American Morons Read online

Nagle hasn’t moved. He feels as though he’s on one of those fairground rides that spin so fast the g-force pins you against the wall. Now, he wants to say something, but his hostess doesn’t look up.

  “Quite a story, you’re right,” he finally tries.

  Then she does. Her eyes are expressionless. She lifts the diary and commences reading once more.

  “July 7, 1844—Since the Disappointment—that’s what they’re calling it—I have stayed out of town as much as possible. I have kept to my books, which have given me less pleasure than usual, and I have walked so long in the woods that even the bobcats no longer flee me. The world hasn’t ended. It just seems to have emptied.”

  “Two years on, now,” his hostess says. “June 4, 1846—My 29th birthday. Two goshawks and one brave wren celebrated with me. After the Disappointment, most of the Millerites scattered back to their farms and families, and many left the area entirely. Alas, those that have stayed are the ugliest and most stubborn remnant of the believers. They huddle behind hedges when they see me coming, and today they closed their shop windows in my face. I threw myself a picnic under the oak tree in the town square for spite, then came home. At dusk, a knock at my door startled me from my work desk. I considered fleeing or hiding in the attic, but did neither. Instead, I marched through the hall and flung open the door to find Little Ben R., pale and sad with his hat in his hands, his beautiful yellow hair shining like daisies in the sun.

  “‘Mary-gold,’ he said. He has called me that ever since our school days.

  “‘Come in,’’ I told him, but he refused.

  “‘The day of the Dis…that stupid day at the church. I was the one threw the mud at you. I was angry. I was crazy. I was wrong.’

  “‘Oh, Ben,’’ I said. ‘‘You were always crazy. Always wrong.’ ‘And I was so happy just to have him there that I tossed my arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.

  “He leapt back and blushed as though I’d dropped my dress. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘To university, where I should have been all along. Just wanted to say goodbye to you, and now I’ve said it.’ Then he bolted into the woods.

  “I am going to die alone.”

  Gently, as though patting the hand of a child to bid it goodnight, his hostess closes the book.

  “Shall I go on?” she says, opening the next volume in the stack

  “Why did she stay here?” Nagle asks, as if the answer might explain why he has kept coming back, all this time.

  “She doesn’t say. But she had her work, her home. The people who valued her knew where to find her. She was wise enough, I suppose, to know that those things were more than anyone has a right to expect. So she did Thoreau’s laundry, and biked eight miles to Holderness for her groceries, and kept out of town. Emerson invited her to work as a secretary at one of the universities in Boston and keep his family company, but she wrote back to say that someone had to keep an eye on the Millerites.”

  His hostess rests her hand on the open book like a little girl touching her reflection on the water. She is more alone than I am, Nagle thinks.

  “January 1, 1855—They came today at dawn.

  “Ten years ago—eight years ago, five, even—I might have expected it. But it has been so long. And last night, the snow came down soft and deep, covering my little porch, blanketing the trees and the forest floor, filling in all the terrible spaces in the world. I had rung in the New Year with my spirits—Nat’s sad little twice-told ghosts, and the chokecherry cordial I bought from Richard Hart’s wife over by Squam Lake. When the rapping and pounding came at the door, I was not only surprised but barely inside my body, having slipped safely down the well of sleep. Then Tom Evans, Jed Whitesmith, and a couple more I have known since before I was born burst into the room. There were others with them. Millerites, I assumed, or whatever they are calling themselves now that Miller had failed them. Even if I’d been fully awake and sober, I couldn’t have fought them or run away, because they really had come for me, and they really did want me.

  “‘Get dressed,’ Tom Evans barked, looking at my wall sconce so he could pretend he hadn’t seen my open robe.

  “‘What do you think you might do with me, then?’ I asked.

  “One of the Millerites looked up from under his wide, black hat, and Lord, he was only a boy, couldn’t have been more than twelve. Not a hair on his face.

  “‘Save you,’ he said, so sweetly.

  “‘For that, I’ll need my walking dress,’’ I snapped, because by that point I had come back to myself, some. I splashed water on my face and put on layers of underclothing and my two sturdiest, plainest black dresses, one over the other. No reason to antagonize them further, I reasoned. And no need to be cold. They let me take a small satchel of necessaries and this diary, and that’s all. My salvation, apparently, resides here, where I write by the single candle they have allotted me, in the newly built White Mountains Women’s Asylum.

  “Ah, well. The dark is dark, the sheets are clean, they have left me alone to write, none of my fellow inmates are screaming. I will wait for the light. Then I will see.”

  “Jesus,” Nagle whispers.

  “January 2, 1855—My head throbs as though it has been sawed open, the contents moved around to make room for all the revelations I am to receive.

  “The strategy is this: I am to be denied sleep. Outside my cell door, they have hung a cowbell, as well as assorted metal implements. Every hour or so, someone comes and clangs the bell and rattles the bars until I bolt upright and throw my hands over my ears. Then the boy I saw yesterday or one of the others comes to me. They whisper without pause about the end of the world. I almost feel like an oracle, except that my head is cracking open. Then they leave me for a while. Brief while. Until the next round of clanging and rattling and visitations. Over and over. And now they have come again….

  “January 8, 1855—Apparently, 1855 will be the year that Mary Elizabeth Gault will not sleep at all. It has been seven days. There is no pain anymore. My head has ceased to warn me of the dangers of unceasing consciousness. There is no sense anymore. I have screamed at them, ‘HAVE WE NOT BEEN THROUGH THIS? Did you all not bury yourselves once, and would you mind very much going off and doing it again?’

  “I wonder what they’re doing with my letters. They’re not sending them, surely. Not that they need worry. Who would come?

  “February 12, 1855—I got a walk today. Out to the edge of the woods and back. Snow thick on the ground, but I could not feel it. Ice trapping the light, so that the trees and the clouds and the little roofs looked abandoned. No birds, no deer, no winter loons. Only my own footprints, my keeper’s alongside, his whispered words. The end is near. Bow down. Let go of your pride. Open your heart. Receive. Repent.

  “March 1, 1855—Two months, today, by my still-running count in the dirt on the floor of my cell. This cannot last. They will have me. Or I will die. Or the undreamt dreams massing beneath my eyelids will burst over me in a torrent and carry me away and away. Please God, if there is a God, not to Heaven. The light is too bright, and I must sleep.”

  His hostess offers another of those close-lipped, fleeting smiles. “After that, the entries are less frequent, more disjointed, and little wonder. At one point, she considers running, but to where, or whom? And anyway, she no longer has the strength. And then—”

  “Stop,” Nagle says, his voice edgy, nastier than he intended. His limbs feel weighted, as though the blood has pooled and thickened inside them. “Wait. Please.”

  She doesn’t look up, but waits.

  “I mean…how does someone just fall out of the world, and no one notices?”

  “You’re not enjoying my story, are you, Mr. Nagle? Well. It’s almost over. June 4, 1857—They have made a tactical error. Did they know it was my birthday? I feel as though I have had a snowball smashed in my face, that my poor, sun-starved birth skin has split and fallen from me. They have brought me books, and I am born anew, strong like they will never be. How did they e
ven manage it? Did Tom Evans take pity on me after all this time? It is more than two years since they have imprisoned me here. They almost never come to talk to me anymore, and they may not realize it, but they probably need not ring the bell or clang the bars of my cell any longer. I could no more sleep through an hour than freeze myself into ice and melt through the floor with the morning sun.

  “Somehow, they have located Little Ben Roberts, now married and settled somewhere near Keene, a father twice over, and a bookseller! They have told him that I am ill and enduring a long, private convalescence. And he has remembered what I love—or at least what I loved when he knew me—and has sent me treasure beyond what I could ever have hoped. Hello, Pamela, you stupid, sullen, virtuous ass. Hello, Henry David, you self-righteous so-and-so. I have missed you terribly.

  “My jailers say they want to remind me—in case they have accidentally made me forget—what the merciful love of a gracious God can inspire a man to do. They say they want to enlighten me, not crush me. On that score, they needn’t worry now. With these books, I can build a fortress through which none can reach me. Farewell, Jesus. Go ahead and end the world without me.

  “Winter, 1859—Somewhere, I lost track of a day, or several. I have given up guessing. What does it matter? What matters is this: they are letting me out in the evenings, like a half-domesticated cat, to roam the woods and hills alone. They have asked only for assurance that I will not run, and I have given it gladly. I no longer want to run. They don’t realize what has happened to me. I stop under a tree, and crows cease cawing. The drifted snow scrapes up my legs and down into my boots, but it does not—cannot—make me cold. The moon moves where I tell it. In the shadows of the firs, I have sensed bobcats shadowing me. The Millerites do not know what they have made from me. I cannot be killed from lack of sleeping. Forgive them, Lord. I’ll never.

  “I have banished sleep altogether. It has been seventeen days since I so much as closed my eyes. I read, I walk, I have waking dreams. What a strange drowsiness possesses them, all these Millerites and townspeople. Whereas my little life is rounded by nothing. Grounded by nothing. Bounded by nothing.

  “The Counselor came today.”

  Nagle leans forward and takes a gulp of cold tea, the jasmine pods drowned and limp on the surface. The aftertaste burns the back of his throat, and he coughs hard. The cup clatters in the saucer, and a single loon lets loose one of those longer, climbing cries, a whole throat flung open to the sky. He hears crickets. An owl. The lake lapping against the dock in the inky blackness of the New Hampshire night, just out of sight beyond this windowless room.

  “If Mary kept a diary of the 1860s,” his hostess says, “no one has ever found it. And in the last volume”—she holds up the book with the spine that reads 1870—”there is just the one entry. June 4, 1871—I am daydreaming today—for sleep is a whole other country now—about the evening he came back to me. Rail-thin in his long, black robe, a boy no longer, his lovely lips lost in the black bramble of his beard. He came trailing Millerites like trained hounds behind him, but entered my asylum alone and took me out for a walk. For nearly one hour—the time I once measured in snatched sleep—we did not speak.

  “Finally, I stopped beneath an oak tree, heard a branch bend above, and knew that one of my companions had arrived to watch us.

  “‘Have you come to free me?’ I asked.

  “‘‘Twas I who had you brought here,’ he said. ‘‘So you could free yourself.’

  “‘And so I have,’ I told him. He didn’t respond. His eyes were as black as a wolverine’s, and just as wary. I asked his name.

  “Then he sighed, and for a moment, he was my boy again, and those eyes drank me in, and I drank, too. Here, I thought, was a force of the forest, something to lure to my bed and keep beside me, both of us burning bright to warm the terrifying cold out of the other.

  “‘Why, woman? Why will you not yield? How can you, who sees and knows so much, not see what is right in front of you?’

  “I sensed my advantage and pressed it the best way I knew how: I took his hand. It lay in my palm like a trembling chick. I could feel his sweat. The first proof, in so long, of my own heat.

  “‘How can you still be sure?’ I whispered, the bracken on his face all but tickling my cheek. ‘In spite of the Disappointment, the disappearance of your flock, the feelings I can feel, right now, stirring in your skin. How can you believe that the world is about to end?’

  “His hand slipped from mine like a brook trout wriggling free of the hook, and his wolverine eyes rocked me in my birth of bone and breath. ‘Because I am the Counselor,’ he said. ‘And I have come to end it.’ And with that, he left me there.

  “Once a month, ever since, and sometimes more, the Counselor comes to take me walking. Always, he brings my latest package from Little Ben, who apparently has cast aside his wild religion and become a devotee of wild British poetry. He sends me Morris, Swinburne, the Rossettis. The Counselor tells me of the impending glories of the new Coming, when the earth and lakes and undeserving will burn away in a single blast, leaving the blessed to proceed in company and song to Glory. I walk closer to him than he wants me to, and I stoke my smile constantly to keep it bright, because if it should slip, flicker, fail….

  “Sometimes, I think about the world beyond this valley, over the White Mountains. The world of waking and sleeping and dreaming and not believing. The world I once was certain was my own. Dream on, I say to that world. Sleep well. And I will stay. Because either the Counselor and I have both been driven to madness by decades among the Millerites—perfectly possible, and please God, let it be so—or I am Scheherazade, dancing and bantering, flirting and teasing, so that the Counselor never realizes that the last task he set himself to complete before ending the world was accomplished a decade ago. Because I swear I felt it in his skin, the moment I touched him. I saw it flicker in the blackness of his eyes. And still, he has never realized that I believe him. To him, I remain the forest witch he has imprisoned and will never admit he loves. The one whom he apparently cannot proceed to Heaven without.

  “Meanwhile, you Millerites. Sleep, also. All you Evanses, Whitesmiths, and Nagles who brought me here. Dream of the day it is finished, one way or the other, and one of us comes for you in the dark.”

  Closing the book, his hostess looks up and cocks her head on her long, white neck as Nagle twitches, helpless, in his chair. “That’s it,” she says, as that cryptic smile slips across her face again, then disappears. “Drink it all in, now.” She stands. “You see, it’s become a sort of family tradition. Passed down from generation to generation. The obliteration of the lot of you—the ones who imprisoned her—one family at a time. And since I’m now 54—the age Mary turned on the day of her last entry—and seeing as how you seem to have recovered at least some of your equilibrium a bit more quickly than I’d hoped…But then maybe you didn’t want children as much as you thought you did.”

  Gaping, Nagle twists and whimpers in his chair, remembering the night he woke up screaming, right upstairs, his abdomen blazing as though a poker had been stabbed through it, his testicles on fire. Good God, what had she done? He remembers Elise hurtling downstairs for the doctor. How long afterward had they discovered that he was sterile? Six months? Less?

  Struggling against the constriction in his lungs, the intensifying weight of the air, Nagle gulps enough breath to say, “You murdered my parents.”

  “Oh, not me,” she says, the moonlight shimmering behind her as she stands. “That was my mother. On her 54th birthday. Thirty-one years ago today, right? She had more of a…dramatic flair, I think. See, there are so few of you left. We try to keep it to one per generation, now.”

  The crushing sensation engulfs him, no longer in the air but like a fist around his heart. He can barely muster the energy to keep his head up.

  “How?” he says feebly.

  Her frown seems genuine, bemused. “I’ve often wondered. I mean, if the Counselor really was the man
they both believed he was, how could Mary have withstood him all those years, as I assume she must have, since we’re all still here? Unless she had some sort of extraordinary power of her own. Or maybe she was mad, but courageously so, with the kind of courage that allows someone to go it utterly alone in the face of a vindictive world.”

  She begins to circle the library, turning down lamps. Nagle closes his eyes as his compressed heart thumps and shudders.

  “On the other hand,” his hostess murmurs. “Just for fun. Think about all that power Mary had, whatever it was. Think about the Counselor’s power, which at the very least was enough to convince hundreds, maybe thousands, that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Then think about those powers combined. Because surely by now you’ve figured out who my great-great-great grandfather was.”

  But Nagle is barely listening. When she closes the library door, he finds the darkness less consuming than he was expecting, more gray than black, and not entirely empty. He wonders if he will be buried beside his parents. Then he wonders if his parents are buried beside the last generation of the Evans family, the Whitesmiths, the rest of them. Maybe they have all been laid in that very same churchyard, in the very same graves where their ancestors waited bravely, joyfully, for the end of the world. Maybe he has come home.

  Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air

  “Mechanical constructions designed for pleasure have a special melancholy when they are idle. Especially merry-go-rounds.”

  Wright Morris

  Ash came in late, on the 10:30 train. I was sure Rebecca would stay home and sleep, but instead she got a sitter for our infant daughter, let her dark hair down for what seemed the first time in months, and emerged from our tiny bathroom in the jeans she hadn’t been able to wear since her Caesarean.

  “My CD,” she said happily, handing me the New York Dolls disc she’d once howled along with every night while we did the dishes, and which I hadn’t even seen for over a year. Then she stood in front of me and bobbed on the clunky black shoes I always loved to see her in, not because they were sexy but because of their bulk. Those shoes, it seemed to me, could hold even Rebecca to the ground.