Blue Asylum (27 page)

Ambrose approached the corpse, carrying a shovel and a white sheet. He spread the sheet out, took the old man by the arms, and tugged him onto it, as his straw hat came off and fell into the street. No one stopped to help. They glanced over at Ambrose and kept on walking. This wasn’t their business. It wasn’t even their town. Ambrose began to drag the dead Indian away. He moved him several feet and went back for the hat. He put the hat on the Indian’s chest and dragged the sheet again, slowly and steadily, until Iris couldn’t see him anymore. Iris sat down on the bed and waited. She wanted to help him but sensed he wanted to be alone. Find a good place where the earth was rich and loose, and do the job no one else was willing to do.

This was as good a place to bury a man as any. Ambrose’s coat lay on the ground. He was out behind a saloon, in a plot of land filled with weeds. Claimed by no one. A one-legged chicken hopped nearby, pecking at something invisible. Its shadow darted with it.

Ambrose stuck the shovel in the ground and lifted a measure of dirt, weeds trailing off it, and dumped the earth to the side. He repeated the process, the earth filled with small pebbles, the shovel scraping against them. Grasshoppers bounced around him, pinging off his arms and hands. The sun a muted yellow, neither hot nor cold. Neutral, like Maryland once pretended to be. The hole grew deeper. His clothes were soaked with sweat. He braced his back and threw a shovel load of dirt into a patch of wild bergamot that grew by the split-rail fence. He eyed the Indian, estimated his height, and lengthened the grave. What a human bit of caprice to fear for a corpse’s comfort.

A pang had started in his chest that wouldn’t go away. An unloosening. He knew better than to dig a grave, for the fact he had once been forced to dig another, Seth’s grave, and the fangs in that event were coming back to bite him. So burying the Indian was a foolhardy mission, and he would pay for it later, he knew it, but no one else had stepped up for the task, and it was indecent to leave a dead man rotting in the street. He and his fellow soldiers had been forced to retreat from some of the battlefields, leaving their dead behind, but there was no excuse this time. He wasn’t in a hurry, wasn’t forced away, and no one was shooting over his head. The act was dangerous only inside himself.

A whippoorwill landed on the branch of a tree nearby and sent down its haunting song. No small tragedy of bird life could have made that song. God had placed leftover grief in its trembling body, all that unexpressed sorrow from the centuries past. Women who lost their children, men who lost their wars. Terrible reversals of fortune. Storms and famines and cruel twists of circumstance.

He finished the hole as the sun set. It was deep and wide enough. He’d seen bodies buried too shallow during the war. At night those hasty graves would glow with an eerie mist. Some kind of gas put off by the body, the camp surgeon said. Anyone who’d seen that glow would forever dig the deepest grave they could. The piles of loose dirt around Ambrose’s feet had hardened into shapes. In the indistinct glow of dusk, the piles looked like grave-dwelling creatures crawling out to gather food. He threw down the shovel and banged his hands together to knock the dirt away. The Indian was smiling now. A slight, wry grin, uninspired by any amusement. Just things drying inside. That hateful insouciance of nature taking its course. Nothing was sacred.

Ambrose knelt, staring down at the Indian, at the crusts of blood around the hole in his forehead. The old man’s hair was braided and stunk of animal grease. Had he opened the filthy shirt, some thready trading-post castaway, he no doubt would have found tattoos and scars and marks. They had all meant something. Now their stories had abandoned them. Ambrose pressed his fingertips against the man’s lids and slowly drew them over his dry eyes. The lids moved up again when he released them, giving the dead Indian the half-lidded look of a chameleon. He positioned the hat over his chest, tried to cross the stiff arms, but gave up that battle. Inside the grave within a few hours, the corpse would relax and take a pose known only to God.

Ambrose pulled the corpse into the grave and let it fall. He climbed in, stepping carefully around the body, moving the sheet, positioning it, straightening the hat. Had the Indian died but forty years earlier, Ambrose imagined, the air would be filled with great keening, prayers said over him, perhaps women cutting their skin, perhaps a funeral pyre burning. Now, nothing. A lone white man doing what was right. He folded over the sheet so that it covered the head and body, crawled out of the grave, and began to shovel the dirt back in. Every time a shovelful hit the body it made a sound like nothing else in the world. Every time, that sound fiddled with something inside him. The soul is nothing but the innards of the finest watch, ruined before the watchmaker’s hands even touch it, by its exposure to air.

Iris heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, a slow, deliberate thumping. She turned up the flame in the lamp and went to the door. Opened it on Ambrose, whose face was dark in the hallway. She swung the door open wider and he entered, his shadow huge and lumbering in the room. He said not a word and she was too afraid to speak. Something had changed in the course of an afternoon. She was glad she had not seen his eyes clearly, afraid what she would find there.

“Ambrose?” she whispered.

He went into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. She stood in the room, waiting for him to come out, at the mercy of passing time. She held the lamp to the clock and read the time. An hour had passed. She knocked on the door but he didn’t answer. She waited, knocked again. Nothing but silence. She pushed open the door. He was sitting naked in the dry tub, in the dark room. She retrieved the glowing lamp from the room and set it on the edge of the washstand. His clothes were piled beside him on the floor. His shoes were next to the clothes. One of them was turned over, the sole worn down. His hands were crossed and resting on his belly. His mouth slightly open. Half lover, half corpse. The sight terrified her. She did not know what it meant, her man sitting naked like that in the dry tub.

She said his name in the hope it would break the spell. He did not blink. Bits of dirt and grass still clung to his face. She knelt down beside him. Gently took his cold fingers and disengaged them from each other so that she could hold his hand. She stroked his face, leaned down close to him, spoke very softly.

“Blue like a feather. Like a boy’s biggest marble. Like a sapphire, like sedge grass in the rain, like a newborn crayfish, soul light, wedding flowers, the sea . . .”

He was better the next morning, better still the next. He drank his coffee and she drank hers next to him. She was getting used to the taste without sugar. One day the war would be over, and sugar would return. They’d had the first cool night. The window was closed and the extra blanket was spread out upon the bed. They had weathered the storm together. He was Ambrose again. The inflections had returned to his voice. His eyes were clear. He had a bit of stubble on his cheek that she planned to gently ask to shave, not trusting him yet with the razor.

“It’s time to leave,” he said. “We’ve been here almost two weeks. We’re running out of money. And it’s not safe here, not really. We need to keep moving.”

“Can’t we stay a few more days? I’m so tired, Ambrose. I feel like my soul is dead asleep. Hibernating like a bear.”

“Maybe another day or two. But we have to have a plan. Half the railroads are out. And I hear rumors of Indian attacks to the east.”

He took a large sip of coffee, winced at the burn. Was silent until his expression smoothed again. “I spoke to someone in the lobby the other day. He works on a schooner that runs down to the Keys and back to Mobile. I can speak to him. See about doing some work in exchange for passage to Mobile.”

“Mobile is to the west.”

He shrugged. “War makes you take the long way home.” His hand found hers and held it. She loved it when he broke through with a gesture of strength. Became the man again. Let her be the woman. Let that moment exist.

“Will we go to Charleston?” she asked.

His hand tightened. He shook his head.

“And even if we were able to make it to Winchester . . .”

“I know.”

They went out in the afternoon. He walked slowly down the stairs in front of her, his collar folded wrong. She reached out to correct the mistake, neither one of them missing a step.

Clouds were heavy in the sky, dark and swollen. A coming rain. She could smell it. The streets bustling, people going somewhere, women with parasols to shield them from the current sun or the future rain. The place the Indian’s body had lain was like any other spot. People walked right over it.

Ambrose turned to Iris and they joined together for an instant, a quick kiss in open air. Shyly, as though their tale could raise a scandal here. He gave her a smile that meant something boyish and pure, and they went in opposite directions. He adjusted his slouch hat. Her sunbonnet was fixed just fine.

She reached into her pocket, touched the coins there. They lightly thumped against her body as she walked. She had seen a jar of applesauce at the trading post, and over the time since she’d spied it, she’d had a craving for applesauce. The craving had died when Ambrose had fallen ill, recovered when he did, and was now upon her full force. As she walked she thought of the jar in her hand, could already feel its weight. She imagined having the applesauce on toast in the morning, time skipping ahead in her mind, a flurry of the waxing and waning of light.

She reached the end of the street and turned the corner. A group of urchin boys crouched on the sidewalk, playing jacks. Hitched horses dropped fresh manure. An old man sold smoked mullet. She glanced across the street and froze.

A face, so immediate and sharp. Impossible. Her heart was unmanageable in her chest. Her breath caught and aching. Lightning through her bones.

Dr. Henry Cowell.

She pushed into the double doors of the saloon and stared at him over the swinging doors. His face was sunburned and his clothes wrinkled. His posture, though, was unmistakable. That same straight back. The familiar long stride. Two guards trailed behind him. Sunlight glinted off his glasses.

She couldn’t move her eyes from him. Her heart thumped wildly. Perspiration soaked through the fabric of her dress. So he had come for them. Had probably stopped and searched Fort Myers, then moved on to this bedraggled town.

He turned the corner and disappeared, and she ran out of the saloon, bumping into people, zigzagging crazily, her breath coming fast, her arms pumping, people turning to stare because even in this crazy town full of drunkards and pirates and outlaws and sailors, a woman in a dead run was a sight indeed. Her fists didn’t uncurl even when she reached the porch of the hotel. The lobby floor creaked under her weight as she ran across it and took the stairs two at a time to the top of the second flight. She rushed to the door marked “17,” threw it open, and slammed it again behind her.

The doctor had come looking for them, and it was only a matter of time before he questioned the right person or turned the right corner. She had made the mistake that all fugitives make, imagining she was free. She rushed around the room, gathering the few things they’d brought or acquired and putting them into Ambrose’s worn haversack. She found the remainder of the money in the bottom drawer and stuffed it inside the haversack as well. She was ready to go, and yet could not leave. She had to wait for Ambrose—and what if the doctor had already found him? That unalterable combination of blue eyes, high cheekbones, and slouch hat could fit a few other men in this town—yes, a few others—but not many. And how about herself? How easily could the doctor find her by asking a few questions about a white woman with hazel eyes and a mass of chestnut-brown hair running down her back?

She untied her bonnet and went into the bathroom to stare at herself in the mirror. Her own reflection seemed too familiar, too striking. She unfastened the pins from her hair, combing it with her fingers until it hung straight down. She’d run across one of the stark handbills posted on a pole after her escape from the plantation.
White woman. Of medium height, hazel eyes, long chestnut hair. In the company of Negroes.
The Negroes were gone, but her height and build were immutable. And the hair. Thick and long and lovely.

She found Ambrose’s razor. Went back and stared into the mirror again. Her heart was still racing. Eyes staring back at herself. She grabbed a hank of hair, stretched it out until it hurt her head, and slashed at it with the razor. She opened her fingers and let the hair fall to the floor. It landed curled like a ribbon. She shut her eyes tight and kept cutting, as the hair fell around her legs, occasionally tickling her shins and ankles. The razor grew dull; she had to use a sawing motion on the last of her tresses.

When she finally opened her eyes, her long hair was gone. In its place was the short, rough haircut of madmen and trappers. She stared at herself, her eyes tearing up, as the door to the room creaked open and she recognized Ambrose’s familiar steps.

When she opened the bathroom door he was right there in front of her, staring at her, his face suddenly drained of color. He reached for her short hair and then stopped, letting his hand fall back to his side.

“Seth,” he said.

His eyes had turned to glass; he stepped away from her, his hands animated now, flying around as though to find something to steady himself. He kept backing up and she followed him, trying to explain that they had to leave, right now, by boat or train or pony, they could not hide themselves, the doctor had come for them . . . but Ambrose did not let her finish. The sight of her new haircut had undone something in him. He turned and bolted out the door.

She ran after him, bewildered, stray tendrils falling from her head and swirling away in the draft her body made as she flew down the stairs. By the time she had reached the lobby and run out onto the porch, Ambrose was nowhere in sight. She looked to the right and the left, scanning for Ambrose, alert for the doctor. Every fiber in her wanted to go back to the room, hide under the bed, and wait for the darkness, but she chose a direction and ran down the street.