On a quiet Sunday morning, Iris followed the wagon bearing Ambrose’s body through the town. She had found someone who agreed to bury him out by the creek with the last of the money left over from the sale of the bag of sugar. A dog crept out of a yard and barked at the horses or the wheels or the scent of death. The bark sounded strange to Iris. Muted. And the rising sun. Its borders were fuzzy and it seemed to be in the wrong place in the sky. Weeds and treetops moved, and the sheet covering Ambrose flapped, but she felt no breeze against her face.
She had failed him utterly. Stolen him from an institution that had, at the very least, kept him alive. Taken him for herself and killed him in less than two weeks. She was the strangler fig. She did not deserve the feel of the breeze, or the colors of morning. She had condemned the doctor for his hubris without noticing the monstrous pride of her own.
The wagon wheels creaked. A hawk flew overhead. A distant church murmured a hymn.
Iris looked back and noticed a motley group of children following the wagon. Wondered why they weren’t in that church. Wondered where their parents were. The wagon wheel hit a pothole; the sheet moved and exposed Ambrose’s bare feet. A small exclamation came from the children and Iris stumbled forward, catching up with the cart and pulling the sheet down. The effort exhausted her, and she breathed heavily as the wagon rolled past familiar crape myrtle bushes. Weeds broke through the dirt road. The children followed them. The tableau of the woman with the man’s haircut and the dead man and the wagon was just another toy the war had made for them.
The man she hired wouldn’t dig the grave by the creek. “Too many roots,” he said, and finally they agreed that he would dig at the edge of the meadow. He was knee-deep in the grave now, and some of the children had wandered away. Others sat in the grass and watched pensively, as though something more exciting would happen any minute. The wagon horse waited patiently in its traces, flicking its ear against the tickle of a blue fly and bending over to nibble at the goldenrod. Iris stood, arms folded, watching the dirt fly out of the grave.
She was not surprised to see the tall man entering the meadow, wearing the same clothes as the day before, walking in that familiar, stilted gait. His two guards trailed him. Yesterday, the sight of him had sent her into a hair-slashing frenzy, but now she simply stared with dull eyes as he made his way toward her.
Two shocks to the system—first, the news from the hotel clerk that yes, there was a man and woman matching the couple’s description in the hotel, but the man had died during the night and was now being buried in the field at the end of the road. And then, the sight of her. Iris Dunleavy, arms crossed, her shoulders no longer high and proud, her hair short under her bonnet, eyes downcast. Standing before her lover’s grave.
He’d tried Fort Myers first, gained passage through the Union guards by declaring himself on neither side, but a British doctor on official and extremely important business. The guards had burst into laughter at the thought of this strange-talking fool who smelled like roses, chasing two lunatics through the war.
“Of course,” they said. “Have a look around, Doc,” and laughed some more. The search of that dusty coastal town had proved fruitless, and so had another, and another, and here he was in the fourth, sunburned and exhausted, tobacco juice on the soles of his boots, yellow pollen collected on his glasses. He motioned to his guards to stand back as he approached her. His grief at the news of Ambrose retreated, briefly, as he let the sight of her fill him. He’d spent so much of the last week hating her, delighting in the thought of her humiliating recapture. But the woman before him was broken, nothing proud left to conquer. And the man they had pulled back and forth between them like a prize lay dead under a sheet.
Her eyes were utterly hollow. He stopped a few feet from her, removing his hat.
She looked away, looked back at the grave. Behind them, the children were quiet. “I failed him,” she said. “I failed.”
“His chances weren’t good to start with, Mrs. Dunleavy,” Dr. Cowell said. His words were bare and bleak and soft and true. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”
She shook her head. No color came to her face to warn of the coming tears.
“I made him worse.”
“He was worse to begin with. I imagine you made him as happy as he could have been.”
“I believed I could cure him.”
The digging continued. A dragonfly circled low and then arced away toward the bonnet of a girl. A night crawler wriggled out of the sod that was piled up near the grave.
“I suppose it’s human to believe you can help the ones you love,” Dr. Cowell said.
Iris glanced at the guards, who still hovered in the distance. “Let us finish burying him, before you take me back.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Her hair wasn’t fixed right. The bottom of her dress was torn. As the doctor noticed these things, he felt a deep and flushing regret. He had considered himself a man of peace, disdainful of both North and South for their tendency to use blood as a palliative, but he had fought for love with just as much ferocity, and now he could see that love for the sad, stumbling, prideful, hopeless thing it was.
He put on his hat. “Go home, Mrs. Dunleavy.”