Don’t you think, my gentle Jack?
But no answer follows, only a splash. Which makes a sort of marriage.
FADE UP INTO:
TABLEAU FOURTEEN: LETHE
The RIVER’S steady ebb and flow, giving way to the WHEELS of a traveling gurney. It STOPS, with a screech.
MEDICAL STUDENT
You’ll swear to its freshness?
MORGUE ATTENDANT
Dead a day at most, sir—and there’s nobody will miss its company, neither, not even were they to check the roster. Still, I wouldn’t worry too hard over legality, I was you . . . your professors turn a blind eye already, don’t they? Only stands to reason the law’ll soon follow.
(He folds back the sheet)
So. How d’you find her?
MEDICAL STUDENT
Very beautiful indeed. A suicide?
MORGUE ATTENDANT
Picked from the river just this morning. Unlucky in love, as the old cant goes—but we can’t know that, can we, sir? Be nobody left upright in London, if that was all it took.
MEDICAL STUDENT
I suppose not.
(A pause)
One always wants to say words over a body; death should mean more than just a chance for further study. And yet . . . any eulogy I
might consider seems so trite next to the sight of her lying there
like that, all alone. So—cold.
MORGUE ATTENDANT
It’s a cold old world. Ain’t it?
MEDICAL STUDENT
. . . I suppose.
He SIGHS, reaching for his scalpel.
A FEAST FOR DUST
All that summer so far there had been no real hint of precipitation, just drought, flame, and the ash it left behind, cut with intermittent rumors of blood falling from the air.
As the place he’d started off from fell further behind, in every new township that Sheriff Jenkins added to his hastily drafted map of the surrounding territories, he found men and women who prayed for rain ever more desperately, berating first the Injuns who no longer occupied their lands, then whatever strangers were unlucky enough to wander by, then God and the Devil in turn, before finally turning—only at the last—on themselves.
Storm’s coming, he’d tell them, once he’d done enough to grab their attention—then find himself constrained to add, after they inevitably greeted such a prediction with hopeful pleasure: No, not that sort, sad to say; what it’s bringin’ is something you in no wise want, let alone him who brings it. Which is why you need to look to your sins and own your secret guilts right now, folks, this very instant, ‘fore the curse of self-deception all but assures the bulk of you end up the way we did, back home . . .