“But she treated me.”
Geraldine raised her eyes to mine, then looked away. I had seen disappointment.
“They always need an exception,” she said.
Geraldine then told me of several cases, over the years, where the doctor had turned people down—even in a crisis—and how she had let it be known, generally, that she would not treat our people. They all knew why. It was more than your garden-variety bigotry. There was history involved, said Geraldine. I understood, then, that I’d known everything and nothing about the doctor. Only later did I realize: if I had been the same age as C., it would not have mattered. Even though she’d cured my head bumps, become my lover, I’d always be her one exception. Or worse, her absolution. Every time I touched her, she was forgiven. I thought the whole thing out—as Geraldine says, I took in the history. I had to swallow it before I accepted why Cordelia loved me and why she could not abide that she loved me. Why she would not be seen with me. Why tearing down my house was her only option. Why to this day she lives alone.
Doctor Cordelia Lochren
Disaster Stamps of Pluto
THE DEAD OF Pluto now outnumber the living, and the cemetery stretches up the low hill I can see from my kitchen, in a jagged display of white stone. There is no bar, no theater, no hardware store, no car repair, just a gas pump. Even the priest comes only once a week to the church. The grass is barely mowed in time for his visit, and of course there are no flowers planted, so by summer the weeds are thick in the old beds. But when the priest does come, there is at least one more person for the town caf to feed.
That there is a town caf is something of a surprise, and it is no run-down questionable edifice. When the bank pulled out, the family whose drive-in was destroyed by heavy winds bought the building with their insurance money and named it the 4-B’s. The granite faade, arched windows, and twenty-foot ceilings make our caf seem solid and even luxurious. There is a blackboard for specials and a cigar box by the cash register for the extra change people might donate to the hospital care and surgeries of a local boy whose hand was amputated in a farming accident. I spend a good part of my day, as do most of the people left here, in a booth at the caf. For now that there is no point in keeping up our municipal buildings, the caf serves as office space for town council and hobby club members, meeting place for church society and card-playing groups. It is an informal staging area for shopping trips to the nearest mall—sixty-eight miles south—and a place for the few young mothers in town to meet and talk, pushing their car-seat convertible strollers back and forth with one foot while hooting and swearing as intensely as their husbands, down at the other end of the row of booths. Those left childless or, like me, spouseless, due to war or distance or attrition, eat here. Also divorced or single persons who, for one reason or another, ended up with a house in Pluto, North Dakota, as their only major possession.
We are still here because to sell our houses for a fraction of their original value would leave us renters for life in the world outside. Yet however tenaciously we cling to yards and living rooms and garages, the grip of one or two of us is broken every year. We are growing less. Our town is dying. I am in charge of more than I bargained for when, in the year of my retirement, I was elected president of Pluto’s historical society.
At the time, it looked as though we might survive, if not flourish, well into the next millennium. But then our fertilizer plant went bust and the farm-implement dealership moved to the other side of the reservation. We were left with agriculture, but cheap transport via the interstate had pretty much knocked us out of the game already. Our highway had never been improved, so we began to steadily diminish, and as we did, I became the repository of many untold stories such as people will finally tell when they know there is no use in keeping secrets, or when they see that all that’s left of a place will one day reside in documents, and they want those to reflect the truth.
My friend Neve Harp is one of the last of the original founding families. She is the granddaughter of the speculator Frank Harp, who came after the first town-site party failed in its survey. Frank arrived with members of the Dakota and Great Northern Town Site Company, who were establishing a chain of towns along the Great Northern tracks. They hoped to profit. These town sites were meticulously drawn up into maps for risk takers who would purchase lots for their businesses or homes. Farmers to every direction would buy their supplies in town and patronize the entertainment spots when they came to ship their harvests via rail.
Now, of course, the trains are gone and we are still here, stranded.
The platting crew moved by wagon and camped where they all agreed some natural feature of the landscape or general distance from other towns made a new town desirable. When the men reached the site of what is now our town, they’d already been platting and mapping for several years and had used up in naming their sites presidents and foreign capitals, important minerals, great statesmen, North American mammals, and the names of their own children. To the east lay the neatly marked out town sites of Zeus, Neptune, Apollo, and Athena. They rejected Venus as conducive, perhaps, to future debauchery. Frank Harp suggested Pluto and it was accepted before anyone realized they’d named a town for the god of the underworld. It was always called Pluto, but the official naming of the town did not occur until the boom year of 1906, twenty-four years before Pluto was discovered. It is not without irony, now, that Pluto is the coldest, loneliest, and perhaps the least hospitable body in our solar system, but that was never intended to reflect upon our little municipality.
Dramas of great note have occurred in Pluto. In 1911, five members of a family—parents, a teenage girl, and an eight-and a four-year-old boy—were murdered. In the heat of things, a group of men ran down a party of Indians and what occurred was a shameful piece of what was called at the time “rough justice.” The town avoids all mention. My thoughts veer off, too. As it turned out, it was soon found that a neighbor boy apparently deranged with love over the daughter had vanished, and so for many years he remained the only suspect. Of that family, but one survived—a seven-month-old baby who slept through the violence in a crib pushed unobtrusively behind a bed.
In 1928, the owner of the National Bank of Pluto fled the country with most of the town’s money. He tried to travel to Brazil. His brother followed, persuaded him to return, and most of the money was restored. By visiting each customer personally, the brother persuaded everyone that their accounts were now safe and the bank survived. The owner killed himself. The brother took over as president. At the very apex of the town cemetery hill, there is a war memorial. In 1949, seventeen names were carved into a chunk of granite that was dedicated to the heroes of both world wars. One of the names, Tobek Hess, is that of the boy believed to have murdered the family. He went to Canada and enlisted early in the First World War. Notice of his death reached his older sister, Electa, who was married to a town council member and had not wanted to move away like the mother and father of the suspect did. Electa insisted that his name be added to the list of the honorable dead. But unknown community members chipped it out of the stone so that now a roughed spot is all that marks his name, and each Veterans Day only sixteen flags are set into the ground around that rock.
There were droughts and freak accidents and other crimes of passion, and there were good things that happened, too. The seven-month-old baby who survived the murders was adopted by the same Oric and Electa Hoag, who raised the baby in pampered love and, once she grew up, at great expense sent her away to an Eastern college, never expecting that she would return. When she did in nine years, she was a doctor. The first female doctor in the region. She set up her practice and restored the house she had inherited, where the murders had taken place—a small, charming, clapboard farmhouse that borders the cemetery on the western edge of town. Six hundred and eighty acres of farmland stretch from the house and barn. With the lease money from those acres, she was able to maintain a clinic and a nurse, and to keep her practice going, even when her pati
ents could not always pay for her services.
One thing shamed her, only, one specific paralysis. She was known to turn Indians away as patients; it was thought that she was a bigoted person. In truth, she experienced an unsteady weakness in their presence. It seemed beyond her control, as was the other thing. She loved someone far too young for herself, inappropriate in that other way, too, but in his presence her feelings gripped her with the force of unquestionable fate. Or a mad lapse, she now believes.
At the same time those feelings were often the only part of her life that made sense. To try and break that bond, she married, but was widowed. She formed a final relationship with a university swimming coach whose job did not permit him to leave the campus for long. They had always intended that he would move to Pluto once he retired. But instead, he married a student and moved to Southern California, so he could have a year-round pool.
THE BROTHER OF the suicide banker was Murdo Harp. He was the son of the town’s surveyor and the father of my friend. Neve is now in her seventies like me; she and I take daily walks to keep our joints oiled. Neve Harp was married three times and kidnapped once—she survived all four events. She has returned to her maiden name and the house she inherited from her father. She is a tall woman, somewhat stooped for lack of calcium in her diet, although on my advice she now ingests plenty. She is one of those interested in restoring authenticity to town history. Both Neve and I have always had the habit of activity, and every day, no matter what the weather (up to blizzard conditions) our two-or three-mile walk takes us around the perimeter of Pluto.
“We orbit like an ancient couple of moons,” she said to me one day.
“If there were people in Pluto, they could set their clocks by us,” I answered, “or worship us.”
We laughed to think of ourselves as moon goddesses.
Most of the yards and lots were empty. There hasn’t been money in the town coffers for street repairs and the majority have been unimproved or left to gravel. Only the main street is paved with asphalt now, but the rough surfaces are fine with us. They give more purchase. We don’t want to slip. Breaking a hip is our gravest dread. Once you are immobile at our age, that is the end.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you why Murdo’s brother, Octave, you know, tried to run away to Brazil,” she told me one day, as though the scandal had just occurred. “I want you to write the whole thing up for the town historical newsletter. I would like the truth to become part of our official record now!”
I asked Neve to wait until we finished our walk and sat down at the caf, so that I could take notes, but she was too excited by the story beating its wings inside of her, alive and insistent that morning for some reason, and she had to talk as we made our way along.
“As you remember,” said Neve, “Octave drowned himself when the river was at its lowest, in only two feet of water. He basically had to throw himself upon a puddle and breathe it in. It was thought that only a woman could have caused a man to inflict such a gruesome death upon himself, but it was not love. He did not die for love.” Neve paused and walked meditatively for about a hundred yards. Then she began again. “Do you remember stamp collections? How important those were? The rage?”
I said that I did remember. People still collect stamps, I told her.
“Yes, yes, they dabble like my brother Edward,” she said. “But for Octave the stamps were everything. He kept his stamp collection in the bank’s main vault. One of this town’s best kept secrets is exactly how much money that collection was worth. Even I was not aware of it until very recently. When, as you know, our bank was robbed in ’thirty-two, the robbers forced their way into the vault. They grabbed what cash there was and completely ignored the fifty-nine albums and twenty-two specially constructed felt boxes framed in ebony. That stamp collection was worth many times what the robbers got. It was worth almost as much money as was in the entire bank, in fact.”
“What happened to it?” I was very much intrigued, as I’d heard only confusing rumors.
Neve gave me a sly, sideways look.
“My brother took bits and pieces of that collection, but he had no idea what was really there. I kept most of the stamps when the bank changed hands. I like looking at them, you see. They’re better than television. The collection is in my front room. Stacked on a table. You’ve seen the albums but you’ve never commented. You’ve never looked inside of them. If you had, you would have been enchanted, like me, with the delicacy, the detail, and the endless variety, at first. Later you would have wanted to know more about the stamps themselves and the need to know and understand their histories would have taken hold of you, as it did my uncle, my brother, and as it recently has me, though thankfully to a much lesser degree. Of course, you have your own interests.”
“Yes,” I said, “thank God for those.”
As we passed by the church, we saw the priest was there on his visit. The poor man waved at us when we called out a greeting to him. No one had remembered, so he was cutting the grass. He looked sad and overworked.
“They treat the good ones like simple beasts,” said Neve. Then she shrugged and we pressed on. “In reading my uncle’s old letters, going through his files, I’ve made a discovery. His specialty, for all stamp collectors begin at some point to lean in a certain direction, was what you might call the dark side of stamp collecting.”
I looked at Neve, thinking that I’d seen dark tendencies in her myself, but still surprised about the stamps.
“After he had acquired the Holy Grails of Philately—British Guiana’s one-cent magenta, Sweden’s 1855 three-cent issue which is orange instead of blue-green, as well as many stamps of the Thurn and Taxis postal system and superb specimens of the highly prized Mul-ready cover—my uncle’s melancholia drew him specifically to what are called errors. I think Sweden’s three-cent began it all.”
“Of course,” I said, “even I know of the upside-down airplane stamp.”
“The twenty-four-cent carmine rose and blue Invert. Yes!” She seemed delighted. “I’ve been reading through his notes and combing through the collection for that one. He says that he began to collect errors in color, like the Swedish stamp, very tricky, then overprints, imperforate errors, value missings, omitted vignettes, and freaks. He speaks of one entire album page devoted to a seventeen-year-old boy, Frank Baptist, who ran stamps off an old handpress for the Confederate government. I’ve yet to determine which it was, but am sure I’ll find it.”
Neve charged across a gravelly patch of road, much elated to share the story, and I hastened to stay within earshot. Stopping to catch her breath, she leaned on a tree and told me that about six years before he absconded with the bank’s money, Octave Harp had gone into disasters—that is, stamps and covers (envelopes or similar materials) that had survived the dreadful occurrences that test and destroy us. These pieces of mail, marked by experience, took their value from the gravity of their condition. They were water stained, tattered, even bloodied, said Neve. Such damage was part of their allure.
By then, we had come to the former bank/caf, and I was glad to sit down where I could take a few notes on Neve’s revelations. I borrowed some sheets of paper and a pen from the owner, and we ordered our coffee and sandwiches. I always have a Denver sandwich and Neve orders a BLT without the bacon. She is a strict vegetarian, the only one in Pluto. We sipped our coffee.
“I have just read a book I ordered,” said Neve, “on philately, in which it says that stamp collecting offers refuge to the confused and gives new vigor to fallen spirits. I think Octave was hoping he would obtain something of the sort. But the more he dwelt on the disasters, the worse he felt, according to my father. He would brighten whenever he obtained something valuable for his collection, though. He corresponded with people all over the globe; it was quite remarkable. I’ve got files and files of his correspondence with stamp dealers. He would take years tracking down a surviving stamp or cover that had been through a particular disaster. Wars, of course, from the Ameri
can Revolution, the Crimean War, the First World War. Soldiers would frequently carry letters on their persons, of course. One doesn’t like to think how those letters ended up in the hands of collectors. But he preferred natural disasters and, to a lesser extent, man-made accidents.” Neve tapped the side of her cup. “He would have been fascinated by the Hindenburg and certainly there would have been a stamp or two involved, somewhere. And our modern disasters, too, of course.”
I knew what she was thinking of, suddenly—those letters mailed on the day we lost our thirty-fifth president, or the mail, I pictured White House thank-you notes, that had been waiting, perhaps, in Jackie’s purse. I went a little cold with dismay to think that many of these bits of paper were perhaps now in the hands of dealers and for sale all over the world to people like Octave. Neve and I think very much alike, and I saw that she was going to sugar her coffee—a sign of distress, since she has a bit of a blood sugar problem.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll be awake all night.”
“I know.” She sugared her coffee anyway and put the glass canister back. “Isn’t it strange, though, how time mutes the horror of events, how they cease to affect us in the same way? But I began to tell you all of this in order to explain why Octave left for Brazil.”
“With so much money. Now I’m starting to imagine he was on the trail of a stamp.”
“You’re exactly right,” said Neve. “I was talking to my brother yesterday, and oddly enough, he remembered that our father told us what Octave was looking for. This object had entered the possession of a very wealthy Brazilian woman. In his collection notes he mentions a letter that survived the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, a Dutch stamp placed upon a letter written just before and carried off on a steamer. He had a letter from the sack of mail frozen onto the back of a New Hampshire mail carrier who died in the east-coast blizzard of 1888. An authenticated letter from the Titanic, too, but then there must have been quite a bit of mail recovered for some reason, as he refers to other pieces. But he was not as interested in sea disasters. No, the prize he was after was a letter from the year A.D. 79.”