“No actual word. Like widow or orphan, what I meant, for something that happens all the time. You got a brother, one of you will outlive the other. Or a sister, I guess.”
“There’s not a word for a lot of things,” said Joe Wear.
“Sure,” said Roy Truitt.
Joe Wear put his arms out like divining rods and breathed in. He shut his eyes. “Here’s where my counter was,” he said.
“I remember that counter. How’s it feel?”
“Can’t tell. Like nothing. Like I was never here.”
“Story of my life,” said Roy Truitt.
“Yours? Take the alley but leave me that. It was my story. This place! Hey,” said Joe Wear, looking up, and he saw her. “Well. Well, Bertha now.”
“That unholy object.”
“Careful. I made her. Can we—you got something to take her down.”
“Probably. Let me look. You made her? Guess I heard you were an artist.”
“Her arms and legs. Your grandfather—your step-grandfather—he made the rest.”
“He wasn’t an artist.”
“No,” said Joe Wear. “A doctor. Minna’s father. Dr. Sprague. An educated man, like yourself. Surely your mother—”
“My family wasn’t much for stories. I mean, Arch was. He was the one.”
Years later Roy Truitt’s niece would go looking: there was DNA to test, and databases full of genealogies. You could discover amazing things about who you were without leaving the house. Roy was an old man by then and had outgrown the genealogical urge. “I wish to remain a mystery.” To yourself? “Particularly.” What Arch had liked about the unseen world: you could think about it but you could never solve it. Mysteries were full of promise, were a pleasure to contemplate. Facts were disappointing, and Roy had put all his stock in facts and had been, all his life, disappointed. “Leave me out of it,” he said to Brenda.
“You want her?” Roy Truitt asked Joe Wear now, gesturing at Wooden Bertha on her column, and that nearly made Joe Wear roar that he would see the Widow Truitt and any so-called Truitt descendants in court, he would take the whole place so as not to have to ask for this, which was his: he would not ask permission. “Of course,” said Roy. “I can mail it for you.”
“I’ll take her with me,” said Joe Wear.
Anybody who looked through the window—and people did peer in, a month after the murder, they dared each other to—would have seen an angular older man climbing atop a stool steadied by a stout middle-aged man, handling what would have looked like to a suspicious eye the corpse of a child, rigor mortis set in, something ghoulish—no. A doll. Two men with a doll. Well, that was even more suspicious, wasn’t it.
The two men laid her out on the glass of a pinball machine, a newish one, Disco Dan.
“I’m sorry,” said Roy. “She’s lovely in her way. I wonder how she got here. Thank you,” he said. “Mr. Wear. We’re very thankful.”
Bertha. Joe’s Bertha. She would surely need restoration; there were toothmarks in one ankle. The head that Dr. Sprague had made was so dear, and so bad—it couldn’t be replaced but perhaps, perhaps. Or not. Leave her as she was. Her skirt was split down the middle, for cycling; her limbs were willy-nilly. Stretched out on the darkened pinball machine, she looked as though she had just dropped out of the sky. She should: she had. We all fall out of the sky. That’s where we come from. Joe Wear gathered Bertha Truitt in his arms, and took her out of the bowling alley, out of Salford, out of Massachusetts, out of New England, so they could start again.
Acknowledgments
This book is highly inaccurate, even for a novel, but two books helped make it a little less so: The Game of Candlepin Bowling by Florence E. Greenleaf (as told to Paul C. Tedford) and Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo. My remarkable late great-aunt Jessica Bernstein’s unpublished memoir of her World War II service, “Sir, I’m from Indiana,” was hugely helpful and inspiring. Thanks, too, to Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland, for some timely ghost advice.
And many thanks to: Paul Harding, Paul Lisicky, Ann Patchett, S. Kirk Walsh, and Michael Taeckens; Henry Dunow, Arielle Datz, and everyone at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner; everyone at Ecco, including Daniel Halpern, Miriam Parker, Sonya Cheuse, Emma Dries, Sara Birmingham, and particularly the wonderful Megan Lynch.
I have been very lucky to work with Robin Robertson for literal decades: I cannot thank him enough.
About the Author
ELIZABETH McCRACKEN is the author of five books—Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories), The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award)—three of which were New York Times Notable Books. McCracken has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Also by Elizabeth McCracken
Thunderstruck & Other Stories
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
Niagara Falls All Over Again
The Giant’s House
Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BOWLAWAY. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover art © Katie Daisy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCracken, Elizabeth, author.
Title: Bowlaway : a novel / Elizabeth McCracken.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Ecco, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018025083 | ISBN 9780062862853 (hardback) | ISBN 9780062862860
Classification: LCC PS3563.C35248 B69 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025083
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Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-286287-7
Version 12112018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-286285-3
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