There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his
daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer
of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with
familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these
things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations
the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
-Deuteronomy 18:10-12
I had my fortune read by her anorexic daughter. Twenty years of living, but she’d already seen all things, and thus was an old maid. Her name was Isis, and people came from miles around for her services. The decrepit house had no advertisements, showed no sign of the talent living inside; you had to know about it to find out where it was. I came to the town of Gramercy soon after I finished the meager medical training one needed to become a doctor in those days. Really all I learned was to write prescriptions for morphine and show people how to administer it themselves, which is all the medicine I cared to know anyway. Pain’s a problem everyone suffers from, and is easily solved. I knew Gramercy was a hub of trade, kissing the east coast of the Mississippi with some bizarre supernatural attraction drawing villagers from inland as well. The perfect place for my services.
I didn’t come to the house looking for Isis. I was a confident, educated man and saw no need for having my future read. A sign in the window of the house was advertising for roomers. First I thought the fortune telling wasn’t enough to cover household expenses, but quickly learned they could’ve afforded a real house with fresh paint in a city like Memphis or New Orleans. Isis and her mother Winona stayed in that house out of eccentricity, not need. Isis would never ask for money for her prophecies; it was her mother you had to pay. Winona believed bearing such a child entitled her to a few things, as if she carried the weight of her daughter’s gift, her abnormality, and her disease.
I moved to Gramercy ignorant and cold. I’d heard about Isis, and figured people desperate enough to pay for fortune readings would pay for anything to dull their pain. I didn’t bring much with me, just a leather brief case and a few boxes of clothing. I didn’t even meet Isis until over a week after I moved in. We passed each other in the hall on the way to our separate rooms and I tried to introduce myself, but she shuffled quickly past me, never looking up from the floor. I knew Winona charged me too much, but I found something about the wooden house and the chickens clucking in the back yard comforting. My room was on the second story, next to Isis’s. It was the biggest bedroom in the house. The dark wood paneling and floors were plain, but that’s why I liked them. I was given a small bed, a wood desk painted white, and a large chifforobe. The house was dilapidated, but spotless. Winona seemed to never stop cleaning, and so she was always dirty, damp spots on her dress and bandana covering her hair. I got to feel like a woman was taking care of me without having to deal with one’s emotional needs. She only spoke to me on the first of the month when the rent was due. I learned about her past as I learned about everything, from other townspeople, who seemed endlessly curious about what life was like in Winona’s house.
Winona was a big-boned, firm woman, strong from a lifetime of having to do everything herself and bitter from hating it. Her hair was cropped and her patience was shorter. She was a farmer’s daughter and had spent her life convinced she deserved better. She’d dreamed of marrying rich, and it was a tough lesson that inevitably you must be rich yourself to get a rich spouse. Waiting for her fantasy to be fulfilled, she’d put off marriage for far too long, and when the pressure from her parents and gossip from the townspeople became suffocating, she accepted the first proposal she got. Pregnant with her daughter at the ancient age of twenty-five, she killed her husband with a shovel to the head and buried him with that same tool in the chicken yard after she’d discovered he’d gambled away the money her father had given them. The money wasn’t their entire savings. It was a harsh punishment from a harsh woman.
They didn’t do anything about things like that back then; the man was simply a victim of bad judgment. Winona considered her pregnancy a good excuse not to remarry. Some thought that being exposed to and participating in the murder of her own father while in utero gave Isis her peculiar gift. The mother took little interest in her daughter until Isis learned to speak. Since she was rarely spoken to, no one’s really sure how she learned, but it’s said her first words were “watch out,” a full two minutes before Winona dropped a bag of flour. Isis gave her first reading to her mother when she was only five years old. Isis predicted that Winona would never be made happy by a man, and wouldn’t regret murdering her husband until death.
The day after our hurried encounter in the hallway, I went out to the yard to meet Isis properly, be a gentleman and get off on the right foot. She was kneeling in the dirt at my feet, her long grey dress tucked underneath her. “Hello, my name is Jesse. I’m going to be staying here for awhile. I’m a doctor.” She looked at me, but didn’t get up. The wildness of her appearance was startling. I felt as though I was trying to shake hands with something feral, something that greeted others of its kind with smelling and growls. She took my offered hand as if she’d never shaken a person’s hand before. The fragility of her bones frightened me and made my arm hair stand on end, as if the temperature had plummeted. I could’ve crushed her fingers as easily as icicles. She didn’t say anything, just let me move her arm up and down a few times and went back to scattering chicken-feed. I returned to my room and stared down at her from the window, my heart pounding. My fascination with Isis began with her cold, frail hand and grew over my time Gramercy.
Isis bore little resemblance to her large, powerful mother. She was frail and wore no makeup, her waist-long black hair was a tangled bird’s nest. She dressed in the same grey ankle-length dress every workday, weekend, and holiday. Her tattered fur coat, which looked as though it had been made from the pelts of poisoned raccoons (and probably was), stayed wrapped tightly around her even when it was sweltering. Never a drop of sweat appeared on her white forehead no matter how hot the southern afternoon. Isis complained constantly about being cold, which I suppose was a result of her condition. Despite the shivering, she refused to wear socks or shoes. During her readings she tucked her feet up underneath herself on her wooden chair, which looked so uncomfortable it could be distracting. In her free time, Isis sat in the same position in the dirt in her yard, conversing with her cats and chickens or just staring out into the tobacco fields until her mother grabbed her by the arm, pulling her hair sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose, back to reality and into the house to do another reading.
The girl was known as a prophet, a soothsayer, a shamaness, and a witch—varying degrees of goodness corresponding to varying degrees of satisfaction with her predictions. Even the local priest visited her on a regular basis. Father said God knew how the world worked, but Isis knew what was going to happen. Surprisingly, no one looked down on him or pointed out his hypocrisy for spending an expensive hour in Isis’s kitchen each Sunday after ten o’clock Mass, which, perhaps to reciprocate, she attended as dutifully as he did her readings. Isis sat completely still in the furthest back pew, hollow eyes staring straight ahead. She didn’t stand, kneel, sing, or take communion. She disappeared before anyone could shake her hand and say “Peace be with you.”
Her mother didn’t approve of her participation in church, because Catholicism discouraged the practice of magic and fortune-telling except by members of the clergy. Most of the citizens of Gramercy subscribed to a mix of Catholicism and voodoo common on the southern banks of the Mississippi, so religion wasn’t usually a problem for her mother’s pocketbook. Occasionally a visiting Christian zealot off the river boats would make a fuss about witchcraft and devil worship after church services, but no one paid much attention. The people of Gramercy were strangely protective of their local celebrity, and treated visitors from the river as if they were less substantial than the water they traveled in on. Even her biggest detractors credited her with stimulating the economy. Neighboring towns were full of tobacco farmers who, though they could barely put bread on their own tables, made pilgrimages to Isis’s doorstep, which inevitably led to trade.
The number of transient people passing through Gramercy because of the river and because of Isis drew me there, but I could never have predicted how significant her work would be for mine. If it hadn’t been for Isis assuring everyone that they could use morphine without the worry of overdosing, since she’d already told them how they’d die, I wouldn’t have stayed long. The town’s only need for a doctor was to supply the ever-growing opiate consumption. For real medical emergencies, the townsfolk turned to shamans and priests. No one believed that doctors or medicine could help anything. Perfect for me since I couldn’t tell a broken arm from appendicitis anyway. So I stayed.
Outsiders, including me at first, were astonished by the citizens’ lack of concern with death. They treated binge drinking and drug abuse as nonchalantly as fixing a leaky sink. The citizens could speak their minds and air their grievances without fear of getting shot. Their Catholic morality combined with impulsive indulgences bore a strange fruit. Because everyone knew how they were going to die, all preoccupation regarding death disappeared. Isis’s prophecies were never questioned and always came true. The effects of Catholicism and voodoo were as obvious as the effects of the fortune telling. Children said the rosary dutifully, played with voodoo dolls, and swam recklessly in the current-ravaged river. The suppressed sexuality always present with Catholicism kept the town brothel humming. The madam was very successful, but Isis had warned her that the days of women reigning over such establishments were coming to an end. Unfortunately, men would figure out that they could have control over their own pleasures soon enough.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was something wrong with Isis. At first I thought she only made me uneasy because she was so different from any other human I’d ever encountered, but she had an aura of ill health. She struggled to drag a sack of chicken feed across the yard that she should’ve been able to lift easily. She was exhausted and cold with dark circles around her eyes. If I’d been a better student I would’ve figured it out sooner; I didn’t realize she was anorexic until I saw Winona scraping Isis’s breakfast plate into the trash one morning. I didn’t know much about anorexia, but had heard of it. I tested my theory by inviting Isis to eat with me, offering snacks to her while she sat in the dusty yard. She accepted the food, but didn’t eat a thing I gave her, just ripped it into pieces and fed it to the animals.
I had a diagnosis, but this disorder also needed a motive. It was evident that Isis wasn’t concerned with appearing conventionally attractive and she had no interest in men, though some were interested in her for reasons both honorable and dubious, so I quickly ruled out physical appearance as a reason for Isis’s disorder. She functioned in a different world from the people around her. She didn’t seem to regard our reality as particularly important, which is perhaps why neither her condition nor her gift meant much to her. The ideal woman in that part of the world was an archaic image, well-fed farm-raised breasts and lips and hips. The standard excuse for anorexia was completely inadequate. I had to dig further.
It took the entire fourteen months that I lived with Isis and her mother to piece together an understanding of her condition. Eventually I determined that Isis’s anorexia was the product of carrying too much weight, that the constant accuracy and perfection of her readings caused the eating disorder. The typical excuses were feathers compared to her intense gravity. I once heard Isis tell her mother that the fortunes hurt in the telling. The lives and problems and futures of every client weighed on her. She reduced her own body weight to make room for them on her back, but it was still too much. She walked slowly, hunched over like an old woman, which only made her appear smaller and more birdlike. It was a wonder that her own cat never killed her out of confusion.
Unlike many around Isis she didn’t starve for lack of food. Her mother profited much from the fortune-telling and more from the exorbitant rent I paid her. Winona provided her daughter with the best food and new clothes, both of which the girl pretended to accept but never used. The soft dresses hung in her closet, which became a buffet among the local moths, while her harsh grey one never left her body. Winona’s gifts to Isis were devoid of love and full of pride for herself for being able to provide them. She didn’t acknowledge that her presents were never used, whether or not Isis like her gifts wasn’t the point. Gourmet meals of liver and veal and bread and cheese were cut up into tiny pieces and pushed around Isis’s plate but never touched her lips. I’m not sure whether Winona was so uncaring that she didn’t realize what was happening, or if she deliberately ignored the issue, but three times a day she placed food, food that some of the people whose futures Isis told would’ve killed for, before the girl and took it away half an hour later, mashed up with a fork, but otherwise untouched.
Isis’s only friend and companion from childhood was her loyal, lean calico cat, Jane. No one was sure how old Jane was. She was a thin cat with a lustrous coat, and half of one of her ears had been torn off in a fight. She looked lopsided and tough. Jane had been present at Isis’s birth as the only midwife, ate the placenta and tied off the umbilical cord herself. She’d earlier witnessed the murder of Isis’s father, making eye contact with Isis in the womb and assuring the embryonic girl that never knowing one’s father is often not a bad thing. Isis never went anywhere without Jane. Jane curled up at her feet during her readings, Jane was the only other ever to occupy her bed, Jane discreetly ate her table scraps. Their companionship was so fulfilling and complete, that it was no mystery to me why Isis shunned human contact.
Most of the people Isis gave readings to were strangers, either farmers who’d saved for months to make a pilgrimage to discover their destinies and their deaths, or river men from the passing steamboats looking to blow a month’s pay, unaware of what they were in for. But several people returned over and over to hear the same predictions. One of them was the aforementioned town priest. Poor priests are expected to have the answers to everyone’s problems while having no troubles themselves. Father didn’t believe in voodoo—he was as Catholic as they come—he just had nowhere else to go for advice. The problem was, he was in love with a thirteen-year-old prostitute named Evangeline.
Evangeline was a beautiful, perverse doll with blonde hair flowing down to her waist, enormous green eyes, and tiny, bow-shaped lips. She was the perfect whore—ageless and malleable as a toy. The river men who didn’t blow their pay on Isis spent it on Evangeline, and the time Evangeline didn’t spend in the employment of the river men, she passed in the arms of the priest. The pudgy, balding, uncertain priest disguised himself and hurried down the docks to the brothel, averting his eyes from everything but the dirt below his feet and mumbling the Lord’s Prayer. He pretended that the madam was Evangeline’s mother, that the other girls were her sisters, that she was twenty, not thirteen. He ignored the gaudy lingerie, the moans from next door, the rhythmic shifts of the bed in the room above them. He paid her, of course—her madam would have accepted nothing else—but Evangeline let him pretend to leave the money by accident.
Everyone in the town knew about Father’s dalliances with Evangeline. Some places wouldn’t have tolerated such behavior from a priest, but the townspeople forgave his behavior as long as he continued to say Mass at the regular times and play the pipe organ he’d brought with him to Gramercy. After service on Sundays, Father walked Isis home, since her mother wouldn’t accompany her to Mass. Isis gave him a reading after they got settled across from each other at the kitchen table where Isis always sat when she worked. The table was tiny, barely large enough for Isis and her mother to eat on together, and as scarred with her work as Isis was. The wood on her side was smooth, slightly worn with age, but the side where the customers sat was being scraped away by their nervous scratching. The priest worked from the bottom, hoping Isis wouldn’t see his anxiety, picking at a depression begun by someone before him. The surface on his end of the table was covered with pits, pot holes, and ditches from fingernails and pocket knives.
Isis predicted the same future for Father every time, though in the days between the readings, he’d pray for her to tell him something, anything else. I listened to the readings through a hole in the floor of my room above the kitchen and Father’s was the first one I eavesdropped on the second or third Sunday after I moved into the house.
“Hello Father. What would you like me to tell you today?” Hearing her voice always felt strange. She rarely spoke except when giving readings.
“What’s going to happen to me, Isis? Will I ever be free of her?” I could hear in his voice that he was shaking.
“Father, Evangeline will never return your love no matter what you do. It isn’t your fault. She lost her virginity so early that she’s incapable of feeling true affection for any man. You’ll never stop loving her and you’ll continue to visit the brothel bi-weekly and pay her for her company like the river-men for the rest of your days. You’ll never have sex with anyone else.” I was shocked at how frank she was speaking to a man over twice her age, who was possibly the only figure of authority in Gramercy, and could hear him sobbing. “You are and will continue to be a good priest, Father. You’ll help many people in your life, but you’ll never be able to help yourself.”
He departed that and each sequential reading in tears, slivers embedded in his finger-nails. When he left Isis’s kitchen, he cursed her as the Devil incarnate, but by the following Sunday morning, she was a prophet again.
The local butcher, Buck, was another regular patron whose troubles I listened to through the hole in the floor. He was a tall, fat man with a ruddy complexion due to his strict diet of red meat. Buck had a bizarre and crippling pity for the animals he slaughtered to feed the town each day. They haunted his dreams. Buck came to Isis so she would remind him that his terrified fantasies would never come true. He needed her to tell him that a herd of cattle wasn’t one day going to tear him to shreds with their flat teeth and digest him in their multiple stomachs, regurgitating his body to chew him up again and again for eternity. Buck’s career as a butcher hadn’t begun this way. Once, after several years in the profession, he’d accidently looked into the eye of a cow as he sawed off her head, which every butcher knows is incredible bad luck. He had his first nightmare about being eaten by cattle that night, and his fortunes declined rapidly. His new wife, a young, devout vegetarian from St. Louis, died a month later. She got a parasite from some ground beef Buck had snuck into her stew in frustration when he realized her city habits wouldn’t die with a simple change in location. He needed Isis desperately and each reading ended with him begging her to marry him, but each time Isis foretold that he would never remarry. His guilt over his wife’s death would chew him until he died.
My skepticism about her talent faded quickly. Before I came to Gramercy I considered myself well-traveled and well-educated. Fortune telling was just some backwards superstition, valuable only to anthropologists and the primitive country folks who might still be deluded enough to believe it. Living among people who believed so strongly in Isis’s predictions piqued my curiosity, and my curiosity killed me. It took months of listening to readings through the floor before I gained the courage to ask her for one. When I finally sat down to face her at the distressed side of the table my heart thumped erratically while my palms grew damp with the sweat of fear. No one should really know these things. She made eye contact with me for the first time since I’d moved into the room next to hers two months before. She didn’t slip into a fiendish trance or inhale mysterious powders or rub a crystal ball, she just talked.
“Hello, Jesse.” Hearing her say my name made my blood freeze. “You’re a doctor who knows nothing about medicine. You don’t care much sick people now, but you will. You won’t live here long; you’ll only stay a year longer. You’ll be unable to save the one sick person who you feel compelled to help. You’ll become addicted to the product you sell. And you’ll never understand me. You’ll never figure out what you think is wrong with me.” That was all. She waited for me to ask questions, but I raised my shivering, sweating body from the table and retreated to my room.
There was a boy once. He appeared shortly after Isis told my future, and I wonder if he was the one thing she didn’t see coming. He was the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. His name was Sid, and he was addicted to morphine out of boredom like many of the villagers, but unlike many of the villagers, he never took a reading and so didn’t have the assurance that it wouldn’t kill him. Sid was several years Isis’s junior, but she gave off an aura so ancient that even a grown man would’ve seemed younger in comparison. Sid looked as if he might’ve been strong before the addiction devastated him and had the dark tan produced by working outside. He wore the same tattered, baggy jeans and heavy work boots every day, sometimes with a stained tee shirt that had once been white, but most of the time shirtless. His ribcage and spine protruded from his scarred torso and he made no effort to hide his track marks. Sid came and sat next to Isis in the backyard each day after his morning fix, helping scatter chicken-feed before nodding off next to her, Jane purring between them. The only time I ever saw Isis smile was when he brought her an emaciated, consumptive black kitten he’d found by the docks. The flicker of joy that crossed Isis’s face scared me so much I was bedridden all afternoon. The kitten was christened Emily, and she was the only gift shared between them in their yearlong courtship.
Winona didn’t appear especially interested in the affair, which she needn’t have been since the two lovers never once made physical contact. I thought the first presence of a male in her daughter’s life might have been upsetting, or at least cause for some display of emotion, but Sid was present like a potted plant is present. Winona was probably happy that his semiconscious body kept the crows out of the yard while Isis gave her readings. Now I realize Sid could only have been hanging around because Isis was the only person who tolerated his sleepy presence. She would’ve been the perfect friend for anyone incapable of carrying on a conversation. But then, out of some kind of delusion that I’d never experienced before coming to Gramercy, I thought it to be nothing but love. I assumed Isis’s heart raced in anticipation when Sid appeared over the horizon, walking up the dirt road with a cloud of dust billowing out behind him in the red dawn light.
I had so much hope for them. I thought Sid might be able to help her; but truly, what man has ever been able to help a woman? Past delusions, so dearly held, can be frightening to consider. I took Sid aside one day, heading him off farther down the road than Isis could see, and warned him. “I’m a doctor,” I said. “That drug will kill you. More is never enough. Though you feel like Jesus Christ with the shot in your arm, no one else can see it, and never will.” My warning went unheeded as I knew it would. An enormous disregard for reality debilitated both Sid and Isis, and in each other they found someone to share their imaginary worlds with. This was more precious than cotton or whiskey or tobacco. It was more precious than gold.
My year in the town was fruitful and passed quickly. I made enough to pay Winona too much for my tiny room, but my interest in Isis kept me there. Sid was a steady part of the geography of the backyard from noon till sunset and I got a childish thrill from watching their courtship unfold, dysfunctional as it was. I attended Mass on Sunday because that’s what everyone else did, I bought meat from lonesome Buck, and even passed a few nights in the arms of infamous Evangeline. I observed Isis obsessively, but didn’t take another reading, and though I tried to talk to her, she never again spoke to me as frankly as she did that afternoon sitting at the kitchen table. My only passing interest in women had consisted of busty blonde whores and fresh young nurses at the hospital where I’d worked briefly, so my fascination with Isis couldn’t have been sexual, though now I consider the possibility that I was in love with her. During my second sticky summer on the river, Isis’s predictions for me came true.
One Sunday Sid didn’t come, and I knew before I was told what had happened. He’d overdosed on the docks and fallen into the dirty water below, needle still in his arm, rubber tube around his bicep. The devilish black kitten that’d been their single love gift died the same night. Jane carried Emily by the scruff of her lifeless neck and brought her to Isis’s bedside, mewling with fury, fluent in the language of woe. Isis had to have known it was going to happen. She knew what was going to happen to everyone. Her grief was astonishing. She’d always lived as if she were mourning a death, so most didn’t notice the changes that I saw. She wouldn’t sleep in the house anymore because that’s where she had been sleeping when Sid died. Now she slept in the chicken yard. She cultivated an unnerving habit of sleeping with her eyes open, sitting up, back straight as an arrow. It looked as if she were just sitting out there, staring off into the trees, as she did all day. You had to look closely to see the shallow, rhythmic breathing and the trickle of saliva her open mouth let drip down her chest and into her hair. I grieved with Isis because I hoped it would lighten her load and because I genuinely mourned the inevitable revelation that the future and possibilities I’d created for her and Sid were fantasy.
After that, I had to act. Isis could tell what would occur a hundred years in the future, as if no time at all would pass between the present and future event, but that year with Sid was her eternity, and when it ended, time for her would not continue. Isis’s previously fragile health was deteriorating. Winona appeared to notice no change, but I expected to find Isis dead around every corner. My affection for her, whether fatherly or romantic or who knows what, hit me like a freight train. My nerves were so shattered in the weeks following Sid’s death that I did what I’d sworn never to do—I sampled my own product. I wanted gradually to weasel my way into her confidence, then manipulate her into eating, into living, but she was shrinking too fast. How long can a human live without food? I tried to remember from a textbook I’d never opened. She surprised me by not being surprised when I approached her about her disorder, which not a soul had previously mentioned to her, much less described it as a serious problem. Her large, dark eyes studied the floorboards. “I’m not hungry.”
“If you don’t eat something soon, Isis, you’ll die.” She looked at me vacantly, comprehending nothing. She picked up Jane, draped the cat over her shoulders, and went outside to feed the chickens.
Thus began my militant, desperate attempts to heal her. Just as she’d predicted, I needed to help her, but lacked the skills. Each morning I woke her with a tray of milk, tea, and buttered toast. She sat in her stiff posture, feet tucked underneath her in the dirt, and ripped the toast into small pieces, pretending to eat while she slipped bits of bread to Jane and the chickens. I brought her snacks, attempting various combinations of food and drink at different times of day, frantic to find something she’d like. Nothing appealed to her. I tried talking to her about it, both as a doctor and as the friend I wished I was. During my lectures she’d stare at me in utter confusion with furrowed brows, only to excuse herself without responding.
I started force-feeding her in furtive struggling moments when I didn’t think we’d be seen. My rashness, violence, and fear shocked me. I chewed the food in my mouth, then shoved it into hers like a bird, and her pathetic attempts to fight against me broke my heart. I considered approaching Winona, but was afraid she’d think I was a little too interested in her young daughter and silence me with the same shovel she’d used on her troublesome husband. Winona infuriatingly continued her daily chores like always. I imagined she’d done this through every hardship she encountered, pretending like it didn’t exist until it died. Her refusal to acknowledge Isis’s brittle health made me wonder whether I might’ve been imagining the weight loss in some kind of insane hallucination. Each morning I grabbed Isis’s wrist to pull her behind the chicken coop and the sensation of her bones in my fist grounded me. I wasn’t imagining it. Isis had been skeletal before, but now her bones were consuming her flesh. The grey dress hung more loosely, enveloping her and concealing her slow death. Her face resembled a haunting, beautiful sugar skull.
I failed as she’d said I would. Isis starved to death, and no one was surprised. No matter how many times my fingers pried open her jaws and stuffed food past her small, pointed teeth, nothing stuck. Even if I restrained her through the night to make sure she didn’t throw it up, the nourishment wouldn’t take. When I came into the yard that morning, I didn’t notice at first. Isis sat in her usual place looking out to the tobacco fields. She never turned to look at me when she breathed, so I took my silent seat next to her, fingering the crushed up crackers in my pocket that I was going to force down her throat. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until I stole a glance at her eyes. Those enormous, bug-like black orbs had dried up, and her skin was shriveled. She looked like a dried-out sea creature for sale in one of those tourist shops down river, near the ocean. The rudimentary autopsy later verified that Isis died with her virginity fully intact, never having tasted a passion for anything but her cat’s calico fur. Jane screamed and yowled for three days in the most horrific mourning ever suffered by any creature, then disappeared. I suspect she drowned herself in the river, but I never could find her. Winona methodically dealt with her daughter’s death like other household chores.
All of Gramercy came for the funeral. The casket was closed in the most sensitive gesture Winona had ever done for her daughter. Isis would’ve never wanted all those people staring at her, trapped in a pine box. Sid and the cats were glaringly absent, it seemed Isis and everything she cared about had died at the same time. Winona put on her finest dress and high heeled shoes that I’d never seen her wear. She looked a little fatigued since she’d been up all night preparing a monstrous feast for the wake, but otherwise was stoic like always. Buck was there, sitting at the opposite end of the front pew, and he cried louder than anyone, his large stomach threatening to burst out of his black shirt with every sob. Evangeline and her madam were there. Evangeline wore a modest, black dress and no makeup, platinum hair tucked into a tight bun. I’d never seen her in anything but her whore’s costume, and she looked so beautiful I choked on my own saliva. Every man in the church stared at her through the service except the priest. Father didn’t look up from his Bible even when he wasn’t reading from it. He read some verses that I didn’t recognize or pay attention to and played a few notes on the organ. He was nervous, but I’d never seen him relaxed, so I’d assumed that anxiety was his usual state. He paused halfway through the service and finally looked up from his Bible, into the crowd.
“Some people here may not know this, but I’ve spent a lot of time with Isis. My relationship with her is something that might be seen as sinful by those who like to speculate about things they don’t know. Isis possessed a gift that I don’t understand, but she helped me more than anyone I’ve ever known. Even God.”
Evangeline stared at him, enormous eyes wide in alarm, from the back of the church, but he didn’t return her gaze. He looked around as if he didn’t know what else to say, then set down his Bible and strode down the center aisle, out of the church. All was silent for a few seconds, and then Buck started wailing with renewed vigor. Winona rose, glared at Buck in disgust, and told the crowd she’d be serving lunch in the lobby. The clicking of her shoes on the tile echoed against the church walls. Everyone except Buck and I gathered their belongings and wandered, chattering, through the huge, heavy doors.
Winona asked me to move out so she could mourn the death of her daughter, and because it wouldn’t be proper for a man and woman in our situation to be living together alone. I would’ve left anyway, there was no longer any incentive for me to stay there and peddle drugs to the citizens of Gramercy.
My struggle to heal Isis so consumed me that I lost all sense of direction. I moved to another town further south and took to walking up and down the river bank, searching for Jane’s body and fantasizing about the filthy depths. I took to the same morphine that had killed Isis’s only sweetheart. Her only other sweetheart. I’m not sure whether I am one or if I have one. The drug travels the rivers and canals of my body like the steamboats, bringing sustenance, excitement, and something to watch from the muddy banks. I am shrinking like Isis, and I like it. It helps. I can’t bear this much weight.
