The lamb tottered down the gangplank one day in early June, led by a rope. Halfway to the dock he planted his hooves and stood blinking in the morning light. From his fishing place by Wendell, the chef turned and let out a low whistle.
“They did it,” he murmured, his face reverent. “They got the lamb. Little fellow’s come all the way from Naples. Not Naples, Italy. Naples, Florida.”
Wendell studied the little creature. “What’s it for?”
“What do you mean, what’s it for?” the chef snorted. “It’s for lamb stew. Although that’s not much lamb to go around, is it?”
“It’s just a baby,” said Wendell.
“Ah, yes,” said the chef. “Just a baby.”
The lamb was imprisoned in an empty pigpen in the back, by the gardens, while the rumors of lamb stew swept the asylum. Later in the afternoon, Wendell went out to visit him. He was all alone, sleeping on the ground, which still stank of the excrement of pigs. Wendell crouched low, hooking his fingers on the wire of the fence and staring at the doomed creature. He whistled softly and the lamb woke up. Wendell continued whistling until he rose to his little feet and wobbled over to him. His eyes were dark brown, eyebrows expressive, white lashes longer than any woman’s. He had a slight, natural smile passed on from generations of pleasant-featured sheep. He was curious and trusting and had a lamblike ignorance of his impending fate. Wendell pressed his face to the mesh of the wire and the lamb touched his nose with his own.
Wendell felt a huff of his warm breath.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the chef had pulled down an old cookbook from the cabinet and had it open on the table. His eyes eagerly scanned the list of ingredients. It was all coming back to him now. He would make a salad too, using the soft inner leaves from the yucca plant. And didn’t he have some dried basil somewhere? He went about gathering the ingredients, whistling a song he’d learned from one of the Cuban fishermen who traded at the docks. Midafternoon he found his ax and sharpened the blade against a block of limestone, still whistling. He tested the blade along his thumb until he winced and then smiled. A crease in his thumb filled up with a hairline sliver of blood. He put on an apron and went out to the lamb’s pen with his ax.
He stopped. No. It could not be. The sweet saliva teasing his mouth all day suddenly evaporated.
The gate to the pen hung open.
The lamb was gone.
He stood there, mouth agape, the ax hanging useless by his side. This could not be. Pride. Joy. Anticipation. The chef had perfectly seasoned himself for dinner that night and he would not be denied. He ran back, sounding the alarm, and a hasty search party was convened, the chef and some of the kitchen staff and the gardeners and a few of the orderlies. They stampeded through the asylum grounds and into the forest, beating at the undergrowth with sticks, slapping at bugs, wary of crocodiles and snakes. Some of them called the lamb as if he were a dog, their voices high and desperate.
“Go with them,” Mary told the doctor.
“No, I’m not going to go stomping around in those woods and getting bites all over me. I’m a doctor. I have patients waiting for me.”
“I want that lamb!”
“They’ll find the lamb, Mary!”
Word spread around the asylum that the lamb was missing, and those who could understand the news did, and felt sorrow over the loss of the special dinner that would have made this night different from the others. Some of them had laid out their best clothes for dinner. Clothes they’d worn back in Charleston, or Boston, or Maine. Back when they were a husband or a father or a wife or a daughter or a dentist or a hunter or whatever they were before they were lunatics. The presence of the lamb had awakened their names. Now that the lamb was gone, that part of them was gone too. They went to their windows, stared at the sea. Felt themselves diminish back into what they had become.
Iris took her good dress and put it back in her trunk. It was trimmed with ribbon, too special to wear just any night in an insane asylum, but fairly appropriate for this night of lamb stew, and now because the lamb was missing, Ambrose would not be able to see her in that dress. She had wanted so badly to watch him look at her.
Ambrose himself had carefully shaved, or rather had begged an orderly to shave him, for he was still not allowed to handle a razor himself. Later he had asked the patient next door, a bit of a dandy, to borrow some bay rum to put in his hair. He had planned to wear his best shirt to dinner that night because the lamb had given him permission to look his very best for Iris. Now he rubbed his face and smelled the cool odor of bay rum filling up the room. The light was fading.
Lydia Helms Truman felt her eyes moistening. She had been looking forward to the lamb stew and was not planning to swallow it in the way she did buttons and marbles and pebbles and rings and coins, with a quick gulp and an arch of her throat. No, she had planned on savoring that lamb meat, hoarding it with the tongue before finally surrendering it to the gullet. Closing her eyes, taking her time. Spoonful by spoonful. Remembering lamb dinners around the table with her husband and children. Back when she belonged in that house. There, with her family. The taste of lamb had inextricably linked itself to her place at the table. Now, both were lost. She sighed, dabbed at her eyes delicately with a handkerchief, and looked around for something smooth and small.
The old woman whose husband was clear as day to her but invisible to others broke the news to him, taking his warm hand and explaining that though they would not have lamb for dinner that night, they still had each other. And though disappointed at first, he had nodded in agreement. They still had each other, and wasn’t their companionship as savory and spicy as the lamb would have been? And wasn’t their love a perpetual lamb that blinked itself awake each day? She had laughed and said, “You have a way with words, my love,” and had kissed his cheek and then gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. His hand moved up her back.
Eleanor Beacon, who felt too much, had heard of neither the lamb’s arrival nor its escape. All talk of living creatures and their fates and their place at the dinner table had been kept from her, and, as she did every day, she had taken her meals in her room, bread and cheese and fruit, foods that would not cause her grief. And so the news of the lamb’s escape went down the hallways and courtyards and into day rooms and offices and even down to the pier, but the news skipped over Eleanor’s room, and she passed the afternoon kneeling before the window, watching an ant take bread crumbs one by one into a crack in the wall. She imagined the ant’s back aching from the strain, its ant children calling for the food from their little nests, all the expectations upon the creature, so tiny, so hard outside, so soft inside, so vulnerable to birds and footsteps.
She stared at it. Moved close so that her words huffed against it and slightly altered its course. I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.
Doctor Cowell had won the battle with his wife and was not out in the woods. He was in his office, listening to the man who’d blown out his eyes with a Colt .45. The man was immaculately dressed, as always. His face perfectly shaven. Hair perfectly combed. He had been a successful attorney in his former life. Were this woman he had loved never born, he would still be practicing law and appreciating sunsets, and his sense of smell would be no better than that of any other man. But now he had his head turned to the open window. His nostrils flared slightly.
“I don’t smell lamb cooking,” he said.
“The lamb escaped,” said the doctor, preparing himself because he knew the subject of lamb and its aroma would lead his patient back to the subject that consumed his every waking thought: that of the woman he loved and lost, and her lavender cologne. He was correct.
“They say the smell of a magnolia tree blossom can carry for fifty miles,” the man said. “But I could go to Spain, or the Arctic circle, and still smell that cologne. I smell it now. It’s wafting through the room as though she had just passed by the open window.”
The doctor wished the lamb had never been brought to the island. He hadn’t missed it, not until it came and went. Now every other meat was going to taste like not-lamb before it tasted like chicken or pig or beef or fish.
***
Out in the woods, past the deserted Calusa village and its midden piles and the remains of open-air shelters, Wendell put the finishing touches on a fence he’d made from white mangrove saplings and rope. He’d sneaked into his mother’s keepsake chest and stolen his old feeding bottle and filled it with milk. Now he held the bottle out and turned the tip down. Milk dribbled out. The lamb lapped at it greedily. The wind carried over the faint shouts of the search crew. They would not come this far. There was a line, invisibly yet implacably drawn, that designated how far men would go to recover the prospect of lamb stew. It stretched far into mangrove and bush, past alligator holes and the nests of ospreys and rabbit burrows, but it did not reach the line that designated how far a boy would carry that lamb to safety.
Within a few days, the lamb had learned a trick. He would rear up and put his hooves against Wendell’s thighs as he greedily drank the milk. Wendell’s journey to this secret place had not been easy on this day. Bernard, the burly, evil-tempered dock guard, had denied him the use of the chef’s canoe.
“But I have permission,” Wendell protested.
“Where’s your note?”
“What note? I don’t have a note.”
“No note, no canoe.”
They had argued for a few minutes before Bernard finally relented. “Just take it, then. You’re the son of the superintendent. I suppose you think you can do anything you want.” He untied the canoe, making Wendell wait as he took his time undoing the half-hitch that could have come undone in seconds. When the knot came loose, he pushed the canoe out to sea so that Wendell had to wade in for it, soaking his pants all the way up to the waist.
Now he tipped the bottle as the lamb drank the last of the milk and lay down contentedly in the wild grass.
“Get enough?” Wendell asked.
The lamb stared at him with his dark eyes.
“I’m crazy,” he told the lamb. “Everyone thinks I’m a normal boy, but I have done terrible things in the forest.”
The lamb rested his head against a woolly leg and closed his eyes, lulled to sleep by the monotone of confession. Wendell knelt down next to him and stroked his head, thinking now of Penelope.
He could still feel her soft, warm fingers around his throat and remember the joy that had flooded him as he began to lose consciousness. That was the last time he’d ever spoken to the girl, terrified to approach her lest the chef act upon his threats and report her to his father. He had tried to get a note to her explaining his mysterious actions, but a nurse had intercepted it, and he dared not write another one. She must have felt abandoned. Betrayed. He didn’t know. He only knew that despite the pleasant scent of nearby honeysuckle and the lamb’s pastoral breathing, he felt the familiar heaviness in his stomach he always associated with guilt.
He said goodbye to the sleeping creature, tiptoed out of his pen, and made his way through the mangrove forest back to the canoe. He paddled it out of the estuary into the open water and headed for home. The guilt was still with him, but so was the love, burning. He remembered an old legend from England. When a beekeeper died, someone had to go out to the hives and break the news to the bees. No one had informed the hive inside himself that his girl was dead and never coming back. Perhaps that was why she was still so immediate to him, her lips, unkissed, so rosy and soft, those long eyelashes and her crystal-blue eyes . . .
With a small sigh of defeat he turned back toward the shore, climbed out of the canoe, and performed the wretched deed again, ankle-deep in shallow water, turtle grass around his feet, in the shadows of the red mangrove trees, as two anhingas quarreled above his head.
The chapel was so small it barely qualified as a building. Wendell stood in the doorway, half in shadows, half in light. The chef, who had finally come out of his terrible mood brought on by the lamb incident, had explained the protocol to him.
“You cross your heart like this,” the chef said, demonstrating on himself. “You say, ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned.’ You tell him how long it’s been since your last confession.”
“I’ve never been to confession.”
The chef was slicing potatoes in the kitchen and glancing into an old recipe book. “Leeks?” he said. “I don’t have leeks.”
“I said, I’ve never been to confession.”
“Then you tell him that. Then you confess your sins.” The chef looked at him sideways. “But what sins could you have? Have you wet the bed lately?”
“I don’t wet the bed!” Wendell said hotly, and the chef burst into baritone laughter.
Now he trembled in the confession box. A drop of sweat ran down his face. No cooling breeze in the stagnant heat. The confession box door slid open and Wendell half jumped.
Father Byrnes didn’t seem surprised to see him. He had the same neutral expression he’d always had. Wendell wasn’t sure he could say the dreadful crime out loud, so he had written it on a piece of butcher paper, which he had folded and now held in his sweaty hand. He used his other hand to awkwardly cross his heart. “Forgive me Father,” he began, his voice shaky, “for I have sinned.”
The priest started to speak, but Wendell interrupted him, afraid he would lose momentum if he didn’t rush forward. He had made the chef tell him the exact words he needed and he was determined to see them through. “You know all things, Lord, You know that I love You it’s been never since my last confession and I don’t know if I believe in God so if I am still crazy after this then perhaps there either is not a God or there is a God and He doesn’t love me for you see I have done terrible things in the privacy of the woods and I was not crazy when I came to this island I was just a normal boy minding my own business—” His words broke off with a short cry and he bolted from the confession box and ran into the sunlight, realizing, with a terrible pang, that the folded piece of paper was no longer in his hand. He turned and ran back into the sanctuary, where the priest was just opening the piece of paper. Wendell tore it from his startled hands and ran. He did not stop running until he was beyond the pier on a flat expanse of beach, and he tore his confession into shreds and gave it to the wind. He stood watching the confetti bob on the waves as brown pelicans dive-bombed it, consigning the unspeakable act to the secrecy of their gullets.