Lost Nation (54 page)

She went into her room, pausing to look at her hand—the pain so great she expected to see flame in the flesh. And then was floating. That room also a murk of smoke but she looked to the narrow high slit of fresh blue sky and lifted herself and floated toward it.

She was sprawled on the grass behind the tavern. Then she was up and running for the barn, reaching as she ran, snatching up the leaning empty rifle. Useless at the moment but she knew not to leave it. And the pain had left her. As if it would remain behind. A mystery and a wonder. Don’t even think about it she told herself. Running.

Then the tavern exploded. The roof and loft and the fire was blown open to the richness of unimpeded air which the fire ate and towered and she was running toward a pair of shadows peeling away before her in the grass. Then the fire broke through into the storeroom and the entire building blew apart. Pieces of logs spinning through the air easy as swallows. Great splinters, white as flesh.

She was struck and went down. The grass back here frost burned but still green at the roots. Life itself. The smell and taste of the earth. Noontime of a fall day.

Postlude

The Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred & Ninety-Six

He was an early riser
. He always had been but the women slept late and so what had been pleasant habit became compulsion: the desire for those few hours when he was alone in the world and might fashion it any way he liked. It didn’t matter that he only had to suffer his way through breakfast and could escape to his office and then his rounds. Her silence, her implacable silence offered up as judgment upon him followed him throughout his days. Each day, each the same. As if she read through him, through the three-piece suit and the light phaeton and the matched pair of fancy gray driving horses, through the leather grip so respected by everyone else, respected and feared, which was an attitude he liked. It was not just his profession but a calling, a thing near holy. Other people saw it, others accorded respect to him. How she could deflate him with her silence was something of a mystery. There had never been the first unkind word between them. None even passed along from his wife, her daughter. And yet before the old woman he felt stripped, as if he were a boy dressed up in a man’s suit. Not an impersonator so much as a thing not yet mature. A man with gray at his temples, a veteran of the Civil War.

A lovely morning in July. The house and gardens on the hillside above the lake outside of Geneva, high enough so he could stand on the broad front lawn and see the rooftops and steeples of the town. Or could turn to look straight before him to the broad width of Seneca Lake, this early a silver flashing surface of light waves with a broad swath of the rising sun reflected over the water, too bright to look at. From the town the lake stretched south twenty miles, widening only slightly. A finger of a lake, one of half a dozen that ran north to south across the ripe fertile band of western New York State. People spoke of the Finger Lakes as if they were simply lovely bodies of water there for the people to live around, to enjoy, to fish from or boat upon, to have summer cottages against their shores, to enjoy the moderation the water provided throughout all the seasons of the year, but every day after his morning office hours when he drove his team out on his rounds through the surrounding farm country—farms of richness and wealth, dairy and grain and orchards of all manner of fruit and the great vineyards that were strung on the temperate clay hillsides overlooking the lakes—every day of this he recalled exactly whose fingers these lakes represented. The hand of God laid down upon this land, a hand blessing all that lay around it, as if God had seen this land and loved it and wanted to impress upon it His love. No matter that Jonathon Astor knew the lakes were glaciated striations. For who can say how the hand of God moves?

Surely not he. Who had been a student of medicine when the war emptied the college and he ended up spending four years sawing limbs standing it seemed either in cold mud or under a canvas that accelerated the summer heat, his apron and arms stained with blood, the cauterizing iron held waiting by one young slightly wounded orderly after another, the iron an extension of his hand as were the saws. For the most part the men he did not disfigure were the ones he saw die, eaten slowly up from their wounds as their flesh turned yellow then green then brown then black as the gangrene ate past all efforts to check or halt it, so much so he could smell a man stretcher-borne and know if he would live one day or five. The other, lesser wounds, the ones he repaired, he did not praise himself for. For all but a fortunate few of those men were sent back into the campaigns that all gained names that seemed someway burnished but to him were only a long trough of blood and limbs and death and more than once, more times than he could count, some
face peering up at him as he brought the saw down for that first awful rip, that face was a face he’d repaired someway the week before, the month before. Until he stopped looking at faces, no matter if the wounds were slight or mortal. All the faces of boys. Even the ones older than himself. Mere boys.

After the war he returned to the village of his youth. Two days after he returned he presented himself at the home of the doctor that had birthed him. Doctor Warren was a man in his sixties, with a wife a decade and a half younger and of so many tales told. And the late-born daughter, the single child. All Jonathon Astor wanted at that time was the remembered quietude of his youth. Which he knew he would never regain. But the old doctor was the place to start. Jonathon was not the sort of man to come back into his town and become a rival to anyone, even one gaining in age and with a reputation for silent work and little attention to late bills or any payment made at all. Especially such a man. At that time Jonathon cared nothing for the stories of the doctor’s wife. He’d seen all that man can pitch against other men and rightly thought that every town needs something to talk about. And it was simple partnership he sought—there was no thought or intention or reason to expect any greater union. What both men understood was that each was vital to the other. Vital to the town and the outlying people. What the doctor saw was what the young man expected—a link, a succession. Not for himself so much as the people he served. And the young man, who was not so young as he liked to think and certainly not how others saw him, he also wanted that sense of continuity. That there were places and times where the world made sense. Where he might birth children and then later birth their own. Where he might even bring some calm to those same people he once birthed as they lay dying. He had no great notions of the measure of any one person’s days. Old age and slow death were aberration and not the other way around. As the old man knew. So they made good partners.

What he hadn’t counted on was the doctor’s daughter. The daughter of their September, a child born to the doctor and his wife when they’d given up on children. So much younger than he that he hadn’t considered her at all—a ragged child wearing out good clothes in rough play when he left for the war was how he recalled her. So was unprepared for the day just less than a month after he began working with
her father when at the end of the day they had driven up to the house in the doctor’s buggy, still discussing the farmwife who had gone mad and was speaking in tongues and eating earth and they sat in the yard before the cobblestone house as they determined to return to the remote farm again first thing in the morning. Then the younger man climbed down from the buggy to walk the mile into town where he stayed not at his parents’ home but in a boardinghouse where he might stay awake as long as he liked reading journals and medical books, some even imported from Europe. He stepped from the buggy and bade the doctor a good evening and in the swift early autumn dusk turned to see her coming around the house, through the white painted gate that led to the back of the house where he’d never been but where he’d stretched his neck more than once to admire the flower gardens. And there she was.

Seventeen years old in an indigo dress with her red-blond hair worn loose and thick onto her shoulders and carrying a nosegay of cultivated deep purple asters and with rose-waxen light over her she stopped and looked at him and boldly said, “It’s one thing to be serious and another to be gloomy. Put these in water and they’ll cheer your room.” And thrust the flowers at him and before he could respond beyond reddening she turned and went up the three stone steps and across the porch with its narrow columns and into the house. Without looking back.

Estelle Warren. Twice that fall he sent notes inviting her to attend social events and twice she responded, denying him without dismissing him. But also both times filling additional pages with her thoughts, a scattering of thoughts upon books she’d read or things she’d observed, notes of the everyday. As if some part of her turned to him even as she hesitated. Both times he went alone to the events and neither time was she there with someone else. He did not speak to her father of her and the doctor never mentioned his daughter and neither did his manner or treatment of the younger man change—toward favor or not—but remained constant, professional, occasionally ruminative over some diagnosis and always solicitous of the younger man’s opinion. He’d not met the doctor’s wife, had only twice glimpsed her from a distance and both times she was hurrying away, as on some errand of sudden and terrible urgency.

The following spring he opened his small hoard of savings and purchased a lapstrake catboat, a thing of great beauty and a craft of ways all unknown to him. He felt he’d taken a deep breath that would never
be released again. But had spent portions of those long winter evenings regarding the long-since dried flowers and her brief message to him and concluded she was right. Was it a coincidence of the season that she gave him flowers that matched his name? He decided it could be but he could rightly guess Doctor Warren had at some time mentioned in passing the name of his new associate. What he pondered with greater gravity was her message to him. Even in doing so he guessed that he was failing her in some vital way. What he arrived at was that it lay only within his own hands and will to effect his future. So he bought the boat.

He paid for half a dozen lessons and then spent another month of evenings and weekends out alone on the water until he could handle the boat in all but the worst of weather. He had no desire or intention of being a foul-weather sailor. To sail, for him, meant relief from sullied things, past and present. He was not after testing himself but rather mastering a pleasure. It seemed enough.

In late June he sent a third note. He invited her nowhere but simply stated that he would call for her on Saturday afternoon at one-thirty and suggested she attire suitably for the water.

He rented a gig and was sweated through his shirt under his white suit when the horse trotted up the drive of the cobblestone house. He feared himself a fool but she was waiting on the porch, dressed also in white, with a broad-brimmed hat that tied under her chin. She did not smile but greeted him gravely and stepped up into the gig even as he was hurrying around the horse to assist her. When he came up beside her she looked down at him from the seat and smiled at him.

Estelle walked back and forth on the marina dock looking at the catboat and then turned to him and said, “She’s beautiful.”

Jonathon stepped down into the cockpit and reached a hand and this time she let him assist her onto the decking. Then she turned and said, “The word is, that you sail with a passion. Most every evening.”

He said, “I guess I’m the talk of the town then.”

“Oh no,” she said. “I had to ask to find out what you were up to. What’s her name?”

His throat was thick. Stowed earlier was a basket of lunch and bottles of fresh spring water and one daring bottle of wine hidden under the napkin lining of the basket. He wanted a swallow of the water. He said, “
Violet
.”

“Violet?”

“After the flowers. The color.” He was shaking and half turned and bent to cast free the mooring lines, thinking if he could only get the boat underway, wondering if he would be able to sail at all or if they would wobble helpless and stranded.

“Of course,” Estelle said. “Violet. People would’ve misunderstood Aster. Thinking yourself grand is what they’d have thought.” She seated herself on the decking and lifted first one foot to her knee and then the other and removed her shoes. He was loosening the sheets and eyeing the pulleys to make sure all ran clear and the sail flapped loose against the mast. He took up the single paddle to push off from the dock. All the time seeing the undersides of her thighs as she snapped the lacings through the eyelets of her shoes. She dropped one shoe into the cockpit and went to work on the other and then looked up at him just as he was looking at her.

She said, “Do you care if I go barefoot?”

He reached for the tiller and begin to pull the sheet to tauten the mainsail and said, “I like to go barefoot myself, once I’m under way. It feels right, my feet against the boat, against the decking. And, if there’s much breeze at all, water sprays in. So your shoes get wet anyway.”

They were out away from the other docked and moored boats and he was letting the sail fill more and more. They began to move crosswise to the wind toward the open water of the lake.

She said, “I don’t care a thing about my shoes getting wet.” And reached down and plucked them both up from the cockpit and held them in one hand, ankle-high white calfskin shoes. Her eyes on him, her eyes laughing but her face serious, as if she expected him to know her intentions, she swung the arm holding her shoes out over the catboat and dropped them into the water.

Now he smiled at her and pushed the tiller hard and brought the sheet in so the sail snapped tight as the boat came around into the wind. There was the brief lovely moment when the boat shuddered and then it leaped forward. Water began to sheer up both sides of the bow and all that lay ahead was the long expanse of lake water and both sides the gentle even-rising hills speeding by.