way. And you always talk a little first. So the ones that had never been to the house before I could rule out pretty much. Now some men will lie about that sort of thing, even to a whore. But you can usually make out when a man’s lying. The men off ships didn’t never lie about it; it was only men from Portland or nearby places that would lie. There wasn’t any other reason for em to lie—they just feared being found out by their wives someway. Now my mother didn’t likely know but if somehow she had she sure wouldn’t have announced it, either to them or me. So, I did that. I figured there was no way for em to know me but at least they might remember me. To make some man who might be my father remember me. So I done that for a while and then I quit it.”

  She stopped. When he finally looked at her she was staring down into the stream. He said, “That’s a sad thing.”

  “I know.”

  “Is that why you quit it?”

  “No. I quit because it was making me too popular with certain men and the other girls got lathered up and a couple worked me over and told me not to holler and moan so damn much.”

  “I see,” Blood said. Looking at her now. Then he said, “So when did you discover it was sad to have been doing that?”

  “Why,” she said. “Just tonight.”

  They were quiet together then.

  After a time she said, “Life is terrible sad, idn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She reached then and touched his bare arm, just laid her hand flat on his forearm. She held it there a moment, then reached and touched his chest through the neck opening of his blouse.

  “You’re awful cold,” she said. And took her shawl off and wrapped it around him. He did not move while she did this. Then she reached again and lifted one of his hands from where it hung down and held it between both of hers and bent and breathed into the cup of her palms to warm him. Then she tugged at him, a small gesture that she could have quit if he resisted at all.