“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.
He would wake in the night and the room would be filled with dead people, all the dead people he had ever known. His mother and father, Emilia, sweet Franny. Larsen with his bloody wrist would be there. Standing beatific in the midst of them would be Antonio, his eyes white as marble, his face a blank. Truitt would call out their names, as if they could speak to him their terrible secrets.
He would hear the poet’s voice:
It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.
Catherine would wake. She would move around the room, her arms aloft like white wings, her nightdress billowing around her feet, until the dead were gone, leaving only the blue moonlight. Then she would quiet him, and he would sleep for a while.
Every night he would drink his water, while she turned her eyes away and wept. He felt an enormous sadness, a particular sensation of loss, but he never wept anymore, and he never spoke of it.
Some days he wouldn’t speak. He would wander restlessly from room to room, through the many rooms of the grand palazzo, picking up small objects, turning them this way and that in the light, trying to remember where they came from and what they were for. He would ask her the names of things. He would ask her where they had come from. She didn’t know. From Europe, she would say. From Italy. From Limoges.
She stopped. She started again. She wanted to walk into the woods and throw the arsenic away where no living thing would find it. But she didn’t throw it away. She kept it, in its blue bottle with a Chinese label.
She knew there was a point at which she could stop and the poison would fade. He would be left weak and haggard and scarred from the deep blisters in his skin. He would live, but he would die early. Still, he would not die now. He would not die at her hands, while her hands bathed his skin. He would not die in agony. There was a point at which he could live, and there was a point beyond which nothing could be done for him. She knew she was approaching that point, and her anguish grew every time he forgot a name or sat up suddenly in his chair and moved to another, every time she bathed him with warm water to alleviate his chills and his fear.
Mrs. Larsen had grown to hate her, knowing somehow that Catherine was the cause of whatever was killing Truitt, that she was killing him as Emilia had tried to kill him. But Truitt knew it was his youth, the dissipations of his youth that had brought him to this.
Luxe, calme et volupte, the poet had written, and Truitt had taken it to mean a life of endless indulgence, a life in which beauty and sensation were all that mattered, a life in which there were no consequences. When Emilia had betrayed him, when Franny had died, he had vowed that his days of indulgence were over. He had given up drinking. He had led a sober life. He had learned nothing. He loved Catherine with the sensuality of his youth, he longed for Antonio as he might have longed for a lover, and it was killing him. He had forgotten the poison, had forgotten that this was being done to him. He thought he had done it to himself, long ago, an illness he had contracted in his youth, the rancid sexual contagion of his childhood, knowing it was fatal and was now, after years of denial, finally showing its vengeful teeth.
He looked on his life, on the part of him that was living and that had once been whole, with awkward tenderness. He tilted his head toward it as one might toward a baby, afraid to hold it, to pick up such unblemished beauty. He had once moved and talked like other men, been comfortable in his clothes, held women in his arms. He had been a father. His child had been an idiot. He had been a husband. His wife had been a charmer and a beauty and had ruined his life. He couldn’t remember her face. He hadn’t seen Antonio since he was fourteen, twelve years ago. Where had they gone? What would his face look like now? His mind turned all day long like a plant toward the light, toward questions that had no answers.
He moved into the old house with Mrs. Larsen. He moved into the bedroom he had as a boy, the narrow iron bed, the overhanging eave, and the one gabled window to the stars. He was afraid of the ghosts in the big house. He thought he could escape them.