John the Posthumous Page 5

  I would prefer a dragon beam, actually, fractured or otherwise, if not jack rafters and a scissor brace, or even queenposts on a tie beam, or hammerposts on a hammer beam, the purlins having been ravaged in the usual manner. But these elements, alas, occur elsewhere—a few doors away, or down a block, or over a hill and toward the river, crossing the bridge now into the next town.

  The roof often appears a peculiar blue. At this distance, anyway—from the lawn and the walk. The dormers are somewhat darker.

  Your standard roofing nail, nine gauge or ten, barbed, lands on the awning or on the garden path.

  Slating: copper wire. Shingle: cut-iron or steel.

  Is it true that the mansard roof was named for the form of Mansart’s coffin?

  But now we are north of the boy.

  Poor boys fall from chimneys only in the morning, according to that old saying—just as a gentleman drowns only at night. Either way, a windstorm next August will carry off the neighbor’s weathervane.

  I paint the eaves and doorframes every five years. I have twice replaced the flashing at the ridge.

  The shakes are cedar or pine or cypress, hand-split and stained.

  Pitch: 12/12.

  The gambrel roof was named for the gambrel stick—bent like a horse’s leg, and from which butchers would hang dead animals.

  Lightning strikes the ladder, several rungs down.

  My father’s house, on New Street, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—which I visited as a child, in 1969—was a brown Colonial with four columns, dentil molding, and a widow’s walk.

  The cornice vents attract various insects—crickets, termites, flies.

  Flat wire: one foot square. Single bead: soldered.

  And now we find a cat’s tail near the downspout.

  The gable roof was named for the gable wall—brick, in this case, with an ornament on the door.

  From above, the man on the roof—just east of the dormers; prone—may appear a branch or a pitchfork, or perhaps a tiny gap in the valley.

  Tulips are rooms in red blood. Have I mistaken the phrase? Horsetail grows in the yard. You weed and you weed, but in it creeps. Lawn also refers to a linen of some sort—and plat, at one time, referred to the shape of a blade. Imagine a dagger or an ax, or those swords designed to resemble bodies. Women of a certain station, I once read, were not to be seen in the presence of knives. And so the ancients would place their artifacts at the doorpost, and take away on a glass plate a portion of the offering.

  The porch light: this scatters the cats. I sweep the patio every two weeks, and clean it with bleach in summer and fall. The wind in the pickets, I should think, terrifies the mice. But now I have lost the sun again. A squirrel drowns one Monday in a flowerpot. I bait the traps with meat, and cut the branches along the path. I trip—you see?—on the last step.

  The object nailed to the tree: something small and wooden, but not a doll.

  The Rowan children would feign death on the doorstep of the first house; and in the yard of the second house, before a shed and a hedgerow; and in a field of weeds beyond the third house, next to a barn, the name and the hex sign upside down.

  A newspaper account describes a boy of five, caught beneath a maple gate for sixteen hours—outside the Milton house, on Bird Road, in Whitebriar, Pennsylvania, 1953.

  In folklore, the orphans cross one road and then another—having traveled due south for three days, or perhaps four; and having discovered a breach in the greenery; and having surmounted a low wall or fence—arriving at your door in the middle of the night.

  The trap in the crocus patch: this breaks the rat’s neck.

  The patio: two columns, a lantern, and a wrought-iron bench. Doll parts are arranged on the lawn. A few of the taller trees—these are diseased. Needle blight, is it not? I water the annuals in the afternoon. The dog pursues the birds quite ruefully, it seems to me, falling just before the porch door. I set the tacks on rags and cover them with ash.

  The doorframe disappoints the wall, as the wall disappoints the floor. The mullions divide the yard into nine portions. But portions—or, if you like, portion—is an unlovely word. Guest and host, for their part, issue from the same root—ghostis. Which means stranger, villain, enemy—though naturally I had believed it to mean ghost. And the figure in the corner, lower right, is neither my daughter nor her hat, but just a paper bag in the grass.

  On the north side: the fence is six feet high, board on board, posts four on center. The pickets are in the Gothic style. On the south side: the fence is four feet high, open-picket with three-inch spacing, posts eight on center, rails at the top and at the bottom.

  You would be forgiven, however, for mistaking a certain post—on at least one occasion, in the rain—for the form of a woman. While the split rail—hanging at this angle—often puts me in mind of a skeleton on a wall.

  The gatepost, in our case, rotted first.

  A gate, absent a lock, may be understood as—in legal parlance—a place of danger. The creaking of metal gates—this, I like to think, was the great eighteenth-century sound. Just as the great nineteenth-century sound was the burning house.

  She would kneel here with the shears.

  On the west side: the hedgerow is six feet high. The wasps keep mostly to the rockery—beyond the flowerbed, the creeping Jenny, and the child’s things. Burdock—also known as cuckold’s dock, as it happens—grows more beautifully, it is safe to assume, outside other houses.

  I cannot abide a column overgrown with vines.

  On the east side: the garden wall is five feet high, brick in a standard configuration, flush cut. The child found mice there from time to time. The bats prefer the latticework, the balcony, the gutters. The border plants burn or freeze, as the case may be.

  I am displeased by the pine trees, by their location and arrangement, and by the manner of the shadows thrown across the lawn. A section of the path is hidden behind the firewood. The stakes are placed every three feet, from the gatepost to the cellar doors.

  The deed, duly executed in the month of November, covenants that the party of the first part has neither suffered nor wept, walking the lot haltingly, from a corner formed by hazels, around said curve, thence north 86 degrees, 44 minutes, 29 seconds, a distance of fifty feet to a point or site of conclusion on the eastern line.

  On the street map: a creek, a park, a boulevard.

  The survey refers to a lane rather than an alleyway. A revised version, dated two days later, corrects this—but mistakes several letters in my name.

  Some Colonial maps are adorned with bridal inscriptions or memorial borders. I gather, however, that diagrams of fire are rare even in the earliest specimens.

  Lot: 7. Block: 23.

  Red arrows—and the letter P, reversed—mark the iron rods, capped, that appear as zeros in various places.

  Radial, north side: 118 feet. Radial, south side: 125 feet.

  A rood, in England, is a quarter acre—but may evoke, in the New World, animals in the kill. The sky is dead leaf or king’s yellow or burnt lake—at least as the field books have it.

  The survey of the Burton property, on Court Street, in Germantown, Pennsylvania—purchased 1930; abandoned 1931—indicates, at the bottom of a pond, a treeline and a tiny folly.

  The Gunter’s chain has one hundred links, steel wire. The choke is a brass device—akin, in certain depictions, to a compass—trampled in the grass, or lost one morning in a forest. The dials sometimes resemble headless birds.

  Tract: 8. District: 16.

  I mark a large square in the garden, its western edge ten feet from the property line.

  Some Colonial maps display rows of daggers, for fenceposts, and rows of cannons, for houses. The bell tower is often replaced with a list of solemn phrases.

  On the county map: a mountain range, a river and a bridge, a turnpike.

  The survey places my wife’s name beside mine. The name of the town appears just above a signature and a date, and just below a single black st
roke.

  ADULTERIUM

  ONE

  Decline implies a distant relation. Better this, you know, than Henry or Edward. Poor John is all alone on the porch. Another name is written out, in black ink, on the headboard and on the bedroom wall. Butcher is our favorite shade of blue. Quietly, on the other hand, offers a view of the husband from the house. In this case, the victim sits in three parts. A clattered bone is homelier than a drowned wagon. The sticks, such as they are, appear at a peculiar angle. The dead card is read at the garden wall.

  The ashpit attracts finches rather than bats, but the housecoat catches fire anyway.

  Long affliction is worse, of course, in August. The lawn is brown, spoiling things every morning. The afternoon begins with Miss Milligan in a corner room. It concludes with stewed tripe, or with aspic and a knuckle of veal.

  Our house seems meager between the trees.

  Wasting, for near relations, offers little scenic detail. In this case, a souvenir cracks in two. The blade is the face and the haft the body proper. It follows, often, that the ladies wait at a train station. As a matter of course implies the nighttime attire. The shift exhibits a chain-stitch, worn on the wrong side. Killdeer and sparrows are found in the piano. Laurel, it appears, cannot come down after all. We are so sorry to hear about Dorothy and Anne. Another name is written out, in black ink, on the back of the attic door.

  A staircase will do for the swoonings.

  TWO

  The knife recurs as a figure in certain rooms. Take the parlor, where the matron, aflame, parts the drapes—and the bedroom, where brown ants cover the haft.

  Have a better look.

  The spine, despite its color, whatever this may be—I imagine you find the light as dim as I—dates the item. The break remains the break—in halves, to the left of the letters. The pike hides the rust very nicely.

  Your carving articles, years ago, might include a little brass hook, this to remove the eyes. A scullion would address the red tables. An abigail would attire the girls, were there any. These cleavers, of the kind we were accustomed to in childhood, if more ornate, had been devised for cadavers, in fact. Pluck its feathers, they say, and a butcherbird resembles a blade. Hold it this way and it resembles a hand aslant. But skinning implements have no place in a good home, have they? The demeanor of these, I submit, and of the leavings, to say nothing of the town steeples—evident now at the near window—settles the question.

  Flay, in any case, once meant bed, as in a ditch or a trench, or on a wide green lawn one summer afternoon—given the terms of the early American lexicon.

  While stab would prevail on the more suitable occasions.

  At the time of our murder, reader, a knife might display the victim’s name. This was less the habit later in the century. Messages of other kinds, engraved on the male side, were customary in some marriages. The effect upon the heart, as distinct from the throat, to cite only two bodily objects, was certainly great—but was usually described in unfortunate ways. The letter V as arrow, in one view. In another, the letter L as pistol or gibbet. Immurement of this sort, whatever the text, came to seem rather too mannered a practice.

  The man stands in the corridor, the woman at the top of the stairs.

  The color changes at the ridge—toward the wood now, once and for all. Blue often implies something human. Black letters, as these, to the left of the emblem, contrive to escape harm.

  Surgical instruments—in a hemlock box, in a bridget—would sometimes assume unusual forms. They were likely to split, grips of this variety—stag instead of hickory or larch. Ivory—forgive me the handprints and the rats, the late hour—was always taken down first, the carts dashed with pitch. The bone saw would say the boy’s name. Horn saws would bloom in the road. But some maps favor exaggeration, do they not? From above, the houses seem to bleed. These versions, rivets pitted brown, were reserved for oxen—wounded in the straw, or lost—and these, with nickel-plated teeth, for cuckolds and Jews. Another tale, offering the latter facts more amply, and less dully, notes the shape of the rope in the dayroom.

  If death is a room, as one conception has it, then where is the family? Let us wait in a safe place and consider this. Are the doors an argument for ornament? Doubtless they are said to resemble sad men. The route to the bureau, I suspect, is just as you remember it. Do excuse the collars—or excise them. Can we conclude that the bed is properly dressed? See how the knife lies there, at this angle, in lieu of you.

  In the history of adultery, women cross all morning, east to west, as in the parable of the gown: a murderer left—in the parlance—for dead, without further confession, post after post after post. In the history of adultery, women cross from this corner to that, in gowns, as in the parable of the copse, where a body is found—broken, in one description; dead, in another—though suddenly the origins of corpse seem in order, or at least preferable, post after post after post, the other houses without a sound. In the history of adultery, men fall on the lawn, and at the gate, one by one, or they kneel, merely, among a woman’s things, as in the parable of the house, where the room faces south, and where the husband finds the wife.

  See how the drapes disclose the road.

  The declining hour, I can confide, is always lonely, a fact that returns us to the terms of the town—but I ought not speak so often of grief.

  Manners for mourners differed somewhat in the country, where a dinner-setting might include, to the left of the strop, a jar of hearts. A child’s knives should sit crosswise. A white plate should conceal a dark card. Have they measured as yet the length of the carcass? Grouse, in bruises, to use the local phrase, was acceptable on these occasions. Pox hen, gutted and trussed—or potted—was not. The decorum of boys, as to the body, and in the event of slaughter, for that matter—the sheep at the rail, if not the goats—was a lesser concern.

  There they were, in bleak attire.

  A flaying blade appears as ornament in certain documents, and also as the sign of Saint Bartholomew—flayed alive, by all accounts, and now drawn without a face.

  In some later cases, furthermore, the murderer would engrave the blade with a particular figure. A spire meant the left eye, and a lance the right. A pitchfork or an orphan pin—one of these, I believe, meant the heart. Organ knives were designed for the windpipe, the lungs, the intestines, and so on. While the bed knife—sometimes called a pale or a picket, after the fashion of the more lavish axes—was an indication of shame, in every case. Hold it this way, at night, and it resembles the neck. Have the shadows as you prefer them. The maul sword, for the cleaving of limbs, was said to die as we do. A strange notion, that, given the location of the gouge—rather green from across the room—and given the hilt in the light.

  The ridge is blue, like the wound—but easy to mistake for a stain. A black emblem, to the left of the fault, shows the town’s arms and, in the background, a pattern of animals. The spine reflects a portion of flesh.

  The man stands at the window, the woman at the bed.

  A knife box of the period—in locust or elm—might display the family name. Calfskin would conceal the nails. Hinges of the spike type—shot copper instead of low brass—were believed to carry plague. Is ours without a proper lock? It might sit atop a red table, near the Queen Anne chairs. Open, it might resemble an urn. There were usually two, in those days, side by side—unhappy as that sounds. The wrought-iron rings were another great regret. While battle-scabbards were often missing from the narratives altogether—despite the matter of the beadle and the chambermaid, stabbed at last in a church tower.

  The family is far away. Ornament, according to one argument, portends death. And bedposts of this kind, I suspect, are better suited to other rooms. Do you approve of the birds in the bureau drawer? The wool presents a flaw all its own. The bedsheet is embroidered with hornets—or spotted with blood. The gown is torn. Does the knife hide politely? Brown ants cover the hands, the outline traced with dye.

  THREE

  Convey
ance of the remains: in coffins.

  These are adorned with various forms. The likeness of a child—most notably—or an overturned rowboat. The hanging features a three-legged mare, which gives way, in later examples, to a simpler figure.

  The drop, at Newgate, 1783.

  Two posts and a crossbeam, a five-foot trap, and a scaffold covered with haircloth or drill. The veil always acquits itself quite well. Ox-carts travel hither and yon.

  A balcony gallows may help dignify things a bit, despite the maulings in the courtyard.

  A roadside gibbet, for its part, makes little accommodation for the sounds in a house.

  The long drop, at Lincoln, 1872.

  This effects a broken neck, yes. Or, as in the hangings of—among others—Mr. Adams and Mrs. Brown, decapitation. Shrikes may imply a later occasion in a summer month.

  But to retrieve ourselves from distraction, please.

  The coffins: four across.

  Blue is appropriate for a battle or a strangling, though a fire is more likely. A drowning, in this case, requires clouts at the partition. A betrayal requires an elm floor, rotted through.

  The Murder Act of 1752 excludes the carriage and the roofline.

  Mr. Twitchell—having stabbed to death Mrs. Twitchell—hangs at Penton in June. The hood is a white cap, in fact, with three defects. The dissection is performed at Surgeons’ Hall.

  There follows a quiet fall on a gravel walk.

  The Anatomy Act of 1830 excludes the attendants, two and two.

  The steps—at Bristol, at Vickers, at Westgate—are painted red. At Hackett, the sexton stands at a rail. A ladder, by contrast, would imply a schoolroom or a barracks.

  A winding-sheet would imply contagion, despite the burlap sacks at the chapel wall.

  The coffins: on the lawn.

  These are adorned with various forms. The likeness of a child—divided lengthwise—or an overturned rowboat. The inscriptions, in cursive, list the hour and the year, and then explain the arrangement of graves.