A singular solution to an unhappy marriage. Published in Timber Creek Review, Winter 2000.

WINTERS OF THE HEART
by
Lucille Bellucci


Gerald looked thoughtfully at the long pearl hatpin piercing the doll's breast. With thumb and forefinger, disliking its ugliness, he picked up the rag figure. He recognized the striped kitchen toweling that had been rolled into a sausage for the body. A piece of string both strangled a neck and formed a head. Eyes, nose, were roughly penciled on the knob of a face. The stitched-on limbs of felt cloth had jagged chips glued to their ends--fingernail and toenail clippings, he supposed. The hair was string, fastened on top by a safety pin.
He hadn't been inside the place in five years, and was disgusted by its slovenly condition. Irritably, he had tumbled empty pots and pushed over sacks of mulch (wondering at the same time how Alice had managed to haul three twenty-pound sacks from her station wagon to the shed in the back).
A board had slid off a five-gallon clay pot; inside sat the doll, like a mandrake root in clothing.
He remembered another doll like it. Twenty years ago, on a quest for an exotic vacation and after spending two uncomfortable nights at a hotel in Port-au-Prince where Alice kept hearing lizards scampering across the ceiling, they had moved to a modest room in the home of a Methodist missionary from Tennessee. Amid the clutter on his desk they had noticed a handmade rag doll. Gerald thought its stained cotton garment and crude string hair repugnant. For days Haiti's poverty had reproached him wherever he looked; it depressed him to see a toy no better off than the child who must have owned it. The children all had huge hungry eyes and swollen bellies, which were lighter-colored (like balloons stretching the rubber, thought Gerald) than their skinny black faces and limbs. Their sick livers would probably afflict them all their brief lives.
Alice had asked about the doll on the missionary's desk.
"It's not a toy," the cleric replied, his face turning a dull pink. "It's a, what you might call, a hex, a voodoo doll. I found one of my parishioners, an owner of a small radio shop, making a spell over it. He wouldn't tell me who or what it was for, but I knew about a feud he had with a neighbor. This man never missed a day of Sunday school.
"From that day on I have felt quite useless here. If I were to close my mission this very morning, I am sure that by midnight there will be a drum ceremony right here in my yard. There'd be the whole thing--a priestess sacrificing black cocks and women in white shaking themselves and spinning around and around a bonfire." His expression was ironic, self-mocking. "As you see, I am still here, and I don't ask questions anymore."
Yet Haiti held an appeal for Gerald and Alice. Knowing they would probably never return, their sensory pores opened wide. The tropic nights were as starry as a movie set, and actually did resound faintly with drumbeats.
"So corny," Alice said. "If we lived here the romantic thing would be for you to drink yourself to death. And I'd have an affair with the priest."
Gerald was intent on getting the hammock's upswing to tip gin-and-tonic into his mouth. "No, you wouldn't. You'd go crazy for my wrinkled white linen suits. Women die for that dissipated look in men. I'd make a very good dissipated sort."
Haiti aroused powerful erotic impulses in them; he wouldn't have been surprised if Alice conceived a child during those hot nights under their mosquito net. It was a new experience to lie spraddle-legged on moist bedding, with nothing but the sweat on their skins for cover, and wordlessly play with each other's body. Their membranes were slippery, turgid, it seemed, all the time. But she didn't get pregnant until they had been back in New England a year.
There was not much to do in Haiti. They went driving along the western coast and walked aimlessly around Mole Saint-Nicolas, accumulating a train of beggar children, until they gave up and went back to their car. About five miles out of the village, Gerald had to stop. The road was blocked with men, women, children, and police; all were looking at something in a ditch. Gerald got out and peered down. He saw, though a cloud of shiny green flies, the naked trunk of a black man. The head and limbs lay a few feet from the trunk. Every body part was hacked partly through, the joints of arms and legs cracked open and slick as soup bones. Flesh and intestines still smoked from a bonfire that someone, the police perhaps, had scattered. Gerald realized he was breathing shallowly, through his nostrils.
A policeman was staring at him, or Gerald thought he was, because glasses of a blackness he associated with the blind covered the man's eyes. "What happened?" Gerald asked. "I mean, why...?"
The black reflecting lenses stayed fixed in his direction, and finally the policeman, a handsome man with square jaws and blue-black skin, replied in a mixture of French and English, "Werewolf. They cut and burn him so he cannot come back." He pointed at a straw bag and a slaughtered cock in the ditch. "The bag has charms. He will not come back."
Gerald heard someone gagging and turned to see Alice with her hand over her mouth. He led her away, back to the car, but she kept looking over her shoulder at the mess in the ditch.
The next day they left--almost fleeing--Haiti and flew home to Connecticut. Compared to Port-au-Prince, Old Saybrook's cool summer was friendly and welcoming, but he found himself counting people in the streets. He had never noticed before that there were more cars than pedestrians, and those were usually parked, seemed never to be leaving or arriving. Main Street had a secluded, self-satisfied air, and no man or woman looked at him sidelong as he passed.
He was one of them; but Gerald began to be sensitive to remarks such as, "We're not from around here. We're from New Hampshire," meaning that the tiny distance between New Hampshire and Connecticut was really a chasm. The complacency of it bothered him. He guessed it was because he no longer felt safe, that everyone was living in a delusion of permanence. Nobody understood that just six hours by air to the south was a tortured people, a colony of protozoa bursting apart and liable to surge across the strip of water to multiply in new, American tissues. He thought that one day New Hampshire and Connecticut would band together as twin siblings in the new world to come.
He didn't think that Haiti had affected Alice at all. She went right back to her Guilford Stone House Restoration Society and the Ivoryton Playhouse in Essex without much more than a reminiscence now and then about their queer vacation.
He wondered about that, as he held the kitchen-towel doll hidden in the potting shed. She can't even draw the eyes right, he thought. Four years of that stupid workshop at Annie Hart's and she still can't draw eyes. He didn't doubt that it was his wife who had made the crude object, since she was the only one who ever used the shed. She was always in it or worked near it with her eternal cuttings or sickly transplants. He had to insist that she scrub under her fingernails with a stiff sisal brush before touching meats; despite her hands getting red to the point of rawness, Gerald blamed the gardening for their condition.
He heard muffled rumblings coming from the garage. She was back from her shopping. Feeling like an overgrown playmate, he put the doll back in the pot and the board on top, then laboriously, with pain shooting to his head, righted the things he had tipped over on the floor. He thought about asking her about it and knew, as surely as his knees wanted to turn backward whenever he took a step, that she was going to start, and blush, and stammer excuses.
It took him five minutes to climb the six steps to the patio. Tiles were treacherous. Even rubber-tipped walking sticks skidded and took you into a (half-second of expectant death) splaying fall with them, if they weren't placed squarely on a surface. He stepped high over the doorsill into the house, neat, straight-edged house so different from Alice's potting shed.
She was putting away groceries when he hobbled into the kitchen. Her pale blond hair touched her shoulders and curved outward in subtle semblance of cheer. He opened his mouth to tell her about finding the doll but said instead, "Time you had the gray touched up again. It's growing back faster where you part it."
"Hi, Honey," she said. She smoothed down her hair, turning the upturned ends under against her neck. "I know, isn't it awful? Maybe I'll just give up on it one of these days. Look at the standing rib roast I got. I'm going to fix it exactly the way you like it."
In the center of the morning's sunbeam, her face was indistinct, blurry with light. He blinked when she moved away from it. He looked at the once-smooth neck and the soft, defenseless pouch under her chin.
"It's too big for just us two. You know I hate leftovers." He sickened himself; yet she would persist in trying to comfort him. Give up, he would often tell her, give up and put your strength into something worthwhile.
She was saying, even-toned and reasonable, as though they were both really talking about the meat, "There won't be any leftovers because I'm taking half of it to Mother. She's got a cold and doesn't feel like cooking. You like rare and she likes well, so it all works out."
"Your mother," he said, "is a whining, lazy freeloader." He should leave now, but he didn't. Helplessly he watched her eyes. She turned away, her hands busy with seasonings over the raw, sticky slab on the butcher board.
Near the open window a robin caroled. Up to its fat rusty belly in apple blossoms, it seemed to be singing straight to them in the kitchen. She looked at it, smiling. "Listen, Gerald. What a sassy bird. His chest is all puffed up like a pigeon's."
The pleasure in her voice enraged him. She never gave up, and he could never change his reaction to it. If he said a plain, noncommittal "Yes," her face would open, the fine wrinkles unfolding as if he had cried "Hallelujah!" and thrown away his sticks and danced on his toes.
Without a word, he shambled out of the kitchen.
In his darkened study, where dusty blue curtains kept out the spring morning, he sat down and counted his pulse until it slowed. He stayed in this room most of the day, through the seasons; he thought of it as his submarine, where he kept his oxygen tank. It was where he read the science periodicals stacked on the floor in precise two-foot piles, the sum of his shrunken spirit. Even that was a pretense; there was nothing in which he believed when he was the only speck in the universe not getting enough air to breathe, his heart battering itself against his sternum, as he choked and hung onto his lifeline from the oxygen tank.
Somehow, today, spring had pierced him and he had had an impulse--an absence of numbness--to make a scratch or two in the earth and plant something. It was essential that his wife be away when he did it and so, furtively, he had put up his face, clean-shaven as always, to the sun and permitted himself a slow, unsteady ramble around their half-acre of tree and bramble behind the house. His nerve ends could not appreciate the warmth of the sun, but he could remember it, yes he did. The past winter had been ninety intermittent days of snow and freezing rain. One night in midwinter he had smashed the glass image of the TV weatherman with his stick. Alice's crying maddened him even more; he wished she had cursed instead. She never reproved him, because she had an infantile belief in passive endurance and God's will.
He supposed the ludicrous voodoo doll in the shed was a passive attempt to kill him: if it worked, it was God's will since, after all, magic spells were pagan nonsense. If it didn't work, then it was God's will that he live. The reasoning was consummately Alice.
At dinner over rare roast beef that she carved in tender pink slices, he thought again of the untidy potting shed. After the doctor said that exercise could slow down the muscular degeneration and Gerald started to shuffle about the house, Alice had sold or given away all the odd bits of furniture that cluttered the rooms and the hallway. She kept things out of his way, as he kept away from her. The place was neat and sterile; there was nothing for him to stumble over.
The litter in the shed piqued him. It made him picture her slamming the shed door and tossing weeders and pruning shears, caked with mud and gluey with sap, all around just anywhere. Maybe she rolled among them, like a dog let out on grass. Had she sat on the floor and made that doll in her secret doll house?
"I met Les Caldino on Cove Street," she said. "He asked if we wanted to sell the Pond Meadow parcel." She drank water, her three fingers holding the glass in a parody of the delicacy her hands had once had.
"He does." He noted the rapid ticking of her eyelids.
"He said he'll top any other offer you get."
"Why sell? Keep it for Nick. He might say thank you."
"Nick is not ungrateful, Gerald. He came running home when you got sick and he'd stay close if you both didn't always...argue." She wiped at a spot of gravy on the polished mahogany.
"We don't argue. I tell him he's a bum and I know quite well he'd like to kill me. He's always very controlled. The boy has character. I would have killed my old man." He said suddenly, "Les is a good-looking guy, isn't he. Do you run into him often?"
"The last time was around Christmas." She held out the platter of beef. "More meat?"
He took the dish unsteadily from her and set it down on the bare table, to one side of the trivet. She picked it up at once, but already there was a mark on the oiled mahogany skin. "Oh, Gerald." Her eyes flooded and she put her elbows on the table and sobbed into her hands.
The pink meat he had eaten blackened in his stomach. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm sorry," not saying her name.
Weeping, she rose and started clearing the table.
He got up, knocked over his sticks, bent to retrieve them, and went to sit in the dark of the patio. Twenty minutes later he heard her go into her room and close the door.
Alice drove off at noon next day to take nearly three-quarters of the roast to her mother. "I won't be long," she told him. She had tried to make him a sandwich but he said no, he would boil himself an egg. He stood listening to the station wagon roar, idle, back out, then go down the road. He seldom accompanied her, and she did not ask him, anymore. He had not seen Alice's mother for two years, since he had known he was slowly dying. She did not visit him, nor talk to him on the telephone. He hated the heavy-fleshed old woman, who lingered in a perpetual state of need. Alice, of course, drudged along in blameless filial piety.
A fantastic notion struck him. Had Alice made another voodoo doll in her mother's image? He grunted in reluctant amusement. What a coup. Two passive murders in one blow.
Letting himself pitch freely from side to side because he was alone, he thumped to the patio and settled in a deck chair. Like a witch's hut in a fairy tale, the potting shed crouched in the side of his vision.
He closed his eyes.
Her heels on the tiles awakened him. Approaching, she seemed to be wearing mirrored sunglasses like those of the long-ago Haitian policeman; reflected in them branches flew past like broomsticks, bits of sky, himself floating in the chair. But when she stood over him, he could see her hazel irises behind the lenses.
"I fell asleep," he mumbled.
"Yes. Go back to sleep." She went into the house.


Summer grasses ripened and yellowed from neglect. At the foot of the garden birds fed, unfrightened, on plums and strawberries gone wild. Alice let them have it all, and added to it with offerings of bread and seed. In past summers she had been all activity picking, boiling, canning. He thought he knew why she was idle now but kept it to himself. It was his private game. Part of the game was not to search out "his" doll where he had replaced it. Several times he surprised Alice by asking after her mother's health.
Somehow this summer, this peaceable ruminate summer, they had begun sitting together again on the patio. Holding books in their laps, they said little to each other. At the end of the day he could not remember what he had read. In repose, not being anxious to please, she mystified him. He noticed she had grown thin; under her eyes swelled purplish bags. He knew she had stopped going to the hairdresser because there were two inches of gray ringing her face. Her hands at last healed and became smooth. One night he had a high fever and she sat at his side in the dark holding his hand, a friendly, neutral touch. She went out no oftener than once a week to shop for the few things they needed, and to look in on her mother. Most days she slept late into the brilliant mornings. They both ate less than it must have taken to feed one Haitian child. With him it was because heartburn attacked him after every meal; Alice always said she wasn't hungry and threw away half the food on her plate. The heartburn interested him. He wondered whether she had inserted a pin through the chest of the doll.


In October the TV weatherman began his winter predictions. No change, he said happily, from the previous winter. Early snow in the Berkshire Hills, better stock up on firewood.


Sleep pulled at him, fighting his rise to the surface where her voice hovered, but when he awoke he heard only rain pummeling the roof and its hard rush out of the drain spout. From the garden, through the one-inch opening in the window, he caught whiffs of moldering leaves. His own body smelled of decomposition; he was sweating despite the chilled room.
Get up, he told himself. The sticks wobbled under his imbecile bulk and he swayed, off-balance, and sprawled backward upon the bed. Up again, he made for the door and crossed to her room. Are you awake, he whispered. The rain gurgled. Before he touched the light switch he knew how he would find her.


After the fire department had come and gone, after the hospital's futile ministrations, after the funeral, he stood leaning against the kitchen sink staring out at the rain. Many times since that night he had tried to compose a message to his son. In the end he did nothing.
The potting shed sagged from so much water. Was the doll still there, in its clay tomb? The long string hair on its head, he thought. He had overlooked that crude detail. Both he and Alice's mother were fuzzy-scalped, the old woman's hair even scantier than his. He did not need to look at the doll again to know the fingernail clippings were not his, but Alice's own brittle and discolored growths.
He heard a noise that seemed to come from the garage; childishly, he pretended Alice was driving in, the station wagon's heavy engine throbbing, as always, against the sheetrock walls.
A long silence followed the first sound. No bird chirped; rain minded itself, falling outside the window. He was alone.
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