Sarah Canary (6 page)

Tom stopped beneath the rope. ‘Now, boys, it’s all understood that we have nothing to do with this,’ Hank Webber said loudly. ‘The Chinaman is doing it all.’

The sun swam upward in the East, a great red concentration. ‘Look there,’ said Tom to Chin. He pointed into the open fields. ‘That’s Scotch brush. The Sisters of Charity brought it here. They missed Scotland so much. Now look at the way it’s spread. It’ll own this land in another ten years.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘But it’s beautiful when it blooms. You should be here in the spring just to see it.’ Sunlight filtered through the tree branches. Tom stuck one hand into a patch of sun and turned it slowly. He spread his fingers until all the shadows were gone. ‘You’ve been a lot of places, Chinaman,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a lot farther than I have. Is there anywhere more beautiful?’

Chin looked at the peak of Mount Rainier. The distant ice glittered and beckoned. If you let go for an instant, your soul would fly to it. If you could walk inside that combination of light and ice, its beauty would blind you. Powerfully beautiful. Dangerously beautiful:

‘You lived in paradise,’ he told Tom.

It was important that a man live somewhere. People were not meant to blow over the grass as Chin did, footless and rootless, like ghosts. It was important that a man die at home. Nothing was more important than this.

‘Hang him,’ Jeb told Chin. ‘Do it now.’

‘Embrace God,’ said Mrs Taylor. ‘Do it now.’

Chin lifted the heavy rope with two hands. It slid without catching over Tom’s head, settled on his shoulders. ‘Maybe I’m going to show you what I promised you,’ Chin said to Tom. ‘Something never before seen in this world. Maybe you’ll see it soon.’

Tom said nothing, looked neither up nor down, not left or right. His eyes were open and empty, as if he had already gone on, gone ahead without Chin’s help, was past seeing. His body was cooperative in a distracted, sleepy way. Chin pushed the knot into the hollow spot on Tom’s neck where it seemed to fit. He helped Tom mount a chair, which rocked slightly on the natural unevenness of the dirt around the roots of the tree. Hank Webber pulled the slack from the rope and anchored it. He gestured that he was ready.

Chin removed the chair. He killed Tom as invisibly as he could, there with everyone watching. The law killed Tom, the natural law of gravity. Chin thought of the Chinese miners falling and then of the birds, which did not. He was sorry that Tom’s body did not go as gracefully into death as his spirit, but kicked and flailed and smelled, his feet seeking the ground again and again, until it finally stopped.

‘You’re a free man,’ Hank Webber told Chin. ‘My word is good on this. But let me give you a little advice. Go now. I don’t think you should stay around.’

‘I’m going,’ said Chin. He caught the bundle of his belongings that the sheriff threw at him. Everything was tied up in his blanket now, white-man style. He kept his eyes on the ground so that he could pretend no one was looking at him. He watched the toes of his heavy boots alternately striding into view, now the right, now the left. He took big steps. The ground before him was wet and still retained the impressions of earlier shoes. Behind him he left his own tracks. His heels dug into the mud, making a trail of holes, each one looking like a small, open, angry mouth. Chin knew this. But he would not turn around to see.

~ * ~

ii

In 1873, Georg Cantor developed set theory, based on several practical suggestions for proofs made to him by God (the proofs have held); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, master of the ghost story, died from an overdose of laudanum taken to ward off his nightly dreams of being buried alive; Cornell’s President White refused to allow Cornell to face Michigan on the football fields with the words, ‘I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.’ Is there a madman here? Which one is he?

Sanity is a delicate concept, lunacy only slightly less so. Over the last few centuries, more and more of those phenomena once believed to belong to God have been assigned to the authority of the psychoanalyst instead. Some of the saints can be diagnosed in retrospect as epileptics. St Theresa was almost certainly an hysteric. St Ida of Lorraine seems to have suffered from perceptional insanity. She only thought that her body was amplified to monstrous proportions in her desire to be acceptable to God; we doubt this swelling actually took place, in spite of the testimony of the astonished and crowded nun who shared her bed. The prognosis for such cases in our own age is excellent; saintliness can often be completely cured.

We owe these advances, at least in part, to experimental alienist physicians such as the doctor who worked at the Steilacoom Territorial Asylum in 1873. The same year Freud entered medical school in Vienna, Dr James Carr was duplicating the experiments of William Hammond, cutting the heads off coupling frogs to isolate the physical location of instinct in the frog’s body. Hammond claimed to have kept the headless male frog alive for up to ten days, and in all that time the male never released his purposeful grip on the female. The seat of instinct, Hammond concluded, was in the spine. Dr Carr had great difficulty getting his frogs to couple at all, and then they lost all interest in sex when they lost their minds. They were, perhaps, less instinctual to begin with, more cerebral, more effete, these western species of frog. He had experimented with Red-legged Frogs, identifiable by their short hind legs and warty skins; Tailed Frogs, smoother, olive green, and named for their tail-like copulatory organ; and the smaller Cascades Frogs. He had switched to East Coast varieties now.

His patients were not expected to couple at all, were, in fact, segregated by sex, at least in their sleeping quarters, to prevent this very thing. Dr Carr had little to say about their care. The asylum was run according to the contract system, and the authority of the physician was secondary to the authority of the contractor and his profits. Dr Carr made the original diagnosis. He chose what medications were to be tried and in what dosages. Beyond that there was little he was permitted to do. His recommendations that particular patients be discharged were often opposed by the contractor, one Arnold Greene, who was paid ninety-one cents a day by the Territory for each patient and saw, therefore, in each cure the loss of revenue. When the doctor and contractor differed, the superintendents for the asylum invariably ignored the doctor. Research might have been a great comfort to Carr if he hadn’t been faced with these intransigent frogs. It was so unjust.

~ * ~

3

Morning at the Steilacoom Asylum

Assent - and you are sane

Demur — you’re straightway dangerous—

And handled with a Chain—

Emily Dickinson, 1862

Despite his isolation, Dr James Carr tried to keep up with current developments in his field. He had written several letters to colleagues detailing the astonishing earthquake cures at Steilacoom last year. There had been a flurry of gratifying interest, but no one could duplicate the results. The cure only seemed effective when it had the authority and scope of an Act of God. Nothing smaller worked. He had spent several weeks designing the Carr Quake Chamber, a tubular cell suspended from the ceiling by rope. He had drawn up plans, specified dimensions, sacrificed nothing in the way of patient comfort or the gyrational range of the device. It would never be built. Certainly not at Steilacoom, where even outmoded technologies such as the Autenrieth Mask, the Cox Swing, Reil’s Fly-wheel, or Langermann’s Cell were deemed beyond the austere budget of Contractor Greene. For a time, Carr had been quite interested in the fat-and-blood cure popularized by Dr S. Weir Mitchell, a leading neurologist during the Civil War. The fat-and-blood cure emphasized overfeeding, massage, and complete rest. But someone had told Contractor Greene that Leland Stanford found it cost-effective to supply the Chinese railway workers with opium, which acted as an appetite suppressant and reduced food costs. Most of the patients in Steilacoom were on some sort of medication anyway; many of them took opium derivatives. Contractor Greene cut their meals to two a day. He called this trimming the fat from the budget.

The regimen Dr Carr now envisioned for Steilacoom rested, like a footstool, on three solid points. The first was hearty food - beef, in particular, as so many of the insane are lacking in iron. He described to Greene a fortifying dish that could be made by scraping the tender parts of a steak away from the tendinous connections so that the juice is retained and then salting it heavily. This diet would be contraindicated, of course, in those cases where patients suffered from the delusion that they were made to eat human flesh or the blood of their friends.

The second point was exercise. Steilacoom boasted its own roller-skating rink; all that was required now was the provision of a reasonable number of skates so the patients would not have to wait so long for a turn. Dr Carr would have liked to see the insane on horseback, too, and participating in guided gymnastics, but he tried to deal in realities.

The final point was music, music and dance. The medicinal benefits of music, he told Contractor Greene, were hard to overstate. A piano or melodeon in the female ward would answer the purpose. Violins for the men. There was already an asylum band and Dr Carr would have liked to see every inmate participate, the most incapacitated being asked only to play the triangle or the sticks.

The superintendents, led by Hank Webber, their most illustrious member, had promised Greene that when Dr Carr’s contract expired, he could replace him with a physician of his own choice.

‘Get the patients out in the open air,’ Dr Carr was always nagging the wardens. ‘The breath of God’s free atmosphere, the open face of Mount Rainier, these things are a wonderful tonic,’ and they took this advice when wood needed to be cut or water drawn, and they did, out of respect, refrain from kicking the lunatics in the physician’s presence. Even so, they resented him. Dr Carr could feel this and he complained to the patients about it often.

One of the most sympathetic of the insane was the young man named B.J. Voisard, who now stood outside Dr Carr’s office, trying to figure out how to open the door with one hand and not drop the load of wood he was carrying with both hands. The problem proved insoluble. Fagots of wood clattered to the floor and B.J. had to dance to protect his feet. When the wood had settled, he swung open the door.

‘I heard there’s a new woman in the ward,’ he told the doctor, dropping to his knees to gather up the scattered kindling. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

Dr Carr was seated at his desk with his notebook open before him and the tip of his pen in his mouth. He had undone the cuff of his right shirt sleeve to allow the free flow of blood to his writing hand. ‘I’ve only had time for the most cursory examination,’ he answered. His eyes were a pale, filmy blue and he blinked them often. The lashes were white and almost invisible. ‘Might be an ecstatic. She makes those meaningless, ecstatic noises, so that’s the direction in which I’m leaning now. I’m going to send for her again after breakfast. Then we’ll see. Anyway, a new patient in January is not too surprising. Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.’

When he had been admitted, late in October, B.J. had been delirious. He had no memory of this, but he had read the notes Dr Carr had made at the time. Tongue coated, breath very offensive, bowels constipated. Intellectual monomania with depression, Dr Carr had concluded. B.J. still spoke rapidly and often appeared to be uneasy, but his physical health was much improved - his digestion was better, his secretions more free - and he was often quite lucid now.

He glanced at the contents of Dr Carr’s desk. The glass office window defined a small neat square of sunlight about the size of a blotter. Inside it, the colors made vivid by illumination, were a slab of obsidian that the doctor used as a paperweight, a letter opener shaped like a golden feather, and his notebook, pressed open to a clean white page. On the edge of the desk, pushed out of the sun, there was an empty whiskey bottle. At the bottom of the bottle, two frogs sat and ignored each other.

‘It’s not mating season,’ B.J. told the doctor. ‘It’s winter.’ He wondered where Dr Carr could have even gotten the frogs. One of them had the pale palm of its hand pressed against the glass, four fingers spread wide. The curvature of the bottle magnified the hand so that it seemed all out of proportion to the frog’s body. ‘Where did you get the frogs?’ B.J. asked.

‘Boston,’ said Dr Carr. ‘I sent away for them. In the big hospitals in the East, where there’s lots of money and the doctors earn big salaries, frogs mate like weasels. There’s never any shortage of frogs.’ His voice had an abused edge to it. B.J. liked the doctor and wanted to make him feel better.

‘Would you like to talk about it?’ he offered.

‘I ordered six. Four of them arrived dead. I’m just lucky a male and a female survived. Count your blessings, right, B.J.?’

B.J. dropped the wood by the fireplace and approached the desk, dusting his hands off on his pants. He had a splinter at the base of his left thumb. He picked at it until it came out, leaving one small drop of blood, which he licked away. ‘Can I see what you’ve got on the new woman?’ he asked.

Dr Carr flipped back two pages in his notebook. ‘Just the observations I made last night when she was admitted. I haven’t gotten back to her yet today.’ He passed it over the desk to B.J. Dr Carr’s lines slanted upward and he had a rounded, feminine hand. His ‘e’s’ yawned from the page like ‘o’s.’ B.J. underlined the words with his index finger as he read.