Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (10 page)

Nor did she feel requital when Powers and his wife died on their way to the Bahamas in a charter plane. She had not wished him—as she wished Jamie Pearson—dead. She bore no grievance that would demand requital in some coral reef off Nassau in the Bahamas. Harriet has never been to Nassau in the Bahamas, nor, for the matter of that, to water warm enough for coral reefs. But she owns coral necklaces and bracelets, and she had seen photographs in
National Geographic
of the Great Barrier Reef. Magic fish and eels can snout their way through coral, whereas men would flay themselves on contact with the pointed nubbins of the rock. Their skin would shred and bleed and sharks would follow the blood trail and make a noonday snack of Samuel Powers and his bride. She wonders, idly, if sharks eat human hair. She wonders if they’d lop off his wife’s head entirely, or leave the strands of orange hair to coil through the coral like weed.

Now she feels sleep slipping up. She has twenty minutes to rest. She switches off the electric blanket; “Lord forgive them their trespasses,” she prays, “as I would ask forgiveness of my own.” She thinks of Thomas Sherbrooke, whose knowledge of ships had been meager; he had piloted a rowboat once, on Parrin Lake. He had learned to swim and had bought boats in bottles, she imagines, and watched the firelight gleam off their rigging and sails. He would have watched for hours, his elbows on the desk.

Whales would spout to starboard. Dolphins would follow the ship. He lay on the forward deck, thinking of home, noting how the water underneath him was moving so much faster than water in the near distance, or at the horizon. There were bands of water. He knew the waves were demarcation points. (“Dear mother and father,”—he had sent one letter home—“Forgive me if you can. I’m off on what we sailors call the ‘Bounding Main.’ I have no regrets or uncertainty in making my fortune this way, and sure I am to do it because the ship runs four boats and is fitted out with 3500 barrels and for a voyage of 3 years. We are going ‘round Cape Horn and to the South Pacific Ocean in a voyage after sperm whales with a crew of 27 men, and very pious Officers. I am satisfied with my situation and Prospects except only in the grief I caused by the manner of my leaving but you
must not worry
for me, not you particularly mother. There were contrary winds and averse currents but we weathered them and recruited off Payta as also recruited off Tecamur and stand now at a full compliment of men. Tell Daniel to be a good boy and not to do as I have done unless he wishes also to be a burden to his parents. Tell him remember me.”)

She pictures her ancestor, gold-haired, blue-suited, laying down his quill pen to breathe and sigh and stare and brush away hot tears. The ship would heave in the windless swell; the smell of rum was rank. She pictures him rereading—as she herself has countless times reread—his single letter: “It is impossible to describe the misery of the slaves both here and at Rio in particular you would hardly conceive that with all its fine palaces and grand houses with the King of Portugal riding in his splendid Gilt Coach and officers attending him there could be so much misery but while your eyes would be dazeled with all the splendor you will turn them away and see twenty or thirty poor slaves chained together bearing heavy burdens. Your soul sickens at the sight. But I am forgetting my story I went while there to see the place where the slaves were whiped there was one about to be Punished as he was tied to the post his back stripped and 150 lashes given him he uttered not a groan and when the horrible scene was finished the blood lay in pools at his feet and his body was so mangled and torn that he could not rise but lay senseless until he was carried away. Give my love to all the children tell them to forgive my faults and if possible to forget them. Give my love to all my relations and friends if I have any. I hope to be a steward shortly in the Captain’s mess, and share his rations and musick what time he has musick to share . . . ”

He stands in the whaleboat, balancing. There are harpooners behind him. The harpoon is intricately carved, and the blade has a green sheen. It is polished. There is blubber and blood and, astonishingly, reefs that rise like candelabras from the troughs of waves. (“I have hopes you will forgive the rash step your son taken, signing on at Falmouth for which I am undutiful but repentant, and if ever I return again which God grant I shall endeavour to make good in esteem but no more for the present it is too much . . . I get in common with the rest of us the 1.75 lay or one barrel out of 1.75 . . . ”)

The harpoon shaft rests on his shoulder, and the shoulder acts as a fulcrum; it is tattooed. She peers at the tattoos but is unable to decipher them—they do not signify. They are black and red and bulbous. They are changing, self-wreathed shapes. His shoulder aches. He weeps. He fingers the tattoos. She knows there is a message there, but not for her to read.

VI

They eat. He eats in silence, mostly, while Harriet makes conversation. “I want you to remind me,” she says, “to have them plant shallots this spring. Shallots would be wonderful with meat like this, and I can’t buy them anywhere—not Morrisey’s, not anywhere. We could have them every day all winter long. They keep.”

Finney has brought the three wills. He has followed Judah’s instructions; they are alike and brief. Hattie has her constant portion, and there are bequests. The charities amount to one hundred thousand dollars—ten of them each getting ten. The principal beneficiaries, however, change; one testament allots the bulk of the estate to Ian, one to Maggie, and one to an agreed-upon division, half and half of an assessment of the whole. There are copies in the briefcase Finney carries. He will be one witness and will take them to his office for a second witness and to have them notarized and filed.

The lawyer has learned not to offer advice. Some clients want his opinion, but it’s wasted time with Judah and not worth the fuss. He knows that Ian has no chance, that this entire dispensation ceremony is no more than a charade. He had been tempted, almost, to try to track Ian down. He had wanted to see Judah’s face if both of them arrived—but then Finney thought that this too might have pleased his client. And then he thought that Maggie might inform her son, or maybe the letter would anyhow reach him; then he thought the simplest thing is do what Judah asked. He bills for his time, whichever way, and each of them will be a legal binding document once signed. If pressed to it, he’d say that Judah’s crazy like a fox. “Ours not to reason why,” he reminds himself, “ours but to do and do it properly.” He’d set the briefcase by the sideboard and received a Scotch from Judah and ventured a joke: “It’s your funeral,” he’d said.

Finney drinks. He requires the hair of the dog. He needs an entire kennel, based on what transpires here, based on what these people think is sensible; he swirls the whiskey in his glass, watching the water separate out from Scotch. The Big House isn’t big enough to contain Margaret Sherbrooke; the state of Vermont isn’t big enough, and he’s heard she’d flown the coop as far as San Francisco, figuring the whole East Coast wasn’t sufficient, thinking maybe she’d try for Hawaii. Finney knows the type. He knows the ones who go to court with a black eye from a door or maybe some Italian who obliged them, and wail and say it was their husband and can they please have everything he owns. He knows the ones who sign on late then want to leave early, taking fifty percent of the whole. But though he heaps them all together—with the ambulance chasers and the malpractice people and the ones who run to Canada, then ask for amnesty—Maggie is one of a kind. Finney figures her at fifty, and maybe a year or so past it, but you’d never know by looking and you’d have to do the arithmetic twice. She’s playing Florence Nightingale tonight. She is all smiles and chatter and hot compresses and sympathy; Judah’d got what he wanted by getting her back. But Florence Nightingale contracted syphilis, Finney knows, and died in the Crimea of a dose. That was the hell of a thing—he finishes his drink and jangles the ice cubes and figures maybe he’d best pour the second go-round himself. You pick a model of charity and decency and selflessness, and make her a model for nurses, and she gets the clap.

He pours. He is here to safeguard the Sherbrooke interests. Heavily, he toasts her; she smiles up at him sideways, batting her eyes. But she is a Sherbrooke also, and an interested party, and Judah’s never even entertained the notion of divorce. He himself suggested it, and Hattie no doubt suggested it often. But Finney got a flat-out no, and Hattie probably got worse, a mind-your-own-business-not-mine.

“Are you happy to be back?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Does it still feel like home to you?”

“Of course it does.”

“Why did you leave then?” Judah asks, interrupting them.

“You know.”

“No, really . . .

“Let’s not start that, Jude,” Hattie says. “Not now.”

“Why not? No time like the present . . .”

“I never heard you say that,” Maggie says.

“All right. What brings you here?”

“The love I bear you.” She says this with the precision of a prerehearsed recital, looking at Finney instead.

“Bore,” Judah says.

“
Bear
.” She cites her letter to him. “And you said you bore me once.”

“How was the trip?”

“When did you get my letter?”

“Monday.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Tore it up,” he lies. “Flushed it down the toilet. Gave it to Hattie instead.”

She turns to her sister-in-law, but Harriet asks for the salt.

It had happened to him with his son. Feeding Ian, watching how his baby learned to swallow or stick out his tongue, inserting the small spoon with its quotient of apricot or carrot or banana mush, Judah remembered feeding his mother—with her on her final bed, drooling. Lavinia Sherbrooke lingered for months, force-fed by him or one of the nurses—eating from china, and with the best silver and crystal. But she ate only mush or a boiled egg maybe on a strong morning, with maybe a sip of champagne. She ate with the witless deliberation that signaled bodily function and not her spirit’s purpose; her intention, she declared, had been to call it quits.

Judah fed his mother patiently, announcing how the egg was fresh; he’d plucked it from the chicken coop five minutes before boiling. “It should set up,” she said. “There’s such a thing as over-fresh.” She said the glass she drank from stank, and that it smelled of onions, or possibly garlic or scallions, she wasn’t certain which. He brought her day-old eggs, and she said they were too old.

Still, the room is peopled. There had been birthday celebrations and dinners for the Governor, when the Governor came south. There had been eighteen servants quartered in the servants’ wing. Directly above his bedroom, in a third-floor storage hall, dresses hang. His grandmother had had the habit of preserving the year’s most beautiful dress and selecting it on Christmas Eve. She would give the rest away to charity or servants or nieces—or, if she were fond of the fabric but not style, would have the dress remade. The storage hall was cedar-lined, and the commodes and chests were cedar, and therefore the clothes stayed moth-free; Harriet strewed camphor on the floor. His grandmother, commemorating, would pin a note to the left shoulder of the dress—so Judah, holding a yellow lace-embroidered flaring full-length gown would read:
1882. June 25th The Adams Ball. I danced till 2 a.m.
In 1883 she wrote:
January 23. Reception for Anne Watts
—and chose a dress that was predominantly violet, an oriental-influenced arrangement of silks. There were ball gowns and picnic outfits and gowns she wore to christenings, but after 1907, with her husband dead, she wore only black. It pleased him, sleepless, to think of his grandmother’s portly promenading form, and the grave gaiety of Christmas Eve, when she made her selection. There were hats and riding habits and gloves and shawls in profusion. There were mantillas on pegs.

“I, Judah Porteous Sherbrooke, being of sound mind and body, hereby declare . . .”

“Don’t,” Hattie says.

“I do declare,” Maggie mocks him. The women lean together.

“And dispose as follows . . .”

“Jude,” she says. “Remember the day we got married? You flustered the J.P. so—what was his name again, Thompson? We were married in this very room—Paul Thompson, that was it.”

“Yes,” Hattie says. “He lived in Eagle’s Bridge. He ran for Sheriff, later, but he lost, remember, and every time he did a marriage he warned about breaking the law.”

“What I remember”—Maggie reached around the glasses and put her hand on his—“was when he came to the part about goods. I still don’t know if it’s ‘earthly’ or ‘worldly’ because you had him flustered . . .”

“
You
did,” Judah says.

“What I remember, anyway, is how he mixed the two together and came up with ‘worthly goods.’ ”

She will not leave off teasing, Judah knows. She takes his declaration on her terms.

“And then we were all out on the porch. And he said he’d take the wedding picture and you focused it for him and came to stand beside me and he must have sneezed or something because when we developed it he’d missed the two of us entirely.”

“Legs,” Finney says, “He got those.”

“So what we have is ‘worthly goods’ and a bunch of steps that needed painting. That’s what I remember,” Maggie says.

“Are you finished?”

“No. You don’t have to announce,” she says, “every little thing you’re planning. It works out different, anyhow, it’s never the way we expect.”

“Amen to that,” Finney says.

“He’s got the papers,” Judah says. “There in that briefcase. It’s yours.”

It is water, always, that he works his way through—water where she sports and luxuriates, the liquid that surrounds her so she is
of
, not
in
it.

“Ninety-eight percent of our body, Jude,” she’d said to him, “is water.”

“Fact?”

“True fact. And every single body cell is mostly water too. We come from it and swim in it our first nine months”—she pointed to her stomach—“like little Ian-Betsy is swimming in there now.”

He managed swimming well enough and had been a strong swimmer. He flailed at the Battenkill, going upriver, and didn’t give ground to the current. But it had been assertion always, and not relinquishing, not lazing on his back. He gauged his progress by the river snags and branches and rocks on the bank; she made no effort he could see but wriggled and flipped her way past him with slithering ease.

“You’re fighting it, Judah,” she’d say.

“Talking of onions,” Harriet says, “we’re mostly out of them. There’s water in the cellar now three inches deep. It doesn’t seem that way above ground, not the worst mud season ever, but it’s bad enough below, I tell you, and very lucky I looked.”

“The wet went deep,” he offers.

Maggie fiddles with the cutlery. “What else can you tell me?” she asks.

He says, of course, no question; it has been in his mind all along. It had been the first thing he intended to discuss. But somehow he got sidetracked, someway it was hard to raise the subject: Do what you want with the house. Judah has no wishes, none that count. Mouse droppings on the carpet she had prized so highly, and squirrels using insulation for their nests—what happens happens anyhow; a stitch in time saves nothing; anyhow the fabric rends. No question, Judah said, he’d been meaning from the first to make some fitting dispensation and quittance for all claims.

That’s why he summoned her; that’s why he’d wished each heir and legatee to come. Ian, of course, failed to show. Ian has been busy with whatever busies him. Finney had no address they were sure of; nor did they try much more than middling hard to notify that missing person of the chance he’d missed. You couldn’t put a wanted poster up, you couldn’t have the post office print an announcement: Ian Sherbrooke, come on home; collect your proper inheritance, your parcel of the acreage and floor of the house and three hundred thousand dollars at the ticket window, please. That’s what drove him off to start with, and it wouldn’t haul him back and if it did he wasn’t worth the finding anyway.

So everything gets sidetracked, he tells her; every talk they had would trail off into bickering. You get to telling someone how jade plants require water. You tell him how the axle on Harry Turley’s Packard split like a toothpick that time. It was like the differential was all teeth, like murder with malice aforethought when the front end dropped. You get to tracking little live things every which way, busy in the scurry of it, keeping up your prattle and dispensing Kaopectate to the very young or elderly, and there is somehow nothing left, no time and not much inclination for the rolltop desk and settling up accounts. You’ve worked your way through balance sheets before. You do it to your satisfaction, toting up a deal more black than red, then looking up and squinting to see an angel of some sort of mercy or death hover stork-legged in the hallway, waiting for your verdict as to which is suitable, water or the undiluted wine.

He himself was open-handed. He’d said why not, what the hell, there’s plenty more and he’d elected wine, saying come along, step on it, Maggie, hop in, we’re going for a hop-step-drive along the Old East Road. There are potholes. There is Harry Turley’s Packard to remember. There is, Judah tells himself, every blunder that you ever made or might still be about to make, rankling so your ears would hum; there is this creature telling you Manhattan Island is a better place for bikes. It isn’t memory. Your memory is good, is maybe better than most. They told you that in school or at the auction barn, and you never lost a number series once you learned it. And anyhow he needs no reminding, knows the present forms the future and is a kind of prophecy that will be history when the future is also the past. I meant to tell you, baby, it’s been in my mind all along. There is yon valley and her pursed lips on him and her hand and her thin cheeks puckered, and the strands of her hair on her cheeks, the way the sweat adheres to skin; there is the jingle of
adieu
and
whatever I do
.

“Please pass the salt,” Finney says.