Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Corvus padded down the sidewalk. It was smooth and wide, and profane suggestions in both Spanish and English were etched on each square, the words in cramped unhurried script, as though copied from some holy guide instead of being its own screaming, shit-streaked cabala. She reached the truck. Someone had sideswiped the door and she couldn’t open it, so she opened the passenger door and slid across the seat. She pulled out, shifting slowly, no thought arising, to Green Palms.

Nurse Daisy stood outside, smoking a cigarette and cooling her forehead with a moist baby wipe.

“ Catachresis is the word of the day,” she said to Corvus in greeting. “It was yesterday’s word as well and, most probably, tomorrow’s. It should be emblazoned on the pediments of this place. Catachrestic. Catachrestical. Catachrestically. The sound alone’s enough to have one running for the exits. There’s a rattle to it, a yeomanly phlegm. Its root means ‘against what is necessary.’ But try using it in a sentence. It won’t fit. Resists the long thought. Nurse Cormac ran off with the exterminator. Those exterminators can talk rings around most people, and she fell for him hard.”

She had drawn the cigarette right down to the filter and now placed it in a sand-filled urn among a good hundred others. “I sometimes think of freshening this up, raking the sand tidy with a fork, lightly sketching a pattern of wings in the Gnostic manner. I never will, of course, because I like it this way too. Not doing one thing is equal to not doing something else. Who said the following? ‘Love, and do what you will.’ ”

Corvus cleared her throat but didn’t speak. Corvus, barefoot, in her father’s shirt, her hair unwashed.

“We have a new neighbor in my neighborhood.” Nurse Daisy pulled out a fresh baby wipe from a packet and rubbed it over her temples. “It’s a pet drop-off bin. People can drop off unwanted dogs and cats in specially marked bins. It’s rather like a mail chute, which will accept animals up to fifty pounds. They drop down softly into a concrete chamber, which is checked and emptied once a day. They’re kept for four days at the shelter, where they’re offered the opportunity for another life in the form of a stranger coming in, though as you know there are never enough strangers. On the fifth day, bright and early, before the sun comes up, before the water dish has to be filled again, there’s sodium Pentothal, quick-quick-quick. It’s a humane alternative. There’s disease out there, worms, blindness, mange, valley fever. There’s neglect and random cruelty. There are designer poisons that take days to work their way through the system. How would you define,” Nurse Daily asked, “the word humane ?”

Two wraiths pottered out onto the balcony above them and dawdled, scratching their arms. Corvus could hear the rasp of their dry skin.

“I know how you got this far,” Nurse Daisy said. “You figured out what you ought not to do, and you determined to do it. Against all advice. Not against the odds, however. The odds were always good. But to serve is not to love, you know. You could be washing old feet from now till doomsday, and there’ll still be that hard dark little seed of doubt, that seed of awareness that isn’t love.”

The wraiths looked down on them with immense eyes. They scratched.

“I hope you don’t think you’ve been chosen,” Nurse Daisy said.

Corvus said nothing.

“I would rather speak five words with my understanding than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue, as the Good Book says. But you understand nothing, so you’ve decided to be dumb, and how long will this last, forever?” She looked out at Corvus from deep within her mismatched face. “Nurse Cormac was such a talker. My ears still ring from her prattle.” She touched her tiny ears, which looked as though they’d been grafted on in some long-ago emergency operation by an inappropriate donor. “Winging her way to Kansas, she is, with her exterminator. Back to the seemingly endless plains where he was partly raised, back to the rats in the silos who were missing their master, missing his particular etiquette with them.”

One of the wraiths was scratching his white arm with a card, an efficient scraping that sounded different from the other’s ragged nails. Then the card tore free and fell like a dart at Corvus’s feet. A Happy Birthday card with balloons on it, much thumbed and twisted. Inside, someone had written, “From all of us.” The wraith leaned over the balcony railing, gesturing wildly, and commenced to cry. The other wraith began blubbering as well. “Hey!” Nurse Daisy screamed. They both fell silent and stared at Corvus resentfully.

“They can’t see you, of course,” the nurse said. “Most everyone in this residence has the dark water in their eyes, glaucoma. They only pretend to see you. It’s much like life here, but it’s not life and that’s why you came back. Because you were going to leave us, weren’t you? You were that close to leaving, but then — let me guess — you saw some cruddy thing that had within it all the importunate treasure of being , some cruddy thing that turned radiant in the light of your regard. So you’ve come back to wait without waiting, as one waits for the dead. You’re not one of those signs-and-wonders girls; you’ll have nothing to teach, you’ll serve in silence, you’ll get the dark water yourself, you’ll labor undetected, they’ll bury you out of this place like some failed old postulant.”

The card beamed up at Corvus, its little back cracked. From all of us!

“That funny friend of yours,” Nurse Daisy continued, “does she know about your decision? What a funny friend. She would’ve dissuaded you if she were able, but she’s not able enough. Solitude is no refuge for the rebellious. She would never begin her search here. And if we’re not what we will become, what are we, then?”

Corvus stood motionless. The evening’s small moths dabbled around her.

“It’s better to be dumb,” the nurse said, “than to speak from a heart that’s all darkness and distraction. I’m agreeing with you. I suppose we should go in. Are you ready to enter our little charnel community, not as docent or guide but as a living member? Do you vow to keep your wits among the witless? Do you commit yourself to pondering ceaselessly the uselessness of caring, the uselessness of love, that great reality for which all else must be abandoned?” She stood and seemed to lunge toward Corvus, but it was just one of the heels on her sensible shoes skidding, no harm done.

“I’m not glad you came,” Nurse Daisy said. “If I were the wishing sort, I’d have wished otherwise, for your sake. But I haven’t wished for anything for years and years.”

CAUTION:

DOORS SWING OUTWARD

They passed the children’s drawings on the wall. Pigs, cows, and bears. Wolves and butterflies. Birds, lots of birds.

“Scant comfort, the gullibility of children,” Nurse Daisy remarked. “It’s completely cynical, this continuous peddling of the natural world. It’s not out there anymore! Even old-timers don’t find anything familiar in this empty symbolizing, this feckless copycatting.”

She looked at Corvus. “I’d wager that as a child you colored between the lines. And where has it gotten you?”

There was a newly empty room. In fact, an aide was still washing down the plastic sealing the mattress; some still bright flowers were tumbled in a cardboard carton along with rubber gloves and the menu for the week. “I want to go hommmmmme ,” Nurse Daisy mimicked softly. “Thirty-one months, every waking minute, not one bloody, blessed other phrase.”