The Monsters of Templeton (38 page)

"Oh my God," I said. "I can't believe this."

She smiled wearily at me and said, "You're not the only one in the world this has happened to, Wilhelmina. It's even happened to men, if you can imagine. It won't get past this hospital."

"Right. Name me one other person, Vi. This is so fucked."

My mother thought, then said, "Mary Tudor, Queen of England. She thought she was pregnant for a really long time. She wasn't, of course. Sterile."

I gaped at her. "You mean Bloody Mary?" I said. "You mean, the woman responsible for the deaths of thousands of her own subjects?"

"I didn't say," said my mother, biting back her grin, "this necessarily happened to sane people."

"You said I had a normal profile," I said.

"You do," said Vi. "To the best of our knowledge."

"I'm going to throw up," I said.

"At least we know it's not morning sickness," said Vi.

I watched as the silvery fillings in her teeth flashed in the fluorescents, her mouth opening wide as she smiled. I said, "I love you, Vi, but sometimes I think I hate you a little, too."

"Yes, yes," she said, standing and kissing my forehead. "I love you, too. I'm sorry about that. It was uncalled for. And I'm sorry for your loss, truly."

"I did," I said. "I did lose something. I feel as if I did lose something, Vi."

She pushed my hair off my cheeks and looked at me in a long and strange way. "I know you did, Willie," she said. "I really am sorry for you."

As Vi left to fill out the paperwork, I passed my hands over my navel again and again. Where I had once felt another heartbeat, I now felt nothing. Air and stomach, fluids and blood. Nary a little growing thing in me; nary even the weeniest little Lump in the world.

AND SO I waited in the hospital, under the wan humming lights, in the hushed din of so many bodies exhaling sickness and sadness into the cycled air. And when I realized my mother must have gone off to give me a moment, I picked up the envelope I'd brought with me, Clarissa's wild scrawl on the outside. I couldn't stand being alone, just then. As the night thickened in my high window, I tore the flap open and pulled out the photocopied pages and read it all once, then twice. Still, Vi didn't return. That night I read the pages over again and again, because reading made me forget about Vi and the Non-Lump and Clarissa, and the ill puce light around me entirely; it was a blessing, it was a reprieve.

Jacob Franklin TempleCIRCA 1822, painted by Jarvis. Note both his smirk and the apparent nimbus around his head.

Chapter
27

Shadows and Fragments

THIS IS WHAT I saw when I opened the envelope:

1. A note in Clarissa's loopy handwriting: W--check this out--I found it in this sort of a miscellany of JFT's leftovers: Shadows and Fragments: A Posthumous Collection of Jacob Franklin Temple's Words, arranged and edited by his Daughter, Charlotte Franklin Temple. Printed in 1853; One of a series of a thousand by E. Phinney and Son Publishers, Templeton, New York. Also, get a load of Charlotte's note at the end. Maybe it's a clue? Love, C.

2. An excerpt, Chapter 32:...how it holds great puzzles! For instance, only one year previous, a mightily strange story circled in the village, as follows. One day, three maidens venturing out into the greater forest on a strawberry-hunt wandered far from their path, and soon discovered themselves lost. Upon erring aimlessly in the dark and frightening woods, the girls, in their distress, began to quarrel, and at last, one of their party ran away from her friends, piqued. Because night was falling, and there had been rumors of a great bear in the woods, the other two began to run until they found their path. On their way home, however, a scream arose from the woods that nearly curdled their blood, and they arrived at their houses scraped by thorns and barely speaking in the clutch of fear. When the third girl failed to arrive at her house by the next morning, the men of the town gathered and gravely went looking for her, but only found one tattered fragment of her hem. All assumed that she was lost. That is not the depth of the mystery, however, for, by the next spring, the missing girl was discovered living in her house as if nothing had happened at all. Though her family's mouths were sealed tight against questions, soon a number of evidence rose up, some of it contradicting the rest: that there were three terrible cicatrices like claw-marks raked across the girl's visage; that a white shock had sprouted in her raven hair; that her mother, after only one month of confinement and her figure as thin as a rake, gave birth to a strapping, rather hairy baby boy; that during the time she'd been away the post-man had seen her in Oneonta, washing clothing, and certainly not pregnant in any way. Most puzzlingly, however, was the observation that whenever the girl saw one gentleman from the village, she would quake and run to hide; and what was strange about it was that this gentleman, though admittedly ursine, was of a great village family and was universally considered almost womanly in his gentleness, and would never have...

3. Charlotte's note: This is an especially puzzling fragment, for I know not from what larger piece my father banished this story, or why he kept it amongst his most important papers. Yet it is fascinating, for it was founded on a piece of actual gossip that I recall from when I was just a girl. In the true version, there were not three, but four young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two who went into the woods that day. Only two returned that night; one never did, and one returned as was related above. The girl who did not return was young Lucille Smalley. Poor Adah Phinney appeared as described above, and it was perhaps a mercy that she died of measles not long after her sudden reappearance, for the oft-repeated rumors that her brother was actually her son would have shamed her deeply (another untruth here is about the hairiness of Simon Phinney, who has had a bald pate since the age of fifteen). The other two girls, the ones who returned unharmed, developed into beacons of our town: Euphonia Falconer, nee Shipman, became a devout member of the Methodist choir, and Bette Rhys, nee Cox, married our beloved mayor and had a brood of ten children.

Chingachgook, or Sagamore, with dogThe bronze statue called "Indian Hunter" in Lakefront Park. Templetonians are frequently confused about who this statue represents--Natty Bumppo, or his Native American companion--though Willie has always believed it to be Chief Chingachgook.

Chapter
28

Sagamore (Chingachgook, Big Snake)

FIRST SENSED THE girl was a wild creature one night. Eight years, nine years old. Woke to hear her moving across the hut. Saw her lift the oilskin, lean out into the brighter night, the fistful of stars. Broke an icicle and put it in her mouth. I shut my eyes. She wanted to eat the world.

Seven years. Seven years we kept Noname in the hut. My granddaughter. Such terrible things done to her, the child, she lost her tongue at four, five years old. Nine years, she grew beautiful. Mushroom skin, no sunlight, tender as a mouse's belly. Cora's face, my son's face, Uncas's eyes, Cora's fine shape. A body that came early under the fawn-skin shift I made for her, soft on her body. Twelve, she was ready for a husband.

Hawkeye spent his time hunting, fevered with her nearby. No heart to give her to him yet. She was too young. Instead, we ate well, his bounty. She slept on furs.

In the night I sang to her the old songs. Taught her the crafts. She made baskets with weave so small the ladies thought they were of thread. But she spent her days looking down at the world, Templeton, the granite-colored lake.

All day, I sold my baskets, saving for her when I was not here. A very old man, I felt my joints turning to stone. My bones ached. Wanted to drink the potion and leave this earth for better grounds. Instead, coin after coin leaping into my small pouch like fish up a stream. For Noname.

One day, I returned and her long hair was wet. She was panting. Her face looked bright as the sun. She had stolen out to the lake to swim. This was bad, bad. The men in Templeton rough settlers, a young Indian girl not human to them. Prey. But I had no heart to scold her. Should have stopped her. But I did not. Felt so old in the face of such joy.

All spring, she came back, wet-haired. One day, something happened. She was wilder than ever, shudders through her body in the bed, her teeth bared in a smile. Could feel it coming off of her, the joy. Asked and asked her what happened. She didn't sign to me. She turned her back and laughed her silent laugh, strangely so like Davey's.

And I watched her. Ten days passed before I saw it in her body. Twelve years old, unmarried, kept for seven years in a hut, and she was with child.

Who was it? Suspicion hatched in me. But I did not tell. She had to be married and I married her to Hawkeye. On their marriage night I spent the night on the cliff over Lake Otsego, thinking of my poor girl. Stared at the water until the old white monster came to the surface. Watched it turn its belly to the night sky, I saw it become a great moon on top of the lake, watched until it went down again.

The first time Noname came into town, a married girl, a woman with child, she struck everything still. So beautiful. More beautiful even than that Rosamond Phinney, with all her roses in her cheeks. The horses stopped walking, feet still in the air. The boys stopped playing ball. Widow Crogan stopped sweeping, and the dust swirled about her like a dustdevil. A sparrow, struck by my granddaughter's beauty, stopped moving its wings and dropped to the ground. Noname moved through the town, gentle and innocent. Everyone watched her, thinking of miracles.

Noname grew heavy, she grew fat. The summer deepened, became filled with gold. The fall came, and the gold weaned itself away. The cool set into the air. The snow fell. Noname's time had come. Hawkeye believed it was his, still. He awoke that day, singing.

But not I, I suspected. A horrible suspicion. As I sat outside the cabin, Midwife Bledsoe moving inside, whiskey-palsied, it was like a sickness, my suspicion. Davey pacing the lake path, scared of what he thought he's done. He was afraid he killed the girl with his seed. Drunk as a crow in the winter berries. A servant from the Manor came up and set everything neat and clean inside. Orders of the mistress, the girl said. Charity for the poor.

No screams arose from that poor, tongueless throat. My poor Noname, poor wild girl. And every time Midwife Bledsoe smoothed the hair from that little face, I felt for the tomahawk by my side. If the baby came and it was what I think it would be, I did not know if I could stop my hand from dashing its brains on the hearth. Or running down to Templeton on my old bones. Finding the terrible man who did this to her. Killing him with one sweet blow, which I should have done the first time he came to this lake. Should have done it the first time he stood over the lake alone that day on the cliffside. As he sunk to his knees and saw a vision. Before he claimed it all, all of it, too much of it, as his own.

Chapter
29

Camp We-no-kow-to-hawk-naw

I HAD FALLEN asleep and my room was dark when I awoke again. Vi was sleeping in the chair next to me, her face planted on her chest. "Vi," I said, and like that, so smoothly, she slid out of sleep and stood and helped me dress again. She even acted as a lookout so I wouldn't have to see a soul on my way out of the hospital. I burned hot and cold again, so grateful it was late at night. As we slid through the dark town in the old car, I watched my mother's pale profile.

"I'm so tired of it, Vi," I said as we wended down Lake Street.

"Of what?" she said. "What are you tired of?"

"Humble pie. I've eaten enough of it for a lifetime, I think."

Vi turned off the car in the driveway, and stared straight at the garage. Averell Cottage's lights were bright before us, Reverend Milky's manatee silhouette outlined against a window in the mudroom. "Things happen for a reason, Willie," she said. "I think maybe you needed a little humility."

I did not have the strength to lash back. I just nodded, climbed out of the car, and went inside behind my mother. She embraced Reverend Milky, putting her head against his fleshy, warm chest. I heard him murmur into her hair, "Clarissa will be on the plane tomorrow afternoon," and heard her grunt back, tired. He gave me a smile filled with such a depth of pity that I dropped my head in confusion. And, when I stepped around them to climb the old stairs, saw how they were enlaced, two unlovely aging bodies, I felt, for a moment, the darkest envy I have ever felt in my life.

I awoke to a day gray-felted with raindrops, the smell of the August dirt softening into mud. Though I normally rose at dawn, I lay in bed long past eight, listening to the rain thump and trickle off the roof. If I kept my eyes closed, I knew, I would eventually go back to sleep. If I slept enough, I would forget all about the Faux Lump and how it infected my brain and my body; I'd forget about Primus Dwyer and that unsettling Ezekiel Felcher; I'd forget that Reverend Milky was always hanging about; I'd forget everything to do with my sperm-donor father and the many messy centuries of my messy, messy family.

I was about to say all this to the Lump, the way I'd grown accustomed to our private little asides, and then I remembered that there was no such thing as the Lump, and that there never had been.

And so I concentrated on putting myself into a five-day coma; long enough, I imagined, to take the edge off the sting from the hospital visit, long enough to let the first day of school arrive with me still on the wrong side of the country. But before I could achieve even a fragment of a coma, my mother knocked and came into my room. She stood over the bed, fiddling with the pearl buttons on the strange, flabby orange cardigan she was wearing.