Free Savage Love by Douglas Glover Page B

Decimal System), and as a result immersed herself in his shadow, becoming adept as a promoter of her husband’s work, hosting exactly the kinds of superbly catered, hideously expensive soirees and dinner parties that Nedlinger abhorred yet required to advance his career as a forensic archaeologist; indeed it has been said that were it not for Melusina Nedlinger’s work would never have achieved the mass recognition that propelled him into the A-list of world-class intellectuals.
    I went to see Nedlinger after she died, as I say, when he was recuperating incommunicado at the farmhouse where, increasingly as his fame burgeoned, he had sought solitude and silence; there was no television, no telephone, no cellphone signal, no Internet and no mail delivery, circumstances that Melusina complained of relentlessly when, as was her habit, she hiked across the intervening fields to visit me — now alone after the sad passing of the old folks, who had died tragically in a barn collapse deemed unsuspicious by a coroner’s inquest. No one answered when I knocked at Nedlinger’s door, but I let myself in, as usual, calling, “Hallooo!” and combing room after room until I found him in his bedroom, stretched on the counterpane in Carhartt coveralls and Greb Kodiak farmer boots caked with mud, listening to Cape Breton fiddle music with earphones, his hands folded neatly and chastely over his protuberant belly. His eyes were closed and the volume turned up; he did not notice me at first.
    A desk buttressed the wall, littered with a half-dozen laptops, stacks of books and the latest forensic archaeological magazines, page corners turned down or marked with festoons of multicoloured plastic flags, marmalade jars full of pens and highlighters — also several containing foreign currency (labelled) — mousetraps, plates with sandwich remains, drink glasses empty or half filled with cloudy fluids, the sharp smell of onions in the air mixed with mildew (there were shelves on three walls, stacked with more books, and several leak spots in the ceiling); the floor was strewn with stone implements (arrowheads, augers, knives, axe heads, adzes), potsherds, bits of bone, neatly tagged but helter-skelter, so that there was nowhere to walk.
    I glanced at the exposed beams, the steel hooks (the previous owners, a couple of retired grade school teachers from Toronto, had apparently practised some sort of S&M role playing) from which, ghastly as it seems, Melusina had suspended herself, expecting, the story went, Nedlinger to arrive momentarily from the kitchen with his nightly Scotch and soda, a mistaken assumption as it turned out, because instead of padding up the stairs with his drink, Nedlinger, on the night in question, had paused in his study, taking out his magnifying glass to examine photographs he had made of the Royal Child, the very same dead Indian baby that had long lain in its sandy cradle inside the glass case on my family’s dining room table in the farmhouse next door. Something had occurred to him, some doubt about his earlier theorizing, for he went to a bookcase and began to reread his book on the Southwold Earthworks, the story of the extinct, possibly legendary Neutral Indians (not what they called themselves), the famous sun-worshippers, deer-herding warrior-farmers, destroyers of the Fire People and the Cat tribe south of Lake Erie, soon to be destroyed themselves by marauding Seneca and microbes transmitted by the Jesuits.
    While Nedlinger perused his old work, now in its thirty-seventh printing with multiple translations and worldwide distribution — not to mention the feature film starring Nick Nolte as the Neutral chief (name translated as Sun, Sun Lord, Sunshine, Ray Of Sunlight, Cloudless Day, Naked In The Sun) and Jennifer Lopez as Morning Rain That Comes After The Night Of Clouds From The Day Before In The West (I myself wrote a small paper on Neutral meteorology as evidenced in their