The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison Page B

bathhouse afterward, already a disease is taking hold. He shifts in his chair, and the feeling fades, but not the anxiety. It isn’t cold enough to require gloves, but his fingers behave as if they are numb. Twice he drops his pen, and the second time it spatters and ruins his map.
    In bed, he yawns and yawns, more deeply each time but without satisfaction. And when at last he falls asleep, it is to the memory of watching her sewing his furs, the needle sharp and glinting in her fingers, slipping in and out, darting among the luster of the dark hairs.
    HE DIDN’T CRY when his father died.
    “Say good-bye,” his mother told him, and he followed her into the bedroom. The shades were drawn, but the sun found its way through the cracks.
    “Why is that there?” he asked, pointing to the white cloth tied under his father’s jaw and over the top of his head.
    “To keep his mouth from . . .” She didn’t finish.
    “From what?” he asked.
    “Opening.”
    His mother sent him to his grandmother’s. The idea was that he would stay there for as long as it took his mother to turn their home into a boardinghouse. Otherwise, where would the money come from? It was a big enough house, five stories, with his father’s law office on the street level, a parlor and kitchen above, and bedrooms on up. By the time she finished with it, she said, the three of them—Bigelow, his mother and sister—would live in what had been the law office; all the rest would be boarders. But in the meantime he had to stay with his grandmother.
    “Why doesn’t she have to go?” he asked, referring to his sister.
    “Because I need her.”
    What about me?
he thought.
    She packed his trousers and shirts into a valise and told him to be a help to his grandmother. He was to do whatever his grandmother said.
    The train from St. Louis to Joplin took four hours, including stops. He had two slices of bread with butter spread between them, and his mother bought him a packet of sugared almonds and a bottle of ginger beer from a man on the platform. He was eleven years old, but when the woman sitting across from him in the compartment asked, he lied and said he was thirteen.
    He still thinks of that lie, remembers it with shame, dishonesty not being among his usual childish failings. It must have been that thirteen represented something to him, safety, the safety of distance. Why, at thirteen, he’d be two years past all this trouble. At thirteen, he might understand what had happened to him, to all of them, his mother, his sister, himself.
    “You don’t look thirteen,” the woman said.
    “Well,” Bigelow adjusted the lie. “I will be next month.”
    The train pulled out with a squeal and a jerk, and the bread in its wax paper slipped onto the floor. The woman picked it up.
    “I’m going there because my father died.” Bigelow tried out the information, testing its power. Would it silence her? It did, and it got him the window seat as well, so he spent the rest of the trip looking out at the fields, the occasional shed or stream or horse. Averting his dry eyes from her gaze.

    He was supposed to be a help, but there was something the matter with him in the country. He wheezed all the time, and his grandmother put him to bed. When the twister came, neither of them could get the cellar door unlatched, it was swollen tight with rain, and she got under the covers with him, shoes and all, and they watched windowpanes break and the curtains blow flat against the ceiling. It was true what they said about twister weather; the light was green.
    Because she wasn’t frightened, he wasn’t, either. She told him stories about past storms: chickens dropping naked from the sky, alive, with every last feather torn off; a field planted with a burst sack of seed corn, not in rows, of course, but, “tidy,” she said, “you’d be surprised how tidy and even.” To hear her talk it was as if tornadoes were invented for amusement, the redistribution of tools and