John the Posthumous Page 6

  FOUR

  The mother gives way, in due course, to a red morris—so named for the disposition of steeples beyond the burial mound, or for the absence of the man’s arms—and then to a blue room. The son, the first one, hidden inside a cabinet or a bureau, something small and ordinary, or—less likely—a Queen Anne wardrobe, is buried alive.

  Perhaps January will allow for another accident on the balcony.

  The coffin is for the boy, in all those old storybooks, and the casket for the man. The mortician, the barn wall, the mute swan—these pages are torn in an elegant way.

  The daughter—disconsolate, contrary, stout—is without a portrait, save for the morgue drawing.

  The lid of the coffin, at least on these occasions, is a walnut headboard or a pine door. A so-called griever’s-knife endeavors to separate the relations from the remains.

  December seems more sensible for a murder.

  The father waits in the gravery—twitch grass and bracken, as it happens, outside the parish house, with animals collapsing in the background. The son, the last one—never mind the claims that the doorframes are composed of bones, or that the bier is a horse on four pickets—wears his brother’s garments.

  The coffin, lined with broadcloth or felt, sometimes contains poison for the worms. A surname appears at the bottom of the page—circled, but also crossed out.

  FIVE

  The common wasp measures roughly two hundred hertz. This is well below the frequency of, say, a human scream. Anderson compares the sound of a dying beetle with the sound of a dying fly. (The names of the families escape me at the moment.) The common bee, absent its wings, is somewhat higher in pitch. (Carpenter bees would swarm the porch in August.) The true katydid says “Katy did”—or, according to Scudder, “she did.” The false katydid produces a different phrase altogether, something far more fretful. Wheeler concludes with the house ant and the rasp of a pantry door. Douglas prefers a hacksaw drawn across a tin can. (We found termites in the bedclothes one year.) A sixteenth note, poorly formed, may be said to resemble a pipe organ or a hornet. The children set their specimens on black pins.

  Pritchard—or perhaps Hood—devises a sparrow trap with nine chambers. Miller lists several calls for geese and quail. But the illustrations, in Tilton’s manual, show congregations of jays. Overleaf, grouse hang in a country town. (The door recalls ours, it seems to me.) The lonesome call—a pattern of four noises, according to Walker—can occur in a simple pit. A piano blind can imply a sad family story. (A shot bird makes a brown sound—or so I thought as a boy.) The hunter’s command is “blood”—and now the spaniel endeavors to terrify the guests—or “dead bird.” Evening grosbeaks are seen near the edge of the oaks, beyond the folly, in a row. Yellowhammers drop on the walk. The chains, on some occasions, approximate the timbre of a man’s voice. A certain hex sign describes a child buried alive.

  Ordinary breathing, for a boy, measures roughly ten decibels. Bedside crying, in winter, in a brick house, animals on the walls—roughly eighty. (The rag doll was without hands, I now recall.) A woman says “dear,” or perhaps “door,” and then two names—or perhaps only one. The action of a hinge, according to Dalton, falls between a shriek and a scream. Burns prefers a series of wails, all in the upper register. (The deadbolt was a dark color.) A father’s sobbing, in a corridor and a stairwell, and then in a tiny room, second story, early in the evening—this may be mistaken for toppling objects or for the scraping of a fire grate. (My window faced the road.) Martin lists the rattlebox and the copper pot, but neglects the cat trapped in the attic. The children arrange the knives in three piles.

  SIX

  But how much lovelier had the wife worn, that evening or the next, the other item, which was quite white, after all, far whiter than the spot at the mouth or the lines of the husband’s cuffs: the rest of his things, woolen by the look of them, trousers and the like, and an odd portion of cloth, folded over the chair. If, as I have been led to understand, shroud implies groom (the latter deriving from the former, or vice versa) rather than dagger (which is apparently without connection to dowager—but how I regret these grisly, inexpert approximations)—then, notwithstanding the corpse on the bier, whether hers or his, the body may imply, say, the contours of a hornbook or a nuptial bed, or it may, simply, fall.

  SEVEN

  The word adultery derives from cry—which calls to mind, certainly, the way the blanket folded back—and from alter, rather than altar, via reave. But I flatter myself that this provides a correct measure of evidence. Nor does the wood, worse still—Queen Anne at the bottom of the stairs; Martha Washington at the knife box, with a bonnet top and a pierced apron. The posts, don’t you know, later became coffins, just as the headstones later became roads—even if skulduggery derives from neither skull nor grave. The latter, incidentally, is also the name of a town in Pennsylvania—where, as I fancy it, he was born; and where, as it now appears, they stopped—and the name of, more happily, an early children’s game—bleach and stack the bones; carve the hearts in the dirt; place the mice inside.

  I recall a pause of some sort.

  Criminal conversation, as the common notion, and as the preferred legal term—preferred here a ruptured version of something finer, either hers or his, while ruptured, now that we have it, revives for me too keenly that awful fall—dates from the nineteenth century, in America at least, in a house in Pennsylvania, in a high bed, in—to contort the conceit further—a torn gown. If only it were, say, brass and wool, rather than fourposter and silk, and, say, embroidered hornets, rather than spotted blood—to live with, in the standard definition, or to live on, alone there at the top of the stairs. But the finial and the bed, remember, later became theirs, or, better still, were lost to us—a less noisome phrase, this, even if it neglects the fire. Evidently hearts once required a burnt deck, like heartsette, which added a wound, and like matrimony, for the lonely—but unlike blind girl, in which the hearts were marked out.

  Were this a medical, rather than a marital, history—you might then excuse so conspicuous a series.

  And what follows:

  Miniatures sometimes left spaces in place of them. Or, more often, collections of figures, usually in blue dye. These could evoke other bodies, but were not always akin to surgical inscriptions of the day. Models of hearts appeared in wood, and then iron, and then gold. Or ormolu, depending upon the victim, as in the Hessian specimen. They were eventually chipped away for kindling or melted down for buckshot, but most hospital documents omit discussion of this.

  Even the earliest primers compare the heart’s shape to a fist or to a hand waving goodbye.

  Matrimonial law, such as it was, and such as it obtained, in particular, at Hunt and Bonelawn and Cripplegate, among other towns less beguilingly named, required excision at the knuckle—one was made to kneel at the foot of the bed, to remove the ring; one was asked to present the family ax—or, in what was thought a more genteel tradition, a white cord at the throat. It was silk on certain occasions, wool on others, such as this one—tartan, say, bars of whatever sort—the rot of little concern here, I am beginning to think. The scarf and the gloves—terribly evident, still, as she had arrived late, or he had, a door there at the end of the corridor—were becoming, though not black, no, not in the way of the apron, painted something closer to gray, actually, or of the cannon, which was played with four hands on an embalming table.

  She kept her rings in the knife box.

  Scar letter, referring neither to the quaint habit of quotation apparent in some later argument—“I wear my hair in a scar”—nor to the sentiment that the dark shapes on a page resemble rows of scars, disappears from dictionaries in the nineteenth century. As does horn, incidentally, at least in the sense of gallows—the planks, let us imagine, emblazoned with names. The coffins—now, I cannot beg off altogether—were marked with charcoal, the chains displayed near the smallest figures, which may indicate a measure of affection, or, given what had befallen them—the de
scription of the crime; the history of the malady; the form of the contagion—a term in the northern cell, notable at that time for its bone hooks and bronze grille, the former engraved with the prisoners’ symbols, numbers, initials.

  Absent, however, were matters of marriage and a house.

  And the rest of the evidence retreats, as I do, from the bodies:

  They were sometimes mistaken for bundles of cloth. Children sometimes left rats in place of them. Various sadnesses, if not bad weather, attended their arrival. Knives and rifles were found in the graves. Emblems, probably imprinted on the skin, were presented by way of explanation. Evidently they were akin to bridal inscriptions of the day—a hatchet on end; a musket aflame; a dagger pointing south.

  But to liken these to the designs on the bedsheets, even were I to omit the blotches of red, indistinct at so great a distance anyway—this might effect too lavish a comparison.

  Cuckoldry, my proper topic, introduces fewer such obstructions, as, in this case, we have a cleaver rather than a hat—rather does merit something further by now, deriving, if a bit circuitously, from jackal, and thus suggesting, among more familiar conceptions, those portraits of mauled boys—and faces painted on shutters, painted on doors, and, in the better houses, carved into walls. If only the wallpaper had offered as pleasing a diversion—or just a fabric like the gown’s, with bleak little seams. The blanket, on the other hand, implies some custom of theirs, her garments set out in a precise way—matrimony, incidentally, once required widow’s weeds and, by the nineteenth century, crosses of moths, pinned—or a brief event at the foot of the bed.

  I recall the house, from the outside, at night.

  The word adultery does not, in fact, derive from cry—just as you had suspected—and the town, I will concede, suitably antique, and quiet now, stands in lieu of another town, come what may, these stains—cheerfully small—on the blade of the paring knife. The ax-blade was steel on certain occasions, silver on others, depending upon the family—the face already engraved with the surname, and the notch perfectly burnt. The handles later became balusters, which later became posts, row after row after row, as in the preamble about the house—a spine on a white plate; a pile of toile clothing; a swarm of fleas in the evening—and the addendum about the bedroom.

  EIGHT

  But how much simpler to consider them from afar, from the door, say, or from the corridor and the stairs, the husband in particular, the next morning: examining locks, drawers, cabinets and the like, uncovering and covering, unfolding and folding, all the articles a darker color in a better light—as the wife turns this way. Costume comes to mind, preferable as it is to vesture, to raiment, to disguise, or to my own attire, for that matter, warp, weft, and so forth—though you may prefer her ermine collar, or a table of cropped collars in a funeral parlor, the choke-smock conjuring the body as a dressmaker’s form, or as a diagram of red wounds, or as, more likely, a man in a cutaway, leaving a room.

  NINE

  I.

  Perforation of the left atrium, and then the right, as occasioned by a ten-inch blade—this posits obvious complications. The introduction of said blade to the diaphragm (between the seventh and eighth ribs) or to the liver (already afflicted with dropsy, incidentally) would explain a break in the aorta. Passage through the lung (inferior lobe, left-side posterior) into the mitral valve (named for the bishop’s hat, I gather) would explain apoplexy.

  In the case of knitting needles, a pair of these, clutched in the customary way—let us imagine a wound somewhat less shapely.

  The hospitals favor blocked columns, skew arches, brick. Crow steps are always something of a surprise. The city examples, modest as they are, are most notable for their nailhead molding. The county examples have black doors.

  If the surgical theater is found on the north side, and the boys’ ward on the south—better, then, to neglect the location of the litter.

  The awl is for soldiers rather than spinsters. A hairpin sits between a lancet and a matchbox, just above the bleeding bowl.

  A reflection will show the victim in repose.

  A wooden version, a model, with the appropriate veins and chambers painted various colors, or stuck with tacks—this accounts for the fire.

  To repair a hole in the heart, or septal defect, of the type common in children, first determine the site of incision (the sternum seems agreeable) and mark it. Cut accordingly. If the lines remind you of pickets, or of wire, or of your wife’s fingers—look away. Rupture of the heart, or heartbreak (to use the Victorian term), requires sawdust and longcloth—though mortification of the organs usually indicates a different complaint.

  Transfixion (atrial, through the anterior wall, the tendon well hidden—or tracheal, at the first ring) requires a clean white smock. Extract the blade posthaste. Suture the wound with silver rather than catgut or silk. Expect death within ten days.

  Sickroom decoration, pertaining especially to the selection of curtains—the depictions vary by circumstance. On Union Avenue, in an upper room. On Broad Street, across from cannons, at the end of a corridor. On New Street, in a house with a blue roof, or a red one, the rot a bit of a pity.

  Muslin is more becoming than wool, notwithstanding the examples at hand.

  Carpets stain nicely in spring.

  Pearl-ash and lime restore scorched linen—and poison the dog.

  The affliction dictates the location of the children. At the fire irons for grippe, for falling sickness, for Mother’s consumption. At the door, which is shut, for daggers. The color of the curtains dictates the color of the wood. Or vice versa—as moths cover the walls.

  To treat dropsy, give vinegar and bitters in one-teaspoon doses, at night—keeping in mind that the father beset by horrors will favor camphor (two scruples should do) and that squills may inspire needless bleeding. Convulsions call for plasters at the throat—and, on occasion, amputation of the child’s hands.

  Heartsickness, or Saint John’s complaint (to use the correct term), is akin to black fever, at least in respect of the lesions—but the site of these, if not the pattern, also suggests plague. Were apoplexy to accompany screws or bloody flux, however, or a wound of a particular size (three fingers across, say)—worms would then explain the rattling in the lungs.

  The pages are marked in curious ways, though ornamental borders of this sort, especially those that exhibit insects, are far more common before 1700. Plague seems to favor green birds, as it happens, or rows of wagons and houses. Certain names are replaced with urns. Another anatomy presents the ribcage in the form of snakes—with winter scenes at the bottom of every column. Plans of the spine, furthermore, often include sickles, in addition to the cleavers near the numbers.

  In folklore, the towns kill children for skulls. These are set atop sticks or crooks, the sockets filled with cloth. Relics are brought to a meadow, a pasture, a knoll—where the families tell pitiful tales at the funeral pile.

  The skeletons in old schoolrooms—these are black, given the inscriptions. They list the illnesses, in order, and relate the terms of the murders. Fits, for instance, with bules—and then the king’s evil. A man and a woman stabbed through the hands on a staircase.

  A treatise concerning Mrs. Trundle’s disease, from 1760, cites the demeanor of the bedsheets, and offers an inventory of hospital objects, beginning with a bistoury and a capital saw. The former, according to the annotation, is engraved with the surgeon’s name. The latter has a stag handle, split in the middle. In certain editions, scarecrows stand in an anteroom—an error, I presume, despite mention of a dwarf-wall. The illustration, overleaf, exhibits four dogs on a cross.

  II.

  In the first postscript, the hearts are mistaken for dead birds. Doubtless the ants are thought a disappointment. When the horse becomes a house, furthermore, termites appear on the floor.

  The room would be easier to see in an exploded view.

  The sternum, imagined as a sword or a dagger, makes a more worrisome claim. The tail of t
he pancreas terminates at the spleen.

  Listen for rales in the lungs and a catch in the throat.

  When the child is supine, as here, the liver hides behind the ribs. The windpipe attracts spiders at night.

  In the second postscript, a boy watches the body. It is said to resemble a table of beetles. The heart is said to resemble a skinned animal or a burnt skull. It waits in the rain, at any rate, like other objects.

  Embalmed, it is properly brown. It will sink if you drop it into a pond.

  In the third postscript, the wife is buried, or set afire, or brought by cart to the mourners. A later translation cites John, at great length, and places the bones and clothing in the road—beside the cleft, as the afternoon passes.

  Maps of the body, in early anatomy, display the organs as houses in a town. The colors are quite bright—or rather dim. The heart is thought to contain eight rooms—or ruins, given the eventual corruption of the term.

  In line drawings of a particular kind, the heavens divide the victims into wretched sections. The legend, decorated with garlands and the like, abbreviates each name. Diagrams of skeletons behave more obligingly, or at least provide a finer distraction.

  Models of the heart, in wooden versions, in old hospitals—these can be nailed to walls or used for kindling. Blankets cover the skulls—while the wardrobe drops four stories.

  Were you to arrange my organs on a table, the lungs, I expect, would sit below the hornets, and the heart at one o’clock.

  Wound dolls, in the form of Devils, are marked at the throat, the hoof, the tail. The heads are stuffed with horsehair and stitched with wool. The letters concern amputation, but can also show the placement of veins.