“Have you come to dance for me, Husband?” I said.
He shook his head. His eyes had a glow to them. He looked smaller than he had in life. There were no ears or eyes on his arms. He wore no crimson cape. After a time he cleared his dead throat and said he would tell his side of the tale of the dealings between him and Bennett Marsden and made the following speech:
“We went in halves to build a grand theater, Bennett Marsden and I, but I borrowed my half from him and he borrowed his half from me. We thought there was considerable good jest in this and sat down to our fresh partnership with the laugh of it still on our lips. We had our drink in the good old Louisville Belle, then walked down the street to what he thought we ought to call the Flourish and what I thought we ought to call the World. We stood outside it when it was close to finished, him calling it his name and I calling it mine. There was work aplenty to do before we had to put a name up over the doors, time and more for me to make sure the name to it was mine.
“Well, Wife, we did that work with each of us in his shirtsleeves and sweating the same sweat. We’d each put in two of our creatures to the job, and even though mine were bigger and better in all ways, I couldn’t fault his that they took after him, nor credit mine for taking after me. At the end of the sweeping and the dusting and the breaking down and the building up each day we would drink at the Belle or send out for a bottle. Then, with drink in our bellies, we would throw lines into the evening airs: ‘Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.’ Or: ‘Sure, her offence must be of such unnatural degree that monsters it.’ Or: ‘You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames!’ Or: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes.’ After which, I would to my house and he to his to sup our own suppers and dream the separate parts of our dream.
“In those days,” Linus Lancaster my dead husband said to me, “Louisville was still something worth the shooting, and a man of caliber could make himself a man of property if he had a way with the world and his hands around the throat of a salable notion, and that was me. That was me! I could sing like one of God’s own angels, could strut the stage and turn a line, and there wasn’t a man in Kentucky could charm a creature like I could. Once, when I was just down to Louisville and getting started, I had had to take Bennett Marsden by the scrawny arm and throw him out the door because he had come between me and some of the flora arrived to us by boat from Baton Rouge. This was at auction, and when I saw her I had to have her, and I had had her and now she was in my home. Bennett Marsden had thought to have her, but it was I who had offered up the best pile of coin. Some several years had scrawled on past since that affair, and the business had been forgotten. Bennett Marsden had found himself one or two fine ones I wouldn’t have argued against tasting, but the fever took them. It never touched mine.
“‘The World,’ I would tell my lady creature of an evening. ‘The World, yes, that’s a dandy name for a theater,’ she would say. One night, when the theater was finished, we said this back and forth as I had at my own bottle then at her, and I went out with my paintbrush in the moonlight and the next morning all the city walked by my sign. When Bennett Marsden came he said nothing, but clapped me on the shoulder and acknowledged that my paintwork was fine.
“We draped the World in gold and purple and spread out word that we would have us a performance after a fortnight,” my dead husband, Linus Lancaster, went on. “We beat the bushes and banged the drum and sold every bench place in the house. We were to play a shortened version of Lear and I was to be Lear and Bennett Marsden my good Gloucester. There were some boys for the other parts and two fine fat ladies Bennett Marsden had found for us to play the three daughters. We rehearsed each night then drank, and after we had drunk I would sit one or both those fine fat ladies across my knees. Bennett Marsden would chuckle when I did this then fill my glass full. They told me there was enough of me for both of them, and as you well know, Wife, this was true. Sometimes when I had them on my knees I would sing. All I had to do was open my mouth and they would all shut theirs. This was also true. Everything I say is true. Many was the time after the rehearsals and this knee-bending with the ladies that Bennett Marsden had his boys or mine carry me home. At home I knee-bended with my own fair creature maiden then slept as something come to the end of its good long labors. Normal times I slept a deep and happy blank, but one night I had the purest vision of a field filled with pigs and me the happiest man alive in the middle of it. You know of that dream.
“We opened to a house as full as the World could hold. One of the boys played a flute and the other a drum. Come time for it and they put their hands together and you couldn’t have heard a word. I stepped out onto the stage for a speech with Gloucester and I took in my breath and let it roar. I said my speech and pulled my wig hair and wept a tear, but when I had finished the house wasn’t weeping. I said ‘fog, fen, and bash’ with every ounce I had but none stirred. Nor did Gloucester stir, so I said some of my speech again. Him as Gloucester came over to me and whispered up at my ear: ‘We’re playing Coriolanus, act four.’
“‘We’re playing shortened Lear,’ I said. ‘Enough with your jokes now.’
“‘I am King Lear,’ I said aloud. I stepped around the stage. I gave the fresh planks some whacks with my foot. I said some of my lines from farther along.
“‘Come, leave your tears; a brief farewelclass="underline" the beast with many heads butts me away…’ he said, in a stage whisper, plenty loud enough for the hall to hear.
“The room laughed with it. Some of them held up their programs. I had never seen these programs. They must have been passed out while I was at my preparations. Coriolanus at the World, they read.
“I stepped to the side and as I did, the boy who had been beating the drum and the two fine fat ladies Bennett Marsden had found for us stepped onstage, and after he had made a speech to the crowd about lightness and levity and my good nature to launch off the World’s first show with such a flourish, he started in on Coriolanus and the others played it right along with him. I had on my Lear wig and my Lear crown and all my Lear lines in my head. I saw straightaway the trick he had played me, understood the payment he had given me for my World. I left out the back door. Walked the alleys home. On the way I passed a creature hauling its master in a little wagon. The master was awake and singing a courting song, the creature had a purple hat on its head.
“That night I dreamed my own creatures hauled me out of Louisville with bits in their mouths. That I sat in the driver’s seat and they stood in for the horses. That I whipped them till the froth flew, till they howled against the metal, till we all fell over dead.”
“You sure fell,” I said when he had at last stopped. “Right over onto your face in the kitchen light.”
He nodded.
“Anyways, I already heard all about the way of the World and liked the first telling better; it came with a dance,” I said.
He gave out a smaller smile this time and adjusted the pig sticker in his neck and nodded again.
“You can see why we broke off our association, me and Bennett Marsden.”
“You mean I can see why you broke it off. Why maybe you left him holding the bills. Left him to carry all the load.”