Free Church of Marvels: A Novel by Leslie Parry Page A

know when he was gone?
    He took the stairs two at a time to Mrs. Izzo’s door. She’d be up at this hour, he knew. She lived alone now and had trouble sleeping. Last year Chester had left for work in San Francisco—he’d locomoted all the way across the country, even seen a herd of buffalo running alongside the train. For a while he’d written home every week and sent back a little money. Sylvan—who had learned to read simple lines of English over the years, studying everything from timetables to signboards to newspaper fish-wrap—would read the letters aloud as he sat at Mrs. Izzo’s table, drinking blackberry tea. He would linger over each sentence, inventing what he couldn’t decipher, eliding what he couldn’t explain. Then he’d write a letter for her in return, taking dictation while she licked at her thumbs and polished some brooches and braided a dead woman’s hair. He tidied up her sentences, or used different words when he didn’t know how to spell hers, and secretly embroidered the banal block gossip. He knew it wasn’t fair, but he wanted Chester, wherever he was, to be jealous. He wanted New York to seem exclusive—a potent, faraway thrill. It ate at him. How had Chester Izzo, with his weedy pallor and glutinous, nearsighted eyes, been the one to get out?
    And he hated how much he loved Chester’s letters—he hated picturing Chester fat and happy, smoking a cigar in the lobby of a gold-rush hotel, gazing down at rickshaws and pelicans and strands of orange lights. He hated how his own voice sounded when he asked Mrs. Izzo if she’d had word from him, how pitched and needy, and how pleased Mrs. Izzo looked when she answered him. But then the letters stopped coming. He’s very busy, I’m sure, Mrs. Izzo would say. He’s getting himself rich . But eventually Chester Izzo didn’t writeanymore, he didn’t send money, and her lies grew more fanciful and elaborate.
    Sylvan stood there in the heat, smelling the steam that drifted up from the windows of the oyster house. He knocked on Mrs. Izzo’s door—a quick rap—and heard footsteps on the other side. The door cracked open, just an inch, and Mrs. Izzo peered out. If the weather had a face, he thought, it would be hers—a stormy mass of graying hair, veins forking down her temples, and a calm, round visage, the color of burnished gold.
    “Sylvan!” She beamed. “Good loot this week?”
    “I need your help.” He leaned in, so close he could smell the glue and silver polish on her skin, and told her what had happened. Without a word she swung open the door and ushered him inside.
    In the ancient waterfront house, with its salt-cracked shingles and smoky parlor, Mrs. Izzo set quickly to work. She cleared off a table, set water to boil, and took the baby into her arms. Sylvan sat down at her workbench, sore. He stared at the hanks of hair that hung from the rafters, at her easel with its bobbins and weights and its elegant, half-finished braid. Under a bell jar was the likeness of a seahorse, woven in colors of rust and straw—even the fins were articulated in strands of gossamer blond. It was for a widowed sailor, Mrs. Izzo had told him. He ran a hand through his own sweaty hair, pulling and twisting as the baby cried louder.
    Mrs. Izzo checked the heat of the baby’s skin and dabbed the mucus from her eyes. She put an ear to her chest and listened to her heart and her lungs. The baby kicked and began to wail.
    “What is it?” Sylvan asked.
    “Fever.” Mrs. Izzo stuck her finger into a liquor jug and let the baby suckle it, then told him to fetch some things from the kitchen: “Cinnamon—ground up—a rag and a bit of oil.”
    He rummaged through the cabinets while Mrs. Izzo laid the baby on the table and peeled away the wet cloth. She swaddled herin a fresh rag-diaper and cotton blanket, then mixed the ointment.
    Sylvan heard pots clanging in the rooms below, the sandy crack of shells. Steam began to drift up between the