Savage Girl (36 page)

He seemed to know every detail about us. He was negotiating to bring the show to New York City, he said.

I drew Nicky aside as Bronwyn and Scott said their farewells. It had been decided—I decided—that Colm and I would stay at the exposition while my brother and Bronwyn would return to the train.

“Listen, old man,” I said to Nicky. “Keep an eye on the girl for me tonight, will you?”

“Why?” he said suspiciously. “Where are you going?”

“Keep her close on the way to Sandobar and see that she stays in.”

“The coochie tents, that’s where you’re headed,” he said.

“Just do as I say, will you?”

“Bronwyn is Becky Thatcher,” he said.

Since I hadn’t read Mr. Twain’s children’s book, I didn’t know what that meant. Nicky said, “Bronwyn is the kind of girl if you had a genie giving you three wishes, like in the
Thousand and One Nights,
you’d spend all three of them on her.”

Bronwyn joined us and, as if overhearing, gave Nicky a reward kiss on the cheek. They immediately marched off together arm in arm, leaving me behind, feeling superfluous.

“Bye,” she said, turning around and flashing me a smile.

“He needs to go to the coochie tents,” I heard Nicky say to her as they were swallowed up by the crowds surging through the mucky Street of Wonders.

•   •   •

I arrived at the big sycamore at Lansdowne Camp at ten o’clock sharp.

Earlier in the evening, I did in fact visit the coochie tents. Merely as a psychological experiment. I wondered if my newfound status as an in-love person would affect my appreciation of a flesh show, the kind of spectacle that had repeatedly held my attention in the Tenderloin of New York City. As I surmised, I now took only distracted enjoyment from it.

No Colm at the sycamore. The cowboys and mountain men gathered around a campfire in front of the cabin, the fellow with the banjo leading them in a mournful prairie song, a rejiggered version of “The Unfortunate Rake” set on the western plains.

Muffle your drums, play your pipes merrily,

Play the death march as you go along.

And fire your guns right over my coffin,

There goes a cowboy lad to his home.

I was not a long time waiting. In the darkness at the back of Lansdowne Ravine, a muted shout. I became disoriented, blundering around in the underbrush behind the camp. Finally I broke out into a small clearing.

Someone was there. Quietly I drew my blade.

Time went funny, my mind playing tricks. How many minutes passed?

“Colm?” I called out softly. No moon. All was black.

Moving forward, I almost tripped across the supine body of a man. Still warm, but quite dead. Lying on his back, blank eyes pointed at the stars.

Not Colm. I put my hand down to feel the body at the leg. Sopping wet with blood, though the arterial pulsing had ceased.

The dead body, ripped open from the throat to the groin. Viscera trailed out into the blood-mucked dirt. The man’s hands rested delicately atop the mess, as if he had been vainly trying to shove his guts back inside his body. He lay almost bisected, his fundamental male attribute missing.

The fury had escalated, victim by victim. This here was on a whole other level.

A gust of emotion took me, and suddenly I was sobbing. “I did not do this,” I said, a hoarse whisper to God. “I could not, would not, did not.”

Saying those words aloud, I felt suddenly fearful, exposed.

“Colm?” I said again to the darkness. Far off, the tinny campfire song continued.

Over my coffin put handsful of lavender,

Handsful of lavender on every side,

Bunches of roses all over my coffin,

Saying there goes a young cowboy cut down in his prime.

A figure moved against the far cliffside of the ravine. I stumbled forward, my hands wet with blood, hoping it was Colm and knowing, if it was not, that I had the murderer blocked off. There was no way through but past me. I would discover her. It would come to a head here in Lansdowne Ravine.

I wanted to confront her, even if in so doing I would become that man, the one on the ground with his innards pulled out.

The figure danced through the bushes ahead of me like a ghost.

Full night. The darkness felt tangible, a thick woolen blanket that had fallen over the whole landscape. Bracken, brambles and thickets of sumac rose in the back of the cabin, whipping my whole body as I ventured forward, and I held out my arms to shield my face.

Then nothing. Breathing hard, I stopped.

Dead quiet. I had lost her. A long beat of silence.

With an earsplitting female shriek, a figure tackled me from behind, leaping on my back with surprising weight. I fumbled with my
own blade and saw a flash of steel, silver-black in the total dark, as the triple razors sang past my face.

I blocked that blow, then another. She stabbed at me, stabbed at me and stabbed at me again, aiming for my leg, and I realized that sooner or later one of the thrusts would get through. I couldn’t hold her at bay forever.

Yelling like a madman, Colm Cullen emerged from the darkness, peeling my attacker off. The triple blades sang once again. The figure jabbed at Colm, hitting him hard in the chest. I lunged recklessly with my knife and connected with something, I didn’t know what.

Colm fell. Struck by my hand or by the attacker’s? The figure turned and fled.

Slipping in the blood coursing from the body of my friend, I collapsed. Colm lay in a groaning heap beside me.

As his lifeblood poured out, he tried to tell me something. “Bron . . . Bron . . .” The word didn’t come.

“I’ll get help,” I said. But I was too late.

29

The sunlit waves of the Atlantic belied my mood. The coastal steamer
Phillip Wheeler
churned its way northward from Philadelphia toward Boston, its deck filled with fun-stunned fairgoers returning from their Centennial Exposition visits. I stayed in the hold with Colm Cullen’s casket.

Miraculously, Colm’s death had not yet become connected up to the expanding family scandal.
TWO DEAD AT FAIR: MURDER IN LANSDOWNE RAVINE
was bad enough as a headline. Adding “Delegate Man Stabbed to Death” as the subhead would bring the press wolves howling.

The other man killed was the bandy-legged cowboy who danced so merrily with Bronwyn, who put his arms around her to scrape the wolf pelt of its bits of flesh. I recalled the stab of jealousy I felt at the time, watching them.

Yellow light slanted into the compartment through twin portholes. But a coffin manages to make gloomy even a pretty day in May. This was my duty, bringing Colm Cullen’s body home to his family in Roxbury. I felt like a brother to Colm, a pesky younger brother who had just happened to get him killed.

Fulsome disaster struck my family, but we continued with our lives as if by momentum. Deadbeat poor, we acted as if we were still rich. During the chaotic aftermath of that night in the ravine, when I saw a police official give deference to Freddy, I wanted to shout, “Don’t you realize? He’s nothing now!”

Everything disordered, everything confused. Anna Maria hurriedly packing for departure, Bronwyn nowhere in evidence. I tried
questioning Nicky as to the girl’s whereabouts that night but failed to get a straight answer. My parents deserted the field, leaving me to the disposition of Colm’s remains.

The waves lapped against the hull. Somewhere to the east, Nicky, Anna Maria and Freddy were on the same ocean aboard a transatlantic steamer, having taken passage to Southampton, England, in a first-class cabin that we could scarcely afford.

Our unhappy family scattered to the winds. We were like Sandobar’s consist—decoupled, shunted aside, parceled off. When we left Philadelphia, we left the proud train behind, to be gutted and sold. I felt more relieved than saddened by the loss. “Every increased possession,” says Ruskin, “loads us with new weariness.”

Anna Maria had managed to secure a five-thousand-dollar letter of credit from her family in Boston. The Delegates’ annual spring sojourn to Europe would be a lot different from, say, the fifty-thousand-dollar tours my parents were accustomed to take.

Fleeing to London would lift them out of the maelstrom of bad publicity in New York. Hunted by the gentlemen of the press—what bitter irony lay couched in that phrase, I had never realized—Anna Maria, Freddy and Nicky slipped out of the country at night like a trio of thieves.

Bronwyn journeyed home on her own, by public commercial railroad, back to Fifth Avenue and Swoony and her dying mother. I finally concluded that the girl had a deadness around her heart. The chaos of her childhood, the breaking of family ties early on, had left Bronwyn emotionally maimed. She reacted with chilling coldness to all developments, including our leave-takings, Delia’s tragedy and even Colm’s death.

Could that coldness be interspersed with violent, even murderous, outbursts? A terrifying prospect.

I thought about the other examples of feral upbringing. A certain lack of affect was another attribute of the wild child Victor of Aveyron’s tortured existence. The doctors who examined him considered him so mentally damaged from his abandonment in the forest that they judged him unable to feel affection or attachment to others.

As the coffin-carrying coastal steamed north, I went over and over
the events of that night in the ravine. All had been darkness and jolting, fragmented, disordered images. I was badly frightened. I hadn’t been able to think straight.

A figure in a blousy, shapeless dress, wild black hair. I felt her body upon mine. I even smelled her. I had denied that specific memory at the time, but it was true. Lost amid the chaos, a scent of oranges, fleeting but nonetheless there.

And if that were so, then Bronwyn resembled what I had lately feared myself to be, an unhinged individual, two personages stuffed into a single body, one capable of at least acting sane, the other quite mad. Perhaps we had made her so with all our meddling. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, the creator and the created, two faces in the same mirror.

A girl in halves. It would be an unsurprising result of her tumultuous life if she was indeed like that. I ached, mawkish with the tragedy of my love. I had developed deep feelings of attachment for a person unworthy of it. After all that, I wasn’t able to give her up. Once more I just felt sorry for myself. And still I loved her.

I couldn’t force myself to bring her to justice. The only other choice was to condemn myself. It was I who was the creature in halves. I again went over the events in my mind.

The ravine completely black. I felt the heft of the knife in my hand. A man lay dead. I didn’t know what made him dead. Then I myself was attacked. By something with long claws.

I thought of the bear chained at the Mountain Man camp. For a brief moment, I fixed on this possibility. The bear had gotten loose and rampaged through the darkness. First attacking the man on the ground, then me, then Colm.

Of course.

But the explanation did not hold water for long. A bear wearing a dress?

Equally unlikely, Bronwyn, a slight girl, embarked upon a murderous rampage.

So it had to be me. I was the killer. The beast on my back was my own insanity, riding me in the guise of Savage Girl. Spurred by some
insane fit of mental instability, I had lashed out, first at the cowboy, then at my poor friend. It all sounded pretty unlikely. Even crazy. But I felt that I was, in fact, out of my mind.

The Cullens of Dudley Square in Roxbury summoned up a good hundred mourners for their favorite son’s wake. They behaved with surprising kindness to me, the unintentional author of Colm’s death. I never detected a hint of blame or anger.

At least I was bringing him back with his manhood intact.

“Shouldn’t’ve never crossed the Muddy,” said Colm’s grand-uncle, old Pap Mahoney. The Muddy River being the demarcation line of the neighborhood in which Pap Mahoney Cullen himself had passed all his days. Quite a few members of the family demonstrated the same rootedness, professing uncaring ignorance of all aspects of life outside their self-imposed boundaries. They had everything they needed right where they were. Whiskey could be brought in.

As the night progressed, the wake settled into an endurance trial. The songs, the stories, the drunk. Colm Cullen had been a peach, a stalwart, the best man ever to walk the earth. Do you remember the time . . . ? Yeah, Jay-sus, and how about . . . ? The phrase “fookin’ died at a fookin’ fair” got a thorough airing-out, accompanied by head-shaking wonder at the sad ironies of life.

In the front parlor, the man himself, tight-lipped on ironies, sad or otherwise. Laid out, asleep. He had somehow maintained a stubborn sunburn in the clouded-over East, his sensitive Irish skin, pink-red even in death.

I should have left him where I found him, in the hoist at the Brilliant Mining and Milling Company of Virginia City, Nevada. His example had taught me to speak up, speak straight, but don’t speak too much. He saved my life at the end.

My friend Colm really was, really had been, what they said. The best man ever to walk the earth.

•   •   •

While in Boston I again visited with Professor James and his dear sister, Alice, in Cambridge, strolled the brick-accented Yard again, cut
Teddy Roosevelt once more. I thought James might be able to shine a light on what mental disturbances could prompt a girl to murder.

At first I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Here I had before me one of the world’s most sensitive observers of human psychology, and I held back. Some instinct arose that made me want to shield her secrets.

Instead we spoke about nature versus nurture. When I asked James for his opinion, he said, “My first act of free will is to believe in free will.” We are stamped ineradicably by nature, in other words, but after that we are free to make our own way however we can.

Slowly, though, after more conversational sallies and more avoidance, I divulged the outlines of a “special case” that I thought might interest him.

I didn’t mention Bronwyn. Rather I spoke again about myself, as a disturbed individual unsure if he had performed unspeakable acts or not. Until suddenly the light broke through and his burden was lifted. Parsing out the circumstances of the latest killing, I suggested it proved at least that I was no longer a suspect in the series of crimes.

“I wouldn’t be entirely sure,” James said.

“But why?” I asked. “I experienced that attack myself, I felt the real murderer actually leap upon my back.”

“I have encountered patients who are certain beyond doubt that they have physically wrestled with a demon of some sorts,” James said. “They can even demonstrate bruises, abrasions. So this latest incident might simply be another symptom of an unsettled mind.”

Ah, thank you, Professor, for demolishing what small hope I had.

“Consider the act of mutilation, of postmortem castration,” James said, ruminating.

“Wouldn’t that indicate a female was the assailant?” I said.

“A female, yes,” he said. “Or an insanely jealous male.”

Looking at me, it seemed, with an accusatory air.

Leaving James much more ill at ease than when I’d arrived, I hesitated over what to do next. Freddy had wired me from London, instructing that I should present myself, while in Boston, at Uncle Ezekiel Saltonstall’s countinghouse. For a job.

Like Bartleby, I preferred not to.

Instead I went home to Bronwyn.

It actually felt a shade dangerous, taking up residence with her in Swoony’s house. Not because of any physical threat, though there was that. But rather because I caught myself thinking of us as newlyweds, starting out married life together with our aged matriarchs in tow, a mastiff before the hearth and a green-plumed African parrot squawking on its perch.

We could have done anything with ourselves—with each other! There were a dozen empty bedrooms, their canvas-draped mattresses waiting to be uncovered. Swoony and Mallt Bowen were certainly unfit chaperones. One of them dotty and the other immolating before our eyes like a stalled Congreve rocket.

Bronwyn’s mother customarily sat in the comfortable corner club chair, handkerchief always in hand. She would often go for hours doing nothing but staring into the distance. She rarely spoke. Occasionally she spit.

Incredible what she looked like. The wasting disease made her increasingly thin, which paradoxically rendered her younger-looking, until she came to resemble her daughter’s invalid doppelgänger. She burned up like a candle. We could all see the flame get weaker and weaker.

Swoony persisted in calling Bronwyn “Virginia,” Mallt “Anna Maria” and me “Friedrich.” Random phrases dominated her conversation. “Never washed in his life” was one. “The floor has a door” was another.

Adjacent to us, a constant reminder of our demise, The Citadel had been taken by the bank as a prelude to sale. Passing through a hall in Swoony’s South Wing one afternoon, I noticed Bronwyn standing in front of the now-locked communicating passageway between the two houses.

She motioned me forward. I put my ear to the door next to hers. A woman humming, the whisper of a broom against the floorboards. We never saw anyone enter or leave the next-door château. We avoided it. Now this. Renters? Caretakers?

“I suppose we should go over and introduce ourselves to whoever
is in there,” Bronwyn said. “Be neighborly, take them a fruitcake or something.”

“I don’t feel like it,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Bronwyn said.

Bronwyn and I existed in a suspended, timeless realm. She felt it, I think, as I did. We waited for what was to happen. Two clock springs coiled tight side by side deep within the escapement, anticipating release by the turning of some unknown gear. I could not help but wish she would take up the pastime of kissing me again. But I felt myself caught, unable to get unstuck.