The Bully of Order (14 page)

Looking out at the rain, I stood ready to be counted, preferring to be wretched than nothing at all. They might come for me to put me in jail. I figured let them and be quick about it. Be bold in your surrender, if not in battle.

The rain drilled trenches in the ground. My boots were soaked through, and the backs of my hands were spotted with dirt and cedar needles that made designs like frost on glass. Sobriety is like a rope too, three days swinging from the yardarm. Three days Nell had been getting worse, and I knew my discomfort was paltry beside hers. Gray skies like the inside of my skin. Today I could become a murderer, a woman killer. She lived her whole life, and it ended with me.

The rain was moving out to sea, a lighted column of transfusion, a light in the bow of the ship of the storm.

All the days and seasons tumbling by and we were like the slaves waiting at the stoneworks for our masters, unchained and unguided, chattering and scared. Nobody bothered with where I came from. I felt like a king, with my father's books and tools, my fine suits, my beautiful wife. You are who you tell them you are. They are who you tell them they are. Then they came with the shackles, and I offered up my wrists and my ankles and my neck. I bent my back to their weight and at first felt straighter for it, but they fed me a porridge of sawdust and whiskey that stunk of the embalmed. My disillusionment was a lighted column. My moral failure a transfusion of salt water.

It was the year after we were married. The sound of falling trees used to wake her in the night. Nell dreamed it. I touched her hair and talked her back to sleep. We had a child. If I spoke of him now I'd be speaking of the future, pulling the strings of my past. He was there with me, somewhere. I couldn't think about that. I'd delivered him into the world, terrified of what I would do wrong. I didn't have to do anything except catch him. Steaming rooftops, I remembered that day; boiled sheets, there was a rainbow and the rebuilding of the pier was finally finished.

I unmade myself here, the Harbor unmade me. I should've never believed the probabilities, stillborn motives. I wanted to be equal but honestly superior. I wanted to be better, but I don't have it in me. I have death in me. Dear Christ, all men are my enemy because I am my enemy. I knew myself to be capable of horrors, and now I'm sure. But she would forgive me. She always has, because I wasn't this way. I was someone else. She went to the dance with one man and spent the whole night with another, a brute. She'll go home in a coffin. She can't. What should I write to her family? Her brother, her poor brother Zachary. What will I tell Zachary? We arrived strong and sober, with plans and energy and adequate resources. I opened an office (never mind the pretense) that prospered. We had a child. The end came hurling toward us like a spring river and washed over us, pushed us absolutely down. I could send Duncan as an explanation, as proof. But he's a child of the Harbor; he belongs here. I can't send him anywhere. Is that pride? He's from me. Is that hatred?

I have a prayer: The woods take me. Bury me beneath your branches, crush me down. Drown me in sap.

Nell was inside the doctor's house. I could touch the door, but I couldn't go in. Not yet.

I chose the woods because it wasn't easy, because I truly did have something to prove. I swung the ax. I pulled the whip. We all saw the future, fortune-tellers, fortune fellers.

A cart passed by on the road, captained by children. The stevedores were yelling somewhere far off, always yelling, always loading. I found the bottom of the world, behind the waterfall. Cudahey's tug was out there, moving like a spirit. That's a man close to God, parquet, near the music, sure. Divine. He knew the way in and the way out, knew all the shifting sandbars and currents; shoal avoider, deepwater seeker, never highgrounded. No matter what happens, Cudahey knows. Who's better than that?

We didn't make it through, Nell, and I'm sorry. We came here, and I thought it was liberation. A fogged window, like looking into a block of ice. Is she really in there? Yes, and bleeding from her ears. The end of the world is at the end of my arm. When did she ask for a new table, two years back, three? It was when ours broke, when I broke it falling over myself, and Duncan mended it wrong because he was too small and didn't know what he was doing, or was it me thinking she wanted it, that she wanted new things and I couldn't get them? No man is as mean as a man that has known privilege and then finds poverty.

Father, I've been in the woods working the big cut. I can count seasons, and I can count trees. The logger has seen the world die a thousand times under his ax. He's cut through the scars of lightning strikes from before our independence. I've seen trees drive a man into the ground like a nail driven into a rotten board. But I'm a tourist in any trade in any life. I need a clear—no, not clear—a dull mind. I need what I gave my beloved wife. In this too I'm a charlatan. I feel the pull of responsibility and the weight of regret, but it's somehow not for me. You've got the wrong man, sir. I'm from a good family. She's my Nell, my only chosen family. The one I wanted, not the one I was born to. I'll be known for this from now on, and nothing else. Is my pity for her or for me? This confirms the monstrosity. It's official.

Duncan was on the other side of the house. I snuck up on him just to see him, to know he was there. He was carving something into the back of Haslett's bench with his pocketknife. When he saw me he ran off fast as a rabbit. I wasn't welcome. I considered Haslett's garden, untended and long dead. Reverend Macklin said it, didn't he? First service Nell and I went to at his new church. “We rely on abandonment as much as cultivation.” My fallow son won't look me in the eye, and my bedded Nell won't open hers. The name, Teresa, carved in the bench wood.

Dr. Haslett was sunk in his chair by the fire. The fire, only coals, black and red.

“I didn't let you in.” His voice was skinnied by his anger, thin and rabid as a ribby dog.

“I know. Can I see her?”

“The lips of a fool consume him.”

“I'll be quiet.”

“She doesn't need to hear what you have to say, and if in fact it's an apology that you came to offer, it's come too late.”

Tears on my cheeks, into my beard and like snakes down my neck. Toward the door, not sure if it was the right one, but it felt right. I could feel her. But the doctor stomped his foot hard on the floor, and I stopped midstride.

“Stay away from her.”

“I have to see her.”

“Oh, she'll be gone soon, and you can forget all about it.”

“Don't say that. I didn't mean to do it. You could do something, couldn't you?”

“You think I haven't tried?”

“There has to be something. Please, you're a better doctor than me.”

“I'm a doctor, is all. You're not anything.”

“You could help her.”

“I could get Chacartegui to hang you.” And now we were tangled together in this rusted wire. I walked in kicking at the barbs alone, and the doctor joined me. The beasts and their rolling eyes.

“I didn't mean to hurt her. I didn't.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know. I came home.”

“You came home?”

“I couldn't have meant to. I'd never—I don't remember what happened.”

“She'll die just the same.”

I wanted to tell him that I'd been outside wondering the same thing, wondering if my joyless strata, days-months-years, could be peeled apart and evaluated for further hints of destiny or tack. Because I'd concluded that there was no patriarchal explanation. I didn't come from a long line of woman batterers, murderers. There was no other responsible party. There was no other rope but mine, and my neck would fit the noose like a knife fits a wound.

“She was better than you.” His anger was in full bloom, a woodstove as the flames warm the metal, still black but not so dusty, shimmering. “She came here in your trust, and you've done nothing but fail her.”

“There were troubles. This is no easy place.”

“Adversity, you twit.”

“Yes, adversity.”

“You're a coward.”

“I know.”

“She's no coward.”

“She deserved someone to talk to, I guess, while I was away.”

His bulk filled the chair, sad blob, fat fingers gripped the armrest. “I should've kept her here. I should've stolen her away from you. I waited for her to come, but it was no time to wait. I should've acted.”

“I told her you didn't want her.”

“You what?”

“When I returned, I told her that I'd spoken with you, and you didn't want her.”

He stared silently at me.

“I swear I didn't intend to hurt her.”

“Every word that comes from your mouth is like a trickle of shit.”

“I'd take it back. She should've left me. I wish she would've. I'd rather have that than this.”

“You should've stepped off the ship when you arrived and slit her throat.”

“No.”

“You're not capable of mercy either. Not capable of much, as far as I can tell.”

“I changed when I got here. I'm changed now, from this. I'm not always going to be this way. You understand, don't you?”

“Oh, of course. And I'm sure you'll be much improved. Much improved. When you're nailed into a box and buried, you'll be at the true pinnacle of your character. The peak of your goddamn game.”

“I'll not hide from death any longer. You can trust me on that.”

“I hope it hides from you, though. I hope you suffer under this memory until you're a thousand years old.”

“I can't imagine living through another night.”

“I pray that God will keep your mind clear, endlessly fixed on what you've done. That you'll have no respite.”

“I pray he kills me.”

“No, not that easy. You have ten thousand days to serve.” The doctor shifted in his chair. “The only question for you now is, what will you do with your boy?”

“How do you mean?”

“How do I mean?” The doctor strained to his feet, and the bottle in his lap was suddenly in his hand and then smashed into the fireplace. The bricks were wet blackened, and the smoke smelled of whiskey. I'd be lying if I said I didn't lust after the spill.

“Should I not come back here? Should I go? My brother says he'll be staying for a while, longer if I leave. He's with his son.”

“And the two of them will raise Duncan?”

“No, he should live with the Parkers. He'd be safe there. They'll take care of him.” Dr. Haslett seemed to be considering this and finding it not disagreeable. Wretchedness of this color was uncommon, shame of the deepest red; it was a curiosity, even to the carnage of the Harbor; it was enough to stunt rage.

“I want you to leave. Go suffer alone.”

I wanted to argue with him. I wanted him to know what my mistake had been, what led to this. I wanted to tell him of the wrath and hatefulness that filled me like black sand. It didn't come from inside; it came from without. Nothing is independent of time, no man or ideas.

I heard the front door open and shut, and Duncan was suddenly standing there, muddy clear up his front, arms hanging practically to his knees. Ropes had more meat on them. He had a dead mouse dangling from his long fingers, and his eyes were red from crying. The doctor kicked at the dying coals with the toe of his boot and then again took to his chair.

“Throw that outside,” I told Duncan.

Duncan stood his ground; nothing about him so much as twitched. The doctor turned to see what he had, and my son hurled the carcass at me and it hit me in the chest. I stood above the dead mouse, and looking at it, realized it was not a mouse; it was a rat. I picked it up by the tail and could see the ticks embedded in its body, hair missing along its back, tail like the rings in a drainpipe. Not just a rat but a sick rat, crusted in salt and mud and disease. When I say I saw myself in it, in its rimed drudgery, I speak the truth.

“Take this,” I said, but he wouldn't do it. “Take it outside.”

“Leave him,” Haslett said. To Duncan: “Go and sit with your mother. Talk to her. Your father's leaving now. Say good-bye.”

The boy went widely by me without a glance and I hated him for not looking at me, more so than for the chucking of the rat. I hated him like I would a dog that dodges out of the way of my boot, more for the dodge than for the initial wronging.

What else was there? “I'm sorry,” I said to Haslett.

“I don't care what you are.”

“I guess I'm sorry to them.”

“Don't think of coming back here. Go.”

I went out the door, dead rodent dangling. My new luggage.

D
r. Haslett stood in
the doorway, looking in. His jacket was undone, and he had a hand inside, searching for his watch chain. When he found it, he pulled the watch free like a frog held aloft by its leg. Ten after four. The boy had moved the lamp to the dresser, and the light fell over his bent back and left his mother's face in shadow. She was as she'd been since she arrived, weakening, pupils unresponsive. If Jacob Ellstrom wasn't gone soon, the Boyertons, the Millers, the Pratches, the Luarks, they'd see him hang for this, and if he escaped them they'd blame the doctor for letting him get away.
Never put your hands to something you can't stand killing
, an oath of disparity, his own; versus
First do no harm
, an oath of despair, warm milk but sour. It is true that men desire to be better, even bad men, but betterment doesn't come easily; great suffering is due the saint as great luxury is due the idolater.

He loved her, but he'd obeyed the law of marriage, both his own and hers. His was done now, officially severed. Bachelor life agreed with him. The anguish of cohabitation could be profound. Prisoners understand, psychotics too.