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Redbird

Chapter 12: The Fool

Summary:

So much can happen in a year.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Smokestacks blacken the air over the city in the distance, and the stench from the stockyards reaches him even a mile away. Stagnant cesspool of a place, dead fish and rotted-out nets and all the waste of its crowded tenements and mansions alike washed up in the bend of the river there. The water crawls with an almost imperceptible pulse. The air passes like dying breath. In the heat of high summer, it slows to a spiritless progress and pulls him along with it toward the bridge and into the city's dispassionate arms.

He reached camp, they said, in the middle of the night, worn down almost beyond recognition. His horse bore the appearance of a long journey and a streak of his blood down her side.

He suffered fevers. The bullet wound in his shoulder healed slow, the burn at his hip slower. Several times, Hosea insisted on staying up with him, not certain he would see the dawn. 

Dreams like visions, or waking visions like dreams faded in and out. A buck that raised its head to look at him for such a long time that he thought he’d really died. Another time, a skulking coyote cowered from him but would not run.  

Abigail sat with him. When she took his hand he had to turn his head from her. The reverend’s drugs made his eyes burn with tears he couldn’t hold back, and he felt hollow and weak.

He would not talk about her or what happened beyond what they needed to know, mumbling about the law and O’Driscolls and such. He could still smell her. The scent of her hair in the pillow. Her body in the canvas. He figured he’d die soon. Slip beneath all pain soon. At some point in that half-dreaming haze, her light open-mouthed sighs began to rise and fall with his own breath and he jolted awake to nothing but the airless tomb of his tent.

The next time he woke, the reverend sat there, reading in the daylight, the tent walls rolled up for a breeze. When the reverend noticed him awake, he held a canteen for him and lit a cigarette, though it made him cough and he recoiled in pain.

“We almost lost you, Mister Morgan. By God’s grace, here you are.”

“I don’t believe in all that, Reverend. I don’t mean to offend you.” He could scarcely manage a whisper.

“Nothing decent ever required faith to be true.” 

He shut his eyes. 

“I ain’t up for philosophy.”

“I won’t bother you with it. I only mean to say that you might deserve grace nevertheless, and you don’t have to think about it any more than that.” His cold hand clutched over his fist in a shaky gesture of accord.

Whatever the reverend’s good intentions were in saying it, the heaviness afterward crushed him, and lying there through the day he felt liable to smother. That night, with the blanket around his shoulders, he managed to get up from his cot and walk barefoot up the lakeshore. By then the moon was full or almost full and he could see bluegills glinting shieldlike in the shallows. Frogsong thrummed loud and constant, drowning out the echoes in his head but making his head pound. He got himself a good distance away and then wasn’t sure he could make it back, and sat on a large bark-stripped log that shone like a colossal bone or antler of a long-dead beast. Just sat there staring at the clear edge of the water washing up to his feet and back.

Footsteps in the sandy gravel stopped beside him. Stood there. The strike of a match. The quiet popping of a mouth on a cigar. A rush of blown smoke. “I thought you’d left us, son. Or I’d have come out lookin for you myself.”

A fever still dogged him at night sometimes, and he shivered despite the heat and the blanket. “I didn’t give you much reason.”

“No, you didn’t.” Dutch sat beside him. For a long while they watched the quiet lake. Dutch’s hand on his shoulder lay heavy. Gripped him. “We don’t have to discuss it, not one word, if you don’t want to.”

He glared at the lake, struggling to hold back everything that came to mind given the slightest suggestion of her in the world.

“But if we can put all of that behind us, son, the future is bright. You just can’t go toward it half-way, and I need you by my side. Do I have all of you?”

He nodded. Rubbed his burning eyes. The fever would put him in the strangest mind. Pictured himself a half-man, walking by an unseen power, still breathing, the unthinking instrument of Dutch’s will. Numb. Mean. Effective.

“You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine.”

He tried to stand without struggling but was still unsteady on his feet. Dutch stood with him and took his arm. “I would bear you on my back to the finish, Arthur, you know that.” And he was always sincere, saying such things.

He recovered himself by degrees, first in the distance he could walk, then tending the horses, and otherwise measured in buckets of water and bags of feed and bales of hay and stacks of cut wood. In all of it, the world had a new weight. But in carrying it a person became stronger. Or so he saw it. Anyway, staying idle only left him with time to reflect on futile things. As soon as he was well enough to ride, he felt freer. Started taking on jobs. Easy ones at first. Gathering Strauss’ harvest, all them sad fools stupid enough to take his terms. First that pathetic Polish fellow. The kid who only wanted to buy his girl a ring. The ranch maid.  Every time he brought the money back, the bastard’s reaction repulsed him. His eyes behind his filmy spectacles lurked dully with the expectation of having something owed returned, not brightened with the shine of earning. 

He was feeling strong for the first time the night he and Sean burned the tobacco fields, exhilarated and working again, triumphant as they rode away on those shires. They should have known better. Two days later, the little Irish bastard was dead. Shooting Sheriff Grey had been little consolation. Leaving a dozen bodies dead in that red dirt, neither. As he picked up Sean’s body, and felt his skinny weight fold over his shoulder, he wanted to burn the town to the ground. But they walked away, leaving behind that deathless wound of a place. 

And then it all fell apart in a blur. Jack stolen. That goddamned mansion burned, the Braithwaite woman with it. All their beastly shadows climbing the walls as she was dragged down the stairs, showing them something monstrous in themselves they had not known before. Righteous anger. A reckoning long overdue. Embers floating around them like they were undersea. The guiltlessness in murdering her sons and riding away from that pyre. Then Agent Milton, the soulless belly-crawler. Nell’s name in his mouth was a dagger he did not expect as Milton asked him how she was. Once they were safe in new hiding, in the house lodged deep in the swamp, and got Jack back from that slimy Italian bastard, he had gone off for a full month just to get the stench of the city off him. And though he came back with treasure he had found, Dutch was already talking plans about Bronte like they had all joined up. Micah now acting the confidant. Hosea quietly resistant, but when it came to arguing, always took what he called the high road and what always seemed, to Arthur, more like giving up. But he supposed that was what happened when a man aged and got sick in a life like theirs.

In winter he and John and Charles rode far up north, looking into a train job, up into the deep snow that never fully melted and where the sun that time of year never rose very high before setting, up near the mining town where he had shot the Pinkerton traitor no one had yet mourned enough to come after him for. Charles noticed him getting quiet, grim, so when John commented on it, What’s crawled up your ass, Morgan?, Charles hushed him and he didn’t have to turn around and say what was on his mind to shut him up.  The train job came to naught, nothing but flat car after flat car piled with white pine, a whole forest of pine shipped down, and the smell of sap laced with coal smoke hung in the air long after it had passed and the black smoke had cleared. 

It was on the bridge heading down where they were stopped by a couple of idiots who had just pulled out their guns. Two raggedy opportunists in stolen coats too large for them, sniffling in the cold. Arthur, in front, quickly had a bead on each of them.

“I wouldn’t do that, big feller,” the one said. His ratty sparse mustache made him appear eighteen at most.

“Here’s your warning to set those down and move. I ain’t askin.”

The second one opened his mouth to say something smart and got out half a word before he shot them both. The first one pitched off the bridge onto the ice below.

“Jesus, Morgan,” Marston said, dismounting and walking over to the second one, kicking him lightly before going through his pockets. 

Charles checked over the side of the bridge and seemed displeased, but to hell with him and Marston for doing nothing. 

“I ain’t swappin smalltalk with some dope-fiend that can’t handle his pistol. You don’t draw unless you’re ready to get shot at.” 

“Well you don’t have to get preachy.”

He dismounted and scaled down the ravine. The first one had landed on his stomach, and blood still shed out of his mouth onto the ice and steamed like his final breath lingering. As if to show him here is what your vile soul looks like as it vanishes into nothing. The bastard didn’t have but twelve cents on him and half a pack of cigarettes. 

He was far ahead as they were traveling back through the Grizzlies East getting near sundown when he had to pull up. For a minute he thought he was seeing things. A woman’s face in the rocks, and more than just what forms in the mind after enough time spent alone. A giant face carved there. As if she were captured trying to see out. He rode to a better overlook, and for the first time in many months, in the field of her determined gaze he started to reach for his journal. In the same moment his hand grasped the absence of his journal in his satchel, he saw something moving there, and grabbed his binoculars instead, and dragged that blurry fisheyed sight across the landscape until he found it. A man, swaying in the mountain breeze from a rope off the front of the scaffold. He sat there feeling sick and relieved he had not gotten halfway through a sketch before noticing the man hanging from his own incomplete creation. He turned Georgia away from it, and now could not expel it from his mind, not just the face and the man hanging from it, but the journal, now lost like the other, any impressions within only partially preserved in memory like the dustfilled prints of a man’s boots to hint at what he had seen. It was for the best that it was gone. Some things better left forgotten. Though they never really were.

It was in the spring he caught himself thinking back on all the carelessness of their last weeks together, urgency and passion that now seemed remote, the passion as well as the pain now dulled. He was washing the blood from his face, seeing in the water those flecks of rusty red that pathetic failed do-gooder had spewed at him, and it suddenly struck him, like a kick in the gut, that he could have a child by then. He held the sides of the wash barrel and squeezed his eyes to quit himself of the notion, but standing over that dark water shimmering bright on the surface he recalled her face, and all those soft times he would lose himself in her, those times they would see into each other and face the risk of it. 

The thought put him in a pitiful mood for the rest of the day, he could hardly face himself, and when Charles asked if he wanted to head into the city, which meant drinking and most likely a fight, he was up for nothing else. The sick do-gooder’s face had felt clammy and sharp under his fists - he’d felt even the ridges of his teeth under his thin cheek - and he couldn’t get rid of the sensation soon enough, happy to bury his fists in the solid gut of an Irish bastard out back of Doyle’s.  

He woke up in jail. A plug of ripped cloth stuck up his bleeding nose, a cut down his chest like it had been made with a razor, not deep but slicing his shirt down to the belt. He pissed blood in the trough, and his sides under his ribs were black and blue. He lay there staring at the ceiling ignoring the other fellers in the lockup guessing at his crimes. It took Charles until evening to find him there and bail him out, and back at Shady Belle he slept for two days. When he woke, the headaches were back for a week, and he set out on long walks at night when it was cooler, to ease the pain, and smoke, and go over and over in his mind about a plan that might get Dutch’s attention more than this failing Bronte farce. 

One of those nights around then, he noticed Missus Adler standing outside the wall, leaning against it, alone. He nodded at John changing out, leaving. A warm spring night. Frogs and moths and fireflies and the like. His boots crunched loud in the rind-like magnolia leaves all about. “You out here poutin after losin to Pearson again?”

She smiled over at him sadly, wiped her nose. Held up a whiskey bottle. “My Jake’s birthday.” 

“Shit.” He stopped. “I’m sorry.” And hesitated to get closer, thinking she might want to be alone. “I’m poor company for consolation.”

“It’ll be a year this month.” She nodded, blowing out her cheeks. “Feels like no time at all.”

“No. No it don’t.”

“Have a drink with me?” She held it out.

He took the bottle. "Can't let you stew alone."

"That's why you'll stew with me."

He raised it in salute to the air and took a drink. "Well tell me all about Jake."

She talked about everything they had wanted together. Farm. Babies. Family. Getting old. Spoken of now like a dream, or the lives of some other people, though who could manage such simple lives now, and where on all the earth, unimpeded, unthreatened, if not nestled in those quiet mountains far north, neither of them could imagine. By the time the bottle was empty, the camp behind them was quiet. Bats in the trees above flitted helter-skelter catching mosquitoes, and they both watched them fairly drunk. His hand brushed hers when he passed the last dregs sideways to her, he hadn’t meant it to. He started to apologize when she set the bottle down but took his hand.

She turned, faced him, calmly put her hand on his chest, and stepped in to straddle his left leg, putting her heels down slow as if she were making a decision in a dream. She pulled him to her by his belt and he staggered upright only to be pushed back to the wall, and this abrupt possibility, jesus christ did he want it; he wanted it so much he was in pain for it, and when she pressed herself against him he became undeniably hard with the touch. His hands somehow held her hips, and with the feel of her on him and the sudden urge that flooded him, he brought her close. Her breath came fast to feel him, and she held the back of his neck and he panted into her open mouth when she palmed his erection with her other hand, not in the least bit shy. But glimpsing her as she kissed him was like a shock, not to see the face that came to mind, nor the taste he knew, and the sudden burning flare of guilt hurt worse than denying himself this one now-gutted solace. He had to turn his face away, and the weight of her body eased back. He exhaled, held her wrists lightly, rubbing them with his thumbs.

“I can’t,” he said.

He could almost feel her pang of disappointment. He felt it as much himself.  “I'm sorry.” He tried to show her he felt guilty. In truth, he already breathed easier.

“You can picture her, Arthur. I don’t mind.” 

He almost gaped at her with that unsettling thought. “I can’t do that to you.”

“They’re both gone. We have to see it sometime. And us two lonely wretches,” she said, then whispered, “Don’t have to be more than a fuck.” 

When he didn’t move, she took his hand and brought it slowly up to her fine breast, and pressed it there. He found himself obliging, and with that uncommon softness in his hand, his throat ached. He felt sorry for her, standing so close to him practically trembling to be touched. Her hand resting on his chest felt hot with the realization of something lost. When she pushed her hips into him, he was already mostly hard again, and it would have taken little more than a word or glance for him to spill right there, as much time as it had been, and she started to undo the buttons of his shirt. He rubbed his eyes and tried to convince himself there was no harm in it. No harm, nothing but the final acknowledgement that the past was past. To feel hands on his skin again. To feel...

He took her breast more fully in his hand and pulled her in by her lower back, aroused by her dusky sigh, and her hand traveling down made him wince to give in, and her chin trembled and he had never seen her this way. Less for his own sake, he began to unbutton her shirt, and her shaking hands began to help him, and he suddenly felt as if he had made a promise he couldn’t retract, as desperate as she moved on him, as piteous as she looked, like to cry. She was different in her way, and he found himself wondering if she was pretending he was her husband, and if this had been the way they moved, a rhythm he couldn’t quite find. It didn’t rightly matter, but he couldn’t help but notice the smell of her skin so different, not unpleasant but different, her sweat, her breath, her hair as she swept it back off her shoulders. Her breasts were fuller, heavier, and she seemed to melt with the sensation of his hand sliding under one, her chest falling with a long sigh. And although he did as she motioned him to do, and kissed and tongued her tit for a while, the fleshy feel of her on his cheek and mouth, he felt further and further detached as she sighed with the sensation and held his head close. When she curled her fingers under his waistband and began to undo his trousers, though, it was as if his own heart refused to go further, his throbbing will be damned. He stepped back from her, goddamn it was a breathtaking pain to step back but his own spine seemed to peel him away. He held her fingers in his hand for a moment, away from his fly. Gently drew the edges of her shirt closed, shuttering that pleasant view. Tried to think of something to say.

“I want to, darlin." When she faced down, he tried to make it right. “Jesus, I would. Don’t want to make you feel wrong about it.” He straightened back from her, cleared his throat as he slowly fastened up, found it difficult to look at her, but forced himself to.  “You’re a fine woman. I just can’t.”

She pursed her lips and nodded, buttoned her shirt again, and sniffed. “It’s hard, you know. To go on knowin you’ll never feel them again,” she said, with a dignity he found himself admiring long after, and she took a cigarette when he offered one, and they both stood leaning against the wall as the sky lightened and birds waked up in the trees. 

“You loved her.” It was almost an accusation.

“Don’t start.”

“If you’re gonna deny me, let me hear you say why. Ain't many chances we get in life. You miss her, Arthur, might as well say it.”

“Yeah, well, don’t change what happened.”

“You sure it ain’t you bein a fool?”

“An O’Driscoll, Sadie? Really?”

She shrugged, smirked. “Wasn’t it O’Driscolls shootin at her that day?”

“I already thought all ways around it. You weren't up on that flat when it happened. You weren't at the ranch.”

Sadie tipped her head in concession and smoked. “Or maybe that knock on your head was harder than you thought.”

“I'm surprised at you.”

“Imagine how I feel.”

He sighed, scuffing his boot among the dead leaves like scattering dirt over a dug grave. “In any case, what’s done is done.”

“I’m sorry for you, then.”

“Oh really.”

“As your friend, Arthur. Might as well tell you the truth. Makes you mean after a while, carryin on that way.” 

“I was always mean.”

“Maybe.” She sniffed, smoked. “But you’re meaner now in some ways. I saw you happy once.”

“That weren’t happy. That was me bein a fool, back then. Before all that mess.”

“That ain’t true, and you know it.”

“What gives you -”

“Listen to me, Arthur.” She pointed into his chest, pushing him back to the wall. “On my Jake’s birthday, you listen to me and don’t say a word back. You ain’t a bad man but you’re on the razor edge of becomin one, doin like you do now. I don’t know what I thought - maybe a little tenderness, some companionship might do you good after you deny yourself every other thing. Maybe you’re just too far gone.”

“You were thinkin of yourself.”

She slapped him, hard, though it stung him more that she would do it at all. 

“Get some rest, dammit. You’re a shell. It’s hard to watch.” She dropped the end of her cigarette, ground it out in all that rustling dead brush. “You’re better, Arthur. You were better.” A crowd of expressions fell over her face, all stern and regretful and accepting of things he couldn't fathom, like closing a door. She took up her carbine, but before she left, she had to touch his arm and give him that look that saw him for what she thought he was, and he had to look away. She patted his arm firmly and walked along the wall to her post, one slight stumble as she went.

He thought about leaving, going into the city. He thought about finding a whore. Just to plumb that final pit of himself he had stayed out of so far. Thought about how good it would feel to fuck the hatred right out of himself again, even knowing it would seep back. Brothels in the Irish district seemed appropriately decrepit. Saw himself waking up wasted on some stained ticking mattress in the heat of that city. 

He didn’t get that far. He got jumped in an alley and fought his way out of it, four grown men, and then sat down against a building to get his head straight, all the echoing rambling of the drunk and the destitute in the shadows and the flickering gas lanterns giving the street a hellish atmosphere. 

“Sir, alms for those who need it.” A woman’s voice above him. 

“My money ain’t mine to give, lady,” he said without looking up, his arms propped out on his knees. 

“No, for you, sir.”

He glanced up to see a nun holding out a dollar to him.

“Oh, I ain’t…” He waved her away. “I ain’t in need,” he said. The man down the sidewalk a ways, lying on his bed of newspaper, was singing a tuneless, wordless song, sweeping his arm heavily to conduct the air.

“Forgive me, you seem to need something,” she said, a little humor in her voice, which was the only reason he didn’t snap at her to get away. When he looked up again, she indicated her own face where bruises darkened his. 

He pushed against the wall to stand up, his joints stiff, his knee especially where one of the thugs had fallen into him. “Well whatever I need, Sister, it ain’t cured with a dollar.”

“Nothing is,” she said, still humor in her voice, her eyes that looked up at him without the slight fear he saw in most strangers. She stood at least a foot shorter than him, and walked alongside him; she didn’t seem to have any particular direction in mind. Anyway it didn’t feel right, leaving her in that place by herself. She lay the dollar piece in the hand of the singing drunk and smiled when he started to sing a song for her as she rejoined Arthur in the street.

At one point, he stepped wrong on the cobbles and his knee nearly gave out, and she walked him over to a bench under a dim street lamp and sat down beside him.

“You don’t need to, uh -” he said, and she fanned herself and dismissed him in kind. 

“I don’t need to do anything. But we can sit here a while.”

Him sitting next to a nun, and behind him the dark cathedral looming, its gardens a rare piece of tranquility in that dark city built for sinning. Dutch would give him grief for days if he saw it.

She introduced herself. Sister Calderón. He gave his real name, which he hadn’t used in months. Felt strange to say it. 

“Mister Morgan, what brings you into the city?”

He thought about his original reasons and stared out at the street ashamed as if she could read them on his face. “Bad business, Sister. You’re better off far away from me.” He rubbed the side of his knee and took out his cigarettes. When he offered her one, thinking she wouldn’t take it, she did, and he smirked over his own cigarette as he held out the match for hers.

“Oh you cannot be so bad, Mister Morgan.”

“With all due respect, Sister, you have no idea.” 

She seemed unconcerned about his long-barreled revolver between them, the one he’d gotten off the body of Flaco Hernandez, carved butt to barrel with skulls. 

“You wanna do some real good, go convert the folks on that street with all the mansions. Tell em to give more to the folks over here.”

“Oh they have no need for God.” She smoked, and he smiled wryly with her, and the moths spun under the streetlamp, their shadows large as crows passing over them.

“Why do you do it?”

She turned her open, curious face to him.

“Why do you try to save folks? Most of us is beyond savin.” He felt a grip in his chest. Made it hard to breathe for a moment.

“If saving is not the goal, does that help?”

He huffed, and smoked, and didn’t see her point.

“We are all sinners, Mister Morgan. And we are all worthy to sit next to each other. There is no condition.”

“I seen plenty of men ain’t fit to spit in front of you, Sister, all the evil they done. Me among them.”

“What is fit or unfit? To have the comfort of another and share the weight of the world for a time is the closest thing to sacred. If you see it that way, then pride is the obstruction. And we are all proud. If there is anything to be saved from, perhaps that is it.”

She had put a dollar in his hand as she got up, her small, soft, dry hand touching his, and told him to put it to good use before she walked off; he didn’t see where to. 

Once he found Georgia, he got out north of the city and set up camp, figuring to sleep until he could wake up without that hangover of shame. And in his sleep, the way she always seemed to when he was at his worst, Nell spoke into his ear.

Do that to me again.

He saw her in that dream, at night. By the river. They didn’t have to be so quiet but were quiet anyway. In the mossy bower of a willow. Her fingers in his hair. Her sweet mouth opening with his.

In the stifling heat of midmorning he woke to the ache of his knee now swollen, and limped as he packed up his things, drifting in the aftermath of sleep, the guilt heavy this time, more than usual.

He could hope for no such goodness in his life again, he knew that much. Bullets seemed to seek him out with more and more intention and better accuracy, stinging the bricks near his head, or close enough he could hear them buzzing past like insects. Sometime in July, outside Annesburg, he came upon the body of a small-time outlaw posed on display on an upturned cart, CRIMINAL painted on a sign hung around his neck. Dowels were hammered in to support the body under the armpits, and the curious filed past him, watched closely by the local sheriff to keep them from cutting tufts of hair or bits of fabric from his suit to keep as souvenirs. The outlaw, pale and posed, with his index finger tied by string to his opposite thumb to appear clasped, had nothing but a small caliber hole to the outside of his eyebrow to attest to the manner and cause of his death. No more than twenty-three. It was impossible not to make the comparison to his own age and consider his waning luck.

While Dutch stalled and angled around the mob in Saint Denis, where you could hardly loiter without attracting the attention of the omnipresent law, he searched for ways to keep earning, inching them closer to freedom, all of them falling back into old habits the longer they stayed there. What he had to show for his few successes, it seemed to make no difference. The growing threats he endured, the close calls, did not incline Dutch to greater urgency. Like all things there, they slowly settled into the muck of their lives, where a person survived by living in delusions and dreams, or unconcealed meanness, all aware of but unconcerned by the slide of time outside.

He pulls up on the reins, coming into the heat of the city, and the clopping of Georgia’s hooves careens off every stony surface. All softness conquered under a hardened crust. The captured trees. The overtaken ground. Brick walls making canyons in the swamp. He sits her slow trot and glares ahead to the echo of his horse’s steps, on the way to another meaningless score.

 


 

“Can I help you?” you had simply asked. All those months ago.

The man cried out in surprise, clutching his heart, losing one shoe in the muck and catching his balance with a look of total dejection all over him. He shone with sweat and was dressed to compete with peacocks for color and panache. 

He had a melodic whisper of a voice. “If you have somehow cultivated the ability to see one fragile petal in this entire odious overgrown swamp or snatch eggs from the mouths of reptiles, then you might be able to help me. Sadly, I think I am beyond succor.”

You held out the orchid in your hand, if only as a convenient article of cheer. You didn’t expect the reaction it wrought from him, which began with a quaver of his chin and then a relinquished sob as he left one shoe behind in the mud and hobbled coltishly through the shallows to get to you.

“A Queen’s.” He approached you with both impeccably groomed hands spread wide, contracting then at his realization of their newly filthy appearance, then reaching again in a soft receiving cradle to accept the waxen flower.

You laid it in his hands and he supported it as if he wanted to touch as few points of it as he possibly could while keeping it from plummeting to the mud. 

“Where did you find it? H-how?”

You had been walking for hours by that time. Blistering feet. You might say feeling sorry for yourself. Your fare ran out outside of Lagras, and the coach driver could not be persuaded or even threatened to bring you further. The asshole. You were hoping to make it to the city before nightfall, and at least to a saloon if you found nowhere to sleep. Then, in a pool of water and afternoon sun, it caught your sight. A demur hint of color beneath the spikes of a palmetto. A stately orchid somehow avoiding the spotlight. Like a deposed royal. Not to pin such a likeness to yourself, but it felt fitting to pick it and carry it with you. Either feeling bitter at the world for putting pretty things in front of you to destroy, or wanting to capture the last traces of hopeless beauty left in your path before they disappeared. 

“Can you find more, do you think?”

You had hardly opened your mouth to try to answer when he was limping beside you, one-shoed, to the road. “Imagine it from my point of view: Here you are, walking out of the murky depths of the jungle, filthy -” he eyed you up and down with a crooked eyebrow full of disdain but also companionable honesty, as he took your arm - “just when I am despairing of the world, and you offer me the one thing I have searched for at the mercy of the insects and the reptilian creatures of the swamp for fruitless hours.”

He walked you to his cart, drawn by a refined-looking pony, and you sagged with relief at the chance to rest. He snapped the reins without having stopped talking for more than a breath.

Orchidelirium, dear girl. It has swept the globe, and here, on the edge of the swamp in our fair city: the epicenter of its bounty. But if I am honest, and my dear I must be nothing but honest if I am to maintain a reputation as the most trustworthy outfitter to women of distinction, I must acknowledge my limitations. The swamp is no place for me.

“Please indulge me; I am not inclined toward judgment, but my tool is sharp-eyed assessment: Trousers. Shirt. Underpinnings to befit your sex, but all the trappings otherwise of a manly existence. Hands and a figure that have worked. Worn. Walking along a road miles from any stop.” 

“I haven’t exactly had a ch-”

He continued, undeterred. “No horse. No escort. Capable but unarmed, unprotected. Dear girl, I will not insult you with charity, but you have demonstrated that you can find what I have spent endless hours in search of. In short: If you have the ability, I have the capital.”

You caught less than half of what he said, your body realizing all it had been through in the last few days now that you sat on something with a cushion. By the time you arrived at the outskirts of the city, to his atelier and its steaming greenhouse, you had a job, two dollars for the orchid, directions to a boarding house off Courtenay Street, and an appointment the following day to have your measurements taken for oh, just a few things, to make you presentable to him, you reckoned. Five dollars to get something to eat in the meantime; you were told you looked pale. With the tint of your hair, downright deathly. As you stood in his atelier, you turned to your left, to the enormous gilded mirror, and the last time you had seen a reflection of yourself, it had been in Valentine, and that person was not the one staring back at you now. You turned away.

The matron of the ladies’ boarding house informed you of your luck; a girl had recently passed away, and weekly rent was $1.25, five cents for linens. She handed you a pile of folded sheets and led you up two flights of stairs to a narrow room with a small iron bed, a tall ceiling, and a coal hearth the size of a hat box. Two tall, narrow windows to the long balcony. No smoking, no drinking, no men. The women all smoked, regardless, merely standing with a hand behind their backs whenever the matron passed by.

Bloomers hung like signal flags across the courtyard. A dead fountain of emerald water stood in the middle, and the nymph atop it poured from a dry jug. Crates and baskets and broken chairs crowded against the walls like an extra measure of protection against all things outside this one secluded space. The many voices of women echoing there. Such an uncommon sound to you. Only women. High and low voices, and all notes of their enticing or disarming or dangerous inflections. Dressing robes and hair tied up in scarves and flirting with each other in their underthings, reading tarot, flipping through magazines. All the laces undone when there were no men to tie up for. They got the read of you as soon as you followed the matron down the hall past their many open doorways. Their side glances slid down you and back up. Someone to torment or teach or mother. You kept your head down and slipped into your room, already hearing their questions and snide remarks in the hallway. 

The windows framed a slender view of the steeple on one side of the balcony and a sliver of a cathouse on the other.  You perched on the sill of the open window for a smoke, and pulled his journal out from your shirt, where you had held it all that time, like precious smuggled cargo. The leather was warm from your body, supple from use, darkened and marked by his repeated touch and the surfaces it had rested on. A few stains of his blood left over from your hands. The pencil lay buried in the middle. Within its pages, it had shaded picture after picture of what would only resemble your brutal betrayal now, if you opened it again. You could not. Instead, you slipped it into a tear in the seam of the mattress and put the sheets on the bed.

You collapsed there in your bone-weary exhaustion, every throb of your heart like a hand grasping for hold, slipping, grasping. You gave in to sleep, hoping you might not wake and face yourself again.

But you did. You opened your eyes, drew breath as if you had lain underwater, and remembered where you were. You sat up and confronted your tiny bare room in the morning light, all hues of dirty white, scalloped ochre stains of wallpaper paste and water damage. The chipping white paint on the windows. The blinding hazy sky. 

At ten o’clock you arrived at the tailor’s and a thin tape-measure was unspooled to assess your every circumference and length, and bolts of color were held up to your face by a woman who could tell the difference between lavender and violet. When the tailor stood you on the stand and held the ruler up and chalked the line against your calves and began to pin the fabric up to your ankle height, you held your breath as the backs of his working fingers would graze your tendon and bone, such a dainty, careful, practical touch. You wanted to stand there for an hour. Just to be touched, not reviled, while he slipped pin after pin into place. And then your wrists. 

They put you in pretty stockings with pretty lace at your mid-thigh. Garters. Drawers. Chemise. A corset with twelve exquisitely tiny hooks to bind you in. A corset cover. Short petticoat, lace petticoat.  A couple of straight modern skirts and gauzy blouses in pastel colors. You declined and then firmly refused the hip pads, though they declared your figure too flat. Your feet were squeezed and hooked into pointy shoes that somehow managed to cause pain up your back. Through it all, Algernon zipped around the room visiting dress forms like a hummingbird, talking to the tailor and the ladies of the shop nonstop about this shantung and that toile, until he needed to sit down for a moment, for he hadn’t had anything to eat since luncheon yesterday at the contessa’s. 

Far too long after that, for your patience, you stood in your new tottery shoes on the pavers outside his atelier. Birds of Paradise fanned open ostentatiously in the ring around the fountain. He led you through the greenhouse and its dense population of dark green philodendron and white lilies. Asiatic lilies, calla lilies. 

“I do realize the theme could be called funereal,” he said as he processed ahead of you to the tap of his heeled shoes. “But my mode is the ephemeral and the transitory, and if there is one truth I have discovered at all, it is that for beauty and love to exist there must be death. The tension is the fire that forges art. The calm existence through racing time. The pleasure of having, exposed to the pain of losing. The strength to pass through.”

He glanced over his shoulder, and he must have seen the small twitch on your face of what was still too close to the surface for you to rest your thoughts on, and spun on his high heel to you.

“My dear, you have loved and lost,” he said, and he sighed and touched your arm so lightly it barely brought the fabric to your skin and tears to your eyes, which you quickly blinked away. “I would tell you I am sorry. In truth, I want to congratulate you. It is an attainment too few allow themselves the risk of.” He took your hand and led you to the tiny table, and then busied himself at a small stove to make tea. The ceiling fans clicked quietly overhead.

Meanwhile, you took a better look at the room where you would spend the next many months making tea for his wealthy, captious clients, sweeping up the scraps of his work, trimming plumes and orchids, keeping books, and listening to him wax on about the exquisite artistry in Chinese porcelain and jade figures, the unmatched grace of Italian furniture, the French art of pattern and contrast, and the differences between Spanish and Portuguese ornamentation you never do manage to learn. The concept of life as purgatory, purgation, purgative, and the constant cycle, the inhalation and exhalation, of experience and mistakes and redemption, and how it manifested unexpectedly in the landscapes of the Hudson River School. The power of numerology. His ridiculous and not at all applicable philosophies on love and loss he seemed intent on educating you about. He piled books in front of you to learn about the orchids he must have. 

It was a Saturday, that day soon after you arrived, when you found a spot of blood on those pretty white underthings, like a fallen petal, the delayed and aching proof of what was lost, the final furthest hope you had almost allowed to seed in your mind. Staying in bed only made you restless and let your mind wander to unattainable things, and you could not bear it for long. You changed into your old clothes and spent that day in the swamp gathering orchids that caught your attention like the splashes of a fish at the surface. You wove between trees, parted drapes of vines, and came upon an egret’s nest, hatched not long ago, the shells lying like pieces you had lost, parts of broken memories and song strains escaped, and left them there. As if in place of what you left behind, you uncovered orchids of such exotic shapes and expressions each one was a discovery, and you lay them in the basket carefully as specimens.

When you brought them back, he seemed only to see the orchids in your arms, not the muddy appearance of the bearer, and you thought he was merely engrossed in his busy arrangement of plumes in a hat, when he turned around. 

“Come here,” he said, clapping his hands lightly before him, his monocle flashing, and he directed you to stand several feet back from the mirror. He straightened your shoulders, watching you in the silvered glass intently, shifting your braid over your left shoulder. Blousing your shirt, ignoring the mud. Serious as he pinched a little color into your cheeks. He angled your chin upward a degree, studying the mirror as if he were adjusting a surveyor’s theodolite. When he turned around, you started to turn with him, but he swirled his hand at you to resume his careful positioning, and when he turned back, he fanned out his elbows as he slipped an acuna’s star orchid behind your right ear. He did it with such precise gentleness you wondered if he knew the source of what weighed on you. 

“She is there when you allow her,” he said, with an esoteric flourish, before he glided back to the hatform. You might have dismissed it as pretending at wisdom, were it not for the tears that sprang unavoidably to your eyes.

And in such ways, over the seasons you fell into what you might call a friendship, became his confidant, and he cried to you so often you took to carrying two handkerchiefs. You knew how to calm him with a single square of Belgian chocolate and few Chinese silk fanfuls of air. He convinced you to accept the daily donning of a lady’s wardrobe and even like it from time to time. You were there to talk him down off a chair the day one of the gator eggs actually hatched, and talked him out of killing himself the day his affections were refused, by telegram, by a socialite with a somewhat overly direct way with words, you conceded. You counted out your own pay at the end of the week. It was the first honest work you had had in your life, and you wouldn’t give it up for the world.

At night, in the boarding house, to the low crackle of gramophones and the laughter and singing of all the girls, you mostly kept to yourself. They seemed to accept you more once they saw you in normal clothes, and almost overnight your wardrobe grew with gifts of their castoffs. Stockings, skirts that no longer fit them. They taught you about the proper shape of eyebrows and how to care for delicate things. You taught them how to get the sharp end of a knife out even when they were shaking and in the dark, and where to stick it, if they had to.

Over the months your dreams began to take different shapes, in vivid colors and breathless scenes of escape but no longer falling. Sometimes familiar hands would find you, touch you in ways you had long not felt, and you would wake up on the edge of orgasm, sweating and unable to complete. Full of regret and resurrected pain.

The summer day you crossed paths with Trelawney, you froze on the sidewalk outside the cemetery. He stopped too, twenty feet away. For a long moment you regarded each other. Your mind raced, fearful of what he would tell of what he saw. His nod to you, before he walked away, seemed to say he saw you, he knew you, and that you were a stranger to him, all at once. It was a reassuring nod, and yet your nightmares that night were the worst they had been in all that time. 

Until that moment, you could pretend you were something different and build fantasies out of feathers and flowers. 

So much can happen in a year.

A woman can make her way out of the wilderness with nothing, and build herself a life.

She can fool herself for a certain amount of time.

And one day, when the door of the atelier opens, she will notice with a shock the cadence of the steps. The ching of spurs will prick her heart.

(You nearly drop your shears, but regrip them, should you need them.)

Algernon turns and greets him by an old alias with a flourish, swamps him with offerings. And after a single glance - one that bears a searing absence of recognition - he turns away. He might as well have stabbed you.

When he leaves, you let out the breath you held all that time.

Your hands tremble, and you ruin two Lady of the Nights trying to trim them.

Hours later, you leave, locking up in the seething cricketsong, those nights that never cool off from the day.

And you turn directly into him, solid as a brick wall. 

The familiar growl of his voice overwhelms you. “Don't you dare scream.”

“I’ve never screamed, you leaving bastard.”

“Get on the goddamn horse.”

 

 

 

Notes:

Obvious license taken with timeline and events. Some of us took our time stalling in chapter four playing everything we could here and picking a bunch of goddamn flowers and doing all the hunting requests and it was great.

Thank you for reading! 🖤