Blue Asylum (15 page)

Ambrose had little to say to the other men. He crossed his arms and stood with his back toward the window, watching two madmen play a game of billiards. One kissed the cue ball every time he took a shot, and the ritual seemed to be working. His opponent, an excitable Greek man, accused him of using magic and began kissing the cue ball as well. The game grew more heated, and the Greek man continued to lose. When it was his turn again, he kissed the cue ball, gave it a stern, warning look, and hit it so hard it leaped off the table. From that particular height, in the acoustics of that particular room, the sound a clay-fired billiard ball made against a marble floor sounded exactly like a rifle shot. Ambrose, who had been daydreaming about the kiss, was caught by surprise. The sound of the shot entered his consciousness, yanked him away from Iris, and gave him back to the South.

He saw himself in a field in Pennsylvania, the stock of the gun still warm against his cheek, Seth’s body not so much falling as slumping, and it was too late for blue, blue was as ineffective and sad as brandy forced between the lips of a corpse, and Seth’s knees took a terrible angle as he slumped but did not fall, forever slumping, never falling, this was eternity, this was hell, and Ambrose tried to scream those legs into straightening but it was too late. He screamed and screamed, strong hands holding him down. A spoon was forced into his mouth and the warm hot liquid within it burned his tongue and then his throat, and Ambrose’s horror turned soft and sweet and sad. He wanted to kiss the boy goodbye but he was dissolving himself, into the white nothing that was better than the sky.

When he awoke, the room was dark, and Dr. Cowell sat in a Windsor chair next to his bed, his arms crossed, sleeping, a single tallow candle casting the doctor’s shadow on the wall. Ambrose tried to shift on the bed but found that his arms were bound to the bedposts, and he could move only his feet, which he employed to kick off his hot blankets.

The doctor awoke and rubbed his eyes.

“Mr. Weller,” he said, in a voice both anguished and relieved. “How are you feeling?”

Ambrose squinted, trying to pick out a word from a long line of them that drifted by in his mind, one most appropriate. But so many seemed to fit.

“Tired.”

“I suppose you are.”

“What time is it?”

The doctor read his pocket watch by candlelight. “Nearly midnight. You’ve been screaming for hours. What happened to you?”

He tried to gather his thoughts. “I had another fit,” he said slowly. “I thought perhaps I was done with them. I’m very surprised.”

“I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised at all.”

Ambrose caught the disapproving tone in his voice. The straps that held him to the bedposts were biting into his wrists, and his arms ached from the strange position. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“You kissed her!” He practically spat out the words. “In open defiance of everything I taught you! Did you not listen to a word I’ve been trying to say? You aren’t well. This kiss has caused a terrible regression in your treatment.”

“That is not true!” Ambrose said, surprising himself with the anger in his voice. “I was in the day room. They were playing billiards—”

“That means nothing! What matters is that you kissed her and less than ten minutes later you went raving mad again. She will destroy you, all your progress. Do you want that?” Ambrose caught a look of something in his eyes. No, it couldn’t be.

The doctor moved the chair close to the bed and sat down in it. “Mr. Weller,” he said. “Do you remember how you used to tell me I saved your life?”

“I remember.”

“And do you still believe that?”

“Yes,” he said, relaxing a bit so that the straps were kinder to his wrists.

“And do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“And do you want to leave this island a whole man, one who can make your father proud?”

He stiffened. It wasn’t fair, evoking his father.

“Don’t undo all your progress, Mr. Weller. Don’t sacrifice your healing mind. Give this woman a wide berth.”

The way he said “woman” confirmed Ambrose’s suspicions. It was an uncertainty. A stutter. A weakness and a pain.

“Doctor,” he said, feeling a sudden glee at the consternation he knew he was about to cause, as though the doctor’s calm demeanor was a sleeping cat and the words were a shoe coming down on the tail. “Perhaps you should take your own advice.”

As doctor and patient argued, a gentler conversation took place in another part of the asylum. Pacing her room, in the sweet, calming odor put off by the smoke in the smudge pot, Iris told Wendell the rest of her story. She felt guilty about the parts she’d left out, and also somewhat anxious, as the story of the baby and the two graves—one new, one open and filled with water—would explain the inevitability of flight. At the same time, the boy was young, and very sensitive. So Iris finished the story as best she could, with no mention of the baby at all. This hurt her; everyone else who had loved the baby was dead, and she was the only witness to the fact that indeed he had been born and had breathed and had fed at his mother’s breast. She ached to say his name. But not now. Not to the boy.

She spoke rapidly, rushing the ending of the story along. Now that Ambrose had kissed her, she was fighting against time. The kiss was in danger of softening her resolve. Taking away her determination to leave this island. Since that kiss she had steeled herself, trying to make the kiss smaller in her mind. As it was, it had spilled across her plans like the contents of an inkwell, spreading a stain in the shape of his face. All day long she had tried to scrub it clean. She was losing the battle. What future could she have on this island with this madman? Her father was waiting for her, with his prayers and his wisdom, and her mother waited by his side with more practical offerings: tea and something to put in her hair to make it soft again. She could not let herself fall in love with Ambrose. But she was falling. As she fell, she finished the story as fast as she could.

Rose had an old tabby cat she loved, named Sirus, who often wandered back in the slave quarters to visit her. She was helping her mother cut out the patterns for a jersey shirt when Iris, passing by, heard her say: “But who will take care of Sirus?” And her mother said, “Shhh. Sirus will be fine.” Having led mostly an invisible life, Iris was used to sneaking around a burgeoning story’s outer edges, listening for scraps of conversation and too-loud prayers, and even for the messages hidden in songs, and it wasn’t long before her suspicions were confirmed: Some of the slaves were planning an escape. Iris took off her apron one night, put on her shawl, and walked right in among them in the middle of their meeting in the stables, seven of them hovering in an empty stall: Rose, her mother, Verna, her father, John. Mattie, the old woman with the creaky knees who worked in the big house. Nate, young and wiry, the best field hand on the plantation. Thomas, who carried a Bible with him everywhere, and Jackson, the blacksmith.

They all stepped back when she walked in. She was the mistress, perhaps their enemy, perhaps their friend; they had seen white people turn on a dime.

Iris said: “What are your plans?”

Thomas never lied, so it was up to Jackson to say, “What plans, ma’am?”

“Your plans for escaping,” Iris said, as calmly as though she were describing a butterfly’s plan to rob a milkweed.

The slaves looked at each other.

“What is your destination?” she asked.

No one said anything. Then Nate said, “North,” and was quickly shushed by the others.

“North?” she asked. “Just north? It’s far too dangerous. You will be captured long before you pass the river. We’ll travel east. There’s a Quaker village about fifty miles from here. They’ll protect us.”

Verna looked straight at her. “We?”

“I am going with you.”

“No!” said Rose’s father, John. “Please, ma’am, a white woman don’t have any business running with the slaves. They’ll think we kidnapped you.”

“She’s not going!” Nate shouted. “I will not travel with her!” The slaves began to argue among themselves, agitated, their voices growing loud and then someone letting out a warning “Shhhh.” The argument would fall into whispers, then build again. Iris left the secret meeting with no resolution.

Later, she appealed to Mattie. “Please,” she told her. “I can’t stay here. If my husband suspects I knew, there is no telling how he’ll react. You see how he treats me. I’ve become a slave too.”

Mattie looked at her balefully. “With all respect, ma’am,” she said, “you ain’t no slave, and never will be.” But Mattie finally consented to speaking to the others, and shortly thereafter came the word of the reluctant decision: She would go with them.

They left two nights later, in the pouring rain, moving into the forest surrounding the plantation as lightning crackled through the sky. The rain was a blessing. It would wash away their scent. They took old cart paths through the woods, hid among the trees in the daytime, and traveled after dark, seven dark shapes and one pale one by the light of the moon. They crisscrossed rivers and broken ground to throw the dogs off their tracks. Stole chickens and eggs from farms. They drank from the wells and broke into smokehouses. Once they found a barrel full of molasses and licked it from their fingers until they spooked and ran away.

They reached a field that stretched endlessly, the middle of nowhere that people talk about, nothing but goldenrod and sheep sorrel. Grasshoppers jumped away from the sound of footsteps. Here they camped for the night. No fire. Dark clouds were bunched up in the sky, as if thrown there by someone done with them. Iris sat apart from the rest. On principle, she was not accepted. Dirty and tired and hungry though she was, she would never be dirty and tired and hungry enough to be one of them. And there had been grumblings about her insistence upon going east, not north.

“We’d be fine now,” Nate said that night, “if everyone had just listened to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Iris said. She felt helpless and miserable and unwanted. “I’m sure the village is just a little further.”

“Sure it is.” He took out his .45 and began to clean it. He’d stolen it from the big house before they left. John watched him, making a face. Nate noticed him.

“What are you looking at?” Nate said.

“Crazy boy like you shouldn’t have a gun. That’s all I’m saying.”

“What you gonna do, old man? Take it away from me?”

They’d had the same argument for days.

“What’s the matter?” Wendell asked from the other side of the bars. It was harder to see his face through the screen they’d put up for the mosquitoes. “Why did you stop the story?”

Iris wasn’t sure how long she’d been quiet. She’d been lost in the memory. She backed away from the window, but not far. There was nowhere to go.

His voice was quiet, respectful. “People start dying now, don’t they?”

She lay apart from the others as she always did, using as her bedding a sheet she’d stolen from a clothesline, full of ordinary scents: spring air and bluing and the clean sharp smell of nothing in particular. In the near distance, gaunt cattle stood huddled together. The war had started chewing on the cities and was now moving into pastoral scenes. It couldn’t stop the flowers, or the grass, and the trees looked the same. But a steer that could have fed ten families now could feed only half that. Strange how she could hate slavery but hate the Yankees, too.

She fell into a stretch of sleep, flat, gray sleep meant only to rest the body. She awoke to Verna’s scream. Horses were coming down the dirt road that ran along the side of the pasture. Iris jumped to her feet, confused, horrified. A man in a slouch hat on a palomino was ahead of the rest of them and was closing in fast. A loud shot went off next to her head and the lead man fell. Iris turned and saw Nate pointing his weapon. He fired twice more as they ran into the cypress forest.

A confusion of voices. Labored breathing. Biting cool of swamp water. Dawn came and shots rang in her ears and then they were all bunched up and dying in that cypress cove. She was on the ground, water soaking the back of her dress.

Rose, John, Verna, Mattie, Nate, Jackson, Thomas. When she came to her senses she was tied to the back of a horse, riding toward Fort Lane, where a judge would say the word that brought her here.

Lunatic.

She knew boys did not like crying women, and so she had held in her tears while she finished the story. Wendell looked at her steadily. She moved closer to the window.

“Do you think I’m a lunatic, Wendell?”

He shook his head.

“Then let me go.”

“Let you go?”

“Help me leave this place and go back to Winchester. You are my only chance for salvation. Please don’t abandon me. I’ll die here, don’t you see?”

Penelope was still alive.

The last of the baby loggerheads had broken out of their eggs and crawled toward the horizon line. The rest of the country had cooled down for winter, but on the island, a profusion of bougainvillea continued to bloom on the courtyard wall.

Banned by the chef from any contact with the girl, Wendell had to content himself with glimpses from afar. The pain equaled, then eclipsed the pleasure, but still he could not help himself. She seemed so solitary, wandering the grounds, clutching her doll and stopping every so often, and peering around her, so that Wendell had to duck behind whatever wall or bush he was using as his Penelope-watching fortress. Did she miss him? Did she feel abandoned? The marks on his throat had turned into faint, petal-shaped bruises, and he longed for a potion that would keep that color there forever. He stroked the marks idly as he watched Penelope collecting small, round stones, washing them in the waves and then piling them on the beach just beyond the vegetation line, the same perimeter in which the loggerhead turtles had deposited their eggs in the summer months.

Wendell squatted next to the pile of stones by moonlight, chin in hand, staring at it. It seemed to beg for decoding. But he could not figure it out. Perhaps Penelope was building a shrine to her own isolation, or simply counting out some quantity that existed in her head. He longed so badly to talk to her, to be near her. Not even by night could he have her company. By some aberration of architecture and, beyond that, fate, Penelope had the only room without a barred window through which they could have held clandestine meetings. The thought of his beloved, her blue eyes filled with tears, her flame-colored hair matted and wet, her red mouth ovoid with an endless scream as cold water pounded on her head, was too much for him to bear. And so he stayed away from her as his throat turned back to an everyday, uninspired flesh color and her pile of stones grew in the shape of a pyramid.