The Monsters of Templeton (41 page)

I never did get to take a nap that day.

I was halfway up the stairwell when my heart did a tremendous jig in my chest, and my skin felt swept with a terrible chill. The stairwell seemed to expand, to stretch until it was distorted and immense, the vastness of the lake outside, and then the room snapped back into place and quivered like gelatin around me, until it shook me down so I was sitting on the tread, clutching my temples. There was a great darkness, then, a sucking sound. When I opened my eyes, everything was blurred together, as if my sight had been smeared with grease.

It was only when I stood, wobbly and sick, that I felt it around me. A mass, a heaviness, some alien thing large and terrible; it was only then that I felt the pulse. But the throbbing wasn't in my own heart, and it wasn't in my gut, where I'd so recently believed I held the Lump, either. It was higher, in the muscle between my shoulder and throat, as if it were a second heart, one belonging to a taller person. I wanted to move my hands up to touch it, but I couldn't. My feet would no longer move; my head would no longer move. I had to strain my eyes to peer downward, and I saw how, above my dress, there seemed to be an ethereal fabric moving in an imperceptible wind like cobwebs. On my arms, another dark fabric was shimmying.

My legs moved without me, and I watched them climb the stairs in horror. Foot above foot, so clumsy, as if whatever was in me had forgotten what it was to walk. I felt the eyes of my ancestors, all those pictures, fall on me. As I moved past the guest bathroom I managed a glimpse of myself, and saw my features were dark and veiled. I knew then it was my good ghost, the indirect watcher over my life, that had for now slipped around me. I'd become the yolk in an egg; I'd become one human bone, my body at the marrow and the ghost surrounding it, tense as flesh.

Like this we came into my bedroom, and like this, we picked a random little book off the bed. My alien hands flipped with a hummingbird flutter through the pages until, at last, they stopped. A finger slid down the page until it reached one word. And then my ghosted fingertip scraped at the word until I said it aloud.

Horse, into the wet morning, muffled as if I'd pressed cotton in my ears.

Horse, the ghost tapped again.

Horse, the finger stopped tapping.

I don't understand, I said.

Then the other exhaled a ghostly breath of frustration, though already I had begun to feel suffocated. The book dropped on the bed. Out the door again, down the stairs. Into the entrance hall, into the formal living room, into the dining room with its vast bay windows framing the lake like a gloomy Hudson River portrait, rich with Romantic bluster and poetry in the wet gray wind.

Toward the dining room table I went despite myself, and I took up with two clumsy hands the little horsehair horse on his four ancient wheels. I took it to the glossy dining table and put it down. Stood akimbo looking at it for a while, until I said, smothered, Yes. A horse.

That's when the ghost around me stepped forward and began disassembling it.

Stop! I said when it began unbuckling the little tin buckle on the saddle and slid it off. It didn't stop. My own clumsy foreign fingers dug in the leather under the saddlehorn and prised it apart. And there, in the gaping old wound in the saddle, there was a tiny scrap of yellowed parchment, crispy. When I picked it up, the ghost slid suddenly away with a tremendous popping sound and I gasped and heaved until I felt the air burning the bottoms of my lungs. The paper was so fragile that I held it as gently as a petal I didn't want to crush. The ghost moved outward into the room again. I closed my eyes until my lashes made it even smaller, but this tactic didn't work: the ghost still purpled its way in.

At last I was breathing normally, sitting down, still staring at the paper that flapped and flapped in some small wind on my palm. It was brittle, liable to fall apart into my hand when I did touch it. And though it was only a small scrap, it had the heft of lead.

Before I opened the letter, I looked up so quickly that I caught the very thin edge of the ghost and at last fixed on it. It squirmed and throbbed in oil-coated waves, as if trying to wrench itself away. "Who are you?" I said, but the ghost didn't answer and instead slowly turned dark with impatience, then a horrid eggplant blue. I considered the ghost, its goodness, its obsession with cleanliness, and didn't say what I thought, which was Hetty? I turned back to the paper and opened it. I saw, in child's script, the words Guvnor Averell. And then I read.

Elizabeth Franklin TempleElizabeth Franklin Temple, when young. This was a miniature portrait on ivory that Marmaduke Temple carried around with him on his many travels.

Elizabeth Franklin TempleElizabeth Franklin Temple, at an advanced age. This is a not-very-flattering watercolor and pencil sketch, probably done by one of Jacob Franklin Temple's brood of girls. By that time, Elizabeth had become a shut-in at Temple Manor, legendary for saying her mind at all times.

Chapter
30

Elizabeth Franklin Temple

I HAD HAD a dream of it long before it happened. I was not one for false portents. I am far too Quaker for that.

Every night in my hard bed was this: first the squeak of boots, the hickory-smoke freshness of winter air. Night. Snow sifting down. And somewhere behind, the sound of carousing men, somewhere on Second Street, the crossroad between the Eagle Hotel--the Federalists' bar--and the Bold Dragoon--the Anti-Federalists' Bar. A crowing of victory on one side, and on the other, a fiddle in a reel of defeat. It is only with the swim in my head, the flip souring in my mouth, that I know that I am Marmaduke within the dream, that the vast body at my command is my husband's.

For a moment, there is the maiden three-quarters moon, nailed above the icy lake and powdered hills. And there is the long stretch of the town before me, down the hill to the lake; and behind me, past the boys' academy and the churches into the heifer-rich farms; and to the right, past the Manor and up Mount Vision, where Davey Shipman's cabin sits; and to the left, beyond the bakery and past the new courthouse and jail. A violent uprising of pride rises in my body, the likes of which I--as a waked Elizabeth--have never before felt.

Then there is a strange sound that I cannot identify, and, sudden, a darker sound within my very head, a hollow thump, like a muskmelon dropping to the ground. The slow tilting of the world as my big body goes loose and falls. The face to the cold, hard mud, a horse-smell. And from there, the trees loom dark over the huddled roofs of Second Street, as if they were menacing the town, and my cheek goes numb against the road. My darkening eyes see a stump in the dirt of the road, a vast old stump from some ancient tree, forgotten, cut to nothing in the road, and in the very central crack of this stump, the tiniest of saplings has taken advantage of some small warmth from dropped manure, and is springing up its tender sprig. Then something hot pools inside my ear, the sound of the carousing behind me fades and is replaced by a series of pulses, beats of a vast and terrible heart, and then there is darkness, and then there is a good release.

I dreamed of my husband's death many times, vividly. The mystery has always been who had killed him. He had many enemies, especially with the questionable election that had happened a few days earlier. The recount of the votes was to end that day. He was an intemperate man, my Marmaduke, wrestled too commonly with the pioneers in town, made enemies with his wealth and strength.

But on the night of his murder, I knew who killed him. Even before he died, I knew why.

THE NIGHT BEFORE my husband's death, I had been watching Davey Shipman's cabin, how all through the night the windows gleamed red. Noname was still in labor by morning, for they would have extinguished the light to give her some sleep had she already delivered the child. I, a mother of seven, though only two survived, I knew what the poor child was going through. When the dawn was about to come, I had been fighting against it for hours. I knew even then that the coming evening was the night I dreamt of, the moon, the blow, my Marmaduke's death. Every time I shifted asleep, the dream came, and I awakened, all my hair bristling with fear. Like an animal. At last, I washed myself in my French violet soap, dressed in my lightest gray frock, pinched roses into my cheeks.

And I stole in my softest shoes to Marmaduke's chamber in the west end of the house. In the keen silence, I could hear the dozens of sleeping aspirations that seemed to make the house itself breathe.

I opened Marmaduke's door and entered. It took me a moment to see that he was not sleeping. He was sitting behind his curtains, watching me through the opening. I came to him. He opened his arms, opened the covers for me. Full-clothed, I slipped inside his warmth; I was so small beside him; I had always marveled at this, my size, his, how I was like a child beside him. We didn't move. We didn't speak. I smelled his good smell, his sleep-smell and he kissed me on my temple. How he let off heat like a veritable furnace, and I, who was never warm enough, was now warm to the core.

I thought, I must tell him. It is my duty, so that he will stay home tonight, for the next few nights, allow the danger to pass. I was stalled by something, though, by large fears. Marmaduke did not always do what one thought he would, and I was afraid he would think himself bigger than any risk that could be in the world. Might even go out simply as an act of defiance. I gave myself until I heard Remarkable talking to herself in the kitchen, as she always did in the morning making breakfast. Then I had to tell.

Duke, I said at last, but he kissed me so that I could not say more.

No, he said. Can't we just be silent?

Marmaduke, I said, but he sighed, rolled away. His huge hand held my hand for a moment, swallowing it up. We both stared at the canopy above, the dip in the fabric, the thin, strong posts. I was ready to try again, but then there was the tread of Mingo on the stairwell, bringing up Marmaduke's breakfast, and I had to hurry up and out of the bed, hide behind the door as Mingo came in, then slide out as he kneeled over the fire. I took a long look in the doorway as my husband climbed out of the bed. Even in his undress, he seemed in-vulnerable, and for a moment, seeing his broad feet planting themselves like stumps on the ground, I doubted my dream.

IT WAS NOT an easy day. I could barely breathe with the strain.

LATER, AFTER DINNER. In the parlor, my little son Jacob was playing checkers with his brother, Richard. I with my book, Marmaduke warming his boots by the fire. Every hour, one of the servants went up to the Shipman cabin to check on Noname and bring Midwife Bledsoe another glass of whiskey. For purposes of cleanliness, the midwife claimed. Though, as Remarkable said, Goodwife Bledsoe must be scrubbed as pink as a baby inside. Every hour, Noname grew weaker. Remarkable came in, licking her lips to smile at Marmaduke, reporting every hour or so on the election recount in the offices of the Freeman's Journal. Still counting, Master Duke, she said, shaking her head but not without a gleam of triumph. In the triumph, I feared for my husband.

BY EVENING, NONAME had been in labor for forty hours, and could not be awoken by the midwife. Dr. French went up. By evening, the throng surrounding the Freeman's Journal offices had thinned, and only the trails of chimney smoke made the town seem alive. I saw from my window Elihu Phinney as he sat there, counting, recounting, recounting, checking a list. I watched him. He sat there until dusk.

A DARK DAY already, it was tarblack outside by the time Kent Peck knocked on the door. They said he was a handsome man, but to me he was as attractive as a block of wood. He brought with him his manure smell, the scent of new snow. I shrunk a little into my wraps. The man squeezed his felt hat so that the three corners became six before he surrendered it to Mingo.

Phinney has published the results, Duke, he said. Ran a special print. Found forty-three ballots missing from Otsego alone. Even tallied up likely Federalists and likely Anti-Federalists, and found a gap of near eighty. Claiming it's because we pressed ballots into some folks' hands.

We did press ballots into some folks' hands. Is that wrong? said Richard, growing furious, purple, tightening his fists into dangerous mallets. My poor Richard, so earnest and good. Something had shifted in him over the past few months, I saw. He was not as innocent as he had once been. Phinney pressed ballots himself, Richard continued. I saw him. And I rode with the boxes, and I can attest that there was no wrongdoing on the journey to Albany. That terrible Phinney, that terrible, spiteful man.

A very weighty silence.

The question, said Duke, standing at the mantel underneath the handsome portrait of himself. The question is not what, if anything, happened. The question is what one does now. There are still rough men in these parts. If the rumor goes into the streets of this county, anything could happen to us.

And I in my corner, I who knew Marmaduke so well, knew from this that he had been guilty of some terrible wrongdoing. I knew then that he had dabbled in the election, and it would all turn out horribly wrong.

HOURS, IT SEEMED, they debated what to do.

Peck was for hiding out, calling in the courts of the state to settle it, keeping quiet until the people forgot.

Jacob was for giving that little Scot weasel Phinney a good thrashing, but he was reprimanded by his tutor that children must be seen, not heard, and Marmaduke grinned at his ten-year-old son, who shook his fist at the town through the window.