The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [35]
Bigelow stops scratching his bites to right the pole, first taking off the stained flags and lifting its top high enough to prop in the crotch of a spruce tree’s branch. The last time this happened he managed to buttress the base with lumber, hammering wood into a clumsy approximation of what keeps church spires pointed toward heaven, then filling in the loose hole with sand and rocks and tinder. But, obviously, that hadn’t worked. So now what?
Bigelow rocks back on his heels, looking at the spruce trees around him. Wind blows through their needles, a conspiratorial whisper. Here’s a good idea—perfect!—he’s not going to reset the pole. Instead he’ll use a tree. He’ll find one that’s tall enough, climb up to the top, attach a pulley for the cord, climb down and cut off the limbs as he goes, then, presto: a flagpole that can’t fall over!
Paregoric, he thinks as he works, sitting astride a branch and sawing the one above it. The word seems to enter his head sideways, like most thoughts of the Aleut woman. What difference if he closes his eyes, averts his gaze, busies himself with his chores? She’s always there.
Tea, tobacco, toffee. Paregoric.
Why paregoric? Could it be that all along she was ill and he didn’t know, hadn’t cared to consider? So intent on sating the demands of his own body—his hunger, his lust—perhaps he hadn’t paid sufficient attention to hers.
He shifts on the bough, and it creaks with his weight.
Well, he had paid attention, but the parts he’d scrutinized— navel, neck, armpits, the crease over her eye, or the one between her buttocks—were those that provided him purchase. They were handholds, or they were mouthfuls. They were like the little notches that climbers search out, places to insinuate fingers, toes, whatever it might take to prevent a fall.
But she’d seemed healthy enough. Strong. She could push him away with no trouble.
An addict, then. Native people were inclined to intoxicants. And paregoric is an opiate, a smooth muscle relaxant that slows peristalsis, soothes abdominal cramps, diarrhea. Bigelow knows this from his father, who suffered intestinal problems brought on by nerves. Paregoros, his father taught him the word. From the Greek, to console.
Was that what she had wanted? Straddling the branch, Bigelow rests his forehead against the tree’s trunk, leaves the saw motionless in the half-cut bough.
He cannot think of a single instance, not one, in which he provided anything that might be considered solace.
AFTER A HIATUS of two weeks, the theater reopens, but without the voice. Bigelow endures one showing after another, barely paying attention to the pictures on the sheet. Consumed by frustrated desire, he strains through the first scenes to catch the singer’s shadow as she arrives, eyes crossing with effort so that he couldn’t read a title card if he tried. Then, deprived of even a glimpse of his quarry, over and over he reviews the possible contents of the locket she wears around her throat. Curl from deceased brother? Likeness of mother? Of father? Artifact of religious confirmation? Or, please no, memento of lover?
When the audience disperses, Bigelow stays behind. He asks the projectionist about the singer. “She quit,” he says, latching the reel arm to the body of the projector.
“Quit? You mean for good?”
“For good?” Gnomelike, he squints up at Bigelow. “For good? For bad? I don’t know. She ain’t coming back, if that’s what you mean.”
“But—”
“Forget about her. She’s . . . she ain’t . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence but bends over to pick up the projector. Bigelow moves forward to help. “Don’t touch it,” the projectionist says.
“I only—”
“Look. She don’t entertain. She don’t keep company. She don’t go for walks. She don’t have dinner or supper or tea. She don’t dance and she don’t play cards. And she don’t anymore go to picture shows.”
“I just want to talk to her.”
The projectionist laughs. “Well, she