Blue Asylum (29 page)

She was not surprised to see the tall man entering the meadow, wearing the same clothes as the day before, walking in that familiar, stilted gait. His two guards trailed him. Yesterday, the sight of him had sent her into a hair-slashing frenzy, but now she simply stared with dull eyes as he made his way toward her.

Two shocks to the system—first, the news from the hotel clerk that yes, there was a man and woman matching the couple’s description in the hotel, but the man had died during the night and was now being buried in the field at the end of the road. And then, the sight of her. Iris Dunleavy, arms crossed, her shoulders no longer high and proud, her hair short under her bonnet, eyes downcast. Standing before her lover’s grave.

He’d tried Fort Myers first, gained passage through the Union guards by declaring himself on neither side, but a British doctor on official and extremely important business. The guards had burst into laughter at the thought of this strange-talking fool who smelled like roses, chasing two lunatics through the war.

“Of course,” they said. “Have a look around, Doc,” and laughed some more. The search of that dusty coastal town had proved fruitless, and so had another, and another, and here he was in the fourth, sunburned and exhausted, tobacco juice on the soles of his boots, yellow pollen collected on his glasses. He motioned to his guards to stand back as he approached her. His grief at the news of Ambrose retreated, briefly, as he let the sight of her fill him. He’d spent so much of the last week hating her, delighting in the thought of her humiliating recapture. But the woman before him was broken, nothing proud left to conquer. And the man they had pulled back and forth between them like a prize lay dead under a sheet.

Her eyes were utterly hollow. He stopped a few feet from her, removing his hat.

She looked away, looked back at the grave. Behind them, the children were quiet. “I failed him,” she said. “I failed.”

“His chances weren’t good to start with, Mrs. Dunleavy,” Dr. Cowell said. His words were bare and bleak and soft and true. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

She shook her head. No color came to her face to warn of the coming tears.

“I made him worse.”

“He was worse to begin with. I imagine you made him as happy as he could have been.”

“I believed I could cure him.”

The digging continued. A dragonfly circled low and then arced away toward the bonnet of a girl. A night crawler wriggled out of the sod that was piled up near the grave.

“I suppose it’s human to believe you can help the ones you love,” Dr. Cowell said.

Iris glanced at the guards, who still hovered in the distance. “Let us finish burying him, before you take me back.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Her hair wasn’t fixed right. The bottom of her dress was torn. As the doctor noticed these things, he felt a deep and flushing regret. He had considered himself a man of peace, disdainful of both North and South for their tendency to use blood as a palliative, but he had fought for love with just as much ferocity, and now he could see that love for the sad, stumbling, prideful, hopeless thing it was.

He put on his hat. “Go home, Mrs. Dunleavy.”

When she had left her house for a new life on the plantation, the cat had been sleeping on the porch in a patch of sunlight. Apparently the patch of light had never moved, and the cat had stayed faithful to it.

The state of Virginia was a wreck, blackened fields and empty storehouses. Pigs rooting up severed body parts, and the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg filled with blood again every time it rained. Yankees and Rebels alike were buried in flower gardens. The hospital in Winchester was filled with the dead and dying. And yet certain constants remained. Like the cat. And the snake fence that ran between the house and the fields beyond it, covered in yellow jessamine vines.

Dr. Cowell had given Iris money for passage on a steamer to Mobile. From there she went east on a rickety wagon owned by a Mennonite, who got her as far as northern Georgia. She hitched rides from kindly strangers on wagons and spent two days sidesaddle on an ornery mule that bucked her off while fording a stream. She ate what people gave her and occasionally pilfered the rest, stealing from corn bins as she had as a runaway from the plantation.

She was an anomaly. A woman returning from war among all the broken men. She was not wounded. Her body was whole and she had the use of her arms and legs. But she had the same faraway look in her eyes as the returning soldiers. They all had seen things that would compromise their sleep, their posture, manner of praying, enjoyment of music and cool water. Forever they would notice the bloody parts of the setting sun.

Iris stared at the cat, imagining that the creature had spent the war licking at a patch of yellow light on a cedar board. She envied that cat for which the war meant nothing but strange sounds at odd hours. The cat raised its head as she approached the porch, stretched out a paw, and then fell back to sleep, making her walk around it. She paused before entering the house, fearful that her parents would not be inside, that something had happened to them. She had borne many things, but this she knew would kill her. She had carried her story all this way with the intention of letting it fall into her father’s lap. He could not abandon her now.

They weren’t in the parlor. The kitchen was empty, the pots and pans in their places. A cheesecloth sat neatly folded on the table, and the air smelled vaguely of grits.

She looked into her parents’ bedroom and then climbed the staircase to check the other rooms. As she’d approached Winchester, rumors had reached her of typhoid outbreaks in the city, yellow fever, gun battles. Somewhere in the five and a half years that had passed since she left the town, she’d lost the belief that she could alter events by bracing for them. God didn’t favor the stoic, necessarily. This she knew from experience.

Her heart began to pound, and the soiled places in the armpits of her dress quickly grew moist again. The house was empty, and with a feeling of dread, she forced herself to go out onto the back porch and look across the yard. There, at the edge of the property, her parents worked in their vegetable garden, crouched together, bent at their work, hats shielding them from the cooling sun of autumn. They both had spades, and a pile of sweet potatoes sat between them, piled up like the eggs she’d seen in the nests of loggerhead turtles. They didn’t look up as she walked slowly toward them through the yellowing grass.

She stopped. She had to watch them for a few minutes, loving to the point of tears how familiar and ordinary they seemed at their task. Their spades moving in the dirt. The sweet potato pile growing. That familiar white bonnet on her mother’s head. The tuck of her father’s chin when he bent toward the ground, as though in prayer. Weeds had sprouted all over the garden. Through war, through peace, weeds took over gardens and she loved them for it. Her parents were alive, doing ordinary things. They, no doubt, had blown gently on their coffee and prayed over their grits. The coffee, perhaps, without sugar. The grits, perhaps, without butter, but these privations could not kill the rituals. Could not end the prayers.

She came closer, wondering which step they would hear or which breeze would carry her scent. One step, two steps, three steps . . . She stopped and waited again. Her father noticed her first. He had bent to retrieve a sweet potato and had halfway straightened before something made him turn his head. He dropped the potato. His mouth moved to form her name. His eyes widened. The war had turned him into an old man, but the sight of her made his face light up like a boy’s. Her mother saw her, too, and they dropped their spades and rushed toward her, arms outstretched, the sweet potato pile a tiny, forgotten hill behind them.

They didn’t push Iris for her story but waited for her to tell it in her own time. Her mother immediately set to motherly tasks, scolding her gently for her sunburned face, rushing into the kitchen to cure her thinness with her cooking, snipping the ends of her terrible haircut with a pair of shears. Showing her in every action that no matter what happened, mothers went on baking and sewing and fussing and cooking and nursing, forever through time.

Her family had been spared the worst of the war, although their larder was low and they had been ordered by the provost marshal to take on a wounded Yankee soldier whose leg had turned gangrenous. They had nursed him diligently, their nostrils stuffed with cotton balls soaked in camphor to drive the smell away, until he finally died and was buried in the back. Iris kept looking at her parents. They had grown frail. Her father’s prayers sounded different when they rose through the gravity vent. More uncertain, weaker, as though they were night creatures almost too old to make the climb. She wondered what changes they could see in her. It was all too much to comprehend, so during the day, she pushed her story out of her mind, filling the hours with chores and idle conversation, never venturing far from home, just taking in the flowers and leaves of the fall, watching the seasons change.

But in the middle of the night, her dreams would insist on what her parents didn’t, bringing up the past in the shocking ways that dreams do, with a picture or a face so vivid that she would be startled from sleep, and lying awake looking at the ceiling she would remember those she hated and loved. Her story was insane. The story itself should be dosed with opiates and kept in an asylum and made to listen to a man in authority until it straightened itself, became reasonable. But it never did. Its craziness was its defining feature, like the color of a house, and it could not be painted over. And so, rather than trying to change it, she remembered it, little by little, in the safety of her father’s house.

The birds began to abandon the feeder outside for the warmer climates of the South. Ripe cantaloupes sat on the porch. Squash piled up in a bucket. Apples turned red in the orchard. And finally, the day came when Iris and her father sat together on the cedar swing. One slat had rotted and been replaced with a new one that was lighter than the others. She had grown stronger over the days since she’d come home, restored by fresh fruit, beef stew, boiled potatoes, and ordinary moments.

Now she was ready to tell. How she had not appreciated this small life and now found herself nearly weeping at every ordinary thing. How she had started her marriage with such optimism and pride and then found her husband to be a monster. She told him about the baby, her voice breaking, the swing losing its rhythm, and of her guilt over insisting on joining the slaves in their flight, and choosing the path that would lead to their deaths. She spoke of her time on the island, and of Ambrose, and how wrong she’d been to believe love could save the beloved.

The loss of him staggered her now. Anything would bring him back, his face in sharp relief, and she would have to stop what she was doing because the love for him denied simple tasks, spilled the water in mop buckets, and mismanaged the fluted edges of dough. And his spoken name would make him come alive again, make his eyes open and his fixed pupils retreat into dots and blood fill up the cut she’d made in his skin when she shaved him with the razor.

She even told her father something she wasn’t expecting to, because she didn’t know it herself, but rocking on that cedar swing, her greatest dread expressed itself in words: That Ambrose had not died because of what she had or hadn’t done. That, in fact, she’d had no bearing whatsoever on his life; she was simply something insubstantial floating through its inexorable arc, as disenfranchised as the broken wing of an insect in the path of a storm. She was at the beginning again. She was lost, and she needed his absolution and his wisdom.

Their teacups emptied and a red-tailed hawk came to roost on the branch of a nearby tree. Her father listened. When at last she had finished, he said to her, “I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve made mistakes. I believed in Virginia. Believed in secession. I thought if I made my words eloquent enough in God’s ears that the South would win His protection. Now I don’t know what to believe. You thought you could control a man. I thought I could control God. So I can’t give you any wisdom. But I can sit here with you and serve as your companion. I can do that just fine.”

This was acceptable to her. She’d drunk some milk that morning and vomited it back up while it was still cold. Beneath where her clasped hands lay on her stomach, something grew in her, a miracle just beyond her awareness. But for now, just the rocking. Just the silence and the smallness and the remembering. The moments floating by, a horse whinnying for peanut brittle from the darkness of the stable, a ripe persimmon falling to the ground, a coon dog making its way over to the shadows made by their swinging legs.

During the passage of those same moments, far to the south, on an island of sand and breeze and lunatics, Wendell crouched next to Penelope’s grave. It was still covered with shells, but in the center sat the junonia shell his father had given him. Wendell took the junonia in his hands and held it to the light. A drop of perspiration ran down his face. His pet lamb, who was now nearly twice as big, had been wandering the tiny enclosure and came over to sniff the shell. Wendell polished the shell on his shirt pocket, then put it back in its place. He rested his hand on the lamb’s back.

Out on the beach, an old woman who loved her dead husband with a lunatic’s passion danced with him as the surf frothed up around their feet. She was late for her appointment with the doctor, but she didn’t care. Her husband’s embrace was too inviting, his heartbeat too real, and his body too warm.

Dr. Cowell came out of the double doors into the asylum courtyard, looking for her, slapping preemptively at a buzzing mosquito. He called her name when he spied her dancing at the edge of the surf, but she seemed not to hear him, and with a great sigh, he slogged off after her, his lace-up shoes sinking in the sand. And any human would see what the doctor saw, a lunatic swaying alone, embracing herself. But the birds saw lovers of equal density, two bodies moving together, two sets of footprints disappearing in the waves.