T. Boyle - Water Music

He flings the boots, paws at the buttons, jerks at his jubbah . Moist and mountainous, she waits for him, eyes aglow, veil lowered, her flesh smoldering like Vesuvius. He wheezes with haste and anticipation. It’s a dream, an attack of fever: no mere mortal could approach this magnificence! He scrambles atop her, feeling for toeholds — so much terrain to explore — mountains, valleys and rifts, new continents, ancient rivers.

♦ GLEGGED♦

She’s a fortress under siege, is what she is. Ramparts manned, oil hot to scathe, gates shut tight as a drum. Since the day he surprised her in the tub she hasn’t had a moment’s respite. It’s been Gleg to the right of her. Gleg to the left. Gleg at the window. Gleg at the door. Gleg in the closet when she reaches for her wrap, Gleg in the garden when she goes out for a stroll. He’s inescapable, inexorable. In the morning he brings her flowers — great bundles of dead men’s fingers and pepperwort, then waits on the stairs while she dresses. At breakfast she finds love lyrics tucked between her oatcakes or folded into her napkin:

How should I love my best?

What though my love unto that height be grown,

That taking joy in you alone

I utterly this world detest,

Should I not love it yet as th’ only place

Where Beauty hath his perfect grace.

And is possest?

She can’t crack an egg without hearing about the “Blushing Mom” of her cheeks or the “Foaming Billows” of her breasts. Lovelorn sighs punctuate each sip of tea, while the scraping of her toast is, he protests, like the rasp of a file along the ridges of his heart. As the chairs shriek back and Zander and her father shuffle out of the room, Gleg leans toward her and whispers: “Had we but World enough, and Time, / This coyness Lady were no crime.” And then adds with a wink, “But we haven’t. And it is.”

Gleg, Gleg, she’s been Glegged to the gills. He is ubiquitous, unshakable, a flea under the collar, a fly in the ointment. In the evening he sits beneath her window, alternately dribbling into a recorder and howling at the treetops like a cat in heat. During the intervals between “airs” he composes poetry and tosses pebbles at the windowpane. One morning she stepped out of her room to find him mooning over the chamberpot she’d left in the hall. Another time she caught him stuffing his pockets with bits of fat and gristle in the hope of ingratiating himself with Douce Davie, her border terrier. She was adamantine. The dog was a pushover.

For today, though, she can let down the drawbridge and air out the battlements — she’s free of him till supper. Just after breakfast he and Zander went off with her father to roam the countryside draining pustules, letting blood and applying leeches to lumps and goiters and yellowing contusions. She watched them amble up the lane on their horses. Zander rhythmic and graceful, Gleg as ungainly as a mantis astride a beetle. At the top of the lane he turned to wave his handkerchief at her. The simp. She wanted to thumb her teeth at him, but he was so relentlessly absurd she actually found herself grinning. Which encouraged him all the more. The handkerchief flapped like a jib in a crosswind. He was a beaming boy, she was a blushing beauty. No doubt about it, there’d be poetry at supper tonight — “My heart’s a red running ulcer, / Putrefact, till your love’s sweet lance / Should cauterize and console her”—but it’s a small price to pay to be rid of him for a whole afternoon.

The first thing she does is throw open the window. Outside the grass has gone from yellow to green, feathers flash in the trees, and the rich raw odor of sodden earth hangs in the air. “Cheep-cheep,” call the mavises, chaffinches and whinchats, anathematizing one another from the rooftops and hedges. A breeze bellies the curtains and the sun throws rhomboids on the floor. Behind her the fish stir in their tank. She begins to feel restless.

She feeds her doves and dace, waters her plants. Starts a book, walks the dog, pulls out her sketchpad. Makes a tongue sandwich, bakes some scones. Sits at her spinet and tears through an up-tempo version of “Edom O’Gordon.” Stares at the clock. Finally she goes to her desk, unlocks the drawer, removes a letter and tucks it into her dress. Then slips out of the room like a thief. Into the vestibule, down the front steps, across the morass of the lane and into the wood beyond.

Ferns line the path like sentinels, clots of shadow gather beneath the bushes. The air is a transfusion. From the pond, the falsetto trill of the spring peepers calling for creeks-creeks-creeks. She’s seen them there, bug-eyed and blistered, trailing coils of mucus, crawling atop one another, foaming, seething, humping. Her feet pad over coupling earthworms, sprouting seeds, the hem of her dress tousles wild geranium and saxifrage, toadflax and meadow rue, gathering pollen, dispersing it. The letter is from Mungo. His last. She’s read it through a dozen times, and she’ll read it through again, on a bluff above the Yarrow, slugs and bugs and grubs mounting one another at her feet, larks twittering overhead, doing it on the wing, the whole world going at it in the slow persistent grind of beating blood and thirsting tissue.

Pisania, The Gambia.

14 July, 1795

My Life,

A touch of the fever, some worms, emaciation, hair loss — nothing to worry over. I am fit and fine so far as outward appearances go. But oh what an ache in my heart! Leeches, flies, food fit for dogs— I endure it all gladly for the fleetingest memory of you. You who sweeten my dreams here in this place of heat and rot, you who give me courage to forge on, you who give me a reason to survive where no other could. Ailie: I’ll sniff out the Niger and be back by spring. Will you wait for me?

When I’m at my lowest ebb, when it seems as if the rains will never let up and I’ll be stuck in this hole eternally, I think of you. And then my heart stirs and I think of da Gama rounding the Cape, Balboa gazing on the Pacific, and I know this is the life!

I remain your faithful and affectionate scaler of peaks, forder of rivers and plumber of the Unknown,

Mungo

P.S. Have met and engaged Johnson, a fine stalwart fellow, intelligent and articulate, a credit to the Negro race. It is his expectation that we shall encounter no real impediment so long as we avoid Ludamar, the Moorish kingdom.

The sun is a weight. She closes her eyes. Mungo is seventeen, hair like spilled barley, muscles hammered into his shoulders, her father’s apprentice. From the far end of the dinner table she grins at him. He lifts his head from the soup, grins back. They have a secret. She’s fourteen. Her chest is flat as a child’s. In the fields, she raises her blouse for him.

When she wakes it’s nearly dark. A rabbit crouches in a pocket of grass, ears pressed back, watching her. She sits up, folds the letter with all the reverence of a votary folding up the Shroud of Turin, and slips it back into her pocket. At home they’re waiting supper. Gleg bats his eyes at her through the kidney pie, fowl, collops and pease pottage, while her father dissertates on the approved method of removing a gangrenous limb. Afterward, the old man takes her aside. “You’re a grown woman of two and twenty,” he says, “and you maun be findin’ yourself a mate. Gleg’s as good as any, by my way of thinkin’, even if he be a bit of a shit-for-brains.”

“You know I’m waiting for Mungo,” she says.

The old man stares at the floor for a long moment, the lines in his face gradually marshaling themselves into the stern, pious and pitiless expression he puts on when breaking bad news to his patients. I’m afraid it’s a cancer. Brain fever. Vitriolic liver. His eyebrows knit until he begins to look like God’s uncle. “Much as I hate to say it,” he whispers, “I’m afraid you canna count overmuch on the lad’s returnin’.”