Johanna Moran - The Wives of Henry Oades

IT WAS LOVELY HERE, green and tranquil. Meg was decked out in her wedding frock, an ivory lace and satin affair with complicated buttons that were hard to undo. She nattered quietly, asking after his tea. The light shifted, the temperature fell, just as she offered a fresh cup. Henry opened his good eye to find Cyril Bell standing over him. Bell sucked on his cigar and hacked a rough cough.

“Are you awake, mate? Are you in need of anything?” Bell’s cheek was bruised, his swollen lip split in two places. “Shall I call the lazy nurse?” He clamped the cigar between his crooked yellow teeth and tugged on Henry’s pillow. “It’s caught in the rail. There now. Much better, isn’t it?”

Henry sat up, groggy, dream-addled. “What brings you?”

“You asked for me,” said Bell, looking wounded. “I came when I heard.”

“I did, didn’t I? Sorry. Thank you.”

Bell smiled a sad smile. “Birds of a feather now, aren’t we?”

Bell wore black gloves and a mourning armband; he carried Meg’s mother’s ginger jar as one would a baby, in the crook of his arm. He offered it now. “Thought you might like a memento of happier times.”

Henry took the lidded jar, a grinding fear clenching his bowels.

“Not a crack, not a singe,” said Bell. “Queer what a fire will leave behind.”

“Is there news?”

Bell shook his head, soft cigar ash falling, breaking on the white sheet. “They’ve gone to a far better place, my friend.”

A vision of his children laid out in death swamped him. Henry’s pained cry roused the sleeping patient in the next bed. “They’ve been found?”

Bell put a finger to his lips. “Hush now, Oades. Calm yourself. No, they haven’t been found. But where the tree is felled that’s where the chippings are.”

“Jesus Lord,” said Henry. “What does that mean?”

“Do you recall the poor Hagstrom family?”

“No,” said Henry. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Six or seven years ago,” Bell went on. “There was a spate of snatchings around the same time. The Hagstrom children, eight little towheaded angels, were all the talk. The old grandfather looked for years. Then one fine day he put his rifle to his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe.” Bell bent close. Early as it was, he smelled of gin.

“I didn’t quit, Mr. Oades. The others gave up. Not I. I covered miles of ground in every direction.” He straightened, dropping his soggy cigar into the beaker of cold tea. “If they were let go alive I’d have found them.”

“It’s only been two weeks,” said Henry.

“It’s been nearly four, sir.”

“It cannot possibly be.” In his mind Henry attempted to line up the days and prove Bell wrong, but it was no use. Some days stood painfully sharp in his memory; others he couldn’t begin to account for. “I’ll pay you to go out again.”

“You’d be wasting your money,” said Bell. “You’ll want to make peace with it is my advice. The sooner you do the better off you’ll be.”

Henry begged. “Please, sir.” His good leg cramped. “They cannot all be gone. I refuse to believe it.”

Bell regarded him with flat pity. He was clearly finished. He’d dispatched his family to heaven and now no doubt wished only to dispatch himself to the nearest public house.

“I still hear my wife!” Henry often felt her beside him, the pressure of her warm hip against his. “She speaks to me day and night.”

“Mrs. Oades was your first?”

“She is,” said Henry.

Bell nodded. “She’ll do more than speak to you. Her face will show itself when you least expect it. You’ll swear it’s her down at the docks. She’ll come to you at all hours, shed of her nightie. That’s the worst. There’ll be times you’ll want to take a working gun to your own head and have it over with. That’s how it was with Libby, my first. Mim’s my second. Childbed fever took Libby. The baby didn’t stand a chance with the top of his wee head missing.” Bell’s cut lip pulsed; his red-rimmed eyes puddled. “I was given a look. A boy.”

John came to mind, fat and howling, a perfect lusty lad, missing nothing.

“I’m truly sorry for your loss, Mr. Bell.”

“I’m sorry for yours,” said Bell, blinking back tears. “You’ll learn to live with it after a while. It’s a promise, Oades. You’ll learn to tolerate. You’ll have no choice.”

The amputee two beds away moaned, as if grieving for the baby with a missing head. The entire ward seemed to join in at once, caterwauling off-key. Behind the cacophony Meg soothed, whispered. There now, sweetheart. Rest a bit. You’ll be all right.

Henry set the ginger jar on the medicine table and turned his cheek to the pillow. “I refuse to believe it.” Meg went on coddling, telling him to sleep, just sleep.

Henry closed his eye, waiting for his family. “Forgive me, Mr. Bell. I’m rather tired right now.”

Bell stood in silence a moment longer. “I’ll be going then,” he said finally. He left Henry with Josephine. She was reaching with the sweetest smile, putting her tender skinny arms about his burning neck. Dad, was all she said, all he needed to hear.

Meg and the children rarely showed themselves again after that day. His dreams became peopled with misshapen intruders, no one he recognized. Drunk on laudanum, Henry called out to his wife. The night nurse regularly scolded him. “That’ll be enough now. You’re disturbing the others.”

He was discharged from hospital on a sunny day in late May. He was ready to go. He’d had more than enough of the place. Mr. Freylock came for him, along with two grim-faced colleagues. They brought a change of clothes, were seemingly pleased with their selection. “You’re not an easy fellow to fit.” There were grunts, a comment on his drawers. “Good God. It must be the same pair he arrived in.” As if Henry weren’t present. It didn’t matter. He felt next to nothing.

They dressed him in a suit of mourning and fixed an armband to the sleeve. The doctor came in and wished him well. “My condolences, sir. You’re to remain off the leg another month at least.”

Outside, the doctor helped lift the wheelchair with Henry in it. They loaded him onto a buckboard that had had its seats removed. He sat above the other three men, like a freak of nature on parade. They said little. Henry said nothing.

He could not say how long they rode. A stream of foliage went by, shops and horses, dogs and people. He untied the armband and tucked it inside a breast pocket. If they were dead he’d know it; he’d know it in his bones.

They came to the Freylock home, where he and Meg had once gone to tea, fifty years ago it seemed. The wife and two children, a freckled boy and roly-poly girl, came out to greet them.

“You are welcome to stay as long as you wish,” said Mrs. Freylock, an anxious woman. “We’ve prepared a room downstairs for you, Mr. Oades. It’s rather small, but we cannot very well bring you up the stairs.”

His vision cleared as she spoke. He became simultaneously aware of the potted geraniums, the pump of his own heart and lungs, the pimples and fuzz on the Freylock lad’s chin. How he’d indulged himself in the sorrow. It was time to think straight, to plan. Henry doffed his hat, acutely sensitive to the cool breeze parting his hair. “Thank you. I shan’t put you out a moment longer than necessary, kind lady.”

The music room had been converted into a sickroom. Henry vaguely recalled the green and gold wallpaper border, painted to look like fringed drapery. The piano was gone now, replaced by a cot. There’d been other instruments on display at the time, two violins, and a lute perhaps. Meg had been delighted. “A musical family,” she’d said. “How lovely the evenings must be.” Those were her exact words. Henry remembered vividly everything she’d ever said.