The Outcasts Read Online Free PDF Page A

and could then distance itself from the terrifying experiences of ice-water baths, forced feedings, and painful restraints by reducing the nurses, doctors, and other inmates to mere points in space.
    She had come to stand in front of the plate-glass window of a grain store and paused to study her reflection: a woman in a plain cotton dress and a paisley shawl drawn modestly over her shoulders. A man soon came to stand next to her. She sensed him watching her reflection, waiting for her to smile, to turn her head and speak. Instead she stepped away and walked to a hotel set back from the train station.
    She took a room, paying for hot water to be brought for a bath. Soon a large tin washtub was brought in by a gaunt, harried woman, along with just enough scalding water to fill it a quarter of the way. The woman then brought a bucket of well water, a chip of soap, and a cloth for drying. She admonished Lucinda not to overturn the bucket and left in a huff when Lucinda asked for more hot water.
    Lucinda removed her clothes and sat waist-deep in the water, her legs drawn up almost to her chin. It was not in any true form a bathtub, and yet the heat on her skin was the most pleasure she had had in weeks. Wrapping her arms around her shinbones, she rested her head on her knees and breathed deeply as though sleeping.
    She thought of the letter, and of the letter writer, telling her to come to the Lamplighter Hotel in Houston. She thought of his hands as he wrote the letter, the fingers slender and tapered with beautiful nails like a woman’s, and of the long lean bones of his thighs, the hollow of his throat, the jutting ridge of the collarbone.
    He had first come to her during her time at Mrs. Landry’s, setting his coins in two neat stacks on the dresser. They had lain together twice with hardly a word spoken apart from the erupting sounds of release and polite good-byes. He was clean, restrained, mannerly.
    But on his third visit, a violent fit had overtaken her as she began to undress, and, panting and jerking, she begged him to leave. The few men who had previously witnessed the onset of symptoms had scrabbled for the door as though she had called out, Typhoid. But he carried her to the bed and laid her down, stripped her until she was fully naked. He lay on top of her, still wearing his trousers and jacket, holding her thrashing head cupped tightly between his palms. He brought his face close to hers and tracked her eyes with his own.
    He asked, “Are you dying?” His breath was over her grimacing mouth, and she believed that she was. His palms pressed more tightly into her temples to stop the spasms, and he asked her again if she was dying. She was in the full measure of her sickness, with no control of any part of her body other than the erratic pumping of air in and out of her lungs. His weight had become unbearable, even with the bucking movement of her body, but when she closed her eyes, he pried the lids open with his thumbs, saying, “Look at me.”
    He smiled, his lips parted with a kind of wondrous expectation, as though he had come to peer into a small pit but instead found a fissure of unknowable depth. He spoke to her, saying, “Here, here,” not the calling of a parent to a wandering child but a demand for her to keep her eyes open and focused on his.
    That she would die from her malady, Lucinda had no doubt. Uncontrollably pitched from a landing, or stairs, or even from her own bed, she would one day strike and crack her skull. Perhaps she would lie in the bottom of a bathtub, flailing and twitching, like some boneless sea creature, slowly drowning in terrified helplessness.
    But as he pressed himself over her, the dark irises of his eyes inches from hers, she began to feel a retreat from fear, a blankness of soul. She never fully lost consciousness and was keenly aware of the skin of her belly incised with the sharp edges of his belt, the buttons of his coat imprinted on her ribs and breast.
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