Drums, heard at first, and then seen. Cavalry with their swords drawn escort the green carriage. Sanson, in his burgundy tunic, stands out like a thumb, sweat-stained despite the January rain.
Louis XVI — that is, Citizen Capet — executed.
I showed Sanson my letter to you, my explanation recorded here as far as this. We sat, blankets over our shoulders, in his garden. His wife was gone by then, unable to withstand the trial and execution of the Queen. Sanson finished reading and sniffed. “What of it?” he said.
“What do you think?”
“I think—” He handed me the letter. “You go into such detail over the fortepiano and the guillotine, only you leave out more recent years — you don’t mention who continued to shore the guillotine’s platforms and complete repairs, or who drove the condemned in the tumbril and cleared the corpses. Who helped lift the heads of the King and Queen.”
“There is that,” I admitted.
“Here’s a question, then,” he said. “Why should the hand feel shame for what the head commanded? I’ve never heard of one breakthrough so lamented, and another so riddled with covet.”
“There’s that, too.”
I threw the letter to the fire and took up my quill yet again.
One more chance, please: Cécile, I hope you will hear what I’m saying. Let me try again: do you remember, Cécile, the Aerostat Réveillon? You in yellow, Marie the Queen in blue. The King in cream and ostrich feather. The white and black marble wet with rain. The uneven cobbles where Taskin and I set that first fortepiano. Grey, mottled cloud behind the balloon — the taffeta the colour of an idealized sky. The bleat of the sheep Montauciel, the iridescent tail of the rooster and his red pompadour comb, how the duck bobbed his head. All faces followed them when the rope frayed, the balloon flew loose, and the Montgolfier brothers chased its shadow over the grounds. Taskin and I carried our instrument through Versailles into the opera house and you, Cécile, sat and played. You ran your hand over the fortepiano — white fingers against the ebony, porcelain on the gold — and spoke: “A lily, Tobias.”
Cécile, our Lord and Saviour was a carpenter.
ARGENTAVIS MAGNIFICENS
Morgan and I first met Howie at a dig. Or, I suppose, Howie met us — we didn’t realize it was him at the time. Our roped excavation site sat two-thirds the way up a slope of the Milk River canyon, and the river, light brown with silt, sauntered below. Morgan and I had been at the site a number of days, and had the majority of the bones of a small false-saber Dinictis felina jacketed in parts and stored at the base of the canyon under the shade of a tarp-canopy, next to our tent and equipment — extra trowels, picks, and such. The last few pieces of the false-saber (head, front legs that bent back on themselves) were still in the dirt, balanced on pedestals of grey-brown consolidated ash and sediment. Morgan lay on his back in the sand beside the pedestals, chipping away at their undersides and holding plastered strips of burlap to the small cat’s skull. I stirred a pail of water and plaster so it wouldn’t set in the heat. Neither of us could see much above the striped lip of the canyon, but we noticed the trail of dust against the blue sky, and the intrusion of country radio and diesel rising from a one-ton. Then the slam of the truck door, a man backlit by the afternoon sun, and a minor rock slide where a black spaniel skidded down the cliff toward us.
“Must be lost,” I said. The site was way off the highway at the Alberta−Montana border, surrounded only by the hoodoos that dotted the badlands.
Feet planted on the canyon’s crest, the silhouette set his hands to his hips while the dog rattled stones ahead of itself, looking like it would run us over. Morgan sat up the best he could with one hand cementing the strip of burlap on the skull.
I left the stick in the plaster bucket and yelled, “Heel the dog, jackass.”
The man’s shape lifted a straw Galveston. I thought he’d yell back, but he whistled sharply and the dog stopped.
Morgan squinted, half-sitting in the ditch. “Who brings a dog to a dig?”
“An asshole.”
“Some people, I tell you.”
A second whistle and the spaniel backtracked — struggled its way up the loose side of the canyon and sat next to the man. The two of them, man and dog, watched us for a full hour. During that time Morgan and I sank plaster strips into the pail, removed excess paste between two squeezed fingers, and held each bandage while it dried around the fossilized cat. When the sun lowered we rinsed plaster and sand from our hands and faces, prepped dinner at a camp stove, and yelled again — this time about the man’s radio. I wonder what he thought of us. Me, a tired, sweaty woman in a bandana shouting profanities from the base of the canyon. Morgan short and stocky, long dusty hair, and a face that he joked was a throwback to the Neanderthal. I don’t know, maybe we were more amusing than I give us credit for. Still, Howie never descended the canyon to our level, or called to tell us who he was or what he wanted. After that hour of boring voyeurism he whistled the dog into the cab of the truck and drove elsewhere.
The second time we ran into Howie was weeks later at our university, when the Department of Geoscience where Morgan and I lectured hosted a memorial gala for a deceased donor. We were obligated to attend, but networking and small talk — that wasn’t for me. I planned to catch the eye of the geoscience chair, down a free drink, and then sneak back to the lab where the false-saber sat on the table. (I had the hard plaster and burlap waiting under a wet cloth, and as soon as it softened would cut the jacket open with a utility knife and roll it back in sections.) Morgan intended to wave a picture of an in situ teratorn in front of the donors and see if he couldn’t change the department’s mind about sending us to the Andes. (The specimen, in the Bolivian altiplano, was our latest pipe-dream — the university had already told us no.)
We arrived late. Morgan and I edged around the auditorium to the bar at the side. While speeches droned on, I scanned the crowd. The department had paid a fortune — spared no cost in attracting wealth — and carted in temporary displays from the museum. Several ostrich-like ornithomimid fossils the university was famous for sat against a wall of windows overlooking the courtyard, and a replica of an Apatosaurus femur — a six-foot thigh bone from one of the largest-known sauropods — had a line of donors waiting for a photo op. Tablecloths, wine, gowns. Most people had pushed their seats back (dinner was long over) and were watching the stage, or chit-chatting amongst themselves. I spotted the geoscience chair talking to a group of black-clad mourners who crowded the exit. The mourners breathed together, and synchronously raised their cigarettes to their lips under the green light of the hall’s exit sign — grief, I supposed, kept their motions in unison. I finished my drink and plotted a path through the tables, and then I saw a black spaniel curled at the feet of one of the attendees, a straw Galveston hung daintily on the corner of the chair back, and the man in the chair who, logic said, must own both the hat and the dog. The man was Howie Bring. Bring Petroleum, Bring Oil, Bring everything — he was the only donor with enough wealth to walk a dog into a reception. Even seated Howie was tall and lean, although I’d put him in his late sixties. He saw me and lifted his hand, gesturing Morgan and I toward his table.
“Constance,” I introduced myself.