Hornbook
Jason Schwartz
The word adultery derives from cry—which calls to mind, certainly, the way the blanket folded back—and from alter, rather than altar, via reave—though I flatter myself that this provides a correct measure of evidence. Nor does the wood, worse still—Queen Anne at the bottom of the stairs; Martha Washington at the knife box, with a bonnet top and a pierced apron. The posts, don’t you know, later became caskets, just as the headstones later became roads, even if skulduggery derives from neither skull nor grave—the latter, incidentally, the name of both a town in Pennsylvania, where, as I fancy it, he was born, and where, as it now appears, they stopped, and of, more happily, an early children’s game—bleach and stack the bones; carve the hearts in the soil; place the mice inside.
I recall a pause of some sort.
Criminal conversation, as the common notion, and as the preferred legal term— preferred here a ruptured version of something lovelier, hers or his, while ruptured, now that we have it, revives for me too keenly that awful fall—dates from the seventeenth century, in America at least, in a house in Pennsylvania, in an ash bed, in—to contort the conceit further—a torn gown. If only it were, say, iron and wool, rather than fourposter and silk, and, say, embroidered hornets, rather than blood—”to live with,” in the preferred definition, or “to live on,” alone there at the top of the stairs. But the staircase and the bed, remember, later became theirs, or, better still, were lost to us, a less noisome phrase, this, even if it neglects the fire. Evidently hearts once required a burnt deck, like heartsette, which added a wound, and like matrimony, for the lonely—but unlike blind girl, in which the hearts were marked out.
Were this a medical, rather than a marital, history—you might then excuse so conspicuous a series.
And what follows:
Miniatures sometimes left spaces in place of them. Or, more often, congregations of figures, usually in blue dye. These could evoke other bodies, but were not always akin to surgical inscriptions of the day. Models of hearts appeared in wood, then brass, then gold. Or ormolu, according to the victim, as in the case of several Hessian officers. Eventually they were chipped away for kindling or melted down for buckshot, but most hospital documents omit discussion of this.
Even early primers compare the heart’s shape to a fist or to a hand waving goodbye.
Matrimonial law, such as it was, and such as it obtained, in particular, at Hunt and Bonelawn and Cripplegate, among other towns less beguilingly named, required excision at the knuckle—one was made to kneel at the foot of the bed, to remove the ring; one was asked to present the family ax—or, in what was thought a more genteel tradition, a white rope at the throat. It was silk on certain occasions, wool on others, like this one, tartan, say, bars of whatever kind—the rot of little consequence now, I am beginning to think. The scarf and the gloves—terribly evident, still, as she had arrived late, or he had, a door there at the far end of a corridor—were becoming, though not black, no, not in the manner of the apron, painted something closer to gray, actually, or of the cannon, which was played with four hands on an embalmer’s table.
She kept her rings in the knife box.
The term scar letter, referring neither to the quaint habit of quotation apparent in some later argument—”I wear my hair in a scar”—nor to the notion that the dark shapes on a page resemble rows of scars, disappears from dictionaries in the eighteenth century. As does horn, incidentally, at least in the sense of gallows—the planks, let us imagine, emblazoned with names. The caskets—now, I cannot beg off altogether—were marked with charcoal, the chains in arrangement near the little figures, which may indicate a measure of affection, or, given what had befallen them—the history of the malady; the form of contagion—the northern cell, notable at that time for its bone hooks and bronze grille, the former engraved with ardent phrases.
Absent, however, were matters of marriage, a house.
And the rest of the evidence retreats, as I do, from the bodies:
Children sometimes left rats in place of them. Various sadnesses, if not bad weather, attended their arrival. Knives were found in the graves, though the posts were never mistaken for skeletons. Patterns of letters and emblems, probably imprinted on the skin, were presented by way of explanation. Evidently they were akin to bridal inscriptions of the day. Ahatchet on end; a musket aflame; a dagger pointing south.
But to liken these to the designs on the bedsheets, even were I to omit the blotches of red, indistinct at so great a distance anyway—that would effect too lavish a comparison.
Cuckoldry, my proper topic, introduces fewer such obstructions, as, in this cawe have a cleaver, rather than a hat—rather does merit something further by now, deriving, if a bit circuitously, from jackal, and thus suggesting, among more obvious notions, those portraits of mauled boys—and faces painted on shutters, painted on doors, and, in the better houses, carved into walls. If only the wallpaper had offered as ample a distraction—or simply a fabric like the gown’s, with bleak little seams. Let us propose that the blanket had, implying, despite the color, some custom of theirs, her garments arranged in a particular way—matrimony, incidentally, once required widow’s weeds, and, at least in the earliest versions, crosses of moths, pinned—or a brief event at the foot of the bed.
I recall the house, from the outside, at night.
The word adultery does not, in fact, derive from cry—just as you had suspected—and the room, I will concede, suitably antique, and quiet now, stands in lieu of ruin, come what may, these stains—cheerfully small—on the blade of the paring knife. The ax was silver on certain occasions, brass on others, according to the family—the face always engraved with names and the helve burnt at the notch. These later became bannisters, which later became posts, row after row after row, as in a consoling preamble or a fable about gallows and towns—”the wife loves the husband”; “the child dies.” Even if, by the nineteenth century, altar would seem far more likely, white as it is, despite the common associations—oath, from the first, preferred locution, and fall, alone there at the door and in the road, from the last.