On this particular morning — it was the first of March, two months into her exile — she felt well enough to help Ida clean up after breakfast, standing at the counter and drying the plates as Ida fished them from the dishwater. She put them back in the cupboard as neatly as she could, though what she really wanted was to smash them on the floor, but that wouldn’t have been practical, not unless they were going to set up a potter’s wheel and start from scratch. The fact was that she’d all but given up on her own crockery coming now. It was lost somewhere, lost in transit — or in Charlie Curner’s hold. She didn’t want to think of him leaving it behind on the pier or pitching it overboard in a heavy sea. She could picture the box, the newspaper with which she’d wrapped each plate, each cup and saucer and the gravy boat and all the rest, in order to protect them from rough handling, but in the end, she supposed, it hadn’t really mattered. What mattered was this: Ida handed her a dish, one of these dishes, chipped and cracked and ugly, and she wiped it dry and set it atop the others. It was something to do. A sop to the boredom. As they worked, Ida did most of the talking, chattering away about anything that came into her head, but it was pleasant enough, calming, the whole house hushed and peaceful in the grip of the fog. Afterward, she sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, basking in the warmth of the stove, then took a thumbed-over copy of Harper’s Bazaar, which she’d already read twice through, and went out the back door to the W.C.
She wasn’t really paying attention, thinking about Edith, how she was falling behind in the lessons they’d set out for her — reading mostly, in literature and history both, but some maths and sciences too and the exercises in the French text the teacher at the school in Santa Barbara had thrust on her the week before they’d left — because she lacked discipline and her mother hadn’t been able to summon the energy to bear down on her, for which her mother was feeling guilty. Before she knew it, she’d lost the path, one clump of crushed weed looking much like the next and a gray impenetrable cocoon of fog spun all around her. There were no landmarks. The house was gone. The fences. The field. Green Mountain. She kept on, watching her feet, her steps shuffling and cautious. She could step in a hole, turn an ankle, break a leg, and where was the blessed thing? It was in this direction, wasn’t it? But no, it couldn’t have been because she would have caught the odor of it by now, the latrine, the stink-hole, and why couldn’t she have a flush toilet like everybody else in the world? A bathroom, a door that locked behind you, tile on the floor and a sink to wash up after? She paused to sniff the air, but the fog was like a wet rag pressed to her face and all she could smell was the familiar odor of rot drifting up from the shoreline. Then she stopped altogether. Stood still. Listened. There was nothing, no sound at all, not even the droning of the seals.
She didn’t know how long she’d been wandering, the magazine clutched in a tight roll in one hand, her insides churning, when she gave up. It was like that night in the bedroom, the night of the lamb, when finally she’d found the chamber pot, but there was no pot here, no toilet, nothing but dirt and weed and the fog that was strangling her till she found herself beginning to cough before she was even conscious of it. Miserable, shamed, she lifted her skirts, squatted there in the void like some barnyard animal and released her bowels.
Nothing but grass to clean herself with. Everything wet, cold, filthy. She tore a page from the magazine, but that was filthy too, the touch of it on her skin, on her privates, like an electric shock. She stood, gathered herself. How had she come to this, this humiliation, this barbarity? Was this what was visited on the dying, this tearing away from the life lived and worth living? This deracination? And here was her epitaph: Marantha Scott Waters, 1850–18—? Deracinated.
She was cold. She coughed, kept on coughing, a spasm sweeping over her so immediately, so desperately, she didn’t have time to brace herself, and then the phlegm was coming up inside her and where was she to spit it? On the ground. In the dirt. And why not? She’d paid ten thousand dollars for the privilege, hadn’t she?
She spat, wiped her lips on the back of her hand. She couldn’t catch her breath. The coughing wouldn’t stop, each cough crashing down atop the next like bricks falling from a cliff. Then she was down on her knees in the wet, pounding at her breastbone, and what had Dr. Erringer told her? That phthisics like her (he wouldn’t call his patients consumptives, never, because the term gave too much agency to the disease) could more often than not expect a complete cure simply from living quietly, exercising moderately and above all taking in the untainted air of the countryside. Yes, and where was he now? Sitting by the fire in his offices, his feet propped up on an embroidered footstool, the wainscoting glowing behind him, anything he could possibly want just a tap of the bell away, a sandwich, a steak, hot cider, a nurse to come in and ease the tension in his shoulders after a long day of dismissing one patient after another with smiles and promises and the medicines that did nothing but make you feel as if you were dead already. Morphia. Morpheus. Sleep and Poetry.
By the time Ida found her—“Mrs. Waters? Ma’am? Are you out there?”—she was sprawled in the grass like a broken umbrella, chilled through and coughing so violently it felt as if her lungs had been turned inside out. How much time had gone by she couldn’t say — she’d been elsewhere, in her mother’s arms, racing her sister down the sun-dappled sidewalk to the drugstore, reading aloud from the Book of Revelation (“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more”) while the pastor and her mother looked on as if she’d just reserved her place in heaven — but it seemed as if she’d heard Ida calling for hours. She tried to respond, tried to cry for help, but her voice wouldn’t come. She’d asked Dr. Erringer about that, about the huskiness of her voice, its weakness, the way it failed her at crucial times, and he’d given an abrupt little nod of his head. “Nothing to worry over,” he told her. “A symptom of the disease, that’s all. The sort of thing all phthisics have to confront to one degree or another.”
“Mrs. Waters?” There seemed to be a light in the distance — a lantern, Ida’s lantern — and she gathered her legs under her and laid one palm in the cold muck to push herself up, so weak suddenly she sank back down again as if her legs had been cut out from under her. She might have stayed there until the ravens came to pluck out her eyes and the beetles surged up out of the earth to reduce her, to consume her, but for the shadow that came hurtling out of the void to fall on her in a rush of churning paws and frantic barking.
“Ma’am?”
“I’m here,” she whispered, the dog nosing at her, licking her face, muddying her dress till it was no better than a rag.
Ida’s face loomed up out of the void, weirdly illuminated by the lantern she held out before her. “Ma’am? Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
It took her a moment. The coughing came in waves, like breakers hitting the beach. She pushed the dog away. Cleared her throat. And finally, though Ida was right there, seeing her at her weakest and worst, she leaned over to spit in the grass because she couldn’t help herself, the sputum grainy and discolored, the taste in her mouth so foul it was as if she’d tried to swallow some dead thing. But then the dead thing was already inside her, wasn’t it?