—Yes, nice, I said.
—Nice guests, too.
—Nice.
He introduced himself, and I shook his hand and gave my name.
—Not the noted colonel? he said.
I said, That war’s over.
—Well, damn, he said. Nice to meet you.
He put out his hand again and I shook it again.
The other lonely drinkers were drawn to his excess enthusiasm. They circled around, drinks in hand. Soon we were a group, old pals. Our conversation touched upon all the chief occupations at the Springs: eating, bathing, riding, drinking to excess, dancing, playing cards, walking to certain nearby rocky prominences to take in vistas, flirting to a dangerous degree, and gossiping without cessation.
One of the relentless topics of talk recently had been the Woman in Black, a widow who dressed in the first degree of mourning, though some said knowingly that the required year and a day had long since elapsed. She had apparently come to the Springs to regain her health but seemed indifferent whether she gained it or lost it entirely. Her mind ran only in doleful channels. She took meals in her room rather than in the dining hall and, of course, never appeared in the ballroom. From morning to late afternoon, she was given to solitary walks along the river road. She was seldom seen by other guests except during her gloomy passages through the lobby on the way to the sleeping rooms, her hem dragging dusty or muddy depending on the weather. One of the drinkers said his wife held the opinion that for the Woman in Black, all clocks had stopped at the moment of her husband’s death, never to start again.
I speculated that she would surely die of heartbreak.
One of the older men snorted back a laugh. And all the others—men even more middle-aged than myself, with well-earned bellies rising plump under bright-colored expensive waistcoats, and also the young romantic—ganged up against me and agreed ruefully that no woman had ever died of grief. Not a one of their gender in all the history of the world. Men die of heartbreak. Women die of old age. That’s why we always precede them in death. Just study the language of obituaries for proof.
I raised a toast to heartbreak.
And after a reluctant pause, they all raised their glasses with me.
At that down note, the other men drained the bottoms of their glasses and called it a night. The bartender made exaggerated motions of wiping up and closing down. I ordered a last double and carried the glass with me out the door and onto the gallery. The moon stood above the far ridges, a ring of light around it in the hazed milky sky. The night was damp and cool, and the fog was beginning to gather in the low-grounds. I put my riding coat back on and stuffed the mail into one of the deep pockets.
I crossed the river on the wooden bridge and walked in the dark along the river road and turned onto the steep path up the mountain leading to the jump-off, an overlook, a vista popular among the younger guests for a flirtatious scramble in groups up the rocky trail to watch sunset. And then scramble down in the twilight and quickly change from walking attire to evening dress for dancing, any occasion for a wardrobe change being always welcome among the young.
I climbed the steep trail, meticulous in my effort to keep gin level to gravity and not to the pitched ground. Huffing and blowing, I attained the well-worn rock ledge, a projection of mountain into space, a sharp angle aimed off to a far western prospect. I tipped the glass to my mouth and swallowed it all down. Drew back and threw the empty glass at the moon.
Failure, of course. Proven by the festive sound of breaking glass faint against the rocks below.
Then, off to my right, a polite clearing of throat. A woman’s throat. I supposed I had interrupted a tryst.
—Excuse me, I said.
I looked along the ledge, expecting a couple. Bodies pulling a discreet distance away from each other.
Instead, silhouetted, sitting with feet dangling over the edge of the jump-off, a lone black figure.
—Again, I said, Excuse me for interrupting.
BACK AT THE HOTEL, I climbed the stairs from the lobby to the Palm Court, a small private upper lounge around which, on three levels, the better sleeping rooms were arrayed. Two men sat in red-painted rattan chairs. They wore expensive-looking suits, one grey and the other black. They both had on collars and ties of the most current fashion. The one in grey was young and big-chested. He sat thumbing a magazine. Despite being indoors, he kept his hat on, but tilted far to the back as if in grudging concession to the requirements of etiquette. A pale stripe of untanned forehead shone yellow in the uplight from the lamp flame. The one in black was considerably older and thin and bald. He bent forward in his chair, holding his hatbrim delicately two-handed, watching with fascination as his fingers rotated it slowly by small degrees around its circle.
They both looked up from their studies and remarked my passage through the court. I nodded and said, Gentlemen, and went on to my room.
I had barely taken off my riding coat when there was a knock. I released the latch and found the two men standing shoulder to shoulder in the passway. They shoved in and closed the door behind them.
—I should ask what this is all about, I said. But what’s the point?
I went and stood against the far wall by the window with my arms crossed.
The older man threw his hat on the bedspread and sat down beside it. He did not look at me, and he seemed very tired.
The young one stood inside the door and glared across the room at me.
—This is all about money, he said. That’s all there is separating us from a full appreciation of one another.
—Who are we talking about? I said.
—Williams. Whose else money you holding?
I thought down the long list of names. Maybe Sloan or Slagle. Most of my other creditors would be civilized enough to have the sheriff serve papers. A few were such earnest Christians that they might just send a Baptist preacher to set my mind right.
—I suppose this is where I take a beating, I said.
The young man clenched his hammy fists and looked at the bulging knuckles.
—Hitting people, he said. Not my line of work.
—I have every intention to pay Williams back, I said. Or Slagle, or whoever we’re talking about. If that matters.
The little old man leaned forward from his seat on the bed and began working his hat around and around again. He seemed not at all interested in the conversation.
—Then pay, the young one said. That’s the simple thing. It’s been a year since your note came due. Be a sport. Give us the money. It being light, we’ll tote it to the carriage ourselves and call this matter done.
He named an amount that would widely cause an intake of breath.
—There’s no money right now, I said.
—And yet you’re here, the younger man said. I asked for rates at the desk. This place ain’t free.
I turned up my palms.
The younger man looked at the man on the bed and said, There’s days I don’t think they can print paper money fast enough to make me keep doing this job much longer.
The little man did not look up or even cease rotating his hat.
—Look, I said. Everything I’ve got is in land. A great deal of land. Not immediately solvent. There’s money coming from the Government to pay off all my notes. But it takes time.
—Time, that’s exactly the problem. Everything would be fine without it. But we’re here to impress upon you the tedious exigencies. Our boss is tired of waiting and wants his money. Business is all this is.
—There’s more to it than that, I said. Williams and I are friends. Going back long before the War.
—Well, sure you’re friends. As long as the money rolls in.
—I had a hand in making him plenty of money when I was in the senate. Road construction money, railroad money, that sort of thing.
—But not lately you haven’t made him any money. And it’s the regular flow that’s of the most particular interest. Look, here’s the way it works. When W
illiams wants something from you, you’re friends. Gratitude and loyalty rule the day. When you need something from Williams, business is business. Study your contracts down to the last word. I ought not have to tell you this.
I said, No, you ought not.
—So, the money?
—I haven’t got the money. I could show you the papers, the correspondence with Washington. I could have copies of them drawn up. It all goes back quite a way. To $53.33 at six percent. For more than three decades.
—That’s all you’ve got to offer? Papers and fifty-some dollars?
—Papers that will soon lead to a great deal of money.
—If I hired you to build me a house, would you show up years later and unroll a floor plan and expect payment?
—It’s something you could show to Williams. It’s all coming to a head soon.
—After thirty years?
—Any day now.
The younger man looked toward the older man on the bed, who appeared to have nodded off briefly. His chin was tilted down and his hat was still between his hands. It was at least one in the morning, and he looked exhausted. Grey whiskers were beginning to sprout across his upper lip and the wattled skin under his jawbone. He roused awake and looked around.
The younger man said to him, We stay any longer, he’ll try to kite a check on us.
The older man didn’t make a sign to show his thoughts one way or the other.
The younger man looked back at me and said, Just fuck you and all your sorry lot. Shitting debtors. My bane in life.
He walked out the door and tried to slam it behind him, but it banged the heel of his shoe, so he walked off and left it standing ajar.
The little older man rose and looked in the mirror over the dressing table. He rubbed his hands down his face to compose it. He touched the pale bags under his eyes with two fingertips as if to press them back into youthful tautness. He put his hat on his head and adjusted the angle of the brim with great precision. When he was satisfied at its cock, he stepped up to me and for the first time looked me in the eye. He made a little movement, no more extensive than a shiver. A straight razor with a tortoiseshell handle appeared in his hand. With one gesture, he flipped the flickering blue blade open one-fingered by the crook end of it and reached out underhanded and slit me a long thin wound through my trousers.
It went from a few inches above my knee up the inner side of my right thigh all the way to the nub of my groin.
By the time I bent and grabbed myself two-handed, the razor was folded back into its handle and had disappeared into a coat pocket.
—I noticed you dressed on the left, the little man said. You can thank me for my attention to detail any time you care to.
Blood ran between my fingers and wet the front of my rent trousers and dribbled down my shins and wet my socks and shoe tops.
HALF AN HOUR LATER, I sat spraddle-legged on the edge of the bed with the Gypsy palm reader kneeling between my feet. I wore only the bedspread gathered around my middle for modesty. The Gypsy dabbed at my thigh with cotton-wool soaked in peroxide. White foam rose up along the length of the wound.
—This is not greatly worse than shaving nicks I’ve had, she said. It’s long, but it ain’t much more than broke the skin.
—That’s not how I bled.
—Well, I guess it’s a powerful place to be cut, she said. But looks like you’ll have to live awhile further.
She leaned and kissed the inside of my knee. A little generous rough cat’s-tongue lick in addition.
The Gypsy getup—green headcloth, red skirt, yellow waist sash, and cream peasant blouse—lay in a bright puddle just inside the door. She wore only my white terry bathrobe gapped open above the waist to show a long shadow between her breasts. Her brown hair was wet and combed in one swoop straight back all the way from her hairline to her shoulders. Across her crown you could still see the parallel tracks of the comb teeth, all the way to white scalp.
Looking up at me, with the red lipstick and dark makeup washed away, she looked like what she was, a moderately pretty woman from Valdosta with a crease or two beginning to deepen around the corners of her mouth and eyes.
—You lay back and be still and I’ll go easy on you, she said.
I WOKE UP at the first edge of grey dawn and opened my eyes to the Gypsy supplementing her income from my wallet. She turned and found me awake and fanned the few bills like a hand of cards. She made a show of holding them to the window, studying their marks. In her most oracular voice she said, In recompense for a great deal of pleasure, you will suffer a minor financial loss. Then she plucked out a twenty and put the tens and fives and ones back in their places.
Twenty dollars, I thought. An acre of good farmland. Ten acres of steep mountainside.
—And now the palm, she said. Complimentary.
She sat on the edge of the bed and scratched a match head and lit the candle. Held my hand tilted to the light. She looked confused. Nothing seemed to factor. She traced her fingertip down the old wide burn scar from Featherstone’s spit crank. A white stripe running diagonal from the base of my forefinger to the hand heel.
—This confounds everything, she said. It cuts across heartline and lifeline both. It’s the fate you’ve got, for whatever that’s worth.
She kissed me on the brow and blew out the yellow teardrop of flame and went out the door.
I fell back into hovering half sleep and then emerged into full consciousness some brief time afterward, singed and weary and defeated by the night’s long tiresome events. The light was rising to full dawn outside the window. I dressed and walked through the empty lobby and across the dewy lawn. Soggy shoes and socks. The river was uncommunicative no matter how much I stared at its face, but I waited on a bench by its side until the dining room opened, and then I went in for coffee and one soft-boiled egg, woefully undercooked and quivering mucus in the cup of its little crystal pedestal.
9
THAT AFTERNOON I WENT OUT DRIVING HUNG OVER THROUGH the countryside, following the river road in a slender racing cart I kept stored in a shed behind the Springs. The spokes of the two wheels were painted yellow, and the upholstery of the seat was red and tucked and rolled, and all the members of the frame were lacquered glossy black. I carried a little flat silver flask in one hip pocket and a little flat Remington vest pistol in the other. In case the razor man reappeared.
A low day. I drove aimlessly at high speed along the road that followed every bend of the river.
At some point after I had turned around and headed back to the Springs, the left wheel started working itself off the axle, wobbling and canting a considerable degree off plumb. I pulled up and sat, wondering how one went about fitting the hub back secure without tools.
One of these tall slouching proud mountain men came walking down the road. He hardly deigned to look at me and would have kept on walking had I not called out and requested that he fix my wheel.
Perhaps my tone was inappropriate.
The man said, Step out into the road a minute for me.
As soon as my second foot touched the dirt, the man hit me three times in the face. The last two blows were particularly well aimed, as they were struck while I was falling. The horse backed a step against the traces and then stopped. I lay in the road and watched the man walk away.
I raised up onto my elbows and called out, Sir. I meant of course to pay.
But the man kept walking and did not even turn to look over his shoulder before he rounded the next bend in the road. I rose upright and tried to spit and clear my mouth, but instead of the manly gob I intended to produce, my lips spluttered and sprayed blood as from an atomizer down the front of my fashionably pale driving coat.
WE MET ON my way back into the Springs with the wheel wobbling and my mouth swollen and scabbing in two places. A spot of blood rising through the fabric on my upper thigh where the razor cut had opened back up. A dark figure walked ahead of me, shaded by a black parasol scalloped like a bat’s wing
with its decoration of crepe. All the heavy layers of women’s mourning attire pulled downward by gravity from bonnet to hem, all black. Upon passing, I removed my own slouch-brimmed hat and gave a nod of greeting. The widow looked up, her face vague behind the veil. So I did not immediately recognize Claire.
But she did me. She lowered the parasol and lifted her veil with a hand gloved in black kid. She said, Will?
Then the leaf-filtered afternoon sun fell on her face. The shock of recognition. Much awkward surprise on both our parts.
I must have looked to her as if I were wearing a mask bearing only a few points of correspondence to the face she had known and maybe loved all those years ago. But Claire was still immediately the same to me, a recognition deep past the point of heartbreak.
Mourning suited Claire, her pale face against the black. I sat on the cart seat and remembered swearing to her years and years before, up on the Lizard Bald, that whatever separations life might throw at us in the unimaginable future, whenever we met I would hold her close to me. No matter what. All my young heart urgent behind my oath.
Of course, I had broken my promise out on the new Nation. And now again an embrace eluded me. How to hold the Woman in Black?
Instead, I climbed down from my seat and stood in the road facing her and said, Are you well?
An idiotic question. Claire’s face was white as cotton. She was not well, not at all.
But if we did not exactly dash into each other’s arms, we were at least warm in our meeting. Sad smiles on both sides. Claire would not climb up and ride back to the Springs with me, so I fell in beside her when she turned and continued walking downriver. I led my horse and festive cart behind us by a long swag of reins. Claire’s muddy black skirt trained in the road.
In the years since I had seen her, Claire had lost a lot. The owl-faced baby had grown halfway up and then died of a fever and congestion of the lungs, blood flowing from both ends. And Featherstone had finally passed to the Nightland. His second death was surely only a little more satisfactory to him than the first, for he did not go nightward in a blaze of pony-club gunfire. He was thrown from the back of a young stallion. Bucked off headfirst into a fence post. Old bones shattered to powder all down his frame. After a brief period of unconsciousness, he came awake and wiped a smear of blood from his brow and directed that he be carried into the parlor and seated in his wing chair of death. He called for a tumbler of Scotch and a wet cloth. He drank and wiped his brow and fell asleep. He died by the fireside exactly like the first time, except this one was final.