The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison Page B

for—” But before he can add “Christmas,” Bigelow takes the bloody handkerchief from his face.
    “We were just leaving,” he says.
    The projectionist snorts. “Oh, you were,” he says, and he clamps his hand on the singer’s elbow and pulls her out of the tent, one hand on the wheelbarrow, the other on the silent voice, who trips along by his side, still covering the bloodstain as if she were hiding a wound.
    “Wait!” Bigelow says, and the voice looks up. Her eyes meet his just long enough to offer hope.
    IN THE STATION HOUSE, having run the black pennant and white square up the flagpole, indicating fair weather with temperatures higher than the preceding day, Bigelow watches through his big windows as the pole lists eastward, almost imperceivably at first, then faster, maybe five degrees in as many seconds. It doesn’t hit the ground so much as recline there, his forecast spreading gently over the mud.
    Impossible to dig a hole deep enough to compensate for deep midsummer thaws. Maybe he can shore it up. Water squelches up around Bigelow’s boots as he walks outside. In a few days, each foot-shaped puddle will teem with mosquito larvae, tiny black fish-shaped things. The summer he arrived he collected some from a ditch, held the glass of swarming water to the light and peered through with a magnifier. Like commas or tadpoles or sperm. Except they don’t so much swim as fold and unfold themselves in a furious series of jerks, ricocheting from one side of the glass to the other. A sort of irritating, itchy locomotion.
    Bigelow stops scratching his bites to right the pole, first taking off the stained flags and lifting its top high enough to prop in the crotch of a spruce tree’s branch. The last time this happened he managed to buttress the base with lumber, hammering wood into a clumsy approximation of what keeps church spires pointed toward heaven, then filling in the loose hole with sand and rocks and tinder. But, obviously, that hadn’t worked. So now what?
    Bigelow rocks back on his heels, looking at the spruce trees around him. Wind blows through their needles, a conspiratorial whisper. Here’s a good idea—perfect!—he’s not going to reset the pole. Instead he’ll use a tree. He’ll find one that’s tall enough, climb up to the top, attach a pulley for the cord, climb down and cut off the limbs as he goes, then, presto: a flagpole that can’t fall over!
    Paregoric,
he thinks as he works, sitting astride a branch and sawing the one above it. The word seems to enter his head sideways, like most thoughts of the Aleut woman. What difference if he closes his eyes, averts his gaze, busies himself with his chores? She’s always there.
    Tea, tobacco, toffee. Paregoric.
    Why paregoric? Could it be that all along she was ill and he didn’t know, hadn’t cared to consider? So intent on sating the demands of his own body—his hunger, his lust—perhaps he hadn’t paid sufficient attention to hers.
    He shifts on the bough, and it creaks with his weight.
    Well, he had paid attention, but the parts he’d scrutinized— navel, neck, armpits, the crease over her eye, or the one between her buttocks—were those that provided him purchase. They were handholds, or they were mouthfuls. They were like the little notches that climbers search out, places to insinuate fingers, toes, whatever it might take to prevent a fall.
    But she’d seemed healthy enough. Strong. She could push him away with no trouble.
    An addict, then. Native people were inclined to intoxicants. And paregoric is an opiate, a smooth muscle relaxant that slows peristalsis, soothes abdominal cramps, diarrhea. Bigelow knows this from his father, who suffered intestinal problems brought on by nerves.
Paregoros,
his father taught him the word. From the Greek, to console.
    Was that what she had wanted? Straddling the branch, Bigelow rests his forehead against the tree’s trunk, leaves the saw motionless in the half-cut bough.
    He cannot think