Blue Asylum (17 page)

“Yeah?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Tell me.”

“All these fights?”

“Yeah?”

“I ain’t never shot anyone.”

Ambrose thought he hadn’t heard right. “What?”

“I’ve never fired my gun. I can’t, Ambrose, I can’t.”

“Why’d you join up, then?”

Seth was quiet for a moment. “Same reason everyone else did, I guess. But I didn’t think war would be like this. It’s worse than anything I ever imagined.”

“Well, you’re not doing the South much good if you’re not killing any Yankees.” He felt a sudden anger for this boy whose hands weren’t bloody. “What do you think would happen if none of us pulled the trigger?”

The tent was quiet.

“Ambrose?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna run. I can’t take this no more. I’ll go hide out in a smokehouse. Sleep in hickory ashes.”

“They’re shooting deserters now. You know that.”

“I know.”

Ambrose watched the orange glow of a campfire through the fabric of the tent. A hickory log sputtered in the fire, briefly scalding the song of nearby crickets. A soldier muttered something in his sleep. A dog padded by on three legs, from the sound of it.

“Never figured you for yellow,” Ambrose whispered, bitter.

“If that makes me yellow, fine. I’ll be yellow as a pound cake, yellow as lemonade. Yellow as a field of daisies. Let the cows graze on me. I don’t care.”

They were keeping watch the night Seth ran. Ambrose knew he was leaving. He could tell by the look in the younger man’s eyes.

Fifty yards behind them, the camp slept.

“Stay off the roads,” Ambrose said. “And travel at night.”

“I know.”

Ambrose thought he was going to feel jealousy at this moment. Raging jealousy, because he just didn’t have it in him to run. Instead he felt only love. And that was the miracle. The surge in hatred since the war began had created more love around it. It was indomitable, mad, and everlasting, scattered through the rich and the poor, deep and calm in the Quakers, hot and fierce in the mothers, faithful in the warriors, wistful in the pets, seeping its way into mercy and atrocity, destroying things, rebuilding them.

He let Seth go, out of love. Seth leaned his rifle against a tree and walked away into the dark.

Just as Seth freed himself, Ambrose broke free as well. The knot on the leather strap of his right hand finally came loose, and he wasted no time untying the left hand and leaping from the bed. His bladder was going to burst. He walked over to the window. Outside was a clump of pampas grass, two circling butterflies, and then bare sand moving into dunes and then finally finishing at the surf. Ambrose unbuttoned his pants and urinated through the bars, a high arcing stream, yellow as the butterflies. Ambrose smiled. Because, because, because.

Iris stirred her oatmeal but could not eat it. The kiss had taken her appetite, and her ability to sleep. She could feel her plan for escape unraveling. Her desire to leave had been compromised by her feelings for the soldier. But what right did she have to feel anything for another man? She was, after all, a married woman in the eyes of the law. Once she was safely back home in Winchester, she told herself, Ambrose and everyone else on this island would fade away, leaving her to the sanctuary of her old bedroom in her old home. Why couldn’t the boy, Wendell, have given her an answer last night? Why did he say he needed time to think? What was there to think about?

She detected a disturbance in the dining room and looked up to see Dr. Cowell stride into the room directly toward her, ignoring the curious glances of the nurses, the attendants, and the other patients. “Papa!” one of them shouted, but he paid no attention. He came right over to her table and sat down directly across from her.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked by way of greeting.

“Done?”

“Don’t pretend innocence. Mr. Weller had a terrible fit. His worst so far.”

She felt twin stabs in her stomach, one at the mention of Ambrose’s name and the next at the mention of his torment.

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “Is he speaking?”

“Yes, he is speaking. But it is how he speaks to me that gives me concern. He is sullen and disrespectful. I fear he is relapsing into madness. All because of you and your influence upon him. How could you kiss that man? Never mind you are married. He is seriously ill!”

She nodded. “I’m sorry.”

His eyebrows rose. “You are?”

“Yes. I don’t know what came over me. I was in a vulnerable state and I allowed the kiss. But I was immediately regretful.”

“Well,” he said, his authoritative voice creeping back, “you are not to see him anymore, or talk to him again.”

“I think that’s for the best. Believe it or not, he is proving just as unhealthy for me as I have been for him.” She smiled at the doctor, feeling sad but grateful that he had removed the torment of Ambrose’s company for her. She was almost fond of the man sitting in front of her with the cravat tied crookedly and his expression of rage slowly dissolving into confusion. He studied her a moment, looking utterly lost. He rose from the table and left the room.

Wendell knew what dinner would be. Sheepshead. He’d helped the chef catch it earlier in the day. He stared at his plate with a measure of pride.

He hadn’t slept well the night before. Shocked by Iris’s story and scandalized by her demand, he’d paced his room. He glanced at his father. Judging by the older man’s mood, Wendell sensed he shouldn’t engage him tonight. He did it anyway, because he was a boy.

“Father? How do you know when someone’s crazy?”

The doctor sighed. “That’s a very complicated question. There’s no simple answer. Now, can we stop talking about madness while I eat my supper in peace?”

“He was just asking a question, Henry,” Mary said.

“I
know.
”

Wendell had heard that tone before in his father’s voice. Like a red buoy, it warned a boy to swim no further. And yet he did.

“Father. About the woman, Mrs. Dunleavy.”

The name seemed to make the doctor’s fork-holding mechanism go haywire. The utensil clattered to the plate. He picked it up again.

“Are you sure she’s crazy?” Wendell asked.

“Of course she is. She was judged insane in a court of law. A judge signed the order. A deputy escorted her to this asylum. And I myself evaluated her.”

“But, is she crazy because she ran away with the slaves?” Wendell asked.

“She ran away with the slaves?” Mary asked, fascinated.

The doctor glared at his son. “How did you know that? You’re not supposed to know that!”

“I heard it from a nurse!” Wendell sensed he had gone too far but the red buoy was bobbing behind him now; he was in free ocean space and he paddled madly, kicking his legs hard. “And she told me herself! But she had her reasons! Good reasons. Has she told you the reasons?”

His father had turned quite red. “You are not to be talking to that woman, do you understand?”

“Lower your voice. You’re frightening him,” Mary said.

“Hush, woman!”

Mary looked shocked.

Wendell stopped kicking. He was so far out to sea he couldn’t see the shore. “I’m sorry, Father. We just collect shells. It’s . . . it’s . . .” He searched for the grand word he’d heard his father use. “It’s therapeutic!”

His father threw down his napkin and rose from his chair. He pointed his finger at Wendell. “I am telling you right now, that if I see you speaking to that patient again—that lunatic, that demented woman—you will be confined to the hospital grounds. Do you understand?”

Wendell glanced at his mother, hoping for a bit of support, but she, too, seemed stricken by her husband’s behavior. She just sat there, blinking, as the members of the family stared at each other in the aura of cooling fish and dying candlelight.

“I understand, Father,” Wendell said at last.

“Good. Because I am the head of this asylum and I am the head of this family and I will be respected!”

The door slammed behind him. Wendell turned to his mother, bewildered.

“Why does he hate Mrs. Dunleavy?”

She stared at the door, her head cocked. “Oh, no, son,” she murmured. Her voice was soft and measured. “He doesn’t hate her at all.”

The doctor took the walkway of broken shells around the building and out the courtyard to the sea, slogging forward in the sand. Ghost crabs skittered away from his feet. A startled cormorant on a dune took flight, scolding him with its call. Overhead glowed a waxing moon and the same sky full of stars that had seemed so fascinating his first night on the island, when his dream of sanctuary still held so much promise.

A great, lumbering shape moved in the darkness. He froze, squinted, and recognized a giant loggerhead turtle crawling toward the dunes to lay her eggs. She dragged herself through the sand with her great fins, moving as though already tired from the journey yet keeping steady progress. He’d heard stories that loggerheads cry when they lay their eggs, great tears by moonlight. But he was not in the mood for another crying female.

The sea rolled back as he stomped toward it and he kept going, down the wet slope, marching purposefully toward the receding waves. Finally he stopped, shoes sinking in sand, as the water roiled back, covering him up to the ankles.

Another patient had applied at the same time as Iris Dunleavy, a woman from Cleveland with terrible waking dreams, but he’d gone over the two applications and chosen the Dunleavy woman, admittedly because hers was the more intriguing story.

So far she had caused nothing but trouble. So far she had refused to listen to him, assaulted the matron, called him terrible names, and driven his favorite patient into outright defiance. Now she was causing his own son to question his authority. She who could not fit into her own society was now destroying his little island colony, breaking the rules that had served as its bedrock. She had searched the recesses of her mad brain devising the schemes of his undoing.

This morning, when he had marched into the dining hall prepared to confront her over her rash and psyche-unraveling kiss, she had completely taken him off guard by meekly acquiescing, agreeing with him for the very first time. Indeed, he had even glimpsed the same look of genuine gratitude in her eyes as once lived in Ambrose Weller’s. Her voice had been so gentle, so reasonable.

He gave in. Crouched down, placed his hand over his heart, bowed his head. And surrendered to it. That fantasy he had pushed out of his head so many times. He let it come now. Tears in his eyes, he felt her, naked beneath him. She stared into his eyes and that fire in them wasn’t madness or the quest for independence. It was lust, ferocious adoration, worship. For him, for him. He put his nose into the nape of her neck and smelled her, the scent of wild and sweet, like an animal thrashing inside a nest of honeysuckle. The syrup, the musk.
Henry,
she said in his ear, breaking the final boundary between doctor and patient. He shut his eyes tighter, horrified and ecstatic.

A strong wave rode up the shore and soaked his shoes, ending his daydream. He opened his eyes and stood. The water swirled around his feet. His socks were cold and heavy. A mullet jumped a short distance away in the water, animated over something in a fish’s world. He sighed and started back home, sand clinging to his wet shoes, his steps heavy. The loggerhead was coming back the other way, retracing her path through sand she had broken on the journey to her nesting place. Somewhere above the high-tide line, her sticky eggs clung together beneath the surface of the sand. In a few weeks, the young turtles inside would begin to crawl out and make their way toward the horizon lights as predators from the air and ground rushed forth to eat them.

The doctor and the turtle approached each other, his shoes shuffling, her massive flippers churning the sand. They stopped and exchanged a long stare, man and beast under tropical moonlight, each with their own burdens. He put his head down and kept walking. A mosquito buzzed and he slapped at his neck.

You cannot do it, can you, Henry?
The voice in his mind was utterly defeated.
You cannot let her go.

Clad in her housedress and fox fur slippers, Mary picked her way around the back of the asylum toward the women’s wing. She bumped into yucca plants, gasped at the furtive movement of ghost crabs and rodents. Birds called suddenly over her head. The island turned alien at night. A series of bumps and tweets and flutters and slithers that left her breathless with anxiety. Her slippers sank into the sand.

She had extracted directions to Iris Dunleavy’s room from her reluctant and bewildered son.

“I’m not going to hurt her, my darling. I’m not even going to talk to her. I just want to see her up close.”

And in fact, that was what she did want. To study this beautiful woman she had only seen from afar. The one powerful enough to send her husband into a fit of rage. Mary stumbled on a rock, nearly fell, and then righted herself. It wasn’t fair at all. It was hard work keeping herself groomed and sweet-swelling in the middle of an embargo. Every morning she dressed herself with such care and did the very best she could to please her husband, and he’d returned the favor by falling for an especially comely lunatic.

Iris stood at the window. She had removed the mosquito netting and now held the bars, staring out into the night. She’d successfully banished thoughts of Ambrose, at least for the time being, but now her anxiety centered on the boy. A day had passed since she’d asked him to help her escape. Surely he would come and give his answer that night. Had she made her story convincing enough? Every word had been the truth. Did he know that? And even if he did, was she asking too much of him? Perhaps she was. But what else could she do? Without the boy, escape seemed impossible. All hope lost. She closed her eyes and offered a brief prayer to the God she believed in only in hours of need. When she opened her eyes again, she was staring into the face of Mary Cowell, the doctor’s wife.

Iris gasped.

Mary Cowell screamed and vanished.