John the Posthumous Read online

  In our family Bible: the flyleaf is inscribed in blue ink, in a narrow hand. From husband to wife—followed by a month, a slash, a year. There is a curious break in the number eight. And a mark of sorts, a smudge—a tiny form in the corner of the page.

  Matthew addresses the husbands and sons, now at some great distance from the river, from the plain, from the town.

  Paul is all alone.

  It was once customary to remove—with a table knife or a razor blade—the pages displaying the names of the wives. And for the forsaken—or the bereaved—to spell out the beloved’s name on a white bedsheet, set the bedsheet afire, and then swallow the ashes.

  THREE

  The churches in Eaton, as in Lawton and Harrow, not to mention Putnam, Dunnock, Whitebriar, and Townsend—these, I believe, were destroyed during the war. In Newbury—where a child had died rather famously, a boy, the son of a minister or a deacon, the blackcoat, as they had it, drowned, his feet cut off for the coffin, which was then lost—the spire was a broach spire. In Bethlehem, the tower once housed four mourners—or five, were you to include the suicide—the chains arranged in a so-called hatchet pattern. (According to one old notion, red steeples are neither God’s arms nor falling bodies—but, in fact, spikes in a crown.) The Durham remains were buried with the beds, just west of the road. The markers, for their part, stood twenty or thirty paces from the churchyard. And the sound of the wind—this was quite another matter, especially in Colonial towns. (Speyer is a German cathedral town—city, actually—on the Rhine.) The Thornton daughters suffered on a rooftop, and then a balcony, and then a knoll. The Bratton marriage documents indicate a church wedding in late May—but exhibit, in place of names, drawings of corpses. (According to another old notion, black steeples are coffins or a cuckold’s horns.) The churches in Eaton were destroyed by cannon fire, I imagine—the bells having been removed to Mill Hall and Pike Fork, or to Woodbine and Barlow. In Marion—where a beadle, dressed in funeral weeds, had been stabbed through the hands, the staircase at the back of the chapel, or in a tower, his body carried out in the morning—the spire was a needle spire. In Bedminster, the tower once housed two prisoners—the first thrown to his doom, as they had it, and the second drawn and quartered, the remains sent north to the wrong town.

  FOUR

  The word cuckold also refers to certain insects. Take the cuckold fly—which is actually a beetle, and which feigns death quite gracefully. The claws are dark—red, to be exact, or perhaps black—and the body oddly marked. The brown-headed cowbird, incidentally, found in the New World, often in barn fires, is akin, given its most notable particulars, to the Old World cuckoo. Cucking, however, as in cucking stool—set at the culprit’s door or lost at the bottom of a pond—derives from a different root entirely, I was surprised to find, implying, among other things, the outlines of clouds, a house pulled down, and four forms in mourning.

  A gentleman carries his manners into every room, does he not?

  The horns are white, at least in Colonial renderings, the preferred versions of these, such as the portraits displayed at a pillory or at a gallows, or the drawings nailed to a soldier’s hands. The branding iron is of little interest here, whatever the letter—the cheek more likely than the neck, under most circumstances, and the neck more likely than the chest. The phrases, explained by location—Alton, Batten, Caul, and so on—date from the sixteenth century, perhaps a bit earlier, and—if I have this correctly—concern the design of bedposts and the placement of stakes. Or, in some commentaries, a blind horse in a barnyard—save for those editions in which the horse is a dog and the barnyard a forest. Either way, horn is akin to hart, as in stag—this offers the antlers, if nothing else—and accounts, of course, for hornet.

  There are drawings of the shoreline.

  She creased the first sheet, as you can see—once, and then again, lengthwise, the corner torn away. And now the inlet strangles a cat? Probably not. But remove the locust trees and you have a pleasant memory.

  Wrecks are less common downriver, or upstream, or in the creek in the next town.

  My, my—the rowboats and the hillside.

  Writ of ravishment suggests an error of sorts, given the nature of the occasion, while simple adultery, in American case law, will often accompany—among other ceremonial terms for the husband—man of blood and, in turn, ghost at the feast. The evidence usually includes several cheerful garments—here is the fearnaught, for instance, hanging in the attic—in addition to the children’s things. Consider Burrows versus Burrows, 1878, Pennsylvania—despite the drawn curtains. Or Trumbull versus Trumbull, 1881, Connecticut—most notable for an accident on a balcony. Or Stark versus Cartwright, 1897, Maryland—in which a valise is stolen, and then mislaid, and later found in a lake. The table-setting that evening, left to right, right to left—which is to say, the view of the suitor from the road—is small consolation, I know.

  The garden calendar calls for jackroot, a plant of the beggar-ticks variety.

  Bestiaries, especially Spanish versions—the miniatures in particular, circa fifteenth century—depict the horns quite modestly. Spikes give way to branches, though these may be mistaken for antlers or hands, after the fashion of other Christian depictions—in which, furthermore, a crucifix appears between the eyes. The pointed cross, also called the cross fitchee, takes a different form for demons and thieves, and, in Dutch versions, burns to the ground. English versions, finally, provide curious explanations of the glaive, the dudgeon, the halberd, the broadax—the wives die even as we speak—and then an apology for the paltry lawn.

  August arrives in due course, the color of a statue or a hatchet.

  But this does overstate it somewhat.

  A window, three doors, the roofline. They sat on the balcony in the morning. And now the water is apparent between the trees? From above, these suggest horseflesh.

  Blight, it turns out, is less likely than rot—as you will see in the fall.

  English canon law allows for mention of a hedgerow, or, in lieu of this, a narrative about a black house, beginning with two formal locutions in the corner room. The first concerns a murder—machination is considered the more appropriate term, at least in these dioceses—while the second is a confession, neatly abridged. Here we have the alcove bed, for instance, from 1793, made up in gray. The trestle bed, from 1810, resembles—if I may beg your indulgence—a trembling man. The canopy bed, from 1819, from 1822, from 1827, hides ten items. A treatise on drapery follows, regarding, in part, a brace of grouse and a saddle of mutton, or—depending upon the sadness of the family—green chains and a windowsill.

  The landscape plan mistakes the location of the garden wall.

  Hoddypoll, which also means fool, I believe, derives from dod—as in snail and small hill—and from koll—which is Norwegian for head or crown, and is the root of kill. We may find doddard, then, in the beheading of a gentleman in the fifteenth century—but dodder, by the sixteenth century, for a kind of chokeweed or for a body shaking in pain. Kellen implies neither a corruption of poison nor an argument for catgut, despite the scarechild—a torn rag with brass eyes—in the basket. Buck’s-head, a later variation, presents happier facts—one’s wife repairs to the country, surveys the scenery, returns home in the evening—but disappears by the nineteenth century.

  The drawings of the shoreline are rather inexact.

  Five—I have five.

  She cut out a little square, and then another—and in this way made the faces. You would prefer a brick walk and a privet? Certain of the words resemble ants in distress.

  The lake is named for the town, or for an animal, and is shaped like an ax-blade.

  Adulterium, as defined by the Julian Statute, circa 13 B.C., offers fewer charms, given the particulars of winter, not to mention various old-fashioned sentiments concerning execution. Mutilation, for its part, is more common—the adulterous wife, or adultera, to use the legal term, surrenders her ears or nose, and, on occasion, her fingers—with divorce fol
lowing in short order. Some transcriptions neglect the stranger, or adulter, in favor of graves—a simple matter of manners, this, notwithstanding the disquisition upon the marriage bed. Others relate ordinary household details—dismantling the chairs, and visiting the windows, and departing the courtyard.

  A gentleman, remember, always averts his eyes.

  Cuckold’s Point, near Brockwell, in London, is most notable for its gallows—the red sticks recall horns—and for the drowning of dogs. A cuckold’s neck requires a spar or beam, as I understand it, unlike the Matthew Walker found on the fainting couch, or the nail hitch found among the movables in the front room. The hangman’s knot, with seven coils, or even eight, as per custom—the shade of brown is often a subject of debate—fails to explain the odd formation of lampposts on the avenue. Colonial towns preferred a woolen hood, manacles and chains, and—regarding the father—the scaffold painted black.

  FIVE

  The foregoing ignores—or mistakes—several details. Cuckold’s Point, according to the map I have in hand, is closer to Evelyn than to Deptford. And Brockwell, strictly speaking, does not exist—in London, anyway. Furthermore, the horned figure—now gone—was not a gallows, in fact, but a simple post. It had been exhibited at a fair—the Horn Fair—in celebration of a king’s cuckolding. Which king? King Richard or King Edward. (John the Posthumous—usually rendered in red—was a French king, alive for five days.) The fair would occur every October, on Saint Luke’s Day. The houses, like the tower, were south of the river, and were torn down in due course. A gibbet—absent, however, any configuration of slats or bars or sticks that might suggest horns—once stood ten or twenty paces from the road. Perhaps the murder had occurred on a doorstep. The cage, on this occasion, was made to recall the human form. (The remains of a certain William Fine, a Jew, were exhibited here for seven years and then removed to another gibbet, in Houndsditch.) Fragments of such contraptions—thought to cure various ailments—were sold at auction. Or stolen in town, as the case may be. The procession would pass through Lock Park and Blackton—the latter the site of a cattle market, a naval yard, an arsenal—and conclude in Charlton, for the sermon. The men wore horns. The carts, as I understand it, were dismantled at the end of the day—the wood stacked and then set afire.

  SIX

  The soldier—a redcoat, by all reports—chokes on a coin or a nail or, more likely, dead bees, three or four of them, shown here in a gray basin and on a white bedsheet. (Better a high bed, as the saying has it, than the sound of blood.) The sound of the blade—the implement is a short dagger rather than a mortuary sword—carries very well. Or so goes one description of the event, despite the burnt curtains, the slaughtered dog, the music in the attic. (A bruit, for its part, is a noise—a fault—in the heart.) The arms, in this formation—a martlet proper, at the battlement; shield, pommel, and hilt vert—are thought silent with regard to a falling body, for instance, or a sinking ship.

  The crying wife, in folklore, is carried from a house—a burning house, in those unfortunate drawings—and then down a road and through a town—or across a field and through a forest—in a wooden bed. (The cannons seem charmless from this angle.) Thence south, perhaps, in a rainstorm, past the sorrow in the burrows, the jackchain and the shooting wall, and now, near a creek or a lake, the sounds of a drowning. A family stands in the grass—the boards red in the background, the steeples green. (Her heart went white, as the saying has it—or, more precisely, silent.) The nightdress is woolen, a plain design, open at the collar or fastened there with a clasp or a knot or just a common pin, the click of which may suggest an insect. (Hessian flies are Russian, in fact, and are sometimes confused with wasps.) Marks on a door, often a collection of scrapes or engravings, can indicate the loss of a daughter.

  The orphan swallows a small bird, a finch or a sparrow, even a parakeet, wings clipped, eyes excised—at least as the narrative survives in the upland boroughs and in several of the Eastern towns. (Bloodbirds, so-called, are said to produce a rueful sound.) A bloody bone is thunder, in one version, and timber and chimney smoke, in another—or a pile of sticks near a river, just before the war. (The treetops seem to shriek.) A rag doll gives way to a stump doll—the face stained red, for the frightened child, or blue, for the dying child—which gives way, in turn, to a toy horse, described in a faltering voice. The rattlebox contains a hook and a blade, and is buried at the margin of the yard.

  SEVEN

  The brown-headed cowbird—as distinct from the white-throated finch, which attacks cattle—is entirely gray, in fact, in the female. These are apparent at your attic windows, three and three, at the end of the season. Several examples, wounded in the usual ways, can be found beside the house, in the flowerbed and in plants of the horsetail variety.

  Weeds, properly speaking.

  Pigeon’s neck refers to a pinewood gunstock. Pigeon’s wing refers to a shade of blue—but also to a knitting stitch and to a bloody wig.

  Crow is an old parlor game, in which the family hides from the youngest son. House sparrow requires a child, a length of thread, and two birds.

  Leave them there a moment.

  The fool hen is brown, in the female, and spotted white—with a black throat—in the male. These are drawn like ordinary barn-door fowl—the throat slit for the windpipe and crop, and then the vent for the heart, gizzard, and so on. It is correct to serve with cabbage and apples, or with pickled beets.

  Your father does the carving.

  Pigeon’s bone refers to a manacle or a shackle, especially at a hanging. Pigeon’s blood refers to a shade of red.

  House sparrow is played in the country, on Sunday afternoons, at wakes and the like. Crow concludes in a dark room.

  EIGHT

  The ants: in parts.

  The choke seeps blood and then withers in the cold. The heart recalls a needle, crooked at one end.

  At night, as here, they can appear rather despairing.

  I compare them with cornfields and with fathers in the dark, though wasps would surely posit a better resemblance.

  Potters, for instance, are the correct color, among other things. White spears are without eyes.

  Hook ants pass the fall in dooryards.

  My advice: ox-gall, turpentine, and boiling water.

  It is best to set the bait in a modest trap, slit dirt at either side. Some household objects, such as a hatbox or a milk tin, their tops properly gouged, will do just fine. Suffocation is often the easiest course later in the season.

  Fire, for its part, prefers girls in a hayloft.

  Never mind a lavish appraisal of the landscape, though, save for the remains of the stables.

  Cattlehouses attract botflies, which resemble bees, generally speaking. Their maggots give sheep the staggers. Warble flies, lost, sometimes freeze on the green.

  The winter passes handsomely.

  And then: hornworms and betsys.

  But cut leaves, as such, can also mean lash rot, a fever of sorts, with wounds somewhat graceless in formation, while the mottling seems more appropriate to a pox.

  Thief ants occur inside decaying trees.

  Shadows never help matters, dividing the bed lengthwise. The yard is dark by eight o’clock.

  I do not expect guests anymore, no, but just look at all the cracks in the glass.

  My apologies: for the black ink, for the meager portion of cloth.

  It is sensible to use arsenic too, though mold will grow anyway. The parts are apparent at the bottom of the jar. The specimen should be placed on bright white paper, after the usual fashion, the block on end.

  Light dictates the arrangement of pins.

  A ridge replaces each appendage, in the male, the skin dull on the dorsal side.

  The face displays a jaw and three sutures. The thorax follows from a notch, red in the terminal segment.

  See the bees atop the cinders.

  But spiders prefer flesh flies, which prefer pox hens, bleeding through the evening.

  To
morrow you will mistake them for postholes in a row.

  The border plants, an afterthought, are caught by blight. The bruises ruin the view of the column and the vines.

  To catch vermin of this sort, first turn back your cuffs, please, and remove your necktie, and then soak the roots in kerosene, cinching the rag with twine.

  But now I have managed to trample the annuals again.

  Certain courtesies also obtain in the case of stakes, beginning at said point in the northeast corner, and running thence west to the decline.

  Solitary wasps occur in the rockery, one chain away.

  Potters, for instance, hunt at the far end, stalks and all. The male seems to gasp.

  When they surrender, examples of this family, the bodies shudder, barkweed strangling flowers in the background.

  I neglect the pots and lose another month.

  The trees follow rather solemnly from the fence, wounds painted red. The hedgerow narrows as it approaches the rats.

  The deportment of the lawn accounts for my fall, northerly in performance, beginning at a distant point on the eastern side of the house, and concluding in the rain.

  These beetles starve beneath the leaves.

  Betsys trap weeps in better weather. Skins lie abed in the winter, the way one’s mother sometimes does.

  Bury carrion by the bracken, please, using a new spade and a tin bucket, your handkerchief set out like so, bees at the very edge of the image.

  The hornets: in order.

  Ours, for instance, are known to swarm about a sickroom. They die inside the lowboy.

  In embroidered form, as here, the face displays a red stitch.

  The veins take a different color, panel out. The thorns are ornamental.

  Never mind that the blanket recalls an animal, from one angle, or that the flies collect in piles.