Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 (6 page)

Caitlin was getting worse. Her lips were slightly purple most of the time, and she used oxygen at night. Michael and Jennifer tried to convince Scott to keep her in bed, but Caitlin wanted so badly to be outside that Scott didn't have the heart to keep her in.

On a Sunday afternoon, Scott watched from a little distance as she played alone atop the fallen trunk of a decaying red cedar. She had given names to various crevices in the soft red bark: the living room, the kitchen, the school. “No, Mr. Ghost,” he heard her say, “you have to stay in the kitchen and cook the Queen's oatmeal."

Scott had never seen her so beautiful.

"Go away, Daddy,” Caitlin said. “My unicorn only likes girls and you're making her shy."

He didn't want to leave, but it was a direct order, so he moved off a hundred feet and sat on the soft fir leaves. The gray sky—the sky was always gray here in Olympia—thinned to tease him with the sun. He felt like he had lead weights in his chest. “I can still see you,” Caitlin said.

Reluctantly, Scott obeyed and took a path that led beside the Carsons’ house to the river. The water level had fallen now, and wooded islands were rising out of it, their re-exposed branches broken and tangled with long thready strands. A rustle came through the wet overhanging foliage and Scott saw Cary walking along the muddy path toward him.

"How are the new grafts doing?” Scott asked. Cary pulled back his cap and Scott examined the sewn-in tissue. It seemed quite healthy.

They walked downstream together until they reached the field of trilliums in flower, their white and purple petals lighting up both sides of the trail.

Cary kneeled and delicately touched one. In Washington, it was illegal to pick trilliums because they took twenty years to bloom. Longer, Scott thought, than Caitlin will ever live.

"I have a bit of surprising gossip,” Cary said.

"Tell me,” Scott said.

"Hold onto your hat. The minister's wife is a body artist too."

"Jennifer? You're kidding."

"She cuts on herself,” Cary said. He seemed to be speaking to the flower. “It's the same idea."

Scott was shocked, and then not so shocked. “How do you know?"

"She came over to preach on me and I saw the scars under her nylons."

"She admitted it?"

"She was glad to have someone to talk to. It's hard being a minister's wife. I feel for both of them, having to keep a lid on everything."

"Considering what the two of them say about you, it's rather hypocritical."

Cary laughed. “I can accept hypocrisy. It's a kind of mutilation."

They walked back together and it was only when Cary headed off home that Scott realized how much the body artist's presence had comforted him.

He'd only been gone ten minutes, but that felt irresponsible. When he came close and didn't hear Caitlin's voice he forced his way through the soggy underbrush and called her name. She didn't answer. He found her lying face up on the soft, crumbling red bark. For a moment he could convince himself it was part of her game and then he knew it wasn't a game.

He called 911 and rode with her in the ambulance. They brought in a cot for him and he stayed with her in the ICU. He'd done this twice before but this would be the last time: Caitlin was brain dead.

His mind wouldn't stop clubbing him. Each time he woke from sleep his body felt bruised.

Michael and Jennifer came by to visit. Michael sat on the edge of the cot while Jennifer stood near Caitlin and stroked her matted hair. Scott wished they would leave but he didn't have the energy to say anything.

"We got in touch with your ex-wife,” Michael said.

The surprise barely penetrated. “How did you know how to reach her?"

"We've had her number for a while."

"And you didn't tell me?"

"She didn't want you to know."

Scott rubbed his own matted hair and felt dull-witted. “Is she coming?"

"She's already here. She's with the hospital administrator."

"The hospital administrator? Why?"

"To make sure that Caitlin is kept alive. To make sure you don't abort her this time either."

Scott heard echoes from the future: injunctions, hearings, his guilt and Caitlin's half-life on the cover of magazines.

He ordered them to leave, but before they could move the door opened and Dawn came in. Jennifer took her hand and the two of them looked defiantly at Scott.

Dawn's face was radiant. If she hadn't been much of a mother during Caitlin's waking life, she'd make up for it now.

He drove home and took a shower and made himself a meal. He considered calling Bruce and asking to borrow a gun.

But he called Cary instead.

"I'll be right over,” Cary said. He brought a black bag. “Let me teach you,” he said.

He set the bag on Scott's dining room table and drew out objects: a doll, a worm, a fishing weight. He explained what he had in mind. Later that evening, they walked down to Cary's house and performed the surgery.

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Neile Graham—Rousay, Orkney—

When a mile-long walk can take you five thousand years

(from a farm to a grave, a miracle of geography, of transdimensional space)

how can you believe this is simply a beach? On a small island? In the far north, north of Scotland, north of the civilized world?

It is. Low waves shadow your steps, echo them, count you as one of the passing fray. They don't mind you one bit. So you start at the beginning, at Midhowe, where the humble rusting hangar shelters the stalled, empty graves of

Neolithic farmers.

You're on a walkway above them. What do you look down on?

All of those five thousand years, or more? Each stall marks where the bones now aren't. How can you imagine the hands that made these?

You can't. Step out into the salt wind. On the promontory now you trace

Midhowe broch. It's new: first century B.C.E., the Iron Age, is almost like home now, isn't it? Isn't it? Okay, try

Brough Farm which flourished between 1200 and 1600, surely that's easier and you've already come a few steps down the beach.

Another broch here.

You try to imagine the towers so close, how the people might have huddled there against raiders, then spilled out in safety across the fields. Still no easier. Damn. How about the Wirk?

What? Not enough left to imagine at all. So St. Mary's Church.

Surely that's easier.

The small shape buttressed to keep it from sliding down the slope to those waves, or better yet here's Skaill farm, empty since

The Clearances.

The Norseness of its name brings you to Viking times. Does that make you uneasy? The dragon prows? The funny hats?

Walk on.

Here's another stalled chambered tomb. Knowe of Roweigar, safely buried in turf. The cow by the notice board eyes you with something like disdain.

You pass now the Knowe of Swandro (a broch, again kindly buried, visible only to the knowledgeable eye), the Norse Hall

(Vikings again).

So here an uneventful walk to Moa Ness, where Picts and Vikings buried their dead. You are pleased to hear the Picts had no grave-goods, were simply laid in their graves. That seems simple and clean.

Not so the Viking grave there, revealing a woman and her newborn, she, covered with many grave-gifts, two oval brooches, a silvergilt ringed pin with gold filigree and amber inlaid. Now it strikes you.

Now you can imagine the grief of one who would lay her there, them there, picture him and the shovels of shore dirt, picture that grief. See one death

(one life)

amongst all of these. You're safe now. Pass the Noust, a simple boat house. That's nothing much. Come now to the end:

Westness House, the laird's seat. It's only a big farm, a manor; there are stories here, too, those you don't need to make up for yourself (Bonnie

Prince Charlie! India!

Pre-Raphaelites and all! The 19th C!) There, now.

You're done. You've come so far and you're not even tired.

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Michael Hartford

My great-grandfather was an egg collector, one of the last of the gentleman oologists. At the height of his activities—he was born in 1886, and started raiding birds’ nests in about 1904—he had a reputation among collectors for daring and tenacity. In the newsletters and journals amateur oologists distributed among themselves, his initials—MQR, for Maxwell Quinn Russell—appear frequently above notes on the nesting habits of cliff-dwelling falcons and puffins, and sketches of rare tawny owl eggs. Other oologists, even some associated with universities in Chicago and Cleveland, corresponded frequently with him, asking him questions about the distribution of swallow-tailed kites and red-tail hawks, and the breeding patterns of spotted cuckoos. Toward the end of his life—he died in 1966, two years before I was born—he was gathering his papers for his memoirs, tentatively titled “The Egg-Collector's Notebook."

I know all this because I inherited his cabinet when my father died. It was a mahogany chest almost as tall as me, with intricate scenes of birds in flight and willow trees sighing beside winding rivers inlaid in teak and ivory. When the doors swung open and folded back against its sides, they revealed a warren of drawers and slots and yet more doors, many with yellowing index cards affixed to them behind gold-colored plates.

Inside the drawers and slots and cupboards were yet more boxes and small chests and papers tied with brittle blue and pink ribbons. And all of this nested containment, the boxes in boxes in boxes, was in the service of MQR's collection of empty eggs. The cabinet was, in the end, a massive container of air.

My wife couldn't stand the cabinet. Its vaguely Oriental styling and dark wood clashed with the bright, spare, modern furniture she prefers, and it gave off a camphor-and-dust odor when the doors were opened. Since its arrival at our house two years ago, a week after my father's death, the cabinet had squatted in almost every room, until finally it was banished to the back bedroom with everything else that is eventually forgotten: dresses and suits that have grown small as we've grown large, paintings that once seemed so avant garde but are now hopelessly dated, entire sets of dinnerware that are the wrong colors for the foods we eat now. The room was full to the point where it was almost impossible to walk through it, and the door stayed sensibly locked, as did my great-grandfather's cabinet.

Locked, that is, until this week. Last month my wife told me to get rid of the cabinet, she didn't care how: sell it, burn it, bury it at sea, just so long as it left the house. I couldn't imagine dragging the cabinet, my great-grandfather's life work, to the curb; I felt myself to be its curator, the keeper of a man's passion, and I had to deliver it into the hands of someone who would continue in my stewardship.

So I made inquiries. The dealers in art objects and antiques whom we know would be not much interested in the cabinet; their world is full of Barcelona chairs and Corbusier lounges, brushed aluminum and stiff plastic. But they know people who know people who live in darker, mustier, rounder worlds, where shadows fill up corners and surprising specimens burst out of uneven drawers. I've seen shops where apothecary tables are lined with jars of powdered monkey paws and extract of nightshade, and hat blocks split open to reveal lockets woven from corpses’ hair. We pass by those places, my wife and I, drawn instead to shiny surfaces like acquisitive crows, but I know they exist, so I know there is a race of people who surround themselves with camphor and dust.

I left my card with the dealers we know, with a brief description of the cabinet scribbled on the back: “oologist's cabinet, c. 1912, Orientalist style with rare collection intact.” The dealers, thin men with wire-framed glasses and starched white collars, would look quizzically at the card, look at me and recall the International table or Mondrian sketch we had bought from them, and slip the cards into their pockets. And I would thank them, look longingly at the Bitossi bowls displayed in their windows, then go home and wait.

Then late one night, after my wife had gone to bed, the woman came to my door. It was raining out, had been raining for days, and her black coat faded into the darkness so that her pale face seemed to be floating in the dim porch light. She held up my card, on which the description of the chest was smudged as if she had worried it with her thumb, and looked up at me with a longing I have never seen before in a woman's eyes.

I hurried her onto the porch and took her coat; she stood wordlessly, her lank black hair dripping onto her shoulders, until I put my hand gently in the small of her back and steered her inside. Even when we got to the locked door where I fumbled for the key yet she had not spoken; she looked straight ahead with those desperate eyes.

When I finally got the door open, I apologized for the disorder. But she was already halfway across the room before I had the light on, moving quickly and surely and never once stumbling against the boxes and crates, almost as if she were floating above the disarray. I followed as quickly as I could, banging my shins against the corners and making a meandering path through the clutter. When I joined her before the cabinet, she was tracing the delicate inlaid patterns with her bony fingers. She straightened herself, smoothed her simple black skirt, and looked at me again with parted lips and those beseeching eyes.

I fumbled on my chain again for the cabinet's key, finally found it, and pulled open the doors. She stood in front of the warren of drawers and cupboards for several long moments, then knelt before the cabinet and pressed her palms against it. I thought I heard a low sigh, almost a moan, slide out of her mouth. I stepped back to give her space, almost tripping on a box full of old shoes.

She wasn't pretty, barely handsome, with straight black hair to her shoulders and skin so pale it seemed blue. Her eyes were a little too big for her head, set far apart, and almost solid black; I couldn't see the line between pupil and iris. She had thin, delicate hands with very long fingers, and elbows so sharp I thought they would cut open the sleeves of her white Oxford shirt. Her figure was like a child's stick picture, with only the slightest curve at breast and hip. I couldn't tell her age; she might have been anywhere between twenty and fifty. She gave off a smell something like gardenias floating in rainwater, sweet and loamy, with an undertone of decay.