Blue Asylum (25 page)

And the time to say it was days ago, perhaps weeks ago, but it was never said. Like the fireflies she used to keep in Mason jars, the promise of its telling had glowed intermittently.

“I love you,” he said. And now the fireflies shone with a constant light.

Neither knew what time of night it was. The darkness had neither deepened nor lightened but stayed true to itself, filling the room with a late-summer grayness, almost cool but not quite. Their wet clothes were off; their bodies had dried and a single sheet covered them. She lay with her back against his chest, naked under the sheet. All those days in the courtyard when they knew they could not touch, they had quieted their bodies before they yearned for this. But now, having been satisfied, the yearning reasserted all its memories of itself, all the untouched sensations of them aching for each other throughout that long summer when turtles pawed at the sand and the moonlight reflected on the water.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“About what?”

“The laudanum. I had no right.”

“You meant well.”

“Women can be foolish. A woman is never more proud than of the nurse in herself; a man might crow about his strength or his wealth or his prowess but a woman believes she can heal anything that limps.”

He was quiet.

“I wanted my love to be enough for you,” she said. “I wanted to be that important. If you need your laudanum, you should have it.”

He moved his fingertips down the length of her spine, his fingers dividing, the index and middle finger trailing along one side of the bony ridge, the smaller fingers trailing along the other. He stopped where the ridge disappeared and rested his palm against the small of her back. “There was a tree back on Sanibel. They called it a strangler fig. It would wrap around a tree next to it and as it grew, it would wrap tighter and tighter until the other tree died. It scared me, to hear about that strangler fig, because it had no will of its own. It became a killer, just by following its natural course. I feel as though I am that strangler fig. I became a killer, just by living. Continuing to grow in a direction already chosen for me.”

“You’re not a killer.”

“Yes, I am, Iris.”

“You killed men in battle under orders. All soldiers do.”

He straightened up in bed to a sitting position, putting the pillow behind his back and leaning against it. “I killed my best friend, Iris.”

She drew in her breath. Sat up next to him and took his hand.

“He deserted. I was forced to shoot him. I had a gun pressed against my own head.”

“What choice could you have made, then?”

“I could have made the choice to die. My father would have made that choice.”

“You don’t know that.”

He said nothing.

“I didn’t have your circumstances,” Iris said, “but I feel responsible for the slaves who died in the massacre.”

Ambrose nodded. She had told him the story in the canoe, under clearing skies. “But how could you feel guilty? You didn’t kill them.”

“I did, in a way. I insisted on running with them, and my husband chose to believe that they had kidnapped me. Were I not with them, they might not have been pursued so ferociously. And I told them to go east, Ambrose. I thought I knew the best route but I was too prideful to admit that I’d gotten us all lost. I keep thinking, Subtract me from the equation and where would they be right now? Mattie, Rose, and the others? Would they be sitting on a porch somewhere? Enjoying the stars? Living as free people? They’re all dead, Ambrose.”

“Forgive yourself.”

They sat in silence, holding hands. “You’re not a strangler fig,” Iris said. “You’re a coconut palm. A hurricane gale comes along and thinks it’s knocked you down, but it’s only bent you. Day by day you’ll straighten toward the sky.”

They could have said more, but they were exhausted. Their eyes grew heavy, and they slept.

Ambrose dreamed in prewar colors, quotidian light. The simplest dreams in the world. A dog and a stick. Grass falling under a swinging scythe. Mud prints across a floor. The dark pool made by a piece of chocolate melting on a windowsill. Boy dreams, motion and noise. Chintz curtains empty, demons at rest.

Merciful God. The demons at rest.

The old Indian man sat there every day, outside the trading post, always in the same implacable position, usually in the way. People would move their horses around him as he sat cross-legged and silent, sometimes smoking a cigarillo but more often simply fixing everyone in his path with the same imperious stare. He might have been a Seminole, or a Cherokee, or even an Iroquois washed down from the North and deposited like sediment at the edge of the sea. It was impossible to ascertain his tribe by his manner of dress. Feathers and beads, yes, but also a white man’s shirt and boots, and wire-rimmed spectacles sticking out of his pocket. A railroad watch and a straw boater. Iris liked seeing him every day, drawing some kind of comfort in the fact no one ever bothered with him. He lingered unmolested, nowhere to go, but content for now in this temperate patch of Florida coastline where no one was in charge and no one cared and no one knew what to do. This melting pot of the listless, the undecided, the weary.

The couple kept to themselves, on the lookout for pursuers, careful not to attract any attention. Lovemaking, conversation, and silence. A tolerable amount of memory. A larger, tentative amount of hope. One man, one woman. One mattress. One lamp. They never spoke of their time on the island. It seemed now like a dream, and the dream encouraged the dissolution of other memories. Perhaps the war had been a dream, and the plantation. Perhaps every heartache was nothing but a night sweat and a vision dissolved in morning light, while every joy, every moment of bliss, was as real as a blade of grass or a bar of soap or a leaf held in the hand. And they were real as well. Two beings who sometimes felt like specters were solid with each other. They took up mass and weight. Breathed in oxygen. Ate oranges. Kissed.

By day Ambrose seemed calm. But his sleep revealed a certain vulnerability. She would wake up in the night with his arms wrapped around her, holding her tightly, murmuring things that had no context in that room. Every few days she checked the laudanum bottle, saw the level of amber liquid going down. She tried not to think of it. She was in love.

They walked to a distant meadow one afternoon, removed their clothes, and embraced in high grass, the sun straight overhead, and the sky a place where sea birds and land birds circled each other. Grasshoppers jumped on their bare legs. Iris looked straight up. A white cloud covered the sun, allowing her a painless eyeful of sky and birds as Ambrose moved against her. She ran her hands down his bare back. His muscles moved when he did. In such a short amount of time, he had grown so vital. His broken parts were filling in. His sleep quieter. His love noisier. The patient in him was sliding away and the man was reaffirming himself, right here, away from the debilitating stare of his history.

By the morning of the fourth day, Ambrose’s beard had grown rough against Iris’s skin. He bought a straight razor and a bar of shaving soap at the trading post. She sat inside the dry tub and watched him prepare himself, pouring the water, wetting the soap, swirling the brush in the lather. This was not just the act of a man grooming himself. This was the lunatic who could finally be trusted to hold a razor to his neck without cutting open his jugular vein. She was quiet. Her bare feet pressed against the cool porcelain. The razor moved down his face. The lather from the shaving soap splattered in the sink. For a moment—just for a moment, after his face was smooth and he had lifted his head up and was scraping his pale throat—she was afraid. But the blade continued to move up, not sideways, and though his hand shook slightly, finally he finished, washed the blade, and wiped it off with a towel.

He lowered himself on top of her in the tub. His cheek against hers, smooth and smelling faintly of wintergreen. The claw feet of the tub scraped against the wooden floor. The bathtub moved slightly. If it could only break free of its plumbing, they could travel that way. Making love. The bathtub inching its way back home.

One morning by the trading post, she saw a young woman holding a baby and froze. Her stare went beyond that of a woman appreciating another’s child. It went on so long that the woman herself turned away, and Ambrose put a hand on her arm and asked, “What is it?” She only shook her head, but he asked again later that night, as they were lying together in their room.

“What was the matter?” he asked. “Was something wrong with the baby?”

“No,” she said. “He reminded me of another.”

Ambrose said nothing, but she knew he was waiting. It was time to tell the baby’s story. He had been quiet all this time, in his grave in Virginia soil, some of the only rich soil left on that plantation after the tobacco crops had ruined the land. That baby she’d held in her arms, his tiny hands opening and balling into fists. Pale blue eyes, a fuzzy patch of blond hair on his bald head. White as a ghost. She had never spoken of him to the doctor or even the boy. But even if that baby could rest without his story told, she could not. Babies died in that war; they died outside it for no reason at all. The guilty would never be punished, any more than she’d already punished them. The weak revenge of a woman, drawing no blood. But what else could she have done?

She could have killed them. Shot them both in their sleep with the same pistol Nate later stole. She’d thought about it, too. But her father had preached too many sermons. Thou shalt not kill. Vengeance is the Lord’s. Shooting the men would startle the pheasants out of the soft reeds of Psalms. She’d left the pistol in the drawer. But now she held the story to the light. Ambrose lay on the bed next to her, eyes on her, listening.

From the moment her husband came home and saw her dress soaking in the porcelain tub, the water pink from the blood of the slave boy, he ceased to be her husband and slept in the guest room. She continued her duties as mistress—the overseeing of the making of the slave clothes, the maintaining of the garden, the keeping of the keys—but she was just a servant like the rest of them. They shared the same table for meals but he spoke to her rarely. Other things occupied his mind. The war was getting worse. The price of things still rising. The slaves uppity. The tobacco full of worms.

After the boy she loved had been sold, Rose, the wash girl, turned inside herself. Her silliness died and her eyes hardened. It was summer, then. Purple coneflowers blooming. The scent of bee balm strong in the meadow by the woods. The sheets Rose hung dried in no time at all. She was sixteen now, a beautiful girl whose heart was broken. The younger children splashed in the river. The older folks sat on Creole chairs at night and fanned themselves with corn husks. She was caught between, too young for most things, too old for others. A grudge born in the springtime taking root in her chest. Her hair so thick she could barely braid it. It fell down her back and was tied with a strip of leather. Too thick for a ribbon. Tawny, bare legs showed under her dress. Her breasts and lips were full. She was asking for trouble simply by existing, by growing up. No fault of her own. A strangler fig.

One afternoon, Iris looked out the window and saw Rose entering the coach house. Something was strange about her posture. A curving inward of normally straight shoulders. Iris waited for her to come out of the house but she did not. Instead, her husband, Robert, came striding up himself. He opened the door and disappeared inside. She watched that closed door. Her hands trembled on the windowpane. She leaned forward, the glass uncomfortably hot on her nose and the tip of her forehead. This could not be happening. She’d heard the tales of other plantation men, what they did with women of their choosing. But Robert was a deacon at church. The Bible was a book he quoted every day. The whisper of the New Testament, the growl of the Old. He’d even used it to justify the owning of slaves.

She could not look at him that night. She wanted to throw things at him, scream at him. But she had been silenced by then. She said nothing. She did nothing. She was afraid any trouble from her would mean Rose would be sold, just as Almon had been. She wrote her father and asked him to come and take her back to Winchester. But suddenly, all his letters back to her stopped, as well as letters from her mother. She could only conclude that Robert was keeping them from her. She stopped taking meals at the table, choosing to eat by herself on the steps. She no longer went to the other plantations, or spoke to the other wives. The parties had stopped, anyway. The war had put a layer of dust on the good china and the julep glasses.

The slaves on the plantation knew about the crime. It changed the tone of their singing, the splash of the children in the creek. Rose’s father had the look of a man perpetually holding himself back from the act of murder. And Rose’s eyes had turned blank. Iris wondered if she blamed her. She was more slave than wife now, if shame could bind a people together whose skin was different colors. And yet, she was not one of them either. She was a ghost.

Late summer arrived, then the fall. Season of apples, pumpkins, and squash. Something else was growing. Rose’s stomach began to swell. All through that fall and winter, what began as a whisper turned into a trumpet. She spent most of her time in the slave quarters. Her mother took over the laundry. She was hidden from view most of the time, but on those days when Iris glimpsed her making her way painfully across the yard, the baby in her large and heavy, she wanted to run to her. Beg her pardon. Tell her that if she could, she would take her and her family far away from here. Perhaps that was where the seed was planted.

This was survival. This was God’s plan turned to rot. This was the dead of winter. The ice crackled outside. The bedroom was always cold. Iris piled up the blankets, but her feet still felt as though they’d turned to ice. She would lie awake at night, shivering, listening to the wind move through the bare branches of the sycamores. The bromeliads in the flower garden died in the frost. And the baby grew.