Blue Asylum (5 page)

“Perhaps,” Mary said, “this woman’s husband didn’t care for her at all. Perhaps he merely fancied himself a good husband, when in truth he was cold and insensitive and thought only of himself.”

“Perhaps the husband did everything he could and was met with defiance at every turn. Perhaps the husband had no other choice but to send her away.”

“Perhaps the husband puts on a façade for the community but behind closed doors is a controlling, hateful man.”

Wendell’s parents stared each other down. He sighed. A grain of sand had found its way into his soup. It crunched between his teeth.

Iris had worn that ring all her life. Now it was gone forever, and her finger felt desolate without it. She glanced at the dark-haired man, who was sipping a glass of water. She couldn’t believe this quiet man was a raving lunatic. He took another sip of water, studied the new level of it in the glass, set the glass down. He seemed deep in thought, lost in some land that may have been green with summer or brown with winter. The angle of his face and the glow of candlelight emphasized the high bone of his cheek, as though a sculptor’s knife had carved it out of the pale clay of a hopeless war.

Attendants in white uniforms came around to collect the soup bowls, and others brought in the roasts. One of them approached their table and set the roast down in the middle of it. Immediately the aroma rushed into her nostrils, and it gave her a frisson of pleasure even as she thought of the doomed cattle that had been her fellow travelers.

The chef came out. Iris recognized him as the black man who had been fishing with the boy when she was led off the ship that morning. His long, pearl-handled knife glittered in the light. He strode over to their table and began to carve the roast. The meat was too rare. Blood ran out the side, spilling over the plate and gathering in a dark pool on the white tablecloth. Iris moved back in her chair. The blood of a steer had a different smell from the blood of humans, but the sight of it, pooling under candlelight, made bile rise up in her throat.

“Damn boy,” the chef muttered. He put down the knife and huffed out of the room.

The dark-haired man looked at the blood. He had started to taste his soup, but now he let the spoon fall back into the bowl. Bits of cool cucumber spattered on his face. He shook his head slowly, moved his lips. He was whispering something, and she could not help leaning forward and cocking her head to hear the words.

“Blue. Blue like a marble. Like cobalt glass.” He shut his eyes. “Like ice in a beard.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Like the stained glass windows of a church.” He picked up his spoon and tapped it against the tabletop, harder and harder. An attendant materialized, leaned down toward him.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.”

“Give me the spoon, sir.” The attendant took hold of it and tried to wrest it away, but the dark-haired man held fast.

“Let go,” he said. “Let go, let go, let go!” His voice had risen to the point that a man babbling next to him fell silent and stared. Iris couldn’t move. She was riveted to the scene playing out in front of her.

Another attendant appeared in the midst of the wrestling match over the spoon and seized the patient by the arm.

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” he screamed. “Don’t touch me don’t touch me take your hands off me—”

“Don’t touch him!” The old man who sat beside her shouted. The other patients began shouting too, incomprehensible things, some pointing at the attendants, some at the windows or each other, reacting not so much to the situation, perhaps, as to the energy in the air. It was chaos; they lusted for it and would not be denied.

Ambrose Weller jumped out of his chair, knocking it over as he fought against the men who tried to restrain him. They wrestled him to the floor, pinning down his arms and legs, but still he struggled, screaming, “Get the doctor! Where is he? Dr. Cowell! Dr. Cowell!”

Ambrose killed his first man in filtered sunlight, so close he could see his enemy’s face. He was in a wood lot managed by the Mennonites. Bluebirds had flown away, squawking, and the other animals had disappeared down burrows or into the holes of trees. Even the ants had towed their white eggs into passages made in rotting logs. The animals in that cool, brief forest were accustomed to the sleepy sound of an ax in red oak, and not the energy of war.

Ambrose took a step. His shoes had been made with the leather from an artillery case. Walking in the rain had stretched them so that they slid on his heel, and the bottom of each shoe had a hole in it. He planned to throw away the shoes entirely when the holes had grown to the size of cherries, had abandoned that plan in favor of plums, then peaches, then apples, as there were no other shoes to take their place. It was still early in the morning and the light was weak, but the forest seemed unbearably warm to him, perhaps because of the fog of gunpowder sitting among the low branches, or the Enfield rifle whose barrel had blistered his finger when he’d paused to reload. Only his feet remained cool.

An artillery shell had burst too close to his ear a few weeks before, and as a result the war made an ocean sound as it filtered through the branches. It didn’t bother him on open land, where the enemy could be seen. But here in the woods it crippled him. He saw a shadow move and caught the hint of a blue uniform. Branches parted, the shade thinned, and the Union soldier stepped into clear light, trying to lift his gun as Ambrose fired. The soldier sank to his knees, his hand flying to a place on his chest that wasn’t right anymore. The man looked down at his hand to watch the blood spurt through his fingers. Pain had not found him yet and thus allowed him, in his final seconds, to have the fascination of a boy. Finally he closed his hand and fell backward, where he lay still on the ground, still clutching his rifle.

Ambrose knelt and retrieved the weapon. It was an Enfield, like his own. He was tempted to go through the Yankee’s clothing and find food, as other soldiers did. Ambrose could take a man’s gun, but he couldn’t take his food or his clothes. Something was sacred about those items. He held the gun, still kneeling, not knowing how to feel. He wondered what his father would say to him right now. He would be dead set against tears. Or trembling. He would say,
Get on with it.

Ambrose looked down at the rifle in his hands. He murmured to himself sternly until his hands steadied and the shiver that ran through the rifle ceased, and everything was motionless again. Ambrose, the dead soldier, his hands, the rifle. That’s what war was. A great motion and then a great stillness in which the winner crouches and the loser lies facing the sky.

He rose to his feet and walked through the woods. Came out the other side and fought the rest of the day on a sunken dirt road that years later would bleed again every time it rained.

Sharpsburg. Where he killed his first man. He remembered thinking,
I am going to be fine.

It was easy to believe, on a day like today, that the island owned a separate sky than the rest of the world. The purest blue available in the universe. And the whitest clouds. She walked barefoot in the sand, hiking up her dress. She cast back a glance to see her footprints trailing out behind her. Yes, she was still real and still solid. A human being with weight and mass, one who could leave depressions in dry sand. She noticed a flower that looked like yellow jessamine growing out of the dunes and thought of Winchester, for at this moment, that same flower would be blooming along the fence in her father’s yard. She’d grown up with yellow jessamine, but by the time she’d married Robert and moved away, she’d taken it for granted. Now the memory of it made her ache. Rows and rows along a fence post she could follow all the way back home. In order to stay sane, she would have to take stock of things familiar, like the Big Dipper she glimpsed through her bars at night, a constellation from childhood that had stayed with her, like a permanent tooth.

Other patients milled about, looking for shells, or wading ankle-deep in the water. One old woman, barefoot and in a yellow dress, held her arms out in front of her, swaying in the sand. Eyes closed, head tilted back. She had the smile of someone who has just tasted the perfect grapefruit. Iris watched her, intrigued. The old woman didn’t look demented. Just too happy to be well.

“She’s dancing.” Iris turned to see Lydia Helms Truman standing before her in a white sundress and matching bonnet. The small, green-eyed woman was as immaculately groomed as the night she’d swallowed her ring. She nodded at the woman, who had begun to turn in slow circles, her feet marking out a circular pattern in the sand. “Her husband of forty years, the love of her life, died of pneumonia several winters ago, and she cannot admit the loss. He is real to her, plain as day, as I am to you. She will not touch her food unless another plate is set down for him. Strange thing, madness, isn’t it? It tortures some, soothes others. She looks happy, doesn’t she? I could only have wished for such happiness in my own marriage. Perhaps I erred in choosing a visible man, when it’s the invisible ones who are sweetest.” She smiled at Iris, who found herself smiling back. The woman sounded so eloquent and reasonable, so full of gentle humor, that Iris was momentarily lost in confusion, imagining for a split second that perhaps she had been mistaken, that her memory had been faulty . . .

“I have something for you.” Lydia reached into her pocket and drew out a silk handkerchief. From the handkerchief she removed Iris’s ring. The amethysts glittered in the sunlight.

“I heard you were missing a ring. I found this in the day room. Does this belong to you?”

Iris shook her head. “No, no.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! I am very sure.” She backed away from Lydia’s proffered hand and moved past the dancing old woman down the beach. She walked quickly until she had made a good distance from the two women, then slowed her pace and followed a meandering trail left by a gopher turtle. The urge to flee rose up inside her, clear as a voice calling over water, and she remembered the flight from her husband, traveling over broken ground, fording rivers so the dogs would lose her scent. Making progress in the nighttime. Taking cover in the day. Stealing meat from smokehouses. She looked over her shoulder and spied two male attendants in the back of the courtyard, They talked earnestly to each other, unmindful of the milling souls. And she thought to herself,
I can just keep walking.
Warm sand under her feet. A sharp clean scent blowing down from the citrus groves higher on the beach. Morning glories still open on the dunes, hermit crabs dragging their shells.

She would worry about food and money and clothes later. Right now, just one foot after another. She walked faster and faster, her breath growing jagged, a salt rush in the back of her throat, palms sweaty. So many footprints now separating her from the others.

A hand on her arm.

She froze.

A quiet, Southern drawl in her ear. “Ma’am, I think you’ve lost your way. Perhaps you’d like me to escort you back.”

Iris let her breath out. She’d been caught. She followed the guard back silently. Lydia and the old woman were gone. The guard left her in the courtyard, shooting a warning look over his shoulder as he walked away. She rested her elbows on the low stone wall and looked out at her footprints, the ones going away and the ones coming back, accompanied by the prints of the guard’s heavy brogans.

“It’s not so easy, is it?” A familiar-looking boy with straw-colored hair stood on the wall, wearing faded overalls rolled up to the knees. She studied him only a fraction of a second before she placed him. That was the boy who was fishing with the chef when she first came to the island. Up close she could see the freckles on his face, and two pinprick black scabs on his cheek.

“No, it’s not.”

“Even if you get past the guards, it’s dangerous out there. Alligators and rattlesnakes. Wild pigs, too. And some people say there are still pirates hiding out on this island. And if the pirates or the gators or snakes or the pigs don’t get you, the mosquitoes will eat you alive.”

She liked the way the boy addressed her, without the studied distance of the nurses and attendants. She scanned the beach again, where the wind was calm and her footprints were still perfectly formed.

“Has anyone ever escaped?” she asked.

“Somebody tried just last year. He collected feathers and made himself a set of wings. He jumped off the top of the asylum. Landed on his head and broke his neck. He’s buried out back. My name’s Wendell.” He stuck out his hand.

“Iris Dunleavy.”

They shook.

“Sorry, I’ve got sticky hands,” he said. “Taffy.”

He looked about twelve. His accent was strange. She couldn’t quite place it. He motioned her to follow him and walked to the edge of the water. He stood watching the waves coming in and out, adjusting his position so that the water never lapped beyond his toes.

“Are you crazy?” he asked.

The question flew at her so open and direct that it took her aback. “No,” she said after a moment.

“You must be crazy, because you’re here.”

“You’re here, too.”

“I’m here because my father runs this asylum.”

“Your father is Dr. Cowell?” That explained his strange accent. A vague lilt. Something handed down from Britain.

“Yes. I am his son. Help me look for shells.” He moved into the tide line, scouring the sand as she watched. “Best time is after a storm.” He picked up a shell and showed it to her. “See this? It’s a coquina. It’s common. What you really want to find is a junonia. It’s brown with black checks. It is the rarest of all. I’ve only seen them in books.”

He dropped the shell and went back to searching, intense and quiet, bent low to the ground, his hands clasped behind his back.

She caught up to him. “Tell me. How long are patients kept on this island?”

He shrugged. “Depends. Some people stay forever.”

“Forever?”

He nodded. “It’s a very long time.” He straightened and stared up at the sky. “But how did they know you were crazy? What exactly did you do?”