The Signature of All Things

his reckless dreams—and Alma, even more unfortunately, did not disabuse her of that misconception.
    Once a month, Alma went to see her old friend Retta at the Griffon Asylum. Retta no longer knew who Alma was—nor, it seemed, did Retta know who she herself was.
    Alma did not see her sister Prudence, but heard news every now and again: poverty and abolition, abolition and poverty, always the same grim tale.
    Alma thought about all these things, but did not know what to make of any of it. Why had their lives turned this way, and not another way? She thought again about the four distinct and concurrent varieties of time, as she had once named them: Divine Time, Geological Time, Human Time, Moss Time. It occurred to her that she had spent most of her life wishing she could live within the slow, microscopic realm of Moss Time. That had been an odd enough desire, but then she’d met Ambrose Pike, whose yearnings were even more extreme than hers: he had wanted to live within the eternal emptiness of Divine Time—which is to say, he had wanted to live outside of time altogether. He had wanted her to live there with him.
    One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed. She tried her best to ignore it.
    Nevertheless, the days passed by.
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    I n early May of 1851, on a cool, rainy morning, a letter came to White Acre addressed to Henry Whittaker. There was no return address, but the edges of the envelope had been inked with a black border, signifying mourning. Alma read all of Henry’s mail, so she opened this envelope, too, as she dutifully caught up with correspondence in her father’s study.
Dear Mr. Whittaker—
I write today both to introduce myself and to share unfortunate news. My name is the Reverend Francis Welles, and I have been the missionary at Matavai Bay, Tahiti, for thirty-seven years. At times in the past, I have conducted business with your good representative, Mr. Yancey, who knows me to be an enthusiastic amateur in the field of botany. I have collected samples for Mr. Yancey and shown him places of botanical interest, &c., &c. Also, I have sold him marine specimens, coral and seashells—a special interest of mine.
Of late, Mr. Yancey had enlisted my aid in the attempt to preserve your vanilla plantation here—an endeavor that was much assisted by the arrival, in 1849, of a young employee of yours, by the name of Mr. Ambrose Pike. It is my sad duty to inform you that Mr. Pike has passed away, owing to the sort of infection that—all too easily in this torrid climate—can lead the sufferer to a fast and early death.
You may wish to alert his family that Ambrose Pike was called to our Lord on November 30, 1850. You may also wish to inform his loved ones that Mr. Pike was given a proper Christian burial, and that I have arranged for a small stone to mark his grave. I much regret his passing. He was a gentleman of the highest morality and purest character. Such are not easily found in these parts. I doubt I shall ever meet another like him.
I can offer no consolation, aside from the certainty that he lives now in a better place, and that he will never suffer the indignities of old age.
Yours most sincerely, The Reverend F. P. Welles.
    The news hit Alma with all the force of an ax head striking granite: it clanged in her ears, shuddered her bones, and struck sparks before her eyes. It knocked a wedge of something out of her—a wedge of something terribly important—and that wedge was sent spinning into the air, never to be found again. If she had not been sitting, she would have fallen down. As it was, she collapsed forward onto her father’s desk, pressed her face against the Reverend F. P. Welles’s most kind and thoughtful letter, and wept like to pull down every cloud from the vaults of heaven.
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    H ow could she possibly grieve Ambrose more than she had already grieved him? Yet she did. There is grief below grief, she soon learned, just as there are strata below strata in the ocean floor—and even more strata below that, if one keeps digging. Ambrose had been gone from her for so long, and she must have known he would be gone forever, but she had never considered that he might die before she did. The simple magic of arithmetic should have precluded that: he was so much younger than she. How could he die first? He was the picture of youth. He was the compilation of all the innocence that youth had ever known. Yet he was