Afterlives Joel Sherman Washington University in St
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Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-2017 Afterlives Joel Sherman Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Sherman, Joel, "Afterlives" (2017). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1073. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1073 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Writing Program Afterlives by Joel Sherman A thesis presented to The Graduate School of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts May 2017 St. Louis, Missouri © 2017, Joel Sherman Table of Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii Hiems .............................................................................................................................................. 1 Silver City ..................................................................................................................................... 13 Counterclaims ............................................................................................................................... 23 James A. Garfield.......................................................................................................................... 39 The Butcher ................................................................................................................................... 43 Honeymoon ................................................................................................................................... 53 Festival of Masks .......................................................................................................................... 61 Habitat Suites ................................................................................................................................ 65 Gulf Coast ..................................................................................................................................... 75 Intracoastal .................................................................................................................................... 91 Afterlife ....................................................................................................................................... 101 ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis for the support and guidance that have led to these stories. Special thanks to my thesis committee, Danielle Dutton, Marshall Klimasewiski, and Kathryn Davis, who helped these stories improve immeasurably from the workshop to the thesis, and whose patience and encouragement have helped me grow so much as a writer over the past two years. I would also like to thank the members of my fiction cohort for being thorough, generous readers. Finally, thanks to my family for their love and kindness, which have sustained the writing of this collection. iii Hiems Having earned his freedom, Hiems felt it a likely time to find a wife. Providence led him to the island that he knew as Saint Domingue, where he lived outside the town of Petit Goave, which at the time was a town of pirates and privateers. These men went by different names: boucaniers, after their tradition of coming ashore to hunt wild cattle and swine, and then building a boucan, a smokehouse. Or else they were called flibustiers, a funny-looking word from the Dutch. These men were colorful and loud like the island’s birds, and they sounded like those birds especially when they called out the town’s name: petty gwav! petty gwav! Our man Hiems had been one of these flibustiers; but, by the time he went looking for a wife, he no longer thought of himself as such. Hiems wrote the word ‘planter’ next to his name on the marriage contract. Next to that, his new wife’s name, Madeleine, written in a controlled curving script, probably the Governor General’s intendant. Hiems’ own signature is composed of short erratic strokes. He was educated, but by this time not much used to writing. The contract dates from sixteen eighty-three and is the first document we have that officially records his existence. And so, let’s begin Hiems’ 1 story with his marriage. We can picture him standing with forty or fifty other men on the beach. Hiems presses into the wet, coarse sand with the toe of his boot. He feels it compress with a slight crunch, like snow, something he hasn’t seen since his youth. The Governor General of the Islands has arranged for one hundred women volunteers of marriageable age to sail from France to Petit Goave, well-known as a “Sanctuary and Asylum of all People of desperate Fortunes.” The Governor General does not want these women to step onto the island unmarried. A freshly built wooden pier juts into the turtle-green water. The men wait, restless on the shoreside, shifting their weight onto one foot and then back. Many do not wear shoes. Many wear clothes that have been stolen. Hiems notices more than one piece of linen that has a former owner’s blood still stained around a hole or a tear. First one rowboat and then a second tie up at the far end of the pier. Women clamber from the boats but stay huddled together over the water. Hiems can tell from the way they sway side to side that their Crossing saw rough seas. The rowboats crawl back across the bay to the ship anchored there. They return with more women. Two Capuchin fathers, overseers of the whitewashed church, stand in their brown robes like gateposts between the women and the men who wait ashore. Tropical clouds press down, balanced atop the green hills, like ships run aground on a bottom of rotten boulders. Hiems listens to men around him speak in French, Spanish, English. The man nearest Hiems holds forth to no one in particular. Hiems thinks at first the man is speaking a language he does not know, but then, looking at the man’s mouth, he realizes the man is missing most of his tongue. 2 The women form a line along one side of the pier. A man whom Hiems takes to be one of the Governor General’s intendants, marked by his clean, fitted coat of green velvet, walks down the line. He speaks to the women in a quiet voice, inaudible above the surf. The men have slowly formed a sort of queue before the Capuchin fathers. The intendant addresses them from the top of the steps that lead to the pier. The purpose of the day is marriage, he says. The women have the right of refusal. Once a match is agreed upon, the fathers will bless the union. Before man and wife can take their leave, a fee must be paid—a livre or escudo or an equivalent coin. The intendant will not accept pearls or precious stones or unminted metal. Hiems thumbs the gold coin in his palm. It fits perfectly into the calloused flesh, as if by design. The Mistress Wright gave him the coin, and encouraged him, just short of an order, to come here this morning. The first man in the queue makes his way up the steps. He walks along the pier’s edge opposite the women. He is just far enough away that if he raised his arm perpendicular to his body, and the women did the same, their fingertips might touch. The man reaches the pier’s far end. He turns around. He stops in front of a woman. A moment later and the low tones of a Latin blessing hum in the heavy air. The man and the woman stop before the intendant, who now sits at a small table on the pier. The man hands over his gold coin and the intendant records the union in his book. The queue ebbs. Some of the men walk quickly down the pier, some slowly. Some look straight at the women, some look only down. Some walk all the way to the pier’s end, where two posts rise up like two more gateposts framing the bay. Some men walk only part way down before they stop and take a woman from the line. One man stops before a woman and reaches out and takes her face in his hand as he 3 might handle an orange on the branch. Hiems has seen men like this before, at the stews, at the auctions. He has seen men reach for other men’s throats with almost the same gesture, the same curve of the hand. The man without a tongue mounts the steps. Hiems can see him worrying the gold between his fingers. Hiems wonders how the tongueless man came into the gold. Not for the first time Hiems thinks about the difficulty of determining who might have wealth. The tongueless man stops before one woman and then another. He pauses and keeps walking. He reaches the end and turns around. His steps are heavy on the boards, and he is saying something in his garbled voice, his face pointed upward at the low clouds. He stops before a third woman. Hiems sees her lower her head. The tongueless man steps forward and pushes her bodily off the pier and into the clear water. Her skirts spread like an oil slick. Two men wade out and help her to shore. Two other men rush onto the pier and drag the tongueless man away. And now Hiems is at the front of the queue. He walks past the two priests, who stand calm