Blue Asylum (13 page)

The Civil War was destroying everything in its path, everything but sky and stone. The plantation was suffering. Supplies cost much more, and because Robert Dunleavy, in his zeal to increase his tobacco output, had never cycled the growing season with crops like cotton and rice, the ground was suffering. Too much had been expected of it. The steady, patient overseer was fired one day, and a new one took his place. Clyde Sender, who had nothing but contempt for slaves and women.

“Why the new overseer?” she dared to ask her husband. “The slaves were happy with the last one.”

“The slaves are getting lazy. They need to do more work. This new man will keep them in line.”

She dropped the matter, but then Robert cut the slaves’ rations of meat and clothing and refused to provide even smock shirts for the children under seven, and so they ran around naked.

“It just doesn’t seem right to me, Robert,” she said, “that those children have no clothes.”

Robert was writing figures down in neat print on a ledger. He looked up. “Many, many other plantation masters never give clothes to young children. They stay warm indoors in the winter and play outside in the summertime. They don’t need clothes. I provided these as a kindness, and now I can’t afford such gestures. So I’ll thank you to stay out of my business.”

That was the end of the discussion. He didn’t speak to her again for three days, which she imagined cleaved to some standard of punishment for uppity wives. She didn’t feel married anymore. She kept her letters home cheerful, so as not to alarm or disappoint her parents, and they wrote letters back full of the same love they’d always had for her. Constant, steady love that made her weep as she read her father’s handwriting—the strict but loving cursive of a preacher—or opened one of her mother’s letters and dried violet petals fell out. The Union army was occupying Winchester once again, streets filled with the colors of the Zouaves, Yankee music playing all hours of the night. They made the people of Winchester take in the sick Union soldiers. Privations were great. Thank goodness their daughter was living the good life of a plantation mistress. The thought of her living in happiness sustained them in these bleak times.

What the war didn’t ravage, the tobacco worms did. Light green, a beautiful color wasted on the ugliest creature in the world. Long as a finger. They could strip a field in a matter of weeks. They multiplied so fast that the slaves couldn’t keep up with them. Every morning, a flock of turkeys were driven into the field, where they ate tobacco worms all day, and were driven out at night bulging with their feasts. Almon, a teenage slave, was in charge of keeping the turkeys in the field and preventing them from escaping into the woods. But Almon was distracted by a teenage slave named Rose, with braided hair and a heart-shaped face, who helped around the house.

One morning in April, when Robert was away buying a new horse, Almon’s mother pounded on the door.

“You gotta come!” she screamed. “You gotta come now!”

Iris would never forget the wet tearing sound, as though a giant man were eating a giant apple . . . followed by a piercing scream. Another, then another as she ran across the property, her heavy keys jangling, past the icehouse and the stables and the beginning of the tobacco fields, to a group of slaves gathered around a sycamore tree, sorrowful, helpless, women on their knees, men with their hats on their chests. Almon was tied to the tree and his bare back had three bloody streaks on it. Before Iris could cry out, Clyde Sender swung the whip again. Almon’s flesh parted, and he screamed as blood ran down his back.

“Stop it!” Iris cried. “Stop it!”

Clyde, who was panting and sweating for his efforts, looked around at her. “You get out of here, ma’am. This ain’t your affair. Not at all.”

“But what could he have done to deserve this?”

“He let all them turkeys run off into the woods while he was over at the clothesline, talking to his little gal.” Iris glanced into the crowd and saw Rose shaking her head slowly back and forth, the only act of protest she had in the world.

“We don’t beat our slaves,” she told Clyde.

“That ain’t what I heard.” He wiped his brow and went back to work, planting one foot behind him and pulling his arm back for the next lash.

Iris lost that span of time, the two or three seconds it took her to rush to the tree and stand facing the overseer, her body pressed against Almon’s back, his blood leaking through her shirtwaist dress.

Clyde Sender lowered the whip. He looked shocked.

“You can’t whip him anymore,” she said. “I won’t allow it.”

He raised the whip and the assembled slaves murmured. Iris was paralyzed with fear but stood her ground, and time moved so slowly that Iris could feel the beating of Almon’s heart and see a butterfly take its time landing ever so slowly on a milkweed near her feet.

Clyde put down his whip, defeated. “We’ll see what Mr. Dunleavy says about this,” he muttered. The slaves ran over to attend to Almon, and Iris returned to the big house, the back of her dress sticky with blood. An hour later, after the water had turned pink in the porcelain tub in which the dress was soaking, Robert came through the door and seized Iris’s arms, shaking her.

“How dare you? How dare you undermine the authority of my overseer? You ignorant fool.” His voice was flat and measured, and not a single muscle moved in his face, but his hands were wild as anything unbranded; they shook her and they shook her.

That night, she went to her bedroom and locked the door behind her, giving him no recourse but to sleep in the guest room from then on. And they were divorced in spirit because that was the neatest and quietest divorce, a fissure taking place under the skin, away from human eyes. Her body had the chill of the spinster but not the freedom. She had no say in the house or the farm anymore, and she stopped receiving seeds for the flower garden she cultivated in the back of the house. A week later, Robert sold Almon to a rice farmer from North Carolina. He was led away with a rope around his neck by his new owner, who rode beside him on a palomino. Almon’s mother screamed and clung to his legs, wailing to the skies and begging the man not to take him. Rose said nothing, did nothing, because she was not free to pursue either avenue of expression. She had only the recourse of any other slave—a chiseled account of the crime etched perfectly into a piece of slate somewhere inside herself where a soft spot used to be. This darkness showed on her face. She hung the sheets, but they didn’t stay put. Some kind of latent energy tore them off the line, and the sight of them, airborne over the tobacco fields on breezy days, always recalled the story of Almon and the grief of that loss.

By the time Iris had finished that part of her story, she and Wendell were sitting on the cool beach, near the tide line, and Wendell had dug a baseball-size hole in the ground with the edge of a scalloped shell. After her voice faded, he kept digging for a while.

“How many slaves did you have on the plantation?”

“About fifty.”

“Couldn’t fifty slaves beat up one overseer?”

“Not an overseer with a whip and a gun.”

“Isn’t that against the law, to treat someone like that?”

“There are two laws in this country. One for black people and one for white people.”

“That doesn’t seem very fair.” The next wave washed up close to the hole he’d dug in the sand. Another few minutes and the hole would be filled. “My father says slavery is primitive.”

“Your father runs his own plantation,” she said without thinking, immediately regretting her words when she saw the look on his face, half hurt and half puzzled. “I’m sorry, Wendell.” She touched his arm.

Dr. Cowell watched them from his office window. They sat, legs akimbo, leaning toward each other. He had rubbed his wife’s rose oil on his exposed skin in the hope he could take a walk on the beach at sunset without attracting midges and mosquitoes, but after seeing the woman with his son, he had lost his appetite for the encroaching tide and declining sun. Now he would smell like a woman for nothing.

Since the day Iris Dunleavy had thrown his paper out of the window, they had engaged in what could not be called treatment or even discussion, but open combat, the two of them a microcosm of the great war raging in the far distance: one side that desired autonomy, and the other that took independence as a sign of madness.

“There’s a woman in this asylum, Doctor,” she said one day, “who never says a word. Who merely claps in delight at anything spoken to her. And I suspect that if I merely clapped at everything you said, I could clap my way to freedom.”

The statement made his face flush with anger, and this reaction, in turn, made him angry with himself, that the woman could vex him so. It had been the doctor’s custom to make sure each patient was out of his office not one minute after the hour elapsed, as he was a stickler for time, but he found himself so invigorated by the arguments that the sessions began running over. Sometimes he stood up to make a point. Sometimes he raised his voice. Threw words at her he was absolutely sure she didn’t understand. But even in these moments he felt somehow returned to his youth, as though if he had turned to a mirror in mid-rant he’d see a man with a smooth, young face and a black beard with no hint of gray.

When inevitably the hour had passed, the nurse’s knock would jolt him out of the moment and he would feel the most profound irritation. “Not now!” he would snap, but five minutes later, the knock would return, and Iris would have to leave, and other patients take her place, and the day would progress, taking her away from him, farther and farther. He fought to remain detached, to focus on her treatment and the promise he had made to Robert Dunleavy—to send back to him the wife he’d once known. But he found himself increasingly less aware of the form and substance of their sessions and more of her expressions, the way her hands moved, the angles of her face and the way her dress color affected the tendency of her hazel eyes to fall to green or blue. He tried his best to shake away those thoughts. The woman was mad. And yet, her words were so well chosen and her eyes were as sharp as anyone’s walking the free streets of the mainland.

During their last session, things had taken a sudden turn that had left him delighted and strangely disarmed. The incident had reverberated in him, and he found himself going back to it time and time again, analyzing it, reliving it.

They were in the middle of a heated argument about women’s rights, or lack thereof, when Iris suddenly offered up a story from her youth. “My grandmother’s name was Beatrice, and she used to tell my grandfather every morning upon rising how lucky he was to have tricked her into marriage. She told him she was a great treasure on a ship bound for Spain, and he was the pirate that stole her. She told him he should wear an eye patch, and a parrot on his shoulder. When she died, my grandfather put a flagpole on her grave and refused to lower the flag, even in the rain.”

Dr. Cowell responded, to his own surprise, not with analysis but his own story. “My grandfather refused to bathe. He disliked the feel of water, and this drove my grandmother to distraction. He wore the same pair of trousers every day except Sunday, when he would concede to putting on his Sunday suit. One Sunday my grandmother told him she felt ill and could not go to church with him. When he returned from church he found his favorite pair of trousers in flames in the front yard. She told him unless he started bathing, he would be next.”

“And did he bathe?”

“Yes, once a month. My grandmother accepted the compromise.”

Iris pondered this. And suddenly began to laugh. He was startled by the musical quality of the sound. Like the experiments he’d performed as a boy, tapping glasses of different volumes of water with a spoon. And he himself was laughing. His own laughter startled him. There was no more contribution to the medical canons to be had here, no more treatment, no more progress. Just the joy of accomplishing nothing, the mind abandoning its duties and surrendering. A nurse pounded on the door, startling him, saddening him, angering him.

“Not now!” he shouted, and the sternness in his voice made him laugh some more.

And now the sight of her taking such an intimate posture with his own son filled him with a longing envy. The windowpane was warm against the palm of his hand. The other hand shielded his eyes from the sun as he continued to watch Wendell and Iris. Suddenly she reached out and touched his boy on the arm. He drew his breath in when he saw the gesture. A hard knot formed inside of him. The sun sank lower in the sky. He stared at it, closed his eyes, and saw five suns, all of them blinding green.

That night at dinner he broached the subject with Wendell. “What did you do today?” he asked.

Wendell shrugged.

Mary let out a high, ringing laugh. “Surely you must have done something!” She was in a gay mood, some combination of laudanum and the arrival of an order of ribbon that had come in on the boat, and which she now wore in her hair. The doctor knew that tone in her voice promised something for him later, and this he accepted with a weary, tacit gratitude.

“I saw you on the beach,” the doctor said to Wendell. “You were talking to Mrs. Dunleavy, I believe.”

“Iris Dunleavy?” asked Mary. “Is she the plantation wife? She dresses so well for a lunatic. She had the most colorful flounces on her skirt the other night.”

“We were collecting shells,” Wendell said. “We found three alphabet cones and a king’s crown and a Scotch bonnet.”

“You weren’t collecting shells. You were sitting on the beach, facing each other. She reached out and touched your arm.”

“Oh, Wendell,” said his mother, losing her gay voice. “Don’t ever let a lunatic touch you. You don’t know what kind of diseases they are carrying. And there are certain mental illnesses that can be contagious.” She looked at her husband. “Am I correct, darling?”

He didn’t answer her. That hard knot had formed again.

Later that night, he and his wife made love upon their walnut bed, oil lamps turned down by half, listening to the uppity bark of a night heron flying over the roof, the bedsprings creaking, some winged insect hurling itself over and over at the windowpane above their heads. His wife gulped air, her sign of approval. He pressed his hands against the mattress, raising himself so he could look down at her face in the bare light of the lamp. That face, so much younger in the gloom. That girlish expression, open and curious, her eyes and her mouth, it was like going back in time, back in the days he rehearsed what to say to her, back when her beauty moved him so, it was not possible to imagine a future in which he did not worship her completely. That was the folly of youth, to believe someday they would grow old but still love with their younger hearts.