Darling

I.

The smell. It infiltrates. It arrives sooner than you anticipate. It always comes first. You begin sniffing drifts of it a few miles out, and as the boat draws close—I’d try to describe it but a word’s a speck of dust and this smell is a whole different world.

A Frenchman in New Orleans once told me freshly dug truffles reek of sex and soil, oil and ash, sweat and citrus. The odor on Jarvis Island doesn’t need you. Been fine alone a million years or more, and wasn’t till fifty-six did President Pierce think to stick a flag in its silver dollar stench.

Remember those Louisiana peaches we worked picking one summer? Made good money and could talk all day while we did. Good chance those trees were grown with guano. Good chance that guano got dug on Jarvis, God’s last rock tossed careless into blue Pacific oblivion. Good chance a cormorant might rest upon that rock, weary from its westward flight. Good chance a thousand might. I see a flock now amassed upon a petrified cliffedge, their sharp caws blended into one blank drone. Watch them fly. Their long black wings waver like rippled satin, their white bellies flash and vanish as they dive through the darkened evening sky. They are falling confetti, the blink of stars.

Now drop your head and watch the bent men dig. Hear their spades steel jangle between windscream and the saltspray crash of waves. Good chance a band of coolies piled that scoop of petrified scat which birthed the bud that grew to bloom into that wet Louisiana peach you so gingerly bit at noon in the height of a long-gone summer, the juice burst sticky on your chin. Bird shit packed in burlap sacks, shipped to the mainland and buggied to neat tilled fields. That sweet rancid rot seeded by the roots.

Can you smell it? I hope you still can hear me. I speak to you from America’s pale in the year of eighteen sixty eight, or nine, at some sun dazed zenith I forgot. The name Morris Blakely fit me no better than his uniform, but both were necessary for what came next. I’ve never forgotten you, darling.

II.

You must remember the night we first met, in that swamp humid June. How, among the crimson blossomed folds of a Crape Myrtle, you unpinned your hair. It fell across your shoulders the way night falls in November, curtain hushed and total, and we woke to find ourselves curled together on the edge of a cotton patch. Watched those dark bodies spotted ragged among thorny green and misty white as they bent and straightened and bent again.

“Pity,” you said as we walked away. “God made us just to turn his head. Crafted us so lovely in every colored clay only for us to clobber each other back into blood common red.”

Saw bent bodies all across that country, you and I. Wandered place to place searching for something good, slept huddled in alleys and under carriages, on sand and soot and beds of autumn granted branches in near silent halflight woods. Remember the circus we found in that Missouri field? Contortionists and acrobats, tightrope walkers and painted clowns, even a captive African elephant. How it snagged the ringmaster’s whip from his fingers, and the audience gasped, and you could see in the man’s ghostpale face there had been a mistake? Only for the beast to raise its long gray trunk, leather cattail black and glistened under torchfire flame, and bring the whip down upon its own back.And everyone laughed, even you. You who, once in a Tulsa snowstorm, knelt by a slow dying cat and stayed there praying till the poor thing made communion with the cold. You bawled all night. But your smile was bright, eyes soapbubble buoyant, as you watched that elephant lash itself.

It’s about who holds the strap and not whose skin it strikes, I suppose, that belies the joke, marks the master.

III.

A crop lies looped around my belt now, rifle slung across my shoulder. Five overseers charged with alternating groups of ten men each, mostly indebted Hawaiians and a few mainland convicts, spread out across the island. We never learn their names. Easier that way.

After the dynamite blasts a hole in a hillside, after the dust scatters hazy and settles in dense white clumps, I blow the whistle. Ten men in hats and rags dash to dig and sweep, scrape and toss under searing sun and writhing clouds of cormorants. Birds sometimes flap over to watch them, their slick feathered heads cocked curious. Once the cart’s full five push and five pull it down a long metal track to the island’s edge, to a huge waxcloth sieve mottled brown like an ugly San Francisco seal, then dig, sweep, scrape and toss it all out again. Pale speckled powder hourglass trickling through wire mesh, stones and fossilized bones and so much phosphate-rich muck. Then five men pull, five men push, and I blow the whistle.

On first arrival their faces warp with exhaustion, their fecal-cloaked arms slow as the long hot days roll on, they cough and choke and spit out the repulsion lodged in their nostrils. But as the months compound and they learn the loop of the triste around their wrists, that tiptoe dance tied suspended from a wall, they become creatures either less or more than human, contented machines. Slowly the men’s automotive faces flatten like smoothen seaglass, they dig clockwork without complaint. There’s no talking permitted beyond the bare essentials. Their mouths are swaddled in cloth masks for slim protection.

On rare occasions a man will remember the ache in his shoulders, the wheeze in his breath, the utter hate. One of them has been exhibiting such signs the past few weeks. He’s not particularly remarkable.

Dark skin, thick eyebrows, triangular cheekbones, an Asiatic skull. Between shovelfuls he looks at me with an anger so hot I turn my head. Something in his eyes reminds me of the man I was, before I took Morris Blakely’s name.

Night’s approach. The sun surrenders orange under endless blue, and on the horizon I spot a glittered fleck trailing fingernail curves of steam. The cormorant inside my chest flaps violently, while my heart, held between its beak, beats deep and slow as sleep. In two days’ time my contract here is done, darling. In two days’ time I’ll ride that shipper back to you.

Supper in the barracks that night. Calcified bread and chewy wan slop, a spoonful each for the caged labor. In come the others: Ambrose, Pierce, Andrew, John. Andrew rolls a cigarette while John, the only man of god among us, closes his eyes and moves his lips in muted supplication. “Fresh shipper this eve,” Andrew says. “Where’s the new man?”

Then he stumbles in the door—a ginger-locked youth with a crate held shaky between thin freckled forearms. “Barty,” he says. “Bartholomew. Minnesota Territory.” He offers his hand to each of us. It hovers afront my nose “Morris don’t talk,” Ambrose says. “Dumb as a fish.” “Ah,” the boy says,”didn’t know American Guano hires dullards.

“Quick as a flick Ambrose slaps the boy against the door. He trips over his crate and tumbles to the floor. “Watch your words, lad. The man’s dumb but no dullard—you’re gazing upon the sole survivor of sixty-five. Was only convicts working Jarvis then, and a band managed to grab hold a few rifles and dynamite sticks. Blew the island moony. Took a month for the next shipper to find Morris here sat thigh-high in corpses. You’ll be replacing him, a better man than you or any of us, so better fix your gob come training’s start at sunrise.”

Through the window, in the barracks’ courtyard, stands a lone orange tree bathed spectral in lunar light. The only plant that grows on this scorched strip, its fruit so phosphate poisoned a slice could drop you lifeless.

I puff my pipe outside after supper, and my mind wanders northeast, to however many years of factories and mills, nights enwrapped in tall grass and cold rainy days hidden in doorways, before we ever set foot in New York. You were to be an actress. Before that a poet, then a painter, then a singer in a traveling troupe. I was to be your husband, once we’d saved enough for a house.

IV .

Remember our subdivided scrap of a room in New York? How I’d sit on the dusty floor and watch you ready for auditions? I could have watched you forever, from any floor, the dirt of a desert or grave. Of course you were cast, more gorgeous than even Fanny Kemble. You were to be Eurydice in an upcoming production.

The director gave you the nanny job to make ends meet until the show’s premiere. Mr. Owens, his name was. A theater man with money and two daughters and a brownstone that whispered of everything we weren’t. On weekends he absconded to his country house, and after you tucked the girls to sleep you’d swing open the ornate front door with its number and knocker, and for a night the mansion was ours.

You’d bring me plates of cake and sliced fruit from the banquet-fit kitchen, I’d rub your legs sprawled across the daybed, we’d take turns sipping bitter flights out the liquor cabinet. Remember how we danced a jingle-stagger waltz around the anteroom? Stepping circles with your arms around my shoulders, your head rested dizzy on my chest.

We rehearsed your lines upon the staircase, I as Orpheus staring upwards through the door to earth, you an oath-promised phantasm below. “Don’t turn your head,” you told me,”or I’ll disappear.”

At the top of the stairs stood a gold-sculpted eagle balanced upon its marble mount. I remember how, for a moment, I really did believe you. Terrified I would turn and find you gone, a bubble’s pop, vanished.

But then you started staying later at rehearsals. Afternoons with the cast stretching into evenings at the brownstone. You went upstate for a week but then a letter arrived saying you’d be gone for another, then another. You still signed them Your Darling, but I knew by then it wasn’t true.

Once, after you’d been gone three weeks, I walked past the brownstone at dusk. Through the tall windows I saw you in the anteroom, laughing at something Mr. Owens said. Your hand rested on his arm. The way you touched him—casual, familiar, like you’d done it a hundred times before. Like it was yours to do. I stood there on the street watching until a police officer asked me to move along, just another vagrant, peeping through windows at lives he’d never live.

The truth is, by then you were his. He had taken you from me, and I wanted something in return.

V .

A spiteful sun noon high since morning. My final hours. The new boy Bartholomew stands beside me as we watch the coolies work. His left cheek is stained blackish blue in the shape of Ambrose’s five fingers from last night’s humiliation. The cormorants are everywhere. They wander aimless, bowlegged like polio patients, wide eyes either opal blue or emerald green but always open.

The begrudged Hawaiian is digging slowly again, clutching his stomach and groaning between shovels. Perhaps he’s got dysentery. A cormorant waddles over, gently pecks his knee. At first he doesn’t notice. But then another flies over, and another, until the swarm’s so dense I can barely see him. Through shifting wingbeat gaps I swear I see the man on all fours, his belly squirming with the outline of a bird. The cloud thickens beehive hot with movement then the birds suddenly scatter. The man collapses.

The others watch as I climb the slope to his prone body, stand back silent grasping their shovels tight. I squat to shake his sunburnt shoulders, lightly slap his sunbrowned cheeks. Nothing. Look down at Barty and shrug my shoulders, when he shouts,”Behind you—”

I ring steel from head to toe, buzzing church bells, fall forward into swallowing redness.

In a moment I come to and turn to see the convict sprinting away, kicking dust full pelt up the pearl white hill, at its crest he disappears. I scamper woozy to my feet and chase after him. His sable blur twists invisible around a mound, only to reappear once more from behind another. I sight the edge of his torn rags as they flap in and out of view with each turn, undulating white walls punctuated only by the flash of dark skin as he emerges then returns into a bright void, until the sinuous dunes shorten into jagged boulders, taper off into waist-high stones, and the sky’s cobalt tongue unfurls into the sea’s abyss.

I see the convict wading into foamy waves. I follow him into the gasp cold water. A few strong strokes and he’s in my grasp. I grab him by the neck but he bats my hands away, launches his head into my nose—crack—I stumble back, rams his fist into my stomach. I swing into his side, a hand against a forehead, knee into a groin, elbow below chin, surge of wind, rasp of breath, the heart’s incessant beating.

Suddenly I’m muffled underwater, struggling like a netted fish. I try to unlock his hands from my throat but they’re firm as tree trunks, he plunges me deeper but slips on the sand. I surface into the cormorant cry air, a blade sharpness in my lungs. The convict’s still holding on tight. I spin and see Barty standing on the shore, mouth struck stupid and body still. “Your rifle,” I shout, “pull your rifle goddamnit—”

When I’m pulled under again. Open my eyes. Above me, swelling and contracting in crystal blots, is my own grimaced mouth and grit jaw, my eyes wide, animal crazed. The veins pop beneath my skin, straight strained arms, hands wrapped stiff around my neck. Bubbles float upward in chains, and the sun begins to dim, and when the bubbles reach the water’s top they pop, and I think of your face, my love, your smile when I turned on that staircase—a sheer echo. My temples burst and dapple the water dark, my limp body falls into the one thrashing below. The world turns. I float away.On my back I stare up at freckled Barty, rifle hung slack at his side, and say, “Thank you, oh god thank you, oh god oh god, ” and the last thing I hear is the ocean’s churn like a thousand rattled pins, like applause.

VI.

Darling. I must sorrowly admit I was in the beamhouse the premiere night of your production, deliming hides of leather as you curtsied to the crowd. Though you smiled when I brought hom flowers I could see in the creased corners of your lips a reticence, a preemptive sense of loss. I never did see you under those mirrored lights. Saw less of you each passing day.

You must remember his youngest daughter suffered consumption, slept with her bedroom window open just an inch. Slept soundly as I slid it open and whisky-tiptoed to the staircase. The eagle was lighter than I expected. Perhaps it wasn’t even real gold. I would have walked out, crossed the city and tossed it in the Hudson, when suddenly there she was, the new nanny, no older than you, just a girl.

She grabbed the bird, tried to tug it from my grip. Her voice was frightened but kind: “Please, sir, please just go, I won’t say nothing.” She was trying to save me, I think. But I held on tighter. She slipped on the runner and tumbled backwards down the stairs.

A shriek. A snap. The sound plays in my head still, has played every night for nine years. The metal clamp of handcuffs, the clang of a chain’s shake.

I awake in my quarters. A blanket stretched across my body, a pillow under my head, outside the windows a calm twinkled night. Slowly a nearby blur grows into Ambrose sitting upon a chair close to my bedside.

“Good evening, Mr. Morris. Bartholomew tells me you had a tussle with a convict earlier today, I’m glad to see you survived.” I can see Barty stood watching in the doorway now, his arms crossed timid. “Bartholomew tells me you instructed him to use his rifle, which was very snappy thinking, and that with your last waking breaths you thanked him profusely, which is exceptionally well mannered.”

I try to rub my eyes, but can’t move my hands.

“The only trouble is, Mr. Morris, Mr. Morris has been mute since birth, meaning he couldn’t possibly have offered marksmanship tips nor expressed his gratitude so graciously. And the trouble thickens, Mr. Morris, upon my looking in the American Guano logbook, to find that you and Mr. Morris Blakely seem to share almost no common physical descriptors, not even the size of your skulls.”

I try to sit up, when I see my wrists are shackled to the bedframe. The cormorant tries to fly up through my throat but it’s futile, I can feel its stuck beak poke at my uvula. Ambrose scoots the chair closer.

“It’s a good thing you’re not a mute after all, Mr. Morris, since you have quite a bit explaining to do.”

VII.

I tried to write you a letter from Auburn Prison, darling, but you know I only attended schoolhouse till I was eight. Barely knew our old address, let alone which scribble went in front of the next. Perhaps you lived in his brownstone by then anyways, or Chicago, or London.I was sentenced in fifty-nine. Eighteen sixty rolled around, then sixty one. Most of the inmates were conscripted to the Union, and I would have been too, if it wasn’t for a shortage of gunpowder. One tenth sulfur, fifteen charcoal, and three parts saltpeter, a mineral brewed inside the stomachs of certain seabirds. Our select bodies were bundled in the boat’s deck like the fleshy peaches we picked that summer, striped and torn, packed tight against the crate’s wooden beams. Down there in the dark it grew difficult to remember our dimensions, what made our bodies separate from whoever’s we were chained to, whose cries were whose. But as the water calmed and the shipper slowed the sting in our noses differentiated us again.

Those first few years on Jarvis were the hardest. Our knees ached intolerable, our eyes stung from the air, our lips chapped and split dry as the straw hats glued sweaty to our heads. This smell, darling. It’s preverbal as pain. Breeds inside you deeper than the fear of the whip, the laceration of the triste’s rope around your wrists, the burn of the sun on your back. Those first few years I could barely think.

Forgot near everything but the smell, the shovel in my hands, the cockeyed stare of cormorants. That’s when one flew through my teeth, one night as I shook in my cage. Flew down my throat, nested between my lungs, held my heart between its gullet but never swallowed. For a time I forgot even you, darling.

And so we dug up Lot’s wife and dragged her to the island’s edge as the war burnt on, bagged and loaded her on shippers bound to that smoke plumed Sodom so she could be measured and weighed, separated and shaken into metal casings, the salt of her body shot heedless through so many sons, the dead collected in columns.

Once the war was won we thought they’d send us back to the mainland, but guano only doubled in profit come Reconstruction. It wasn’t until I sighted an overseer packing his pipe, his visage not all too different from that of Mr. Owens in fact, did I remember you again in a flash of light: there you were on his paper pouch, rendered in printed ink but your beauty unmistakable, by then so celebrated you were even in advertisements: Darling Tobacco.

Suddenly I could recall everything. The creases of your palms, the laughlines of your eyes, the cool breeze of your hair as it fell ticklish across my face. Suddenly I could hear the sweet lilt of your voice.

And you knew exactly what to do, didn’t you? You always knew what needed doing.

The orange tree in the barracks’ courtyard, the water tank. I plucked them in secret one afternoon while on mop duty, sliced their skins open with a stone, climbed the tank’s side and squeezed them one by one into its gurgled water. Remember how their insides emptied, how they stumbled howling through the sunlight like drunkards? Five overseers and forty nine men all dropped overripe and scattered on the ground.

A few still twitched so I used the rifle. I stood there among the bodies, the crop still looped on one of their belts, and understood I had become the elephant. I had taken the whip and brought it down upon my own back, and now upon theirs. But I told myself it was necessary. Told myself three years was easy trade, my love, for the pomegranate promise of your heart.

Dynamited a deep pit to bury the bodies, but you told me it would look better if they were left where they fell. I remembered one overseer was a mute, took his uniform so I needn’t explain. Didn’t know he still had three years on his contract. Three years of blowing the whistle, of watching ten men dig and sweep while I held the crop. Three years of becoming indistinguishable from what I’d once hated.

VIII.

You must remember the day we last saw one another, in that austere New York courthouse. When the judge announced my sentence I could have crumbled into sand, though the thought of you seeing me weak from the stands was even worse, so I held my head straight and firm and forward.

As the two officers walked me to that big wooden door I looked back to see your face, to catch your eye just one last time. But your head was turned. All I could see were the long dark locks of your hair, dark like a pair of thick curtains drawn behind brownstone windows, windows I once watched you through from a dusk fallen street.

I fear you cannot hear me. I fear your eyes are the only proof that I’m alive.

Why did you turn your head, darling? How could you have turned your head?

I speak to you from America’s pale in the year of eighteen sixty eight, or nine, at some sun dazed zenith I forgot. The smell infiltrates everything. It becomes you. The foreman blows his whistle. Ten men dig and sweep, push and pull. The cormorants watch with their wide unblinking eyes.

Somewhere in Louisiana, a peach tree grows.