Blue Asylum (8 page)

“Dr. Cowell.”

A nurse had appeared, one whose skittery demeanor always reminded him of the red-tailed herons that made such a fluttering drama out of nabbing a fish from shallow water. “It’s your son, Wendell. He’s run out of class again.”

The doctor sighed. “In the direction of the woods?”

“Yes. Your wife is afraid he’s up the tree again.”

“Then he can wait until I’m done with my soup.”

“But Mrs. Cowell says—”

“Please! Leave me be!”

“Very well,” she said in a defeated voice, and left him. He hated when he had to talk his son out of his favorite sulking tree, a gumbo limbo that sat on high ground a half-mile from the asylum. The path into the woods ended after a hundred yards. He was going to have to pick his way through the swampy woodland, which harbored not only midges but alligators and water moccasins. He supposed it was too much to ask of his son to shinny up any of the worthy palm trees on the grounds of the asylum.

After a few minutes, he heard different footsteps approach him from behind, then stop. He knew his wife was standing behind him before she said his name, for since the nurse had come to get him, there had not existed the smallest chance of him finishing his meal in peace. She hadn’t dressed for the day and she was still in her long robe and mules. “I have a migraine,” she said in a querulous voice, “and I had to get up off the bed and drag myself out here to get you to do what you would naturally do on your own, were you a caring father.”

“I am a caring father! But I will not be a party to rewarding our son for his dramatics. He’s inherited his tendencies toward hysteria from you and I won’t support them.”

“There are dangers out there. Snakes and wolves and alligators and poisonous berries.”

“You’re exaggerating. He’s always traipsing around the island alone.”

“He is strictly forbidden to leave the property, and yet he comes and goes as he wishes. He’s become simply uncontrollable.”

“He’s a boy. Boys are adventurous.”

“How would you know what he is, Henry? You never spend any time with him. You’re the worst father in the world!” Red blotches had appeared on her face. Tears would follow soon.

Dr. Cowell took a deep breath. He knew exactly how the next few minutes of his life would play out. He and his wife would argue back and forth a few more moments, she would let out a cry that would scatter the white moths circling a nearby yucca blossom, and then he would slog out to visit his son’s sulking tree and he’d get dirty and hot and be bitten by insects and possibly pick up a rash as well.

Perhaps a rash. Perhaps not. See, Henry?
he told himself bitterly.
There is still some uncertainty left in the world.

The first midge bit him between the knuckles after he had passed through the citrus orchard and taken the short, overgrown path hacked into the forest of mangrove and buttonwood. He winced and slapped himself on the back of his hand. Gnats danced around his face as he trudged through the gloom, brushing sticky vines aside. Another midge bit his neck, another his cheek. He slapped himself in the face, felt the sting of his own assault, and swore softly.

The path ended and the woods thinned out. The ground turned swampy. Black mud covered his leather shoes. The cuffs of his pants were filthy. A mosquito buzzed in his ear. An alligator had eaten a Cuban fisherman on the bay side of the island last year. Dr. Cowell tried not to think about this story. Instead he whistled a soft tune to himself, one he’d learned as a child from his grandfather.

A rattling in the brush made him jump back, heart pounding, as a palm rat skidded past his feet.
It’s nothing, Henry. Just the natural world.

He collected himself and kept walking. This was the time of year when the alligators mated. Their salacious roars could be heard all the way to the beach. He needed to urinate and he was afraid the sudden mating call of an alligator might make him soak his pants. He considered stopping to relieve himself but was afraid of exposing that part of his body to the torment of midges. So he kept walking, trying to clear his mind of all that vexed him. His wife. His son. The lunatics. And that woman. Iris Dunleavy. He said the name in his head, frowned because the name sounded light and sweet.
Think of something else, Henry,
and he pictured his grandfather, whittling on a stick, the shavings peeling off one by one and falling onto the floor.

Up ahead, the ground rose and turned to crushed shell. He was at the site of an old Calusa village. Atop the shell mound grew a huge gumbo limbo tree. He approached the tree and looked up. Wendell clung resolutely to an upper branch.

Dr. Cowell removed his sweat-soaked cravat. “What is the problem now?”

Wendell shifted on the branch, causing a measure of loose red bark to peel off and spin to the ground. He said nothing.

“You have given your mother a migraine and thanks to you, I have a bit of one myself.”

“Mother had the migraine when she woke up this morning. I didn’t cause it. I didn’t do anything. Why do you always accuse me of doing things I don’t do?” His face was flushing the same way that his mother’s did.

“Why did you run out of class today?”

“I hate school. And I hate Miss Miller. She’s not even a teacher, you know. She’s just a bookkeeper. She doesn’t know anything. She just reads to me out of a textbook. I can read to myself.”

“She’s the only teacher available to you and, as you know, my education put me where I am today.” Sweat pressed through his cotton shirt. Another midge bit him in the crook of the arm.

“You tell me, Father, what the Pythagorean Theorem has to do with anything.”

Another midge had somehow gotten under his trouser leg and made it halfway up his thigh. He bent down and scratched himself vigorously. His bladder ached. He looked up the tree again. “If you don’t understand the Pythagorean Theorem, you will never understand Euclid’s Proof.”

“I don’t care about a stupid proof!” Wendell bellowed. “I hate school and I hate Miss Miller and I hate this island! I’m going crazy here!”

“You’re not going crazy.”

“Yes, I am. If only you knew how crazy I am!”

The doctor scratched his wrist brutally and made a mighty, shivering effort to control his temper. “Please come down. I’m allergic to these bugs and they are eating me alive.”

“There are no boys on this island. At least when you worked in Philadelphia I had friends.”

Another midge bit him on the spine, and he arched his back in misery. He gave up then. Utterly surrendered. He would spend years and years valiantly fighting for his most demented of patients—the man, for example, who thought his shadow healed typhoid—but in less than five minutes, he conceded defeat to his own flesh and blood.

“If you come down now, I will take you shell collecting tomorrow morning.”

“No, you won’t. You always say you will and then you forget.”

“I promise I will not forget.”

Wendell was silent. Suddenly the doctor felt a bite and then a terrible itch inside his ear. The bastards had found his ear canal. He probed it with his pinkie finger as he added, “And I’ll also give you a quarter.”

“What would I do with a quarter?”

“You can buy licorice from the Cubans. My God, son, I’ll give you a dollar, just get the hell down out of that tree, please please please!”

The branches quivered above his head. A bare foot slid down out of the foliage, then another, and the battle was done.

Iris lived in the big house with her husband and a retinue of slaves who did the housework and the cooking. If she walked out the front of the house, she would find the grid of apple and peach trees that made up the orchard, as well as the vegetable and herb gardens. A walk to the west down a path of crushed stones would take her to the stables, the drying house, the storage, and the barn. The overseer’s house and the slave cabins sat at the back of the property. Beyond that stretched the tobacco fields. In the early years of her marriage, it was easy for Iris to believe that the flourishing plantation was halcyon even at crop level. Sun level, sweat level, dust level. But over time she discovered what being a slave meant, slowly and with starts and stops, in the same manner she had learned, long ago, to read and write.

She was given a set of keys to wear around her waist. The keys opened every door to every outbuilding and storage area on the property. She was charged with supervising the slaves of the household, overseeing a small garden, managing the smaller business affairs of the plantation, and entertaining guests. This last duty filled her with dread, for nothing in her simple upbringing in Winchester had prepared her for the life of Haughwout crystal and long candles and English scones with her tea. The other plantation wives seemed haughty to her. Remote. She remembered one gathering in particular, after the men had gone out on the front porch to smoke and the women were left talking among themselves.

Delores Spears lived out on Gabler Plantation, named for her grandfather and twice the size of Robert’s. She told a story that night, inside by the fire, in her gauzy dress whose daintiness made the story more atrocious. “The overseer had to whip one of our slaves yesterday. He tried to escape. Peter called me out to the yard and Barney had his shirt off and was tied up to a poplar tree. Peter handed me the whip. He said the slaves thought I was too soft, too easy to manipulate. I had to make a point, he said.”

Iris didn’t know what kind of expression to wear on her face. The other women looked fascinated. “Go on,” one of them said. “What did you do?”

“I took the whip. It was heavier than I thought. The slave looked around and saw me and he just looked at me. My husband said, ‘Go ahead, Delores. Hit him.’”

“And then what did you do?” another woman asked.

“The overseer showed me how to hold the whip and snap it back, then forward, and I tried and I didn’t even touch him. Knocked a twig off the tree, that’s all.”

Loud laughter rang in Iris’s ears. She was very conscious of her own pose, awkward in it. Her smile felt strange, and so did the frown she replaced it with.

“So you didn’t even hit him?” asked another wife.

“I missed. That whip is so heavy. It hurt my wrist.” The women leaned in, hanging on her every word. “The overseer told me to try again. I closed my eyes and snapped the whip and it made the loud popping sound. I heard a sound. Not so much a scream but more a gasp. I opened my eyes and his skin was laid open, and the gash was filling up with blood.”

Iris felt horror and revulsion. The women looked awed. One held up her glass. “To respect,” she said. The others raised their glasses. All except Iris. The others gave her frozen looks. But she would not toast to a slave’s blood.

Word about her actions reached her husband by the end of the party. During the carriage ride home, he wouldn’t speak to her, and they rode in silence but for the noises of their own transportation: hooves against macadam, the breathing of the horses, the squeak of the carriage wheels.

“You were very impolite not to join the toast,” he said finally. He kept his eyes straight ahead. His voice was cold and hard.

“Impolite? Those women are horrible! I could barely—”

He gave her a long, steady look. “You will write a note of apology in the morning. You were a guest in their house and it was not your place to sit in judgment of another person.”

She’d been on the island for almost a month. Each day she would meet Ambrose in the courtyard and play checkers until the game was forgotten and they fell into an easy conversation that forgot the most recent years and went straight back to childhood. Before the war, before the damage, before they believed that they had a voice in their destiny, they were children. She was a pale, curious girl who made too much noise while eating celery. The fields behind their property grew wild with evening primrose and goldenrod. Near the cornfield on the east side of their property stood an apple orchard, and it was here that Iris made her sanctuary.

In the spring the leaves grew thick. The apples appeared late in the summer, slowly darkening into the kind of color that, when flushing through a boy’s cheeks, means that he is shy. She sat in the branches, bare legs swinging, biting into the ripe apples, pulling flesh away. Apple cores dropped to the ground around the tree trunk. When she slid down to the ground, her bare feet landed in pulp.

Ambrose had tales from growing up in Charleston, and stories to tell of killing snakes and fishing, favorite dogs and bruised knees, a fascination with pirates, arrowheads in the riverbed, breaking a colt in thigh-deep water, lightning storms. He, too, had an apple orchard. He had climbed the trees and sat on a limb and rested his back on the trunk. He had eaten the apples and landed in pulp. As the days passed, their orchards grew together, and they sat on opposite trees, feet swinging gently. Rationally, she knew that she was an inmate in an insane asylum, people shrieking around her, the polite remonstrations of the guards, the pounding of waves, the maddening bells signaling the schedule. But it was easy to believe they were back in that orchard that not only welcomed their childhoods but all childhoods, and this, for the time being, was her only method of escape.

The courtyard was bright. Summer was upon them, with it a new season of birds and tides and fruit and flowers and loggerhead turtles dragging themselves up the beach, laying a hundred eggs so that one hatchling might survive the raccoons and the gulls on their way back to the horizon line.

The sight of Ambrose did strange things to her now, made her feel alive and strong, as though her home were just beyond the swell of dunes, reachable by an effortless stroll. She had to remind herself that he was a diversion, a puzzle of dark hair and an angular face that would help her pass the time until she could devise a plan for leaving. She’d been studying the layout of the asylum, the entrances and exits, the habits of the guards, which windows had no bars.

All systems have flaws. Marriages, governments, insane asylums. All she had to do was think a little harder.