Bloudy Fielde
Lots more long walks
[Still with The Sanguine Experiment. Told you I needed do the work and get them to that negotiation. This one comes after Eeyore and the Sanguine Spell and covers the weeks up to Disgusting. Walter and Linen are recovering from their very strange night. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
“A gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, The cruel markes of many a bloudy fielde
— and we’re off.”
Linen spread her arms, encompassing the room. Welcome to the quest.
It was a large hall — 50 seats, full with a few students standing along the walls. Everyone wanted the 9 a.m. section. As always on the first day, Linen let her magnolia accent spread a bit. She had a pleasant alto voice that filled the space.
“Let’s start with that first clarion. What just happened? — No, don’t look at the book, folks listened back then, much as they read, or more. This is verse written for the eye and the ear. What just happened?”
A hand. “I couldn’t understand all the words.”
“Never mind the words, we’ll go word-by-word later. And I bet more sunk in than you realized. What did you see? Your mind’s eye, what did you see?”
Another hand. “A big guy on horseback.”
Linen snapped her fingers. “Colors?”
Another student, a boy in a Nittany Lion sweatshirt and yellow curls sprouting under his hood. “A field, grass — green, I guess.”
A smaller, wiry boy. “He’s been in battle.”
“How did you know? What did you see?”
A voice from the back. “His beat-up shield.”
Linen echoed. “His beat-up shield. Cruel marks of many — many — a bloody field.” She heard the word bloody echo, and let it. “Another color, anyone?”
“Red.”
“No one mentioned red,” a girl argued.
“No red mentioned,” Linen agreed, “but who in their mind’s eye saw red?”
A few hands.
“Hands up — colors? Green? Silver? Red?”
More hands. Sun moved across the pebbled windowglass. Smells of coffee and shampoo and tobacco wafted from their clothing.
“This matters,” she said. “The tactile, sensual matter of the poem. This semester we’re going to talk about religious allegory. We’ll talk about Elizabethan court politics. We’ll look at some critical modern-day readings of The Faerie Queene, poke the machine a bit, see how it works.”
She grinned. “Who’s a theory head?” Hands. “Who hates critical theory?” Other hands.
“Good, good. We’ll have some mighty jousts. — But here’s the point. We are reading a poem about knights and dwarves and elves, written for and read by — whatever the allegorical and political superstructure — people who many of them believed in dwarves and elves.”
Two girls in the back stood and left. Then three boys in jerseys who’d been standing along a wall.
“You will not go wrong if you read the story as story. This man. This bloody shield.”
Other students left.
Battered, she thought, but let the error stand.
“You will never go wrong, if, reading fairy stories, you choose to believe in fairies.”
Three strong-looking girls on the front row stood. They wore navy track suits and had just come, she knew, from the 8 a.m. athletic training class. They walked out the near door of the lecture hall, the one beside the white board.
Linen had never seen anything like it. One student almost walked through her.
“Guess we were wrong about the schedule,” a girl said, looking at a printout, “it says Wiley Hall.”
“Wiley? I was sure it was in Weaver.”
“We’ll email the instructor.”
Linen looked at the 12 remaining students, all clustered on the front two rows. She shrugged. “Guess it’s just us, then.” She looked after the girls who had almost walked through her. No one usually left on the first day. People liked her accent. She had a reputation for being an easy grader.
“Wonder where they’re off to?” She thought of Walter. Maybe he was rubbing off on her. She shrugged. “Some people.”
A girl with curly brown hair tied up with a red ribbon frowned up at her. “I don’t understand. Who are you talking about?”
“Those people who just left — ”
“No one left.”
A boy in a loose black shirt looked up from an elaborate doodle. “Enough of that, Phoebe. I want to hear more about fairies.”
“Some people see me. Some people don’t.”
Linen and the Sad Guy were walking down Allegheny Street towards Linen’s house. A week had passed since the night and event he referred to only as the Gift. Or, sometimes, your Gift.
The Saturday night after the Gift, he had left his phone number on a scrap of paper torn from a notebook he had in his back pocket. “In case you feel sick. Or need anything. Anything. Call if you need me.”
He said it with a frown, staring at her — Linen thought — as if she was an interesting and possibly dangerous beetle.
Linen did not call. She spent Sunday lying on her sofa and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD.
Monday morning when she opened her front door at just before 7:30 she found the Sad Guy standing on her deck waiting for her.
“Good morning,” he said in that rather nasal voice she placed somewhere between Barney Fife and educated Baltimore. The bumbling deputy was easy — West Virginia, north Appalachia, not so far south from where they were now. These were the same mountains, she thought. The Sad Guy’s register was a little lower but he had the twang and the weird Pennsylvania verb constructions. She wondered if he was putting them on — if had grown up educated and decided to submerge.
“Ready?” he asked.
Linen saw that he intended to walk to the bus with her — that he had added half an hour to his walk for that purpose. “Thank you. This is kind.”
He did not answer. On the bus he sat beside her but did not speak to her. Instead began to read the paper he picked up from the seat.
He walked her to and from the bus all week. When Linen asked a question he answered and asked questions in return. They made small talk cautiously, like strangers at a company party.
Friday evening the bus was so full Linen had to stand, but when she started down the hill toward Water Street she saw the Sad Guy following and she waited for him to catch up with her.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
It was not her usual path. Linen did not think he had much business asking. Still, she answered: “State store. Taking a bottle of wine home and getting drunk on it.”
He looked with a sort of rueful grin. “That bad?”
“Crazy. Well, frustrating and peculiar.”
“How so?”
Her mouth quirked up. “You have that notebook? I’ll give you a list.”
Two hours later they were sitting on Linen’s sofa working on parallel lists. The Sad Guy had accepted a jammy egg, a couple slices of home fried potato and two glasses of wine. Linen was polishing off a big plate of home fries smothered with ketchup and eggs stirred in.
“Linen,” she read out loud. “Magic healing, often invisible, doesn’t mind cold much.” She added, “It’s lucky I send my rent check by mail, because my landlord came to check something and I talked to him and he didn’t hear or see me.”
“What do we have on my list?”
“Walter: Magic healing, immune to cold, mostly invisible, doesn’t want to kill self, doesn’t want to kill others.”
“Sounds right.”
“So what does it mean?”
“I’m not sure about that word means. This means that.” He shrugged. “It’s just data points, but we can’t assume they have anything to do with the Gift or even that one list has anything to do with the other. Not yet, anyway.”
“Maybe we just noticed it.” Linen licked the last egg and ketchup off her plate and put it on the coffee table beside Walter’s. “Maybe it happens all along and we — ”
He looked at her with interest. “You just licked your plate.”
“You do weird things.”
“I don’t lick my plate.”
“So?”
“I think you’re going feral.”
“I’ve always licked my plate.”
“How’d you get a job as a professor, then? Don’t they, like take you out to eat to see if you know how to use a napkin and salad fork?”
“Just a lecturer, and yes, and I don’t lick my plate in front of hiring committees.”
“Ah.”
“More wine?”
“You’ll have to walk me home. I won’t be able to see straight. And then I’ll have to walk you back and still get home again.”
“Nonsense, I can walk myself back.”
“No, not by yourself. Anything could happen.”
“Yeah, I might meet a murderer.” Linen stuck her tongue out at Walter. “What I was saying was more or less what you said. Maybe it’s always happened. People don’t always see me now, which is weird, but two days before the Gift I saw the Men from the Hollow Hills.”
She took Walter’s plate and was about to lick it when he pulled it back.
“Had I walked through that homeless camp — or fairy dell — and never seen them before? Or had they just appeared? And you believed in Hippocratic humors theory, bile, blood, all that. And ethereal bodies. You already believed those things.”
“Exactly. The experiment didn’t cause the theory but proved it.” He drank more wine. “Or mostly disproved it, in this case. But something happened. And whatever happened, it’s proving — quirky. I’m not even at the stage of knowing what counts as data, let alone what questions to ask.” He looked at his glass. “I’m going to have to walk half the night to maintain energy equilibrium. And I’m getting pretty drunk. Just my luck if a cop is the only person who can see me.”
Linen scooted away from him so he could stretch out. “Stay here. Sleep on the sofa.”
“No, you’re feral and dangerous. You already tried to lick my plate. Next thing you might lick me while I sleep.”
Linen laughed at him. She stood. “I would not.”
“That’s right, you never touch me. I only touch you but you never do.”
The Sad Guy sounded so petulant that Linen laughed again. “Give me your hand.”
He held it out, palm up. Linen cupped it in hers. This hand, she thought, that dug the knife out of his pocket and slashed my arm two times, severing arteries and tendons.
But it was an ordinary hand, an office worker’s hand, long and slim, with a childlike smallness to the fingertips.
Walter twitched as if he wanted to jerk his hand back.
At random Linen picked a feathered line in his palm and ran her tongue down it. Walter snatched his hand away. “That’s gross.”
“You wanted me to touch you.”
He hunkered his shoulders. “Not lick me. We just talked about — ”
“What if you calculate how long you need to walk for energy equilibrium and we do it together and then you won’t be so very drunk and you can see yourself the last stretch back home?”
They walked half the night. After the first trek up Bishop Street they decided to cross the cemetery. Rabbits hopped over the crust. The trees gestured across the half moon.
Walter said: “It was dark the night of the Gift.”
“The moon?”
“Mm-hm.”
“You know, I have a lot of strange feelings about you, but I don’t feel like you’re about to cut me again.”
“Probably not the best idea to trust your feelings.” He elbowed her gently. “You have terrible judgment.”
“People keep making the same mistakes. When I was 16 I had a little boy. I gave him up for adoption.”
“You — you — have a son?”
Her voice smiled. “Some other people have a son. Nice people, I hope.”
“You didn’t have an abortion?”
Linen shrugged. “I mean, I guess I’d heard of such a thing when I was 16? But as a sort of tale about crooked doctors, probably rapists themselves, doing surgery on bloody kitchen tables. I certainly didn’t know safe, modern abortion was available in Jackson. I couldn’t even drive. And of course the preacher said, you know, God’s grace turns tragedy into blessing, all that.”
“You didn’t choose.”
“Not really.”
No one was around. She climbed onto a gravestone and balanced on it.
“The baby’s daddy was one of my older cousins. At my granny’s house. Looking back, it’s not scary or painful, just weird. He was high, I think. I haven’t seen him for years. And this thing happened, and I was a little grossed out, but I figured I’d take a shower and it would be okay, and then I told one of my girl cousins and I was like: Was that sex?”
Walter chuckled like someone obliged to laugh at a stranger’s joke. He put his hand inside his coat.
Linen jumped down from the gravestone. “Does your chest hurt you?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’m sorry this thing happened to you.”
“No worries, really. It would be a funny, innocuous little memory if I hadn’t had the baby. And even he’s sort of drifted off my radar a bit, you know?”
They walked up toward the top of the cemetery, stepping around the Revolutionary veterans under the cypress trees.
Walter said: “And now you’re looking for a son to take care of.”
A pause. Linen said: “I really think we’ve walked long enough.”
“I don’t need to be taken care of, Linen.”
“All right.”
“Shall I show you how I’d like you to touch me?”
This was such a stumper that Linen stopped and turned back to him. The snow was shallow under the cedar trees. The Revolution veterans slept under a blanket of small black needles and frozen slush.
Walter’s light wool jacket hung open. He only wore it anymore for appearances. Now he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled down the neck of his tee shirt, distorting the collar.
“You’re ruining that undershirt.”
“Put your hand there.”
His heart scampered, paused, pattered on. A jerking wallop. More patters. A rabbit under attack, Linen thought, changing directions, freezing, racing on again in a mad dash for safety. Each big beat seemed to pluck his chest inward, away from her hand.
“My mother killed herself when I was seven. Way my dad acts, I couldn’t blame her, though I used to wish she’d taken me with her.”
He put his hand over Linen’s.
“I found her in the bathtub. She’d tried to stab herself, but the chest wall is pretty tough, you know. Full of bones. Takes practice to kill things that way. But she was determined. She cut her belly open. The technical term for that is seppuku. Takes a while to die. I couldn’t do anything for her.”
Walter bent and put his forehead against Linen’s. “There are worse things in our bodies than blood, you know.”
Linen’s eyes watered. Walter smelled like air before a lightening storm, she thought. She pressed in, rotating her hand on his chest.
She asked, “Ever heard of a fellow named John of God? Kind of a faith healer. Lives in South America somewhere. Claims to reach inside people’s bodies to cure their cancer.”
He nodded.
“Well, under the heading of these things have always been happening: a bird flew through my hand the other day. It was inside my house, hunkered up shivering, you know. And I picked it up to carry outside and before I could open my hands, it struggled right through them.”
A pause. Walter said, “I suppose I have less faith than a bird — no, stay, it helps.”
“I don’t think it’s faith.”
“No, you’re right … your hair gets on everything, it’s on my armchair, now it’s going to be all over my coat … stay, stay.”
He took her coat collar and slid his hands up either side of her neck. He found the pulse.
Linen shivered. “What are you doing?”
“Remembering. Learning.”
The next afternoon they walked again, a sunny walk into cold mountain, not talking at all except to point out what they saw — a yearling turning back on the trail to watch them, smoke wending up from a cabin half-hidden in snow.
Monday morning Linen came out late. She held an armful of books and papers. She felt exasperated when she saw Walter standing like a bad tempered stork on her porch. The White Spy from Mad Magazine, she thought, but a Gray Spy. She knew he would say, and he did say: “You’re late.”
“Sorry. Lots of papers to gather up and organize.”
“You should carry a backpack. Or a satchel like mine.”
“I should but I don’t.”
“That’s foolish. You should — ” He started to take the papers. “These are a mess.”
“Then don’t hold them. Simple as that.” She went down the steps without handing over her papers.
“You’re acting annoying.” Walter followed her. “You are annoying.”
Linen dropped her papers, cursed, and bent to retrieve them. Walter also squatted down.
“I’ve got it. Thank you.”
He stood up empty handed. “This is foolish behavior. You’re wasting my time.”
That afternoon the bus was crowded. Linen was glad to have to stand near the front of the bus. Two steps took her off and away. She did not look back. She didn’t want to mess with the Sad Guy. She did not want him to look at her and think that his time was being wasted.
The next morning the snow whirled. Linen had organized her books and papers the night before and even wrapped each set of essays in a Walmart bag. She came out the door before seven. There the Sad Guy stood on her porch steps, a still shadow among moving ones, she thought.
He didn’t bother with Good morning. “You went off and left. I didn’t know where you’d gone.”
“I went home.”
“I thought so but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to follow and catch up to you but I didn’t. It’s creepy to follow people.”
Linen was very sure that Walter had often been called a creep. She said, “It’s also creepy to force yourself on people who’ve told you how much you annoy them.”
The snow fell.
“I brought you something.”
Walter held up a soft lumpy thing. Linen came to look at it. A backpack, a leather backpack, well-worn but cleaned and oiled.
“Put your things in it.”
In the thickening snow they knelt over the backpack. “It has straps inside, see, to hold your papers upright.”
They organized everything. Linen said, “This is a very good backpack.”
“We should hurry.” Walter was still kneeling, adjusting the straps. “We could have organized everything on the bus.”
“What will you do at work today? Will you be busy, do you expect?”
“Just quarterly reports for another few days. Then I’ll be back to measuring out lives again.”
Linen stared at him.
“Although I usually do it in bulk, not one-offs.”
She kept staring.
“I have these big shears … ”
Linen’s mouth opened.
“I’m an actuary. A mathematician. I make mortality predictions for life insurance companies.”
He looked at her, waiting for her to get the joke.
“I know what an actuary is, dumbass.”
“But it was funny, right?”
Linen held her hand down to help him up. “I may never recover.” Then she thought of something. “You chose your career as a punchline?”
“Yeah … ”
She whooped with laugher and had to sit down. “Oh god oh god.”
“That pitiful?”
“There’s a kind of crazy grandeur … ” She pushed up. “You’re right, we’re late.”
Walter, now also shaking with silent laughter, let her pull him up. He wiped his eyes. “It’s the scale that gets you, every time.”
That afternoon he said: “Come to my house Friday. Come after work. We could have tea.”
“All right.”
But Friday they stepped off into a blizzard. Walter looked around. “It’ll be a mess walking home later. But I don’t want to ask you to stay. There’s only peanut butter and rice cakes for dinner.”
“I have a plan.”
“Go on.”
“We step down to Mama Lucrezia’s and order some carry out. Then we go to my house and I get my toothbrush and long johns and so on. And then we come back, pick up the dinner, and go to your house. Then we have everything and we can stay in.”
After that it snowed too hard to talk without shouting. In Walter’s house he turned on the thermostat. They stood on the floor grating together.
“You remembered.”
Linen nodded. But she had forgotten how dark and cramped his attic was. He saw her looking around.
He said, “This must seem miserable after your pretty house.”
Linen looked for the path. Something about Hansel and Gretel. White stones in the moonlight.
“When I came here before, you had very little. A bit of paltry warmth, half a single-serving lasagna. But everything you had, you shared with me. Without thinking twice. And it didn’t matter. You were going to kill me. But you shared anyway.”
“It’s hard to remember thinking like that. It’s like a memory from another life. But it was just last month.” Walter looked around as if someone might be hiding in the corners. “That energy has to be somewhere.”
He focused on the bags of food. “What’s in yours?”
“Mushroom ravioli. Yours?”
“Chicken parm. You ordered salads and bread and all?”
“Yeah, two whole dinners.”
“Then we can save one and eat one now. No need to go out until Sunday.”
But all the food was already cold. Walter made tea and heated the foil tray of chicken parmesan. Linen sat at the farmhouse table. The bleeding bowl and its tray of implements stood where they had before, but covered with a tea towel. Walter lifted them to the top of a cabinet.
He sat across from Linen. They warmed their hands on the cups as the tea cooled. “I did try,” he said.
She waited.
“The pleasure is undiminished. But I felt no need to repeat it. I try every day with the same result. And look.”
He held out his arm. If there were new scars, Linen couldn’t tell it. All the myriad marks looked faint and white, decades old.
“Is it fast healing, like we thought, or is it that the world makes very little impression on us, nor we on it?” she asked. “You especially.”
He shook his head.
“Here’s what I want to tell you: You don’t annoy me. You frustrate me, you puzzle me … but your frustrating, puzzling, recalcitrance saved my life. And your life. I don’t mind how frustrating you are, not really. I will always want to walk with you. Don’t worry about me calling you annoying. I’ll try not to do it any more.”
Later, she said, “This bed is like the ones in the attics movies. You know, where the kids go when they are sad and maybe they read a book or daydream and they look up hours later, surprised to be back in the world again?”
“That’s exactly how it is.” Walter, sitting on the pile of blankets, looked down at her. “I spend days dreaming in this bed.”
“Like the Wooden Shoe that Wynken, Blynken, and Nod sailed.” Linen passed her hand over the surface beneath her. “It’s kind of crispy.”
“About that. I never changed the sheets.”
“What … what?”
“I like your blood being here.”
“You call me feral?”
“We can swap and you take the recliner.”
“What do you rather?”
“You stay here. That way the bed will smell more like you when you’re gone.”
You beautiful child, Linen thought.
Though as far as she knew, the Sad Guy might be older than she was. He was like a youth withering into middle age, she thought, bypassing the flower of manhood. She thought about asking him to come under the sheets, but she did not have that feeling for him now and would not be able to pretend. She did not want to hurt his feelings.
She lay on the stiff, bloody sheet. She held out her hand and waited for him to take it.
“You could tell me a story,” she said.