The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [53]
“Liquor?” Bigelow asks.
He shrugs. “I’d give you morphine if I had it.”
Bigelow and the Swede head east along Front Street’s new concrete sidewalk, twelve feet wide and eight blocks long. Neither of them speaks; the Swede still carries Bigelow’s bloodied hatchet. The walk to the Line seems to take longer than usual, much longer, and storefronts look suddenly unfamiliar. Twice Bigelow stops and points with the unbandaged hand. “Was that there before?” he says.
The Swede looks where he points, at a flag snapping over the baker’s sign, a pyramid of cans in the window of a dry-goods store. “Don’t you live here?” he says.
Bigelow doesn’t answer.
They cross a field of stumps, straggle through a stream choked with weeds, knock at the door of the house where Violet works, but it’s not yet noon.
“What?” says the girl who answers. Bunch Grass or Six-Mile Mary, one of the girls whose names he doesn’t like to say. Unpainted, her face looks vulnerable, lips so pale Bigelow can’t tell where they leave off and the skin around them begins. It’s a face like his sister’s: smoothly oval, a tired crease beneath each wary eye.
“We’re not open.” The girl pulls what she’s wearing, a faded flowery wrapper, more tightly around her body. Her bare feet are white, the flesh under the nails mauve. She catches sight of the stained hatchet and steps back.
“A bottle,” says the Swede, shoving his boot in the crack before she can close the door. He points at Bigelow’s bandage, a red circle seeping through. “Make it a full one.”
She looks back and forth between them. “Oh all right,” she says finally, and she leaves them at the door.
Expecting a wait, Bigelow sits on the step with his hand in the air, and the Swede leans against the wall. But the girl comes back promptly, wearing a fur over her dressing gown, shoes without stockings. She’s brushed her hair for the transaction. “You’re that fella,” she says as she counts the money Bigelow gives her.
“Sorry?”
“I asked are you the one with the—” She finishes the sentence by gesturing toward the sky over the bluff.
“Oh,” he says. “Yes.”
And she nods, she shuts the door.
At the station, a goose lies dead on the path to his door, its neck broken. Ordinarily, Bigelow is grateful for food he doesn’t have to stalk, but today the bird is a problem. How can he dress a carcass with one hand? He hangs it under the eaves and goes inside. Probably, he’ll end up burying it.
A day passes, and another. Bigelow stares out his big windows, watches the wind push clouds from one frame to the next. Thoughts enter and leave his head the same way, shoved by some invisible current.
A year or so after his father died, his mother sat at her desk and tore up letters, one by one. She read them first, then held the page in her lap, staring at the wall, the same wall Bigelow stared at while doing his lessons, a faded mural of a pheasant hiding under a spray of grass. The bird looked furtive, almost frightened, as if hiding from a hunter or his dog. But, given her expression, his mother was not seeing the bird. Glancing at the letter once more, as if to be sure that she’d committed it to memory, she tore it once, twice, again, again: halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. She burned the pieces, and the next day, Bigelow, doing his chores, cleared their ashes from the fireplace. A few fragments still bore legible words, his father’s angular hand. Bigelow squatted to read them.
Looking, it seems to him now, for a word such as love, or even hate. A word worth tearing and burning. But all he saw was provided.
He has a fever, and the stuff in the bottle makes it worse, but he drinks it anyway, drinks it and goes clumsily about his chores, checking instruments and making notations with his left hand, slow, careful, large numbers. Up the hill to the wireless office and home to translate the cable, drawing his map with halting, inelegant lines, and getting it to the post office by two P.M.