The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Published: 2005-12-15T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

We take Zalman to the emergency room in David’s Oldsmobile, which has a backseat large enough for Zalman to put his leg up and still leave enough room for Bethesda to sit next to him.

“Man, this thing’s a boat,” Nat says with grudging admiration. “What’s it got under the hood?”

“A 307-inch V-8 engine,” David says, swinging the car out the front gates onto the main road. “It was my dad’s. He was a clothing salesman—east Texas and Oklahoma territory—and liked a big trunk for samples.”

“And liked a good cigar, as well, I might venture,” Zalman says from the back, his eyes closed.

“That’s right. Havana Montecristos, when he could get ’em. How’s that leg feeling, Zalman?”

“Delightful, just delightful.”

Before we left, Nat had run upstairs to his room and emptied his supply of Percocets (left over from a back injury last year, he told us) into his pockets and fed two to Zalman with a bottle of Saratoga Spring Water he’d grabbed from the kitchen. The pills seemed to have an almost instantaneous effect on the poet. “Would anyone like to hear the poem I composed today?” he asks, waving the cobalt-blue water bottle in the air.

I’m scrunched in between David and Nat on the long bench seat up front, but I turn and try to catch Bethesda’s eye. She hasn’t said a word since I left her with Zalman in the crypt and her silence is beginning to get on my nerves. “I think we overheard part of it,” I say to her. “Do you remember, Bethesda?” She tilts her head and assumes the same upward-glancing pose that she assumed in the children’s cemetery when quoting from Aurora Latham’s journal. She even moves her lips as if mouthing something she’s listening to, and then finally she breaks her silence to recite: “ ‘When water’s heart is silver, it will beat / so silently it can’t be found through sound.’ ”

Zalman presses the blue bottle to his heart and then extends it toward Bethesda as if offering her a toast. “I am honored to be remembered,” he says, and then begins to nod off. I exchange a worried glance with Nat (Bethesda’s eyes are still trained on the roof of the Oldsmobile), and he raises his voice loud enough to pierce Zalman’s Percocet fog.

“I, for one, would like to hear the rest of that poem, Zalman.” I murmur my assent and nudge David to do the same. Zalman opens his eyes and, fixing them on the blue bottle in his hand as if it were the source of his inspiration, recites from the beginning.

“When water’s heart is silver it will beat

so silently it can’t be found through sound,

nor echo nor, since hidden underground,

by sight of stone-veined pulse; it can defeat

all those who seek its dripping, chill retreat.

Yet water must still rise and seek the ground

in tiny tributaries, circling round,

until their throbbing pattern’s made complete.

Such mysteries the earth secretes away

below the streams that merge and run to seas,

in honor of Egeria’s sad day

and destiny of tears that never cease.

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