Bowlaway

Dr. Sprague opened a practice in the next town over, Foxton, in a black neighborhood called West Hills; he had admitting privileges at the Plymouth Hospital in Boston, which his friend Dr. Garland had founded when no other hospital around would allow in black doctors. None of the white people in Salford could imagine it, the way he could hear wrongness in a body. Leviticus’s siblings were musicians but he had perfect pitch for the anatomical: gurgle, hush, echo. He knew all the body’s misdirections, the stomachache that meant an ear malady, the limp that meant your shoulder needed tending. His expression was scientific as he worked, his hands gentle, impersonal. You were not your body, but if you were to persist, your body must be attended to. His patients loved him. They asked after his wife. “She is very well,” he told Faucenia Brooks, Chickie Barksdale, O. V. Orlebar.

“Come to church,” said O. V. Orlebar. He meant Shiloh Baptist, where O. V. was a deacon, and Leviticus did go a few times. He’d been raised in the faith. His father had been a deacon, too. But church was his childhood, his family, whom he knew he’d turned his back on. His parents were dead. His younger siblings were still on the family farm in Oromocto waiting for him to come home. (That was where his own money had come from; his people had been farming in Oromocto since 1776.) No doubt his siblings—Almira, Benjamin, and Joseph—would think church was the first step north. Most of the parishioners at Shiloh Baptist were from America’s South, people of surpassing kindness and foreignness to Dr. Sprague, above all because they believed in God and everlasting life.

Leviticus Sprague despised Truitt’s Alleys, though he would never say so. To be surrounded by people! Not just the fellow in the next lane over, but the pinbodies, the lollygaggers. The racket. The repetition of it. The troglodyte conditions. The smoke and spit of white men gathered together. The dirty looks. The ill feeling, which itself seemed made of smoke and spit.

The thing that had worried him about married life was the idea of somebody looking at him all the time. Out in the world people looked at him, more now than ever because he was married to Bertha. One of the things he liked about being a doctor: when people had their eyes on him they were thinking of themselves, what he might say about their health, what conclusions he had about a boil or a tremor—they did not care about his body, only theirs. But Bertha watched. She believed him to be her territory. When they ate dinner, the second that Leviticus got gravy caught in his mustache, or ketchup on his chin, Bertha would say, “My darling,” and gesture to her own face. The very second. He could not explain why this bothered him, other than a mustache was private property. “How is it?” Bertha would ask at the first bite, when the grub was still unfolding on his tongue. And meals were innocent. She was always watching. She did not tell him to give up his bad habits but she noticed them. Another pipe, Leviticus? Another glass of whiskey?

He brought all his bad habits to the belvedere. There Dr. Sprague opened the eight windows of the octagonal cabin, smoked his pipe and his du Maurier cigarettes, drank his Gibson’s Finest, read books on the history of the Maritimes, and with the wind whistling through, and the smoke puffing out the top, it was as though Superba were a great kettle, or a steamship headed upriver, a conveyance of industry. Up there he could not be seen and he was himself.

In the mornings he would walk. He was a man of nature, he could go miles along the river, all the way to Waltham, or through the Salford Fens north to Foxton. At the start of a walk, alone and moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted. (Unlike Bertha, he did not have the need to found or invent anything himself.) Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot. In winter you came to the ice floes like shattered monuments in the river; in spring you walked into a blooming dewy magnolia bush. Your walking was a devotion. Most days he rose early and left Bertha behind, asleep, and walked for three hours and was back to fix her breakfast. What happened in those hours? O only the shift from the sky dark and aerated with stars to the layered morning light to the sun gilding the river and regilding the already gilt dome of the courthouse, only the invention of morning, only Bertha in her dreams bowling, bowling, he could tell by her trembling arm and wrong-foot approach.


One early morning as Dr. Sprague walked along the edge of the fens he heard an animal rustling amid the marsh grass. What might it be? Something wild, he hoped. He’d been too long in a city looking only into the hostile eyes of men.

At first he thought the creature in the fens was a big cat. A hillocky beaver. A faun. Through the sandy grass he saw a pair of eyes, at first too wide-set for any earthly creature. Then the face looked distressingly human, though he could hear the steady thack-thack of a muscled tail, a noise neither warning nor comfort, and the unfurling sound of wings or a parasol.

“Hello?” he said. Dark green eyes. A narrow-bridged nose. Leviticus stumbled on the solid ground before the fens; his gloved hand plunged into the muck as though into a human body during surgery, he could feel a beating heart beneath, and he was on the creature’s level. He knew her, the face was hers, in a seizure he believed it. Despite the muck, the dark, the seizure, the beating earth, what he felt was love, and he said her name.

The thing hissed and fled: oily waddle, blurping noise of a stout body sliding into swamp. Not his wife after all. But the love didn’t ebb. Bertha, he thought. No, an animal, or a spirit. He ran home. There, Bertha was turning over in bed, sleepy, dream-damp. “What is it?” she asked. He wanted to tell her. Then he said, “I thought I saw you by the fens.”

She gave a burbling half-awake laugh. “You saw the Salford Devil, maybe.”

He said, severely, he never was severe, “There is no such thing,” and climbed muddy beneath the counterpane. He felt above the covers, then below. “Where’s the Mother Cat?”

“Maybe the Salford Devil’s got her,” Bertha said matter-of-factly.

“Not the Devil,” said Leviticus. “We do not believe in the Devil.”

“I didn’t realize our beliefs were yoked together,” she said. “Anyhow if she’s gone she’ll be back, full of kittens. The cat, Leviticus,” she said. “Not the Devil.”

“That cat’s too old for kittens,” he said, and he made the clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth that always conjured up her and all cats from the corners. She didn’t come, only her children, Donizetti, Raphael, Botticelli.

The Mother Cat didn’t come home that afternoon, or that night. The next morning Dr. Sprague went through the neighborhood on all fours, clucking his tongue, with a herring on a string to toss beneath bushes. Had it been the Mother Cat, twitching in the fen? Where could she be? He went into people’s backyards, peered under their porches. “Mother,” he called, “little Mother.” “You’ll get yourself shot,” said Bertha, “and over a cat, when we have three more!” Eventually he did find her, but dead, beneath the roses in the backyard, intact, untouched: she had crawled there to die. He wept, he couldn’t stop. The Mother Cat had a way in bed of sleeping in the crook of his knees, so he could not move; she spent the evenings purring beneath his book, nudging the book with her head. He missed her bodily—

“We’ll get another mother cat,” said Bertha.

But he would not be comforted. “Another does not exist!”

“Grief is not for cats.”

“Do not, Bertie,” said Leviticus. “Do not.” He couldn’t finish the sentence: whatever she was doing was too awful to be named.

She wouldn’t stop. “Grief is surprise. Grief is, I wasn’t prepared. Grief is, It’s not fair.”

“It isn’t,” he said, but uncertainly.

“That cat was old as Moses and died in a rose bower. You are not griefstruck. You feel sorry for yourself. I feel sorry for you, too,” she added. They looked at each other and understood: this was how they might mourn each other, she clear-eyed, striding forward; he weeping and inarticulate. It was what each would have wanted of the other.


Elizabeth McCracken's books