Authors: Nancy Mauro
But she’d rather die than be so pithy.
“I was thinking about Oster,” Lily says instead.
“What about?”
“I was thinking about servants at that time. The women were something like chattels.” She gives a rounded musculature to her words. “It wasn’t uncommon for these big landowners sometimes to, you know, rape them.”
“So, you’ve come around?” He rips a leaf apart as he walks. “Pointing fingers at your own kin.”
“People,” she says, with an obfuscation that is self-implicating, “are capable of the most unimaginable things. Maybe Tinker abducted my grandfather in revenge.”
“You could ask the Crusaders.” Duncan yawns, cranks his jaw in circles as though letting out a couple yards of fishing line. “’Course they’d deny it. Apple never falls far from the tree, right?”
She would like to bite him, leave the crenellated pattern of her teeth in his shoulder. But that would only have the effect of flourishing a checkmark at the end of his last sentence.
“Those old guys didn’t come around, did they?” he asks, skipping
right over the discussion of Tinker. It’s as though he went to the city and lost interest in their project.
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean, not yet?” Duncan’s voice is apathetic at best. He maintains several extra inches of gait beyond her as though she’s something he wants to keep in his past. “You expect them soon?”
“Nature is grisly and perverted, Duncan.” She takes in a succulent huff of air. “There’s a dog now—a standard poodle—that’s been coming around, digging. Twice this week I had to chase it away.”
“Whose is it?”
“Nobody’s. A stray.”
“Poodles don’t go stray.”
“It’s untidy.”
Duncan says nothing. They continue walking. Of course she’s trying to engage him, to lure him into some semblance of ease so that when she lays in and condemns him for his absence, the surprise and force will bruise him that much deeper purple. It would be easy enough to linger on some simple observations: the sway of chestnut branches and quivering aspens around them, the parch-bottom ditches framing the sides of the road like the gutters of a bowling alley. But this benign wallpaper of chatter will come across as hectoring, circumlocutory, and will dampen the searing ring of her jab. Better just to deal the uppercut now.
“I’m assuming you were drunk when you drove here last night.”
“Yes.” It’s his voice that shrugs, not his shoulders.
“Yes? That’s it?”
“Call it a low point.”
Wow. Lily feels the same rush of heat that overcame her in the field, a parching awareness that he’s going to leave her. Without an arrhythmic step her husband has crossed from casual neglect to a place where he is no longer responsible to her.
Duncan stops when he reaches the crumbled beginnings of the blacktop. “It was around here,” he says and looks at her as though handing
something over, stepping back now that he’s seen her to her destination. His face is so changed, he seems to hold guard behind the sprigs of beard. This is how we are with each other, she thinks. This is why we’re doomed.
For a minute they stand in the middle of the road like that. Only later will she understand that she was studying his face for recognition, however small.
“I dug in the garden without you last night,” she hears herself say. “I found a scapula. From Tinker’s shoulder.”
Without coming any closer, without responding, he reaches for her glasses. When he slides them off her face, the trees blur. Within her narrow focal range, only the edges of Duncan are crisp. Only Duncan is illuminated. Without her lenses all she can see is him puffing on each oval of glass and rubbing them clean with a corner of his shirt. He holds them up, squints against fingerprints, and hands them back. Doesn’t try jabbing them behind her ear—the awkward motion of replacing eyeglasses—but hands them back at waist level.
Lily takes the glasses and wonders what she’s to do with this gesture. Is she pleased with the reach of his hand? Yes, she’s embarrassed by the upsurge of her blood, the granular attention she’s paying to the stubble on his chin. But everything excitable within her is mitigated by his reluctant face, by his silence. The action is just Duncan’s judgment on thumbprints, on her slipshod ways; she is chain grease and smudges and stray hairs.
It is easier to move apart on the road then. There is a natural moment that comes next and it seems right to break apart and search the canal for the spot where the beast is turning back to dirt.
“There.” She points to a mound in the ditch, to the wide span of maple leaves. On top of the mound she recognizes the rack of branches that he twisted from a young spruce. The pile of pig is smaller than she expected. Ravaged by winged things and wolves, most likely. Duncan and Lily stand at the edge of the road and sniff; the animal should be mulch by now. Yet, the air is all balsam and bayberry leaves and she knows they’re both thinking the same things but are loath to consult.
This is the mistake Lily has made. This is the job Duncan could not finish.
There is the purr of electrical wires that sag along the road at intervals and, above this, a layer of bird chirrups. Lily hears each distinctly as she starts down the leeside of the embankment, dry sand sliding ditch-wise ahead of her. She steps toward the mound and picks off the branches, kicks away the cover of broad maples that are spread like serviettes. She pushes the last of the leaves with her toe. The pig is gone.
I
n the evening he joins Lily out back at Tinker’s grave. It’s a night of treasure hunting in the inert soil where, according to the copy of
Gray’s
, they recover two arm bones but no hand; a marble sack of tarsal and metatarsal bones that comprise the foot, but no phalanges. Duncan’s thinking that the toes may have been too small to remain intact and nestled against the foot; perhaps they were ingested whole by a passing sweep of worms. Once he’s in the soil, he remembers the pleasure of searching. He realizes he’s digging to make up for his absence, choosing to go wide rather than deep. He tells Lily this way he can be most effective.
Duncan feels a tremendous need for an element of normalcy in the garden. Not only to camouflage their midnight industry, but also to return his sense of reality. First, the pig was gone from the ditch. Then, this afternoon, he found a sizable puddle of vomit on the rubber mat of the Saab. And running behind his eyelids all day, every day, is a Möbius strip of women in Stand and Be Counted jeans so tight he has to prod and twist just to get an index finger under a waistband.
Also, Lily’s been digging without him. Although the confession is hardly thundering in his universe of daily exigencies there’s no mistaking the intention of her well-placed kick to the balls.
Duncan turns on the sprinkler, adjusts the spray so that it arcs gently back and forth over the portion of lawn that is still untouched. He torches
a cigarette and scratches his ass. At its apogee, the lashing arc of water forms a curtain, an illusory screen to shield the grave. Holy fuck, Duncan thinks, we really did carve it up. This initial midnight survey shows that what began as a small garden patch has advanced like alopecia across the grass. This might pose a problem. In the event that Valerie from the Historical Society sends an emissary to visit poor Laura, the butchered landscape will definitely become a town issue.
Lily comes out of the house and steps barefoot across the porch. She’s been storing away Tinker bits in the basement and is quiet. He shouldn’t blame her for digging without him. Three weeks in and no one understands the urgency of getting those bones out of the ground more than Lily. He’s the one who’s not holding up his end of the deal.
She comes over and takes the cigarette from between his fingers, puts it in her mouth and sucks back. For a minute they stand there, on the same northern line of latitude, looking into the barley and listening to the sprinkler patching against the grass, beading against the green. She sucks again and gives him back the cigarette.
As they pass this transgression from hand to hand, he would like to gather up her hair and yank hard. Just to see. Rub the stubble of his new beard into her cheek until he leaves abrasion marks. Failing that he maybe would like to say something to her. Or even speak in a general, undirected manner using
thou
and
thee.
Perhaps it would be easier to admit he’s failing her if he did so using the subjective and objective forms of the singular second person. But the words are too far out there. So let her make the first move for once. While he’s not surprised that she’s excavated, he is hurt by the thought. If she would just take hold of his sleeve now, these words might come, fluent and concise. She could even weep. This would be helpful, if she wept and moored against his hip. Or pitched herself at his feet. Near his feet. If only she could make herself the vulnerable one. Then he could finally look into her face, take it between his palms like an injury, and figure out what he’s been doing wrong.
They were synchronized once; they ticked with Swiss precision.
What happened to that? Her early-morning rustling of bedsheets was a signal for him to wrap his arm around her as she began her crawl toward consciousness. They learned how the other could speak without using the mouth. At parties, when he caught her twisting her rings he knew to go gather up their coats. When they visited her parents it was understood that she would come and perch on the arm of his chair. It made him feel at ease—she knew that. It made him feel like a husband.
He’s about to lose it all now, he knows. This woman who once understood him without the aid of exhaustive explanation. This long-legged, ink-stained virgin he found like a gift in a library carrel. Standing beside him tonight, perhaps, but not for long. Will she move on to someone else? Could she have already?
Say something, you jackass, he urges himself. Lily rolls her toes in the grass. She looks up into the sky and scratches her neck. She’s offering him all these seconds. But who is she? Not the woman with whom he created a private language of hands. This replacement Lily is an oralist, a lip-reader who stands opposed to the use of sign language.
The moments, each fractional component, clock on in silence. He counts them as they go. Lily leaves him and moves across the lawn toward the sprinkler. His time has expired. She moves along the hedges. As she walks, crickets begin a string of chirrups. So sudden and orchestral that Duncan believes her body kinetics have cued their motion, their startling rapture, the frantic scratch of back legs. It’s too hot a night for this dry-legged rhythm, for two sticks rubbing. He looks at the shrubs; the cigarette drops from his fingers.
“Jesus, Lily,” he says over all that hind-leg racket. “Fire!”
As Lily passes, swaying to the cacophony made in her honor, the crickets begin combusting in the hedge. Yes, the crickets are burning.
She stops and looks around.
It’s you, he thinks. You’ve inspired the suicide of an entire orchestra of insects. Duncan is not the hallucinatory sort, and doesn’t need to rub his eyes or pinch flesh. As he watches he can see sparks of ignition in the
thicket marking the property line. With the frenzy of dervishes, they’re chirping themselves into self-incineration.
“You set the crickets on fire.”
She laughs. Why is she laughing?
“You are messed up, Duncan.”
He can only point, with a blistered finger, to the tiny fires where the crickets pop and smolder in the hedge. Sudden death instigated by a set of Circean hips moving across the grass. She follows this path, the extension of finger across the lawn and into the hedge.
“It’s fireflies,” she says.
Duncan’s breath flutters and hooks. He steps back from the shrubs. He looks at Lily expecting the dark powers of cloud seeders and shamans. But he sees she’s right. That she is just grass-stained flesh, susceptible and unsure.
In the shower, the weak dribble of water (too often a shade of russet brown) clatters as it boils up through the original cast-iron piping, so that Lily doesn’t hear the sopping thud when the bathroom ceiling collapses.
Under hot water that has been forced up two vertiginous floors of derelict plumbing, she lathers out the night’s activity and feels satisfied with the rubble of bones they’ve collected. A cobbler’s pile in just one go. Listening to the grunt and strum and tangy whine of the shower pipes, she realizes—suddenly and miraculously—that all these sounds are coming together to form the basic chords of a musical lament.
I still miss you but my aim’s getting better.
She’s pleased by the thought, tilts her neck to receive the sweet heartland ballad full in the face. It’s then that she feels the first blast to the cheek.
Lily opens her eyes and finds a churning cloud in the curtained tub with her. Hovering overhead is a swarm of yellow jackets: hairy, thick-vested, impossible to count, and at this proximity, more black than yellow. Wasps the size of grapes, incongruously suspended one moment, then
skidding down at her face, her shoulders, undeterred by the slick runway of her skin or her screams or swatting palms. The yellow jackets’ answer is to peck at these, anything that interrupts their dive-bomb formation.
Duncan rips away the remaining portion of shower curtain that hasn’t been tangled in her legs and already torn down. Then, by swatting a cluster from her head with a bath towel—roughly, but who knows what kind of force to apply to a swarm of wasps—and wrapping her with the terry-cloth ends, he’s able to lift Lily from the tub and carry her into the hall.
“Shut the door! The door!” She’s screaming inside the towel. Duncan puts her on the floor (drops her in his haste) and shoves the solid oak hard enough to produce a Richter reading in his molars. A house of lavish appointments, he thinks. Doors that slam, a boneyard out back …
He’s afraid to remove the towel. Call it the kernel of his failing but this has never been his place. Duncan stands over his wife, one leg on either side of her hips. Years ago, when they divided up all the superpowers, established which heroic qualities belonged to whom, Lily drew Strength. Duncan got Invisibility. He hasn’t been much of a husband, this is clear. But he wanted her to feel somewhat protected with him up here. And now in this way too, he has failed.