Blue Asylum (12 page)

Eleanor Beacon, who felt too much, had heard of neither the lamb’s arrival nor its escape. All talk of living creatures and their fates and their place at the dinner table had been kept from her, and, as she did every day, she had taken her meals in her room, bread and cheese and fruit, foods that would not cause her grief. And so the news of the lamb’s escape went down the hallways and courtyards and into day rooms and offices and even down to the pier, but the news skipped over Eleanor’s room, and she passed the afternoon kneeling before the window, watching an ant take bread crumbs one by one into a crack in the wall. She imagined the ant’s back aching from the strain, its ant children calling for the food from their little nests, all the expectations upon the creature, so tiny, so hard outside, so soft inside, so vulnerable to birds and footsteps.

She stared at it. Moved close so that her words huffed against it and slightly altered its course.
I love you.
I love you, I love you, I love you.

Doctor Cowell had won the battle with his wife and was not out in the woods. He was in his office, listening to the man who’d blown out his eyes with a Colt .45. The man was immaculately dressed, as always. His face perfectly shaven. Hair perfectly combed. He had been a successful attorney in his former life. Were this woman he had loved never born, he would still be practicing law and appreciating sunsets, and his sense of smell would be no better than that of any other man. But now he had his head turned to the open window. His nostrils flared slightly.

“I don’t smell lamb cooking,” he said.

“The lamb escaped,” said the doctor, preparing himself because he knew the subject of lamb and its aroma would lead his patient back to the subject that consumed his every waking thought: that of the woman he loved and lost, and her lavender cologne. He was correct.

“They say the smell of a magnolia tree blossom can carry for fifty miles,” the man said. “But I could go to Spain, or the Arctic circle, and still smell that cologne. I smell it now. It’s wafting through the room as though she had just passed by the open window.”

The doctor wished the lamb had never been brought to the island. He hadn’t missed it, not until it came and went. Now every other meat was going to taste like not-lamb before it tasted like chicken or pig or beef or fish.

***

Out in the woods, past the deserted Calusa village and its midden piles and the remains of open-air shelters, Wendell put the finishing touches on a fence he’d made from white mangrove saplings and rope. He’d sneaked into his mother’s keepsake chest and stolen his old feeding bottle and filled it with milk. Now he held the bottle out and turned the tip down. Milk dribbled out. The lamb lapped at it greedily. The wind carried over the faint shouts of the search crew. They would not come this far. There was a line, invisibly yet implacably drawn, that designated how far men would go to recover the prospect of lamb stew. It stretched far into mangrove and bush, past alligator holes and the nests of ospreys and rabbit burrows, but it did not reach the line that designated how far a boy would carry that lamb to safety.

Within a few days, the lamb had learned a trick. He would rear up and put his hooves against Wendell’s thighs as he greedily drank the milk. Wendell’s journey to this secret place had not been easy on this day. Bernard, the burly, evil-tempered dock guard, had denied him the use of the chef’s canoe.

“But I have permission,” Wendell protested.

“Where’s your note?”

“What note? I don’t have a note.”

“No note, no canoe.”

They had argued for a few minutes before Bernard finally relented. “Just take it, then. You’re the son of the superintendent. I suppose you think you can do anything you want.” He untied the canoe, making Wendell wait as he took his time undoing the half-hitch that could have come undone in seconds. When the knot came loose, he pushed the canoe out to sea so that Wendell had to wade in for it, soaking his pants all the way up to the waist.

Now he tipped the bottle as the lamb drank the last of the milk and lay down contentedly in the wild grass.

“Get enough?” Wendell asked.

The lamb stared at him with his dark eyes.

“I’m crazy,” he told the lamb. “Everyone thinks I’m a normal boy, but I have done terrible things in the forest.”

The lamb rested his head against a woolly leg and closed his eyes, lulled to sleep by the monotone of confession. Wendell knelt down next to him and stroked his head, thinking now of Penelope.

He could still feel her soft, warm fingers around his throat and remember the joy that had flooded him as he began to lose consciousness. That was the last time he’d ever spoken to the girl, terrified to approach her lest the chef act upon his threats and report her to his father. He had tried to get a note to her explaining his mysterious actions, but a nurse had intercepted it, and he dared not write another one. She must have felt abandoned. Betrayed. He didn’t know. He only knew that despite the pleasant scent of nearby honeysuckle and the lamb’s pastoral breathing, he felt the familiar heaviness in his stomach he always associated with guilt.

He said goodbye to the sleeping creature, tiptoed out of his pen, and made his way through the mangrove forest back to the canoe. He paddled it out of the estuary into the open water and headed for home. The guilt was still with him, but so was the love, burning. He remembered an old legend from England. When a beekeeper died, someone had to go out to the hives and break the news to the bees. No one had informed the hive inside himself that his girl was dead and never coming back. Perhaps that was why she was still so immediate to him, her lips, unkissed, so rosy and soft, those long eyelashes and her crystal-blue eyes . . .

With a small sigh of defeat he turned back toward the shore, climbed out of the canoe, and performed the wretched deed again, ankle-deep in shallow water, turtle grass around his feet, in the shadows of the red mangrove trees, as two anhingas quarreled above his head.

The chapel was so small it barely qualified as a building. Wendell stood in the doorway, half in shadows, half in light. The chef, who had finally come out of his terrible mood brought on by the lamb incident, had explained the protocol to him.

“You cross your heart like this,” the chef said, demonstrating on himself. “You say, ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned.’ You tell him how long it’s been since your last confession.”

“I’ve never been to confession.”

The chef was slicing potatoes in the kitchen and glancing into an old recipe book. “Leeks?” he said. “I don’t have leeks.”

“I said, I’ve never been to confession.”

“Then you tell him that. Then you confess your sins.” The chef looked at him sideways. “But what sins could you have? Have you wet the bed lately?”

“I don’t wet the bed!” Wendell said hotly, and the chef burst into baritone laughter.

Now he trembled in the confession box. A drop of sweat ran down his face. No cooling breeze in the stagnant heat. The confession box door slid open and Wendell half jumped.

Father Byrnes didn’t seem surprised to see him. He had the same neutral expression he’d always had. Wendell wasn’t sure he could say the dreadful crime out loud, so he had written it on a piece of butcher paper, which he had folded and now held in his sweaty hand. He used his other hand to awkwardly cross his heart. “Forgive me Father,” he began, his voice shaky, “for I have sinned.”

The priest started to speak, but Wendell interrupted him, afraid he would lose momentum if he didn’t rush forward. He had made the chef tell him the exact words he needed and he was determined to see them through. “You know all things, Lord, You know that I love You it’s been never since my last confession and I don’t know if I believe in God so if I am still crazy after this then perhaps there either is not a God or there is a God and He doesn’t love me for you see I have done terrible things in the privacy of the woods and I was not crazy when I came to this island I was just a normal boy minding my own business—” His words broke off with a short cry and he bolted from the confession box and ran into the sunlight, realizing, with a terrible pang, that the folded piece of paper was no longer in his hand. He turned and ran back into the sanctuary, where the priest was just opening the piece of paper. Wendell tore it from his startled hands and ran. He did not stop running until he was beyond the pier on a flat expanse of beach, and he tore his confession into shreds and gave it to the wind. He stood watching the confetti bob on the waves as brown pelicans dive-bombed it, consigning the unspeakable act to the secrecy of their gullets.

The soldier was looking at him, but tapping on his knee, and something about his posture and the look in his eyes suggested to the doctor that he was really somewhere else.

“Mr. Weller?”

He straightened. “Yes?”

“You seem distracted.”

“No, I’m listening.”

The doctor frowned. His favorite patient had been slipping away in recent weeks. No longer hanging on his every word. This left him feeling hurt and wistful, like the sight of his son fishing next to the chef. Hadn’t he brought the soldier peace and healing? Didn’t he deserve at least the respect of attention? Whenever the doctor looked down and saw him at the checkers table in the courtyard, he looked anything but distracted. He was ramrod straight, riveted on the woman at the table with him.

“Mr. Weller, I’ve noticed in recent weeks you seem less assiduous about your mental exercises. You ask fewer questions. Have you stopped caring about your cure, and the hope you can someday leave this island a whole man?”

He looked surprised. “I still do my exercises, Doctor. I still care about my cure. In fact, I think I’m making great progress in my recovery. I haven’t had a fit in some time.”

“While that is true, I don’t want you to become careless. You know as well as I do that these episodes have a way of returning suddenly.”

The soldier was quiet. He folded his hands and looked out the window. The doctor felt very far away from him.

“Mr. Weller,” he said. “Did you hear me?”

He looked at him again. “I heard you.”

The doctor detected something in his tone, something so subtle as to perhaps be his imagination. But nonetheless, there it was. Resentment? Defiance? Hard to say. A subject hovered in the room, waiting to be invoked, like the righteous scream in a rooster’s throat waits for breaking light.

“Iris Dunleavy.” His voice had done a strange thing. Gone down low and soft. He watched the effect the name had on the soldier. How it brought a guarded look to his face, as though that name had to have permission to be spoken, and the soldier was in charge of applications.

“She is a friend,” Ambrose said. “You said I could keep her company.”

“I’m just concerned that you have forgotten why you are here, Mr. Weller. You are here because you are ill, and you need to recover.”

“I know that,” Ambrose said, and surprised the doctor by rising and pacing the room. “But I am feeling better, and I enjoy the times when I can just be a person again, without so much constant thought turned inward. You know what, Doctor? This morning I looked at the sky and thought, What a beautiful color. That’s what I want, Doctor. For blue to just be blue.”

The long days of summer stretched time, made it sleepy and companionable. Profusions of lizards hung in the trees and jumped from the roofs. Mosquitoes came in droves, clogging up drains and darkening windows. Screens were put over the bars on the rooms and then covered in turpentine. Smudge pots were passed around. And the sound of slapping was heard all day. One lunatic slapped a mosquito that was full of his blood, and when he lifted his hand, he saw a patch of blood where the mosquito had been. The lunatic thought he could commit suicide fairly painlessly by slapping the blood out of himself and went into a self-slapping frenzy with such sustained alacrity that he was put in restraints.

The mosquitoes feasted ravenously on some people and left others alone. Doctor Cowell could not step outside in his summer suit for ten seconds without a cloud of them descending on him, sending him scurrying back into the asylum and the comfort of his office. And yet mosquitoes never touched his son, and Ambrose and Iris were still able to play checkers relatively undisturbed. Or, as it was, pretend to play checkers. They hadn’t moved a chip in weeks. Instead they had left the orchard of their childhoods and spoken of everything under the sun. They had even revealed a bit of the histories that had taken them to the asylum, but what was left unspoken was vast and deep. Iris had spoken of the plantation, of the husband who did not love her and the slaves she grew to respect and admire; he had spoken of battles, the privation of the march to Fredericksburg, the snowball fight in winter quarters, his increasing disenchantment with the war. So much blood, and for what? He believed in states’ rights, but not slavery. And he could not fight for one without fighting for the other. This paradox haunted him. If he could only fight for states’ rights with his right arm and slavery with his left, he’d march into battle with the left arm raised in surrender. There was a slave one of the lieutenants kept at camp. Ambrose used to rankle the other men by refusing to let the slave—whose name was William—pour his coffee.

They released these stories to each other with caution and even fear, as though releasing wild birds back into the wild after mending their broken wings. But the darkest birds stayed in the coop. They were not ready yet, and perhaps would never be.

Ambrose watched her now. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“You seem somewhere far away.”

“It’s your imagination. I’m right here. Everything is the same.” That lie was easy to tell. Everything was not the same. She was leaving soon.

Iris and Wendell searched for shells on the beach. The sun was low and their shadows skulked out behind them, crouching when they crouched, reaching when they reached, collecting the shadows of the shells they collected. She’d told her story slowly and carefully, in a way she’d never been given the opportunity to tell it before. Not by the judge, or certainly the doctor. She had arrived, over this measure of days, to the beginning of the end of her marriage.