Blue Asylum (24 page)

She lay down on the bed in her robe, the hair covering her privates still damp. Outside was dead silence save for late-summer crickets and the far-off, barely heard baying of a dog. She blew out the lamp and the shadows died.

Ambrose woke up in the middle of the night. He blinked, eyes adjusting to the darkness as he tried to orient himself in time and space. He was not in the asylum. He knew that for certain. He turned to his left and found her next to him, sleeping without sound, just gentle, deep breaths, her hands folded over, her knees drawn up, her body on top of the bedspread, as was his. The light was so sparse in the room that he had to lean close to see her face. Her sanity intimidated him.

He heard a sound by the window and turned his head. A pair of legs stuck out from under the curtains. Jersey pants, army boots. Ambrose jerked up in bed and slid to the floor. His heart pounded and his body shook as his bare, newly washed feet crept across the wooden floor. He approached the window and eased back the curtain.

Seth stood shivering in the light of a waning moon, arms crossed, holding his shell jacket tightly around him. “It’s not your fault, Ambrose,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Ambrose whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. I’m fine. It didn’t even hurt.” Seth opened his shell jacket and a swarm of flies poured out of it, hitting Ambrose in the face with their sticky bodies, others staying, crawling around the edges of the bloody hole in Seth’s chest. Ambrose stumbled back, beating at the flies.

He woke up with a start, chest pounding, shivering, mouth frozen open in a scream. The curtains were empty. The room was quiet. He glanced sideways at Iris, who was still sleeping soundly, proof that he hadn’t screamed out loud. He closed his eyes tightly, causing several tears to fall at once. God had tinkered in His cruel workshop a million hours making human recollection. How easy and cutting it was to recall Seth’s eyes as the handkerchief was put over them, his final cry. The way the chest wound revealed itself, at first, as just a torn patch of cloth until the blood leaked through . . .

And now it was time to resurrect the color. Blue, his only friend. Blue his nurse. Blue his priest. Blue his doctor. Blue his mother. Blue blue blue blue blue . . .

He removed the bottle of laudanum from the inner pocket of his jacket. He sipped it once, twice, three times and stood straight to appreciate its effects. The medicine traveled down the length of his gut, down his arms, down his legs, weakening the memory until the edges of the open grave blurred and Seth blurred, too.

Ambrose got back into bed, next to the woman he loved. He moved his hand, found the fabric of her cotton robe, clutched it as she slept.

She awoke next to him and suddenly it was real. She glanced at the sleeping man by her side, then stared at the ceiling. She’d been concentrating all this time simply upon their reckless plan. And now, what would they do? Where could they both go where they could live a normal life? She was, after all, both a married woman and an escaped lunatic. Her husband would never grant her a divorce. As soon as she was recognized, she was sure to be sent back to him, or back to the asylum. Would she and her lover have to live a secret life forever? Would she ever see her parents again? And what would her father, a Methodist minister, think of her right now, lying in bed with a man who was not her husband? Ambrose stirred awake, interrupting her thoughts, and he went downstairs to order breakfast. It was brought up on a tray, and they ate it in bed—biscuits smothered with gravy, bacon, and coffee. No bells announced the hour. No bars on the windows. No matron. No blue walls. No shrieking inmates or the monotony of the progress report. They ate together in contented silence as the quality of light sharpened in the window. She still had on her cotton robe. It was a luxury now, these decadent moments between the blowing on the coffee and the sipping. And so they sat blowing, sipping, listening to the noises outside, pleasant morning noises, when the world is too sleepy to fight.

“It’s so strange,” he said, “to wake up beside you. To share this bed.”

She caught the tone in his voice. “Are you bothered by the fact that I am married?”

His blown breath made tiny ripples on the surface of his coffee. “Yes,” he said at last.

“It bothers me as well. Don’t imagine that it doesn’t.”

He looked uncomfortable. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, set his coffee cup down on the floor, and began putting on his socks and shoes.

She leaned back against the pillow. “It was a terrible mistake to marry that man.”

He tied his shoes and said, “You must have been in love.”

“I thought I was, at the time.”

They went back to drinking their coffee. “I’d like to go to the trading post and try to buy another dress,” she said. “Just something simple. And I’d like to explore the town.”

“Someone could be looking for us. We need to be vigilant.”

“Yes, of course.”

She reached for her dress, laid out on the top of the chifforobe next to his coat, and brushed against the coat. It slid off and clanked as it hit the floor.

Instantly he was out of the bed. “Careful!” he said in a surprised, stern voice, seizing the coat. He withdrew the bottle of laudanum and held it to the light, checking for cracks. “It didn’t break,” he added with obvious relief.

“But you don’t need this anymore,” she said.

He put the bottle back in his jacket, saying nothing.

“Pour it out,” she said.

He put the jacket on top of the chifforobe.

“Are you going to say anything?” she demanded.

“Let’s talk about something else. Something nice.”

“You’re convinced you aren’t well and will never get well because that’s what the doctor put in your head. That and his silly palliative of blue this, blue that.”

“Do you love me? Or do you just hate him?”

They stared each other down. A lovers’ quarrel involving two people who had barely kissed. It was all upside down, like the little hamlet around them, like the war around that, like the world around that. She went into the bathroom and shut the door behind her, hard enough to throw a measured insult back at him. More pitchers of water had been brought up, and she washed her face and combed her hair and put on her dress.

When she came out he was sorry. He pulled her close to him, put his arms around her. Put his mouth to her ear and said her name.

In the afternoon they left the hotel and ambled down the dirt street, men leering from the tables set outside the saloons, an older man outside the trading post, gesturing and calling. Cattle ran freely, as did dogs. Ambrose took her hand as they walked together, past the saloons and the carts, past the abandoned fort that flew neither color, past some old A-frame houses with crape myrtle blooming in the yards. It was late in the summer, a time for the ripening of apples and grapes and the stretching of cornstalks toward the sky. Weeds broke through the street, and then the street simply ended in a meadow full of goldenrod, the sky above it so full of blue it could distract the madness of a billion men. They came to a low ridge and made their way through a gallery forest that bordered a twisting, turning creek, so clear and shallow she could see the minnows scatter in the water as a large sunfish approached. She took off her shoes and sat down at the edge of the creek as Ambrose stood watching her.

“Ah,” she said. “Fresh water. We had a creek behind our house back home. A fisherman will say God made a creek for food. But a girl will say He made it for swimming.”

“We bathed in streams when I was in the army. Up in the mountains, the water was so cold we’d turn blue. When winter came, we gave up bathing entirely. Just smoked our clothes over hickory fires to kill the lice.”

Iris put her bare feet down in the cool water. She eased forward and the water crept up to her knees. Ambrose was still standing. A soldier forever on duty.

Iris pulled her feet out of the creek. She began to unbutton her dress.

“What are you doing?” Ambrose asked.

“I’m going to swim.”

“But, what if . . . ?” He looked around.

“No one will see us. We’re alone.”

He retreated shyly to the edge of the trees as she pulled the dress over her head, then removed her petticoats and waded into the creek in her chemise and drawers. The water was chilly as it soaked through the fabrics, then grew tolerable again. A gentle current flowed, just enough to bear leaves and bits of straw along at a leisurely pace. A Sunday pace, although she was not sure what day it was. The water came to her navel. Her bare feet sank in the silt and she stretched out her arms, moving her hands flat on the cool surface of the water. She watched as a green frog swam languidly to the other shore, its legs pumping out to propel it along.

“I wonder if anyone’s told this frog there’s a war going on,” she said. “He probably doesn’t care. It doesn’t affect him. He’s caught the same number of flies since the war began. And the lily pads haven’t changed their shape. That would be so beautiful, to live in that ignorance.”

“I’m sure the frog has his worries,” Ambrose said, but there was a catch in his voice. Something that had nothing to do with frogs and war. She was facing him now. Her chemise was soaked through and translucent. It was outrageous, to be seen this way in front of a man. But what was not outrageous? Slavery, war, madness, death? She didn’t care anymore. She wanted to be cool and free of the dress and yes, she also wanted to see that look in Ambrose’s eyes.

He looked away and then back at her again. Finally he put down his haversack and began to unbutton his shirt, his hands awkward with the buttons. He removed the shirt and pulled off his undershirt. He stood there bare-chested in the filtered light. Iris glanced at him and quickly looked away, her bravery fading a bit, shyness taking over. He removed his shoes and socks and waded in with just his trousers on, his face impassive. His trousers turned dark as the water soaked through, first to the knees and then to the thighs, and then he was fully inside the creek, moving toward her in the water, hands out to touch the surface. He stopped a foot away from her. This was the body she had longed to touch. Here was a freckle, near the right nipple of his chest. And here was a scar, tiny as a silverfish, near his throat. Here was a tuft of black fuzz on his sternum. This was no longer the man she’d argued with in the hotel room, the one whose voice was strangled with pain and anger. This was the man on the other side of the checkers table. His face full of shadows, a bit of light collected in the center of each eye. Here in this filter of sunlight and gloom, of green, of cool, of primary elements. His shoulders were still square from the endless drills, but the effect was softened by the flesh of his biceps and the fullness of his hands. The aureoles of his chest were as dark as his closed lids. He drank in the afternoon the way a soldier, hot and dusty from the march, would drink lemonade.

She touched his scar. It was puckered under her fingertip. Like a tiny sliver of a lemon rind. “Where did you get this?”

He kept his eyes closed. “I don’t know. I took my shirt off to bathe and there it was. That was the funny thing about the heat of battle. Sometimes wounds opened painlessly. One time another soldier came up to me after a fight and told me about his favorite yellow dog. How the dog had a tooth that stuck out of his mouth and made his lip curl around it. He talked about that dog a good five minutes before he fell over dead. He’d had a minié ball in his back the entire conversation and never even noticed.”

“It must have been terrible, to see your friends die.”

He gave her a long look that seemed to come from an interior struggle, a parceling out of guarded memories from those less precious. The action seemed to pain him. He gave up on conversation altogether, took a breath, and slid under the surface, reemerging in a different place, his hair soaking wet, water pouring down his face. He dog-paddled toward her, into a renewal of sunlight, and submerged again. Iris swam toward him smooth as a fish. They met underwater, cheeks puffy with gathered breath. They stopped a few feet apart and lingered there, astonished by each other, the need for oxygen beginning as a tickle. Above them, intertwining branches and broad, flat leaves formed a canopy that held the sunlight out and provided the ambience of dusk.

They are still wet from the water. They have abandoned the creek and sloshed back to town, leaving dark footprints on the bank and then lighter ones farther away. Once they are back in the room, the wet clothes are not removed but assimilated into the act of love. Peeled back, pushed down. The bedspread is heaped on the floor, the wet back of the woman is pressed against the mattress; it makes a dark figure in the rough shape of her, like a child’s shaded drawing on the sheet. They are together in a dark cave in the middle of nowhere, as the sun goes down and the room darkens and neither one rises to strike the Federal matches and light the lamp. Outside their hotel, in the warmth of twilight, stirs a motley gathering of people without homes or plans, but holding on and safe for the moment, great gouts of them milling around with the dogs and the beasts. Natural enemies on other days, in other lands. As dusk falls they coexist in this town that knows no point of view and cares for nothing but today.

They are not soldier and plantation wife. They are not lunatics. They are man and woman as they move together, natural in that motion, a small cry from Iris in the nape of his neck. In an empty house that volume of sound would wake a mother. On a battlefield or out in the cooling street it would be lost. Her fingertips press the flesh of his back and move down. The curtains flutter and at long last his wet trousers land on the floor in a tangle. The bedpost thumps the wall. The bedsprings creak. People in the room below or beside them might be cocking their heads toward the ceiling or the wall, but like another country’s politics, it does not concern them.

There is not so much another cry from Iris as an inhalation, a quick lungful of something unspoken. She can’t give words or voice to this feeling. The moment so pure and blank, time folded into a shape she has never seen before. She wants to tell him that she loves him; she wants to tell him she is sorry; she wants to tell him all her stories in one sentence but she has no breath left in her. They lie together in a tangle of sheets and clothes and perspiration, one-third dry and two-thirds wet—that fraction has shifted in the last several seconds.
Ambrose,
she thinks to herself. The orchard boy and the orchard girl have grown into a man and a woman. The branches bend under their weight.