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And there, too, in that field of marigolds, he saw himself contrasting amid
the red and golden yellow beneath him. Naked, with his pale flesh exposed above
the flowers, he resembled a brittle skeleton covered by a thin veneer of rice
paper. Gone were the vestments of his retirement–the woolens, the tweeds, the
reliable clothing he had worn daily since before the Great War, throughout the
second Great War, and into his ninety-third year. His flowing hair had been
shorn to the scalp, and his beard was reduced to a stubble on his jutting chin
and sunken cheeks. The canes that aided his ambling–the very canes placed across
his lap inside the library–had vanished as well within his dreaming. But he
remained standing, even as his constricting throat blocked passage and his
breathing became impossible. Only his lips moved, stammering noiselessly for
air. Everything else–his body, the blossoming flowers, the clouds up
high–offered no perceptible movement, all of it made static save those quivering
lips and a solitary worker bee roaming its busy black legs about a creased
forehead.
Chapter 2
Holmes gasped, waking. His eyelids lifted, and he glanced around the library
while clearing his throat. Then he inhaled deeply, noting the slant of waning
sunlight coming from a west-facing window: the resulting glow and shadow cast
across the polished slats of the floor, creeping like clock hands, just enough
to touch the hem of the Persian rug underneath his feet, told him it was
precisely 5:18 in the afternoon.
"Have you stirred?" asked Mrs. Munro, his young housekeeper, who stood
nearby, her back to him.
"Quite so," he replied, his stare fixing on her slight form–the long hair
pushed into a tight bun, the curling dark brown wisps hanging over her slender
neck, the straps of her tan apron tied at her rear. From a wicker basket placed
on the library table, she took out bundles of correspondence (letters bearing
foreign postmarks, small packages, large envelopes), and, as instructed to do
once a week, she began sorting them into appropriate stacks based on size.
"You was doing it in your nap, sir. That choking sound–you was doing it,
same as before you went. Should I bring water?"
"I don't believe it is required at present," he said, absently clutching both
canes.
"Suit yourself, then."
She continued sorting–the letters to the left, the packages in the middle,
the larger envelopes on the right. During his absence, the normally sparse table
had filled with precarious stacks of communication. He knew there would
certainly be gifts, odd items sent from afar. There would be requests for
magazine or radio interviews, and there would be pleas for help (a lost pet, a
stolen wedding ring, a missing child, an array of other hopeless trifles best
left unanswered). Then there were the yet-to-be-published manuscripts:
misleading and lurid fictions based on his past exploits, lofty explorations in
criminology, galleys of mystery anthologies–along with flattering letters asking
for an endorsement, a positive comment for a future dust jacket, or, possibly,
an introduction to a text. Rarely did he respond to any of it, and never did he
indulge journalists, writers, or publicity seekers.
Still, he usually perused every letter sent, examined the contents of every
package delivered. That one day a week–regardless of a season's warmth or
chill–he worked at the table while the fireplace blazed, tearing open envelopes,
scanning the subject matter before crumpling the paper and throwing it into the
flames. The gifts, however, were put aside, set carefully into the wicker basket
for Mrs. Munro to give to those who organized charitable works in the town. But
if a missive addressed a specific interest, if it avoided servile praise and
smartly addressed a mutual fascination with what concerned him most–the
undertakings of producing a queen from a worker bee's egg, the health benefits
of royal jelly, perhaps a new insight regarding the cultivation of ethnic
culinary herbs like prickly ash (nature's far-flung oddities, which, as he
believed royal jelly did, could stem the needless atrophy that often beset an
elderly body and mind)–then the letter stood a fair chance of being spared
incineration; it might find its way into his coat pocket instead, remaining
there until he found himself at his attic study desk, his fingers finally
retrieving the letter for further consideration. Sometimes these lucky letters
beckoned him elsewhere: an herb garden beside a ruined abbey near Worthing,
where a strange hybrid of burdock and red dock thrived; a bee farm outside of
Dublin, bestowed by chance with a slightly acidic, though not unpalatable, batch
of honey as a result of moisture covering the combs one particularly warm
season; most recently, Shimonoseki, a Japanese town that offered specialty
cuisine made from prickly ash, which, along with a diet of miso paste and
fermented soybeans, seemed to afford the locals sustained longevity (the need
for documentation and firsthand knowledge of such rare, possibly life-extending
nourishment being the chief pursuit of his solitary years).
Excerpted from A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin Copyright © 2005 by Mitch Cullin. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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