Blue Asylum (16 page)

One morning Wendell found a stone in the fork of a gumbo limbo tree next to a Calusa burial mound. He plucked it from its place and held it to the light. It was smooth, pinkish in tint, and shot through with blue veins—much like Penelope’s skin. He decided to add it to her mound of stones as a secret gift, but when he returned to the beach he found them missing. Nothing there, just an empty nest of broken sand. He knelt, running his hand over the place, mystified.

He tried to catch a glimpse of her in the courtyard. Failing that, he searched the halls and the day room. Her blank stare and dreamy smile were nowhere to be found. A sense of foreboding came over him, and he ran down to the beach, taunted by the cries of willets and gulls, his shoes heavy in the sand, calling her name to the wind. Near the pass he saw something washed up on the shore. It was Penelope’s doll, its dress quite wet but its springy red hair unaffected. Wendell turned and ran back to the asylum, shouting for the guards.

For three days the staff and even the fishermen searched for her. Wendell looked as well, with a desperate obsession, in all his favorite hideaways, wild places no one else had discovered. Middens, abandoned villages, mangrove forests, alligator haunts. At night he soaked a cattail head in kerosene and kept looking for her by the light of that torch as the forest around him spoke. Buzzings, rattlings, chirpings, the hoot of an owl, and the call of a night bird so close it seemed to come from the crook of his arm. As he searched he prayed to the indistinct God in that forest, a neutral essence among the odor of sulfur and animal droppings and rotted berries and decaying fish.

He searched everywhere but the most obvious place, a place that could be found at the end of a short and hateful commonsense equation. The place her body was found, three days later. She had slipped away from the others and walked into the sea, her pockets heavy with the missing stones.

Wendell edged through the group of people surrounding her and looked down at her face. Her skin was loose and ghostly blue. Her eyes and lips had been eaten by crabs. He turned and bolted back toward the asylum, making it only a few yards before collapsing on all fours to throw up in the sand. Instantly he sprang back to his feet and kept going. He jumped the low wall of the courtyard and took the shortcut to his family’s cottage around back, bursting through the door and dashing past his shocked mother to the dining room table, which had been set for dinner with silverware and glasses and a vase full of mauve flowers.

“Darling! What’s the matter?” she cried, but he paid her no mind. He seized the tablecloth, which was edged in rose-patterned lace, and yanked it hard, sending the contents atop it cascading down to the stone floor. He ran back out of the house as glass shattered and his mother shrieked his name.

The chef saw him coming, dragging the tablecloth, and tried to intercept him, but Wendell’s rage at the sight of the man who had kept him from his beloved gave him the sudden strength to butt the large man in the stomach like a goat, causing him to stagger back in surprise, and Wendell broke through the crowd around Penelope and laid the tablecloth over her body. No one stopped him, not even Dr. Cowell, who had been kneeling near her shoulder and now watched his son gently tuck the tablecloth around her body. The birds circled, shrieking. The waves went in and out. The chef straightened, grimacing, his hand over his solar plexus. The crabs, unaccountably, had left Penelope’s nose alone so that beneath the cloth, her face still had the contours of a normal girl.

His mother’s breast was wedged against Wendell’s ear as he wept in her arms. He was not usually a crier, but there were not enough tears in the world for proper expression; his grief was unbounded, unknowable, unfathomable.

“Oh, Wendell,” his mother whispered, stroking his hair. He felt three of her tears in rapid succession drop into the part in his hair, sympathy tears that were a comfortable temperature.

His bedroom door creaked open. Wendell heard slow, heavy footsteps approach and peered up out of his mother’s bosomy nest to see his father standing there, his posture awkward, his expression confused. He seemed utterly lost, just as lost as Penelope had seemed these past weeks when gazed upon from afar. The doctor scratched his beard, rocked on his heels. Started to say something, stopped himself.

Wendell felt his mother stiffen.

“Go,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“But—”

“Go.”

Wendell put his head back down. His father cleared his throat. A short silence followed. His footsteps faded from the room.

For weeks Wendell sat on the beach, gazing out to sea, near the place where the blue body had rested. He was sure that if there was a God who sees all things, criminals and thieves and wretches and private-fondlers, then this God had taken Penelope from him to punish him, and if this was so, he was not a boy at all, but a moving target for a bully who lived in the heavens, and he wanted so badly to ask for answers from the priest, who either did or did not have a melted crucifix in his chest that would offer definitive proof of miracles and mercy from above.

Penelope tormented him in his sleep, swimming underwater toward him, her long red hair flowing behind her, trailing along the ocean floor, brushing over stonefish and coral reefs, tickling barracudas into reverie, tangling in the flowers of anemones and then pulling loose. When he awoke he’d find his sheets wet, and he realized, with horror, that his private-fondling now entered his unconscious hours. The madness did not even end when he closed his eyes.

He and the chef were no longer friends. After all, if the chef had not banned him from seeing the girl, she would still be alive.

It was mullet season. They passed by in groups with their peculiar roar, a sound like thunder. Instead of fishing together, Wendell and the chef fished far apart, using bread dough as bait, tossing a light hook into the place where the mullets roared.

Wendell began to miss the chef. The stories of his days as a slave, his get-rich schemes, his rapid-fire philosophy, the gospel tunes that came humming out of his oversize nostrils, his rough humor, the way he punched Wendell in the arm and then, laughing his baritone laugh, held him at arm’s length so the boy couldn’t punch him back.

As the days cooled slightly, Wendell and the chef fished a few feet closer together, until one morning, without any acknowledgment of the miracle, they were fishing side by side.

The moon was high overhead. Wendell stood over Penelope’s grave, which was covered with shells. Those he found on the beach, plus the ones from the shadow box in his room, had become offerings to her memory. In the center of the grave was a bare circle, the size of a Mason jar lid. The dirt in that circle had lightened over the past months, while Lydia Helms Truman’s grave, set up nearby, still looked fresh. Wendell had thrown away the perfunctory wooden cross someone had nailed together for Penelope and made his own for her out of balsa wood and sinew, fitting the pieces together and then painting her name on it. The first time he misjudged and the last two letters—the
P
and the
E
—ended up crowded together, so he had started over.

Wendell knelt by the grave, pulling a weed that was peeking up through the shells and then remaining in a kneeling position. The woman, Iris Dunleavy, had deeply troubled him with her request, and he had not given her an answer. How could he? Did she really expect him to go against his father’s authority and help her escape from the island? The story she told him had made perfect, tragic sense. He would have run away with the slaves as well, to escape such a horrible man. She seemed perfectly sane to him. But surely she must be mad. His father believed so, and he was the smartest man Wendell knew.

And yet, the words she had spoken to him had given him a pain in his heart that felt so familiar. He put his hand on his chest. The blue painted letters of Penelope’s name looked black under moonlight. The shells glittered on her grave.

He remembered Iris Dunleavy staring at him through the mosquito mesh on the bars of her window.

Please don’t abandon me. I’ll die here, don’t you see?

The doctor had stormed from the room, leaving Ambrose tied to the bedposts. Punishment for his impudence, no doubt. He had dozed off and awakened again just as the dawn light was coming through the bars. The bonds were digging into his wrists again, and his full bladder ached. He started to cry out, then changed his mind. He didn’t need the damn doctor. Perhaps he could free himself. He looked up to his right hand and studied the knot. He shifted on the bed and began angling for position, trying to reach the knot with his fingers. His brothers used to tie him up as a boy and he’d get loose more times than they had figured on. He never told his father on them. Just sought his revenge. Now he went back to that knowledge of slipping one’s bonds. It was sweaty, lonely work. And only for the resolute. He worked patiently, his fingers aching, his bladder feeling as though it would burst. And as the sun grew bright between the bars, he went backward. Straight into the war, past the truly horrific moments and into a time of medium horror. Like eating steak with the blood cooked out, it was a more benign way to sample memory. His fingers ached. The leather binds stretched. The bedposts creaked.

The surprising thing was not that Ambrose had gone crazy during the war. It was that everyone else, every single soldier at arms, had not gone crazy too. That war, still under way somewhere past the line of palms and the mangrove forests and the willet colonies at the edge of the water, was made up of crazy. Crazy politicians, crazy preachers, crazy motivations, crazy ghosts, and crazy gods. Just a sea of delusion, blue at high tide, gray at low.

He was in a long line of Confederates trudging back up the Valley Turnpike, the sun so hot that they could not imagine ever being cold. Rumors of a Rebel offensive into Pennsylvania moved down the ranks. Enterprising old Negroes sold lemonade from carts. It was watery and undersugared and warm, but by now Ambrose had learned to supplement mediocre treats with his imagination, and as he tilted back his head and drank out of a metal cup, a beautiful girl stood by with an icy pitcher, rows and rows of girls stretching out across the fields and collecting tickseed on their stockings.

Seth drank deeply and then said, “I don’t like the idea of invading Pennsylvania. We should stay here in Virginia and let the Yankees come to us.”

“We don’t get to make the plans.” Ambrose took another gulp of lemonade. He couldn’t taste it at all; it was simply water with a price attached.

“I have a bad feeling about leaving Virginia,” Seth said.

The drums sounded again and the march resumed. Jokes and songs moved up and down the ranks, but the voices had thinned. The best tenor in the brigade had died at Fredericksburg, and the keeper of a thousand punch lines had died in winter camp. The brigade crossed the Potomac at Shepherdstown and then headed for Antietam Creek. A deep gloom settled over the soldiers. Sharpsburg reminded them of terrible things. They still carried wounds from that battle, and visions of dying men. One soldier simply stopped and would not go any farther.

“I’ll shoot you,” the sergeant warned.

“The devil wouldn’t make me go back there,” the soldier responded. “Half my company fell in the cornfield and I’d just as soon die right here than smell that place again.”

By dusk, the brigade had reached a familiar road that led to the Piper Farm and the Dunker Church. The corpses that once hung on the fence were gone, along with the bloated horses and the angry bees. But the ground was still torn up with graves. Many of the farmers had fled. Their threshing machines were rusting in the fields. Wrens called from empty barns. And the flowers of broken ground—yarrow, goldenrod, and thistle—had taken over the fields. Just past the Dunker Church sat the West Woods, where Ambrose had killed his first soldier.

The brigade made camp near the church as dusk fell. Flames rose quickly. Fireflies were out and so were locusts, whose abandoned shells were attached to the trees by hollow appendages. No one sang or played cards. They either drank themselves into a stupor, took lanterns to visit the graves of friends, or both. Half a dozen men passed out in the sunken road, which had once been filled with so many bodies that someone could walk a good distance without touching the ground. A dog from F Company found the place his master fell, lay down upon it, and would not get up.

Ambrose fried some hardtack in bacon grease and then sat looking at it. The clouds blew away and the stars came out, white as the church had once been. Someone was crying in the direction of the Miller Farm. The cornfield razed in the battle had grown back, and the wailing seemed to come from the center of the moving stalks. They passed around the bottle as the hour grew late. A hickory branch was jutting out of the fire and Ambrose pushed it back with the tip of his shoe, sending out a sheet of sparks that rivaled the fireflies.

“It’s not right,” Ambrose said. “The living shouldn’t have to make camp on top of the dead.”

Ambrose and Seth shared a tent. They lay awake, listening to the sounds of the night. This new clearing where they were camped smelled clean, just pine trees and undercurrents of sage and something musky and sweet. Here the crickets sounded innocent, and so did the locusts, and the shadows crossing their tent were made of branches or low-flying birds, but nothing restless or dead.

Their brigade had run into a group of Federal prisoners being escorted by Jubal Early’s troops, and the Confederates had made the prisoners stop and give them all their shoes.

“I got a blister from those shoes,” Seth said in the dark. “They’re too big.”

“You should have kept your old shoes. They were worn, but at least they were the right size.”

“I’ll just walk barefoot.”

“No, don’t do that. You’ll get used to them.”

They were quiet again.

“Ambrose?” Seth whispered. He always sounded younger at night, his true age instead of the one he pretended to be.