She closed her eyes and fell back on the wedding bed like a corpse, ready to receive the thrust, and the old man’s impeccable blood shot into her aged vessel with a passionate burst that set her writhing with the life of newly conceived death. Francis watched this primal pool of his own soulish body squirm into burgeoning matter, saw it change and grow with the speed of light until it was the size of an infant, saw it then yanked roughly out of the maternal cavern by his father, who straightened him, slapped him into being, and swiftly molded him into a bestial weed. The body sprouted to wildly matured growth and stood fully clad at last in the very clothes Francis was now wearing. He recognized the toothless mouth, the absent finger joints, the bump on the nose, the mortal slouch of this newborn shade, and he knew then that he would be this decayed self he had been so long in becoming, through all the endless years of his death.
o o o
“Giddap,” said Rosskam to his horse, and the old nag clomped on down the hill of Colonie Street.
“Raaaa-aaaaaags,” screamed Rosskam. “Raaaa-aaaaaags.” The scream was a two-noted song, C and B-flat, or maybe F and E-flat. And from a window across the street from the Phelan house, a woman’s head appeared.
“Goooo-ooooooo.” she called in two-noted answer. “Raaaag-maaan.”
Rosskam pulled to a halt in front of’ the alley alongside her house.
“On the back porch.” she said. “Papers and a washtub and some old clothes.”
Rosskam braked his wagon and climbed down.
“Well?” he said to Francis.
“I don’t want to go in,” Francis said. “I know her.”
“So what’s that?”
“I don’t want her to see me. Mrs. Dillon Her husband’s a railroad man. I know them all my life. My family lives in that house over there. I was born up the street. I don’t want people on this block to see me looking like a bum.”
“But you’re a bum.”
“Me and you know that, but they don’t. I’ll cart anything. I’ll cart it all the next time you stop. But not on this street. You understand?”
“Sensitive bum. I got a sensitive bum working for me.”
While Rosskam went for the junk alone, Francis stared across the street and saw his mother in housedress and apron surreptitiously throwing salt on the roots of the young maple tree that grew in the Daugherty yard but had the temerity to drop twigs. leaves, and pods onto the Phelan tomato plants and flowers. Kathryn Phelan told her near-namesake, Katrina Daugherty, that the tree’s droppings and shade were unwelcome at the Phelans’. Katrina trimmed what she could of the tree’s low branches and asked Francis, a neighborhood handy man at sev enteen to help her trim the higher ones; and he did: climbed aloft and sawed living arms off the vigorous young tree. But for every branch cut, new life sprouted elsewhere, and the tree thickened. to a lushness unlike that of any other tree on Arbor Hill, infuriating Kathryn Phelan, who increased her dosage of salt on the roots, which waxed and grew under and beyond the wooden fence and surfaced ever more brazenly on Phelan property.
Why do you want to kill the tree. Mama? Francis asked.
And his mother said it was because the tree had no right insinuating itself into other people’s yards. If we want a tree in the sard we’ll plant our own, she said. and threw more salt Some leases withered on the tree and one branch died entirely. But the salting failed, for Francis saw the tree now, twice its old sue, a giant thing in the world, rising high out of the weeds and toward the sun from what used to be the Daugherty yard.
On this high noon in 1938, under the sun’s full brilliance, the tree restored itself to its half size of forty-one years past, a July morning in 1897 when Francis was sitting on a middle branch, sawing the end off a branch above him. He heard the back door of the Daughertys’ new house open and close, and he looked down from his perch to see Katrina Daugherty, carrying her small shopping bag, weanng a gray sun hat, gray satin evening slippers, and nothing else. She descended the five steps of the back piazza and strode toward the new barn, where the Daugherty landau and horse were kept.
“Mrs. Daugherty?” Francis called out, and he leaped down from the tree. “Are you all right?”
“I’m going downtown, Francis.” she said.
“Shouldn’t you put somcthing on? Some clothes?”
“Clothes?” she said. She looked down at her naked self and then cocked her head and widened her eyes into quizzical rigidity.
“Mrs. Daugherty.” Francis said, but she gave no response, nor did she move. From the piazza railing that he was building, Francis lifted a piece of forest-green canvas he would eventually install as an awning on a side window, and wrapped the naked woman in it, picking her up in his arms then, and carrying her into her house. He sat her on the sofa in the back parlor and, as the canvas slid slowly away from her shoulders, he searched the house for a garment and found a housecoat hanging behind the pantry door. He stood her up and shoved her arms into the housecoat, tied its belt at her waist, covering her body fully, and undid the chin ribbon that held her hat. Then he sat her down again on the sofa.
He found a bottle of Scotch whiskey in a cabinet and poured her an inch in a goblet from the china closet, held it to her lips, and cajoled her into tasting it. Whiskey is magic and will cure all your troubles. Katrina sipped it and smiled and said, “Thank you, Francis. You are very thoughtful,” her eyes no longer wide, the glaze gone from them, her rigidity banished, and the softness of her face and body restored.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked her.
“I’m fine, fine indeed. And how are you, Francis?”
“Do you want me to go and get your husband?”
“My husband? My husband is in New York City, and rather difficult to reach, I’m afraid. What did you want with my husband?”
“Someone in your family you’d like me to get, maybe? You seem to be having some kind of spell.”
“Spell? What do you mean, spell?”
“Outside. In the back.”
“The back?”
“You came out without any clothes on, and then you went stiff.”
“Now really, Francis, do you think you should be so familiar?”
“I put that housecoat on you. I carried you indoors.”
“You carried me?”
“Wrapped in canvas. That there.” And he pointed to the canvas on the floor in front of the sofa. Katrina stared at the canvas, put her hand inside the fold of her housecoat, and felt her naked breast. In her face, when she again looked up at him, Francis saw lunar majesty, a chilling fusion of beauty and desolation. At the far end of the front parlor, observing all from behind a chair, Francis saw also the forehead and eyes of Katrina Daugherty’s nine-yearold son, Martin.
o o o
A month passed, and on a day when Francis was doing finishing work on the doors of the Daugherty carriage barn, Katrina called out to him from the back porch and beckoned him into the house, then to the back parlor, where she sat again on the same sofa, wearing a long yellow afternoon frock with a soft collar. She looked like a sunbeam to Francis as she motioned him into a chair across from the sofa.
“May I make you some tea, Francis?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Would you care for one of my husband’s cigars?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t use ‘em.”
“Have you none of the minor vices? Do you perhaps drink whiskey?”
“I’ve had a bit but the most I drink of is ale.”
“Do you think I’m mad, Francis?”
“Mad? How do you mean that?”
“Mad. Mad as the Red Queen. Peculiar. Crazy, if you like. Do you think Katrina is crazy?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Not even after my spell?”
“I just took it as a spell. A spell don’t have to be crazy.”