Very Old Bones Read online

  “You know how to do that, do you?”

  “I’ve heard how it’s done. I have the recipes.”

  Two books lie on the table in Peter’s Conspiracy painting.

  The first is the Malleus Maleficarum. Its subtitle, not visible in the painting, is The Hammer of Witches Which Destroyeth Witches and Their Heresy as with a Two-edged Sword. The book is a fifteenth-century theological analysis of the anarchical political forces that for centuries sought the overthrow of civilization through witchcraft, plus abundant remedies for this evil; and it is a work that had motivated Crip Devlin since the days of his priestly intent, for its divinely inspired misogyny conformed to Crip’s own outlook, especially after his infection with the pox by his wife. And did she give it to him, the witch? Well, she did. Didn’t she die of it herself, and die before Crip? Was that proof or was it not?

  Malachi, when he listened to Crip’s wisdom, handed down from the sages of history, felt like a chosen man, one who would yet again do battle with the dark spirits, the lot of the true warrior in every age. Malachi accepted the role without complaint, for its rules and its goals were as familiar to him as the streets and the fields of Albany. He agreed with them, he understood them, and he knew from his wound that he had been singled out for this challenge. As the Malleus pointed out so clearly, devils existed only with God’s permission, and Malachi perceived that God had allowed these devilish things to happen to him, allowed his life to be taken away piece by piece, in the same way He had allowed Job and Jesus and the martyred saints to be warrior sufferers for His sake.

  Without ever having heard the phrase, and with small capacity for understanding it if he had, Malachi had become an ascetic idealist, as obsessed by his enemy as Peter would be by his art; and when you look at the eyes Peter gave the man, you know that both Malachi and Peter understood that the world was inimical to them and to their plans of order and harmony, that their lives existed at the edge of disaster, madness, and betrayal, and that a man of strength and honor would struggle with the dark armies until he triumphed or died on the battlefield.

  Malachi truly believed he would win this struggle with the black villain. He had done as the Malleus counseled, had said his Aves and his Our Fathers, had made the Stations of the Cross on his knees, had talked to the priest and confessed his sins (not his loss for that was an affliction, not a sin), and had gone to mass so often that the women of the parish thought he must be either very guilty, or dying. But, in truth, he was coming to understand that some sort of action that went beyond heavenly recourse was called for, action beyond what was known on earth—except by a chosen few whose courage was boundless and whose weapons were mighty.

  The second book on the table in the painting is a slim volume that is open to a sketch of a plant with leaves and berries that any herbalist would recognize as foxglove. Also in the painting Crip is holding a chicken by the neck with his left hand and from its anus is receiving droppings in his right palm, some of these already floating in a bowl of new milk on the table.

  Crip, before the moment shown in the painting, has enlightened Malachi on the things witches fear most, things that cure enchantment and banish the witch back to her own devilish world: foxglove and mugwort, white mullen and spearwort, verbena and elf grass, the four-leaf clover and the scarlet berries of the rowan oak, green and yellow flowers, cow parsnip and docken, a drawn sword, the gall of a crow, the tooth of a dead man, rusty nails and pins, the music of a Jew’s harp, a red string around the neck, the smoke of burned elder and ash wood, the smoke of a burned fish liver, spirting into your own shirt, pissing through a wedding ring, and fire.

  Crip mixed half a dozen potions for Malachi and he drank them; the two men burned ash wood and fish liver; they found foxglove and cow parsnip and made a paste of it and Malachi went off by himself and rubbed that on his groin. He thought of pissing through his mother’s wedding ring, but then he remembered he had nothing to piss with. More things were done, all of them failing to restore Malachi’s privities.

  Crip then moved to the next logical step: an inquiry into the behavior and the physical properties of the women around Malachi (his sister Kathryn, the Whore of Limerick, Lizzie), for it was well known that witches sometimes assumed the shape of living people, especially women. Even so, they could be found out, for they always had marks and traits that were not human. Crip knew of one witch who had an extra nipple on her stomach, and another with nipples on each buttock. A third witch always lived with two creatures sucking her, a red one at her left breast, a white one at the inward walls of her secrets.

  When Malachi heard these revelations he immediately undertook a thorough but surreptitious study of his wife, and for the first time he realized that she had shrunk in height by four inches, that the mark on her left thigh could well be an extra nipple. He remembered that she brought a succubus to their bed and encouraged him to copulate with it until he was bloody. Also, Crip swore to him that, on the night he watched Lizzie dancing on the Neighbors’ hill, her partner, the shadowy creature, had the webbed feet of a goose.

  And so Malachi made ready to launch his counterattack against the demon (and all its hellish consorts) that inhabited his wife’s body.

  As the time grows closer for it, I’m becoming obsessed by the fact that Giselle is coming here, and that my life is about to change yet again. She now tells me she’s pregnant, and that she didn’t plan it. It’s July, she’s two months gone, and I did it to her in May, she says, when she came up to take the final photo of Peter for the Life profile she did on him. She was here all weekend, we went at it in my room, what, two, three times? And bingo! She left then to travel for two months, and I didn’t hear from her until last night, when she said she’d be up today, with an enhanced womb, for the family meeting Peter had invited her to attend.

  She also told me that, after five years of it, she’s had enough and is leaving Life—as soon as she finishes her current project. She’ll have a baby, then free-lance, giving Life first look at whatever she photographs. She no longer wants to be at the beck and call of magazine editors, now says she’s willing to rejoin the nuptial bed, which she’d hinted at when last we bathed in the steam of our malfunctional wedlock.

  I’d often given her my spiel, that the quotidian life is the most important element of our existence, and although she didn’t accept that in the early days of our marriage, she now says I was right, that a career is indispensable, but it makes for a very sterile life if that’s all there is. She says she envies me the family ties, and that she’s come to understand she and I might be divorced now if it weren’t for Molly.

  Of course I don’t believe much of what Giselle says. Such conversions are for minds more simple than hers. It will be a major change having her with me all the time, but it is true that she’s grown closer to the family since the Life profile on Peter, and the book project that grew out of it. Walker Pettijohn suggested an art book on Peter, a book suitable for coffee tables, with Giselle doing the photos, me doing text blocks plus interviews with the artist (he thought the father-son link would enhance the book’s appeal, but I pointed out to him the awkward disparity in our names), and a critic yet to be chosen analyzing Peter’s work and putting it in historical perspective. Such is the man’s fame, now that he’s close to death (though not yet moribund), that this was one of four book offers prompted by the Life article. Peter has managed to jump through the flaming hoop of high art and come out the other side as a potential creature of the popular imagination.

  I was still at the dining-room table, cheating at cards for Billy’s amusement, when I heard Peter’s hoarse voice call me.

  “Orson, can you come up?”

  And so I excused myself and went up. Peter was in bed, just reawakened after a mid-morning nap. He’d had his matinee with Adelaide, then attacked his easel until fatigue pulled him back to his pillow. He looked tousled and very old for his seventy-one years, his gray-haired torso going to bone, his hair and mustache almost solid white,
and more scraggly than usual.

  When I entered his bedroom he was sitting on the side of the bed gripping the sturdy blackthorn walking stick Michael Phelan had bought in Ireland. His room, the same one he’d slept in all his life in this house, was full of books, newspapers, and three unfinished sketches, this being his pattern: to keep incomplete work at his bedside, study it before sleep, and wake perhaps to find a solution that would let him complete it. I thought he might now be ready for a second go at the work-in-progress, but he had another plan.

  “Anybody here yet?” he asked.

  “Just Billy and myself.”

  “So you nailed him.”

  “He’s here but he’s itchy to leave.”

  “Keep his curiosity aroused and he’ll stay.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Get him to help you move some paintings downstairs.”

  “He’s got a cast on his foot.”

  “How’d he get here? You carry him?”

  “He can walk.”

  “If he can walk he can climb stairs.”

  “Which paintings do you want?”

  “The Dance, The Conspiracy, and The Protector.”

  “Not the new one?”

  “No, I don’t want to shock them. Maybe later. Those’ll do for what I have to say.”

  “Done.”

  I called Billy and he hobbled upstairs immediately. I took him through the rooms, which he hadn’t seen since the day Sarah went crazy because Molly left her alone. Billy and Molly then had to repair all Sarah’s damage and chaos, and that was the first Billy had ever been above the ground floor. He’d told me more than once he never wanted anything to do with the house, or its people, after his father’s experience, the exception being Molly, who always gave him five dollars in birthday gold, as she gave others in the family. Like most people who knew her, Billy projected a ray of love toward Molly “Good old dame,” he called her. He liked to tease her about her hemorrhoids, a problem he also lived with.

  “Christ, what a wreck this joint is,” Billy said when he came upstairs.

  “It’s not a wreck. It’s an artist’s studio, all of it except my room and Molly’s. And he’s even moving things into her room, now that she’s not using it.”

  “Molly’s not livin’ here no more?”

  “Not for months. She’s up at Saratoga with the Shugrues, living in the rooms I used to live in. She couldn’t take care of Peter, couldn’t go up and down the stairs twenty times a day. She’s got all she can do to take care of herself these days, and so we swapped rooms. I came here, she went there. Alice Shugrue’s her best friend in the world, great company for her.”

  “I didn’t know Molly was sick. I don’t hear what goes on.”

  “She’s not sick, just weary. She’s in good enough shape that she’s cooking lunch for us. You like roast lamb?”

  “Are you kiddin’?”

  “Good.”

  “What’s this lunch business all about?”

  “About all the Phelans, and their ancestors.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Don’t be so quick, Billy. We need you, and I really mean that. We need what you know.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ you don’t know.”

  “You know about your father. You know when he came home in ’42, and what he did. I don’t know any of that. I was in the army already. You see what I’m saying?”

  “I see what you’re sayin’, but I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. What’s my father got to do with anything?”

  So I showed him all my photos of The Itinerant series, in which Francis played the central role. I told him how Francis showed up all of a sudden, then fought with Sarah, and how Peter tracked him down and asked him to come back, and that I saw this with my own eyes.

  “But he didn’t come back,” Billy said.

  “No. He kept walking. He didn’t come back to stay till the war. Do you know whether he ever came here in the war period?”

  “He wouldn’t put a foot on the stoop.”

  “Did he ever talk to Peter, or Molly, or Chick, or anybody?”

  “Maybe Pete went to see him at a Senators game when he was coachin’, but if he did my father never mentioned it.”

  “He saw you, and Peg, and Annie.”

  “That’s why he came home. He called my mother and found out I was goin’ in the army and he said he’d come home and be around if somethin’ needed fixin’. He took a room up near the ball park. He’d come down to the house once a week and sit with my mother, bring her a pint of vanilla ice cream, or pineapple sherbet, talk an hour, have a meal with us, then disappear for another week. But he’d come by in a minute if Ma called him. He shoveled snow, cut the grass for her, put up screens and storm windows, fixed a busted asbestos pipe on the furnace.”

  “He was a strange guy.”

  “He was an all-right guy,” Billy said with an edge to his voice.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

  “Everybody else in this joint did.”

  “I just told you that wasn’t true. Stick around, Billy. You’ll learn something about your relatives you didn’t know.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  But I knew I’d hooked him. I took him into Peter’s studio and found the paintings Peter wanted as props when he delivered his remarks to the assembled kin. Billy looked at the paintings the way he looked at everything else in the house: not interested. Then we carried them, one by one, down the hallway to the dining room.

  That Malachi was still influencing our lives like this supported my idea that we are never without the overcoats, however lice-ridden, of our ancestors. This luncheon was going to be an expressionistic occasion, offering graphic imaginings of where we came from, what we might expect of ourselves (and our children), and what we might do to our greatest loves, given our inherited propensities. I tried to imagine whether and, if so, why Malachi was predisposed to disaster, and all I could do was project myself backward into my own disturbed history, into the isolation where I had been able to triumph privately in social, financial, marital, and artistic realms, no failure possible in that utopia where all eccentricity is justified, where ineffectuality is not only acceptable, but desirable as a badge of defiance, where there is no need to engage the actual world because the private world is always sufficient to the day. Reality conquered by the ego: Malachi’s story precisely.

  I now like to think that I am coming out of this benighted condition, and in my own peculiar way am again an engaged citizen of the bright day, working within the race. I see evidence of this in my ability to function in the publishing world without either the hem-kissing subservience of the acolyte, or the wound-licking reverie of the early failure.

  I feel pride in my restrained reaction to Giselle’s pregnancy, never once voicing those Strindbergian doubts that had dropped into my mind like henbane: never inquiring whether it truly was I who seeded her furrow; never offering the suggestion that it was perhaps an anonymous creativist at Life, or possibly Quinn the traveler who had left his enduring mark on her during one of his New York visits. Did I suggest, as the young Strindberg ruffian, Nojd, put it, that “it wouldn’t be much fun slaving all your life for another chap’s brat”? No, I did not. If it was Quinn who’d done the deed, then at least the Phelan ontogeny was now at work in Giselle’s inner sanctum, and I might become father to my first cousin twice removed. But I am no more likely to have certitude on any of this than Nojd, or Peter Phelan.

  Molly pulled the doorbell and stood on top of the stoop with her arms full of groceries. She turned to the curb, where Alice Shugrue waited behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, idling until Molly had gained proper access to the homestead; and then I opened the door and took a bag from Molly (“Be careful, there’s breakables,” she said). I hugged her and bussed her cheek, then waved to Alice.

  “Come in and see us when you come back for her,” I said, “and we’ll catch up on all your news.” Alice smiled and wa
ved me down, saying, “You’re not to be trusted with my news, now that you’re writing a book,” and off she went.

  Molly stepped into the hallway and tapped the bag of groceries I was holding. “You’re not to be trusted with breakables either,” she said. “I’ve seen you with dishes in the hotel kitchen.”

  “There are things I never dropped,” I said, “so get your dirty tongue off me.”

  Molly, kittenish, kissed my cheek with her arms full as we moved toward the kitchen. “I miss this house,” she said.

  “Well, come back to it, then,” I said.

  “Easy to say.”

  “Easy to do. There’s change afoot in the world.”

  “Afoot me foot,” said Molly. “All that’ll change this place is an earthquake.”

  “Exactly what we’ve got planned for lunch,” I said.

  “It’s a scheme, I knew it. What’s he up to?”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s time to tell you.”

  I thought Molly looked well, though a bit more frail than when I’d last seen her. Her north-country exile seemed to be sapping her energy, but she was wearing one of her dressy summer dresses, the pink one, so I sensed she was trying to rekindle her old self for the occasion. We put the groceries on the kitchen table and I then took her by the elbow and moved her toward the dining room and Billy. Her gaze went instantly to Banishing the Demons on the wall, then to The Conspiracy, which I’d leaned against the back staircase. She had seen, and fully understood, the content of both paintings, but made no comment on their presence. She turned and looked at Billy in his plaster cast.

  “It’s a long time since I’ve seen your handsome mug, Billy boy,” she said. “I heard you might be here today.”