Robert Goolrick - A Reliable Wife

She could change her mind, she supposed, would have to, but the thought of Antonio hung on her like a noose. It was not an idle threat. He would write, and it would all be over. Antonio was love to her, or all of it she had known until Ralph. What Antonio wanted, what she had promised him, would have to be done, somehow. And so she started again.

Love, even bad love, was a glittering lure that could draw her attention, if only for a time. The idea of Antonio dangled in front of her mesmerized eyes. It was just a drop, after all, a drop in his water, in his soup, a drop on his hairbrush. It was clear and icy and almost without odor. She knew how awful it would be. She knew how he would die. She couldn’t stop now.

True to his word, he never spoke of it again. He never asked her to stop, never complained of the changes beginning to affect his body, his life. He became anxious. The dreams that had enchanted his sleep turned terrifying, and still he never complained.

He would wake at two or three in the morning, covered in the sweat of terror, and he would turn to her and she would dry him and place him beneath the covers where he would lie until dawn, shivering with the cold. She felt his forehead with her hand. He was burning up. She felt a tenderness she had never felt for any man, a tenderness that went beyond love.

He looked haggard. His clothes began to burn his skin. Any sound, any noise, began to scrape at his ear until he couldn’t stand it.

After dinner one night he spoke in a soft voice, reciting a poem:

I wander all night in my vision,

Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,

Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,

Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill- assorted, contradictory,

Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.

She didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t know where the words came from. There was no reproach in his voice. She assumed it was the beginning of a dementia that would at least make him oblivious to much of what would happen to him.

Depression, morbidity, followed by death. These were the words she had read in the library. She knew everything that was to happen, the sores, the spots in his vision that would turn the world yellow and green, the bilious pustules, the haggard eyes, the dark hollows. She knew and she had thought she was ready.

“It’s wrong,” said Mrs. Larsen. “I’ve seen sickness, plenty of it, in Truitt, in… in the world, and this ain’t no sickness I’ve ever seen.”

Mrs. Larsen began to watch her. Catherine sat and talked to her.

“I don’t know what it is. We’ll call the doctor. He’ll tell us what to do.”

A doctor would find nothing, would suspect nothing. A man Truitt’s age might develop eczema and rashes. His hair might fall out. He might develop a visionary mind, an acute hearing, a ringing in the ears, an irrationality. Anybody might. Such things happened. Truitt, while he wasn’t old, wasn’t young either. But Truitt wouldn’t have the doctor. The poison was his fuel. He was not unhappy. And he loved his wife. She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life. She was the final knife in his heart. He opened his shirt to her with gladness.

Mrs. Larsen watched Catherine every minute of the day. Truitt was her life, and she felt her life slipping cruelly away, as so much else had gone. Gone into madness, into incurable awfulness. And she knew, as she had known before, that it wasn’t natural.

Ralph could not bear to be touched. His skin was so raw he couldn’t stand the feel of the softest nightshirt next to him. He slept naked, under smooth sheets that Mrs. Larsen now changed every day.

He could not bear to have Catherine’s skin on his skin, and yet his desire for her was undiminished. He shivered with the constant cold. His skin felt raw, the sheets felt like icy nettles in the night. The anxiety he felt before going to sleep could be lessened only by sex. Gently he led her, taught her to give him pleasure without touching.

When he had come, he could sleep for a while, but he woke from terrible dreams. He would sit on the edge of the bed, shivering and burning up with itching. She would undo her hair and let it fall on his shoulders and slide down his back, to ease the itching. She would do it for an hour, back and forth as light as breath, her silken hair, while he closed his eyes and dreamed. He was like her child. She was gentle past belief.

He didn’t understand her sorrow. This awful thing was not happening to her. She was causing his death, and he wanted death, so he forgave her. He felt his life slipping away without regret, along with his houses, his businesses, the people he had known and the memories he had harbored for fifty years. Everything had been a burden to him. Losing it now made him feel light. He let it go without regret. Only the bitter image of Antonio, the face he might have known, refused to leave him. But he felt no sorrow, not anymore, while she seemed to grieve deeply. It was deep and private and she had no way to tell him, and he would never have asked, but he wondered and she nursed and dried him and led him like a blind man to the dark bed where she pulled the soft sheets up to his chin and sat in the moonlight as he slept. She was his assassin and his nurse.

“There is iron and oil,” he would say. “There are cotton fields and cotton mills. There is the railroad. There are wheat fields as far away as Kansas,” explaining the empire that would be hers. He was losing money, losing money every day, Truitt who had spent a lifetime acquiring it, and he didn’t care. There was a lot of money.

“I love you,” he would say, his hands caressing her breasts in the dark. “These are the things you need to know. To watch over. You will have so much to take care of. I thank you,” he said, and now it had a different meaning.

He would sit in the shadows of the great hall and think of killing people. He dreamed of killing Catherine. He was worried he would kill Mrs. Larsen, or innocent people in the town, even though he hardly ever went to town anymore.

“I’m afraid,” he said.

“Of what?”

“I’m afraid of killing Antonio when he comes.”

“He’s not coming,” she said softly. “He’s never coming.”

Mrs. Larsen was out of her mind with worry and suspicion. She wouldn’t let Catherine in the kitchen. She made different foods for him, the things he liked from his boyhood. He wouldn’t eat them. She insisted he call the doctor. She had never shed one tear for Larsen, never mentioned his name, but she couldn’t look at Truitt’s blistered hands without crying.

There was no need, and Truitt didn’t want it. Mrs. Larsen begged him. Catherine went to town and begged the doctor to come. She lied. The doctor came. Cancer, he said. Cancer of the blood and the bones and the brain. Cancer everywhere. Cancer caused from breathing the fumes of smelting fires. High in arsenic, he said. Could be that. He had seen so much putrefaction of the flesh, such sepsis of the blood, in the workers of Truitt’s foundries, men who died at thirty-five and left widows and children and he was unmoved. Prepare yourself, he said. Prepare and wait. He gave Truitt morphine for the pain.

“It’s cancer,” Catherine told Mrs. Larsen. “We have to make him comfortable. We have to wait. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I don’t believe him,” Mrs. Larsen said. “Something is happening. Something not natural.” Her kindness toward Catherine turned to suspicion and a maddened wretchedness. She could do nothing. Truitt couldn’t eat her food. He couldn’t sit at the table.

Truitt began to go to the churches, each in turn. He had a profound fear of other people, of being touched and looked at, but he went. Catherine went with him, sitting in plain dresses among the Calvinists, the Lutherans, the Swedenborgians, the Holy Rollers, and snake handlers. The ministers left off preaching about the fires of hell, looking at Truitt’s blistered face, and spoke softly about the redemptive power of love. The fires of hell had burned out, leaving only mercy. It was difficult, but Truitt sat straight, avoiding the staring eyes, and spoke gently to his neighbors and workers after the services. No one touched him. No one remarked that he looked less than well. The ride home, the jostling carriage in the rutted roads was an agony. Truitt was afraid, he was afraid that the horses would shy. They had done it before.