Delivering Virtue Page 5

  Tuttles audibly gritted his teeth.

  “I spilled some soup on my dress” said Delight. “I was just changing it when…”

  “Say something,” growled Boob, “in Latin.”

  Delight laughed, but I detected a fearful tremor in her voice as she so did. “Why, darling!”

  “Say something.”

  “But…”

  “I want to hear some words of Latin come from your lips.”

  “You’re upset. This doesn’t seem the time for...”

  “Say some Latin!”

  Surely, I thought, the woman must know at least some old Roman phrase or incantation she could utter to appease her husband. But I guess if she did it was lost to Delight in the face of her pressing conundrum.

  “Avin,” she said, and in those two syllables I heard her voice turn to the silky, cooing tone she had so often used as prelude to our many past encounters. “Avin, you’re upset. We can work this out. Let me sooth your anger. Tell me what’s the trouble.”

  I could not see, but I imagined her stepping toward the man, perhaps laying her fingers on his heaving chest and leaning in for a kiss. Was I going to have to remain in this closet the whole time they were making love? But no. Tuttles would have none of it. He seized his wife, much in the manner of a grizzly bear springing upon a doe.

  Delight screamed.

  And then Tuttles dragged her from the room.

  *****

  When I heard the front door bang, I slinked out of the closet. I was not particularly proud of myself in that moment, and it did not help to have Virtue gazing at me so serenely and with what appeared to be an infantile smirk of indignation.

  “What?” I asked her, as I laid her on the bed. I quick removed my boots and pulled on my pants. “Monogamy is a gambler’s game. Tuttles should have been on his guard.” I held up my palms. “What else am I to do?”

  The little girl startled me then when she rolled onto her belly and crawled away over the covers. I lunged for her, but there really was no need. She was merely moving to a more comfortable place away from me, near the headboard. I did not need to fear her tumbling off onto the rug.

  Outside, Delight’s cries were ringing in the humid air.

  The ox kept bellowing; the dog continued its yapping.

  I slipped on my shirt just as there issued forth a wild splashing and thrashing in the edge of the river. I leaned to the window and took a peek.

  Tuttles had his naked wife dangling by her red head of hair, and he dunked her under the water, holding her there for a time, until he finally pulled her up coughing and screaming and looking a mess. There was mud all down her front, and her arms were covered in greenish waterweeds.

  “Jesus!” I said, and grabbed up a boot.

  Tuttles kept up this punishment while I hurriedly finished dressing.

  Virtue sat on the pillows at the head of the bed, waiting, her tiny hands folded in her lap.

  Delight’s screams gave way to an alarming sequence of coughing and heaving up river water from her lungs. It was horrible to hear.

  I slapped my hat onto my head, gathered up Virtue, and made for the door. “All right,” I said. I was determined to help Delight someway, but as yet, I had no clear idea how.

  The couple with the boy was standing a ways to the side when I came out of the house. Their mules were whinnying with agitation, rearing up in their braces, and the man was trying to keep them calm. “Whoa, girls,” he said. “Whoa up.”

  The old man stood at the water’s edge and was pointing at the river with his pipe as Tuttles continued to baptize Delight.

  “Son,” said the old man. “Son, you’re gonna drown ‘er if you don’t let up.”

  Tuttles submerged Delight for the longest time. He was shaking with a lunatic’s ire. Everyone seemed to hold a breath together, as if we all hoped it might somehow help Delight hold onto hers. But it was no good. At last, Tuttles lifted her up by her hair, holding her at arm’s length, like a fisherman pulling a pike from a trap. She hung limp. She did not so much as flop or quiver. There was no mistaking the droop of lifelessness that had inundated her body.

  The woman at the shore screamed.

  Tuttles seemed at that moment to snap from his dream of vengeance, only to plunge directly into a nightmare of remorse. He tossed his dead wife away from him, as if he were repulsed, as if he could not stand to touch her. He stood thigh deep in the river, madly rubbing his hands on his shirt as Delight’s flaccid body bobbed and sank and turned over just beneath the silty water sweeping her downstream. Her red hair bloomed and wilted at once like a short-lived rose. It was eerily beautiful, macabre. Her white skin flashed and flashed and sank away.

  “D,” whispered Virtue. “D.”

  *****

  Tuttles waded to the bank and dropped to his knees in the mud. He slumped with his head bowed, holding his hands over his face. Then he began to weep.

  Great lamentations that seemed to issue from the very pits of his personal hell.

  A man wallowing in the woeful ruins of his own paradise lost.

  Delight’s pink parasol rested broken and soiled in the yard. It looked so out of place, like a gut-shot flamingo, and I found myself wondering how it had come to be there when I so distinctly remembered collapsing it and standing it inside the door just a short time earlier. Such, I suppose, are the incongruent and hackneyed ramblings of a mind suffering shock.

  The air was sullen.

  The people and animals all held themselves still and silent, as if observing a moment of stunned and collective reverence.

  A man might have felt he was viewing a bucolic daguerreotype – an instant of time held apart and separated from all the myriad other instants of time – had it not been for the drift of smoke lifting from the old man’s pipe, and the restless surge and churn of the river that was background to it all. One almost sensed Delight’s spirit hovering for a last glimpse at this tiresome world before lifting away. But then, I suppose that was likely just a hopeful speculation.

  I walked quietly to my horses and goat. They seemed knowledgeable of the events forthwith transpired, even those unsavory happenings occurring behind closed doors, and I found myself unable to meet their eyes. I lifted Virtue’s sling from where it hung on Brownie’s saddle, and then awkwardly pulled it over my neck, nearly knocking my hat into the dirt. I was fumbling, jittery. The sling seemed suddenly inadequate now to carry the child, as she had grown so much, but I was in no place to fashion another at this particular time, so stuffing her into the little hammock as best I could, we made do.

  Tuttles did not look up as I awkwardly mounted my horse. The spunk and anger were all drained out of him. I felt he knew I was there, but it had gone past mattering to the man. I, he must have realized, was just one of the multitude who had trafficked his wife’s treacherous byways.

  “Tck! Tck!” I urged Brownie and Puck and the nameless nanny to move away. “Let us go,” I said softly.

  Delight’s Landing receded as we journeyed forth into the fiery evening sunshine. Virtue traveled with her typical, admirable aplomb, a living pendant hanging weightily from my neck.

  Bilious shadows reached over the landscape. Bullbats took wing over the water. Invisible insects started up their choir of humming and clicking and buzzing in the riverweeds. I was filled with confusion and gloom.

  “Et fecit Deus firmamentum,” I mumbled, “divistique aquas, quae errant sub firmament, ab his quae errant super firmamentum.”

  “And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.”

  It was perhaps among the very first lines I had ever heard said in Latin. It came to me now on the water-voice of the river. A fitting eulogy for Delight. One I had learned long ago, back at the commencement of my own life’s road, when I was but a boy.

  WE JOURNEYED INTO THE night, a gibbous piece of moon hovering over us like a watchful eye. I was inspired to cover some ground duri
ng these cooler hours. In truth, I was eager to put some miles between myself and Delight’s Landing.

  Our blue shadows stretched before us.

  But for the clopping of hooves, and the wet whisper and plash of the river, everything was quiet. Even the bugs and toads had gone to bed.

  Puck and Brownie plodded thoughtfully onward.

  The goat was occupied in some sort of esoteric rumination to which only she was savvy.

  Virtue, watching me from her cramped sling, remained tolerant, cherubic, wise.

  I seemed to be the only one on edge. My thinker was awhirl. Bits and pieces of the day were now mixing inextricably with the tatters of old forgotten dreams and limericks and memories from my past. I was having difficulty deciding where to place the line between what was real in this world and what was merely a fanciful fiction. We seemed to have crossed over said line, into a world of whimsical horrors. The moonlight washed everything all the same. It made me drunk with bewilderment. I worried that my sins had led me into hell.

  Delight’s demise became surreal to me now. Her gurgling screams. Her startled eyes. Her lovely white corpse lapsing into the murky stream. Had that truly occurred? I pondered her fate. One instant she was here, and in the next instant she was not. But then, in the end, I suppose that is how it is to be for us all. I considered her as a being among the millions with whom I share this planet. Delight had been a good sort. Not a harlot in the strictest and most disparaging sense. Surely she was just misunderstood.

  “But then,” I said aloud, “we are all just a race of misunderstoods.”

  None of my companions commented on my inspired blurt of insight, agreeing with me, or otherwise, by way of so much as a whinny or bleat, and so, in embarrassment, I held my tongue to any further revelations. And yet I could not help but wax philosophical, if only in my secret thoughts.

  Delight was merely overflowing with love, I decided. So much so that she had to give some away. She only wanted to nurture, due to some force intrinsic to her sex. And granted no child by the gods, she turned her attentions instead to the childish sides of men.

  I nodded at my own shrewd assessment and muttered, “Misunderstood.”

  Virtue squirmed in her sling.

  Then, as was my habit in times of boredom and torment, in an effort to sooth myself, I began a free and rambling recitation from whatever fragments of poems issued forth from my troubled heart and lips.

  “My heart aches,” I began, “and… little birdy… a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains, One minute past, and Lethe-wards sunk… ker-splunkety – plunk… If a Clod bee washed away by the sea… into the dead salt sea I hear lapping from afar… like a star… as you are… my own true love… you are so far… where is blue heaven… where is blue-eyed heaven to be found?”

  And so on, and so forth, beneath the tranquilizing light of the moon.

  DAWN FOUND US STILL on the go, albeit rather more somnambulistically than when we had, so many hours prior, absconded chez Tuttles.

  My eyes were drooping.

  “We will carry on a ways farther,” I told my cohorts. “This time of day is more temperate and pleasing and good for travel. But then when the sun becomes too fierce, we will find ourselves a grassy plot on which to recline in the shade for some hours of slumber.”

  No one audibly balked, which I took as signal enough that we were all in agreement.

  The Platte churned and boiled on our right. I had become increasingly suspicious of its covert agenda. Always in the past it had appeared so benign. But the river looked unkind to me now, populated with underwater bugbears and hobgoblins of a most rascally and ruinous nature. Although it may only have been a childish superstition arising from my troubled nocturnal musings, I felt the river was watching us as we ambulated upstream along its bank. In that early light, it slipped along like some dirt-brown snake awaiting an opportunity to bind us in its suffocating coils and drag us down and down.

  It hissed among the bull rushes.

  It seemed comprised of venom.

  I tried not to let my imagination overpower me, but still, I watched that serpentine watercourse sidelong, ever wary of its true intentions.

  *****

  By and by, the morning passed.

  The sun grew predictably hotter.

  I was just about to pull up and stop when I spied something ahead that moved me to wonderment.

  “What on earth!”

  Now the American Frontier is most undeniably a breeding ground for curiosities. No one familiar with it would deny such a profundity. In my many crisscrosses over the Territories, I had encountered more than one combination of parts joining together to form an amusing and bastardized collaboration. And I suppose at that moment I had become so accustomed to being one of those very anomalies myself, that I felt it a relief to be exceeded in my own ludicrousness.

  “Someone out here is weirder than we.”

  That felt pleasing to my self-regard.

  “Let us go see who these eccentric folk are,” I suggested. “Perhaps we will be entertained.”

  They were not moving fast – somewhat like periwinkle snails sliding across a hot skillet – and so they were easily overcome. The man leading was gaunt and tall and dressed in a ragged black suit that was heavily decorated with red flannel patches at the knees and elbows. He wore a top hat lacking a roof. It strongly resembled a piece of sooty stovepipe crunched down onto his pate. I was surprised to see that he sported a less kempt version of the same telltale beards worn by Thurman and Brother Benjamin. Fleas were fairly visible having an orgy in the deepest forests on his chin. The fellow held a book extended in front of him, attempting to read, while watching his steps at the same time.

  “Verily, verily…” I heard him incant. “I say unto you…”

  His voice was loud and held that quavering gravity one associates with zealots, disappointed fathers, or morose auctioneers.

  He seemed to be reading for the diversion of his dress-wearing companions. They were female, I supposed, but they had had nearly all the more agreeable signs of femininity drubbed out of them.

  The man turned when he heard our approach. He held his book toward me, as if it were a loaded pistol.

  “Good day,” I said.

  He returned my cheery salutation with a chilly and distrustful squint.

  At this close range, I could see more clearly the personalities accompanying him. What a sorrowing spectacle! They were a dull lot, addled and drained by the heat and their toil. Three girls – or near women – it was hard to tell which. At the very least I understood that they were old enough to endure the rigors of propagation, for each showed a swelling beneath her dress front indicating an impending birth to be fulfilled in the not so distant future. Two of them pushed red wheelbarrows heaped with what must have been the group’s worldly possessions. One of them held a filthy toddler resting on her hip like a sunburned, drooling piglet.

  “Nice morning for a walk,” I said, and, taking a chance, continued, “The Lord has provided us a beautiful day.”

  The females did not speak, only let their mouths drop open in a pant. But the man grew friendly and bobbed his head.

  “Indeed,” he said. “The Lord provideth.”

  “To where, may I inquire, are you bound?”

  The man removed his hat. “We’re going to Zion.”

  “And which Zion might that be?”

  “The one,” he said, “at the City of Rocks.”

  I nearly fell off Brownie. But I hid my flabbergastment, and did not indicate that that was my same destination.

  “What…” I shifted in the saddle. “That is a long ways from here. What takes you there?”

  “We mean to join the Prophet Nehi in his kingdom. To help him people the earth with our own kind – the Chosen Ones.” The man shot me a suspicious look. “Do you know about the Restructured Truth?”

  I did not reply. I did not want to reveal too
much to this rag-tag, as I feared we were somehow in cahoots in a way that I did not appreciate, endeavoring, as we were, toward the fulfillment of a common deific dream that we neither one completely understood. I deliberately changed direction in our tête-à-tête.

  “What is that you are reading?”

  The man glanced at the book in his hand. “Covenants,” he said. “Revelations granted to the Prophet and given to his flock for our instruction.”

  I regarded the pregnant girls. Their dresses were all soaked in sweat under the arms and dusted with dirt from the trail. “Would it not be better to allow the lady-folk to do the reading, and perhaps you yourself push a cart? Such donkeywork does not seem fit for their fair sex.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know that’s true. But I’ve been cursed with a bad back. Whereas they are strong and willing. And besides,” he grinned, and held up his book. “It is as the Lord hath commandedeth.”

  Considering his sapped and swollen harem, it did not take much to grasp how this old lecher had acquired his strained back.

  “Besides,” he said. “They can’t none of ‘em read.”

  The girls stood before me, an unsettling and suppressed intensity revealing itself from behind their languid masks. They appeared enthralled by the sling around my neck, and, of course, with Virtue, who was quietly waiting. I tipped my hat to the girls. “Ladies.”

  They stood motionless. If not for the recurrent blinking of their eyes, one might have thought they were lumpy figurines.

  “Let me introduce myself,” said the man. “I am Timotheus McDonald. And these are my helpmeets.” He held his hat toward the girls. “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.” He held his hat toward the pig-child. “And this is my son Neb.”

  I studied the girls, noting that they all shared the same nose and narrow face. “Sisters?”

  “Yes,” said the man. “Orphans. Their ma and pa died in a house fire. But the Lord saw fit that they should themselves survive. They were destitute when I came across them at the poorhouse, and all alone, and so, as God instructed me in a vision, I took them under my wing.”