???
Samuel didn’t write the article immediately. The night of the drowning he tried to jam a butter knife into his chest, a half-hearted but nonetheless anguished effort, and Lewis and Durr took turns sitting with him. The next day they found that Clara, who had banished the town’s women and slammed the hotel room door on Eugenia, had packed through the night to load Grover and their things on an early train. She’d given Irving ten dollars to facilitate this and keep his mouth shut until she left town. She’d headed west, and she talked of Portland.
Dulcy wouldn’t mourn Grover: she hadn’t liked or trusted him. She had a harder time about the green book. The fat tears rolling down her cheeks that night were for the symbolism of her small idiot loss: did this mean that her old life had disappeared?
“I’m not going to dignify that with a comment,” said Lewis. He said it sympathetically, naked in bed, wiping her snotty face, being kind even though he’d had a hard time with Samuel, hiding guns and belts. “We’ll buy another book. You can write down everything you remember, and I’ll ask questions, and you’ll remember more.”
“I think I’m better off just living,” said Dulcy.
Samuel had been trying to alternate sensationalism with wholesomeness in the Enterprise (hopheads flanking baseball photos, accounts of historic murders above profiles of the town’s lovely unmarried teachers). He’d packed June with brides and stories of Chinese prostitution in Billings, and July with parties and William Clark’s newest sins, but now, in August, he gave up on balance. The world, lately, had been all about sensationalism, anyway. A week after Grover died, he published two stories, one a description of the Poor Farm scam, the other a detailed account of Lennart Falk’s saga and beating and failure to recover. Samuel had bribed the jail warden with a printing job and published a list of two dozen beating victims who’d gone on to spend time at the Poor Farm, with accounts of their damage. He described the female inmates who’d been forced to service the Fenoways brothers, though he had to be roundabout with details.
“He writes about how Falk is doing now,” Dulcy said. “How would he know?”
“He contacted the man who retrieved Lennart,” said Lewis, pokerfaced. They were having lunch with Margaret; Dulcy was quite sure Margaret knew they slept together. “Apparently one brother will be coming through soon. Not the one who came before.”
She left town for a walk with Margaret and the Macalesters on the day of the visit. They made it most of the way up Livingston Peak, and they only gave up when they nearly became part of a landslide of scree. By the time they got back the story had spread: Lewis and Samuel had met Ansel Falk at the Elite, and walked with him down to the police station, where they found Gerry asleep on the floor behind his desk—he was off the wagon again, still celebrating Grover’s death. Bixby was on duty and recoiled, but Ansel Falk greeted him quite pleasantly, thanked him for having tried to defend his brother (Bixby admitted to Samuel that he’d put in only a token protest at the time of Lennart’s beating, but Lennart had remembered some moment of kindness), and began to slap Gerry across the face, trying to wake him for a fight.
Gerry, who retched blood between benders now, wouldn’t wake. He lay on the floor, mouth open, tilting his head from side to side like a carp looking for life outside the fishbowl. Ansel Falk tried a few more blows, then gave his own head a little c’ est la vie shake, opened his trousers, and urinated on Gerry’s face, into his open eyes and mouth.
Falk buttoned up while they listened to Gerry choke. “He is bringing it into his lungs,” Falk said. “Perhaps he’ll die of pneumonia. Please send us a wire if this is the case, and otherwise let him know that one of us will be back. We’re taking our time, not forgetting.”
Samuel’s life was filled with unprintable tales. Despite his account of Lennart’s beating, and the abuse of Gerry’s prisoners, the city fathers didn’t force the sheriff out of office. He gave up his Poor Farm stake—Eugenia’s part of it hadn’t been made public in the article, which Dulcy thought was cowardly on Samuel’s part—but Gerry still knew more about the mayor and town bankers than these men thought they could endure.
???
Lewis bought a typewriter and took over the desk in the spare bedroom. He enjoyed watching Brach in the yard below, trying to understand the man and his constant noise, and while he worked, Dulcy pulled out the surviving notebooks and lay on the room’s small bed. She worried that the peach family book might make her resent Walton’s failures, and she started with the pink book of verse instead, flipping to the last pages she’d skimmed in Seattle, searching one last time for clues to Victor’s lost fortune.
He’d been intent, near the end, on what money did to the soul. Dante, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Benjamin Franklin. Money has never made man happy, nor will it. In August, as Walton seasicked his way to Africa, he’d shifted to gold—Love is the only gold; A man who hoards up riches and enjoys them not is like an ass that carris gold and eats thistles—and then to diamonds: Nature has made a pebble and female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
He’d always loved Hugo. Before the boil me, burn me note at the end of every journal, he reverted back to ominous generalities—Jewels being lost are found againe, this never, / T’is lost but once, and once lost, lost for ever (Marlowe)— and ended with Aeschylus, and the essence of the problem: Inscribe it in the remembering tablets of your mind.
Perhaps he’d intended to move on to opals and emeralds. Dulcy had never known him to take an interest in a rock once it left the ground, and she wondered again if simply he’d gone to a Cape Town slum and given the money all away. He lacked religion, but not guilt.
Brach’s refugee cat watched his owner from the half—roof, and Lewis lifted the window to let it in. The cat lay down next to Dulcy and purred, eyes like translucent aquamarines in profile, and she reached for the peach book to kill time and keep the cat close.