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Probably most men can recollect some early period of their lives when the emotional nature predominates-- a time when emotion at the sight of suffering was more easily stirred than in maturer years… perhaps all men can recall a period of youth when they were hero-worshippers— when they felt the need of a stronger arm, and loved to look up to the powerful friend who could sympathize with and aid them. This is the “woman stage” of character…
-Edward Drinker Cope
Marsh has not been looking forward to reading the letter. It cannot be from Cope; Cope is dead, two years dead and soon to be three. But it has the name ‘Cope’ on the envelope, and so must have something to do with the man, and it makes Marsh feel tired. Twenty years ago, it would have set him ablaze with hatred; he would have torn the envelope to pieces, skimmed the contents and thrown them into the fire, then returned to his writing reinvigorated. Thirty years— but he’s old now. Those days are gone.He does not want to read the letter surrounded by eager young men who think of him as a legend, who think of Cope as a shadowy adversary. He does not want to be part of an age of myths. He wants to be strong again. He wants to be able to breathe properly, to suck in the clear winter air without hearing the phlegm rattle in his chest. He puts off reading it, stays at work past closing for the first time in months.“Going soon, Professor?”Gibb, who cleans and prepares the fossils: a tall, thin Yankee.“Soon enough. Good night.”They aren’t friendly. A greeting in the morning, a goodbye at closing time— that’s enough for the staff. He pays good wages; they should be grateful for that, if nothing else.He sits at his desk, watches them file out one by one. Daydreams of going West again, packing a new leather suitcase with rock hammers and rifle cartridges. Someday, perhaps. He has so many other things to do.Dear Professor Marsh, the letter begins, though you were no friend of my late father, it falls to me as executor of his estate… Cope’s daughter, Julia. Marsh remembers a vague, rapidly-moving presence, a small mammal teetering on chubby legs. Julia Collins, now— she must have married. She has been going through her father’s papers. I have burned those I deemed unfit for publication. Nonetheless, I write to request an object of some sentimental value…Marsh has not, truth be told, unpacked all the boxes of Cope’s collection. Cope had gone bankrupt and been forced to sell his priceless fossils; Marsh had bid on some of them out of spite. But even his own collection is too large to go through properly, and he cannot bear to ask his assistants to take over. He knows the piece Julia has asked him for. He made sure it was in the lot he bid on, at the estate sale. Couldn’t quite have said why, and didn’t let himself think about it: one lot is as good as another, isn’t it?It’s in the stacks, with the rest of Cope’s things. He turns on the lights: gas flames gutter into sulky life, shadows fill the frigid air. His breath a faint puff of steam in front of him. Around him a labyrinth of bone. Limbs and claws, ribs and vertebrae, carpals and metacarpals and phalanges. Skulls, rack upon rack of skulls, a great catacomb of lost Americas.Cope, he remembers suddenly, is one of them now. Left his body to the University. He imagines him filling an empty slot on a shelf: where would he go? With the primates, perhaps. Or the predators— the man had a vicious streak, for all his Quaker pacifism. Where had they met? Breslau: von Roemer’s lectures on Cuvier: From a single tooth, a jagged fragment of bone, the anatomist must be able to see the creature entire. What it ate, how it ran. To clothe its nakedness with flesh.A vivid lecturer, von Roemer. An avid collector, quick to supplement his lectures with casts of the newest specimens. The specimen that day had been small, Marsh remembers. Flat, finely boned, fine as a pressed flower.“So. Which of you has the makings of an anatomist?”Marsh had stepped forward quickly. He’d been old for a student, and steadier for it. False modesty a waste of his time.“What do you make of this?”“A bird. Exceedingly well preserved. Feathers, here and here. A runner as much as a flyer, though. Long legs, pubis angled outward.”“Keen eyes, Herr Marsh. Another of you?”The voice from the back of the class had been unfamiliar.“I take it that wasn’t the answer? Can one American help out another?”“He may,” von Roemer had agreed. “But can he?”Cope had affected a broad, bushy beard, in those days, and worn his thick black hair oiled back from the forehead. He might have been handsome, but he hadn’t been. Something about his expression: too unguarded, perhaps. Full of bug-eyed intensity. He hadn’t been a regular member of the course; Marsh had thought of him as just another tourist, at first. There for a week and gone, shuffling round the grand circuit of moneyed Americans who would rather eat Linzertorte in Vienna than dodge bullets at Bull Run.He had looked very young. Had handled the fossil with tentative delicacy, like a believer with the relic of a saint.“The skull is long, slender. More like Conchiosaurus than any bird I’ve ever seen. Are these… teeth?”“Can a bird have teeth?” von Roemer’s Prussian sarcasm sounds almost polite. “What would Cuvier say?”“I don’t know what he’d say. I see teeth.”The professor smiles.“Well, Herr Cope. Perhaps America may yet produce an anatomist.”von Roemer had turned to face the class. A showman’s gesture.“Cuvier— the great Cuvier— in this, he was wrong. A single tooth is not enough: our modern science knows of monsters he did not dream of. Clawed herbivores. Wolves with hooves. Birds with teeth— or perhaps dinosaurs with feathers, na klar?”Marsh had gone up to the lectern at the end of class, once the students had filed out to the library or the beer hall, and looked at the slab of plaster again. He had turned the plaster in his hands, over and over. He should have seen the teeth. If he hadn’t gone first. If he’d known the question was a trick. He would have seen them. But that’s all over and done with. If he’d known then, he’d— what? He isn’t sure. He keeps going, the stacks extending around him like canyon walls. Strata, of a sort: labels in Gibb’s loose cursive and Schuchert’s crabby Fraktur give way to Reed’s blocky scrawl, and then to his own handwriting, his days out in the field with the boys. Cope’s boxes sit at the very back; if these were real strata, they’d be the oldest material. But that isn’t why they’re here, of course. This is just where he puts things he doesn’t want to think about.The right box is near the top. He pries it open, rummages through old bones and sawdust. The one he wants is near the top. He lifts it gently; it’s long and gracile. Another bird with teeth: Hesperornis regalis. When he first saw it, it was just beginning to wear out from the chalky matrix, dark against the white. A splendid sight. He’d whooped for joy, shaken hands with all his students, chipped at the stone with manic precision.But of course the skull ended up in Cope’s collection, not his. They’d sent it back to the rooming house in Bogue for safe-keeping; a week later, taking a break from the field, he’d gone to the inn-keeper to ask about it. It might leave town on the next stage, he thought— best to start the long journey to the railhead before winter flooded out the roads.“You ain’t sent me nothing,” the man had said. “Some boxes came in on the last wagon, but the driver, he said they was all for Philadelphia.”“Cope.”“I reckon that was the name.” Cope had written him a note, later on, thanking him for the skulls.“To O See Marsh,” he’d written.“O, do come and See your birds some day. They are the pride of the Philadelphia collection: simply delightful! I would be pleased to show you the other specimens at any time; I know you are very interested in ugly old monsters.Yours truly,Edward Drinker Cope” And yet: Marsh had hated that letter as much as he has ever hated anything in his life. But the handwriting had brought him back, just for a second, to the house in Haddonfield, to sitting with Cope at the breakfast table, reading through the latest articles. The smell of early fall in New Jersey: wet earth, burning leaves, frying bacon. The gray pallor of the sky, the red oaks on the lawn blazing like beacon fires.“Has thee seen Leidy’s letter?” He can almost hear Cope’s voice again. “He has a few questions about your article.”He’d loved hearing that word “thee”. Cope had gone back and forth from belief to unbelief; he hadn’t spoken that way much since his father died. But his wife and his daughter were still “thee”, and so, somehow, was Marsh.They’d been friends since Breslau. Marsh had shown Cope around the city, pointed out all his favorite walks and cafes and bookshops, helped him with the language. They’d sung ludicrous songs in the Rathskeller, arms around one another’s shoulders. Marsh had known him longer than his wife, longer than his colleagues at the university. He’d been there before any of it.They were leading lights of the journals and societies. And of course they’d stayed friends. They’d had their differences— the Elasmosaurus that Cope put together backwards, with its head on the end of its tail, the insulting correction that Marsh printed without giving him the chance to correct himself. But they’d made things up like gentlemen. Marsh can’t remember what he was working on, that particular morning, but he’d named a few specimens after Cope and he thinks it was another of those. Something copeanus— he can’t remember what he’d ended up calling it, afterwards.They’d finished breakfast quickly, that particular day. One of Cope’s farmer friends had found bones in a marl pit at the edge of his property and sent them some samples, along with a scrawled note that promised a deal mor ef you com before it rains agen. The two had fallen on the boxes like children on Christmas morning. Hadrosaurus, they agreed, and plenty of them, but there had been also a tantalizing curved claw, the talon of an eagle the size of a grizzly bear.By mid-day they’d been less enthusiastic. The pit had been half-full of water, the marl like damp potters’ clay, covered in a thin layer of fine sediment. Marsh remembers the taste of it, the feel of it on his face, a thin, insidious coating that couldn’t be wiped away. The shadow of clouds gathering above them, the same shade as the blue silt they stood in. Still, he’d felt comfortable in the pit. Liked the steadiness of it, the slow scrape of the trowel, Cope’s presence next to him an extra layer of warmth, like a jacket.There had been bones, at any rate. He’d known even at that point that there was something big a few feet down; there had been fragments rising out of the wet, little knots and outcroppings, a miniature badlands. A vertebra worn free of the soil, the edge of a long bone. The skeleton was somewhere close: Laelaps, Cope had thought. They’d hugged each other in celebration, Cope’s body solid and warm against his, a little thrill in the blood.A big predatory dinosaur, one of the first discovered. Marsh had found out years later that Cope’s name for it had been used already, which made it invalid. He’d written a new article, changed it to… he can’t remember. It’s a bit worrisome: He can smell the air of 1869, practically taste his breakfast again, and he can’t remember what he’d called it.They’d kept digging. They’d ached, or at least Marsh had. The rain had come, and the lightning scribed itself across the sky in great rending clawmarks. They’d run to the farmhouse, leading the horses through splashing torrents to the barn. Dripped on the farmer’s flagstones while Cope wrangled them the upstairs room.Built up the fire. Stripped off. Climbed into bed.Marsh had thought— had wanted— there weren’t words for it. But it was how he’d expected the day to end. They’d been cold and tired, but they’d been together, in a room with a bed. He’d never worked out a language for it in his head. He cannot imagine saying, in actual words: Touch here. Here. This is how I’ll— This is what I want. All I want.Want is the wrong word anyway. Need, maybe. Hunger. Attraction, the physicist’s attraction: a natural force, like magnetism or gravity. A falling towards.“Haven’t we outgrown this?” he remembers Cope saying. A slight edge in his voice, a hardness.He has wished Cope dead for those words. Hundreds of times. Thirty years, three hundred sixty five days in a year. Ten thousand, nine hundred and fifty days, he has heard those words in his head. How can you love a man one day and wish him dead the next? And the next? And ten thousand, nine hundred and fifty more times?He looks at the Hesperornis skull, eighty million years and counting. Time accumulates, that’s how. He cradles the thing in his hand as he walks back to his desk. Bone rough against his fingers, brittle and delicate. Pokes the fire, clutches his coat around him. He should go home. He should call a cab and go home, it’s late.There had been three years between Haddonfield and finding the skull, three years since Cope had called him “thee” and sat with him at breakfast. He had been happy to be back West. In New Haven that summer, he’d been sitting in his sweltering office, unpacking boxes of whatever his collectors thought he wanted, swearing at their idiocies and incompetencies. Paid off by Cope, he’d fumed. Suborned. Seduced. In every missing molar, every broken fibula the hand of Cope. Off the train at last, he breathed in the dry air of the badlands, smelled sagebrush and cooking fires. They’d set off for the back country: Marsh and a gaggle of credulous students with shiny, beardless faces, trowels and rock hammers still shiny from the storefront window. It had been a glorious trip. He’d slept on the ground, eaten beans and bacon from a tin plate, woke up cold in the morning and been sweating again by midday, and he’d never felt better.And fossils, of course. Everywhere, it seemed: teeth and tailbones lying on the ground, like discarded toys waiting to be picked up. By the end of the trip he’d stopped thinking about them as single species. They fit together, there had been whole lost worlds for them to live in. In Wyoming, a temperate forest, giant bear-like herbivores lumbering through its groves, herds of tiny, deer-like horses. Packs of gracile hyenas, great stalking cats with scimitar fangs.In Kansas, a vast inland waterway, a warm shallow sea filled with sharks and turtles and great swimming reptiles. Hesperornis had swum these waters, pulled fish from them, sounded its alien squawking cry across its beaches.It was incredible, and better than that, it was all his. Except that it wasn’t. Cope had stolen his boxes. Bribed a wagon driver; Marsh had worked for those bones, slaved over them, danced when he found them. They were going to Philadelphia. It was an enormity, an impossibility. The country would be so vast, if Cope weren’t in it. But suddenly it felt so small. Two men could barely divide it between them.He tormented himself with thoughts of violence. And gradually, through the days of digging, those thoughts grew a name, and the name was Charlie Hooker.Hooker was one of the guides, a man who said he knew Kansas pretty well and could handle himself in the backcountry. The students thought of Kansas as a place for fossil hunting and not much else, but Marsh had wondered. There had been other reasons to travel in Kansas in the 1860s. He’d been out of the country while it was all going on, drinking Doppelbock and making notes on Cuvier. But he’d remembered puzzling out headlines in crooked German blackletter: Stadt von Lawrence verbrannt. Hundert Männer getötet. Not all the bones in Kansas were fossilized.Hooker didn’t look like a hard man. He dressed like a dude: derby hat, neat black moustache, cravat carefully tied, coat open at the collar to show the white shirt below. The Yale undergraduates looked like mountain men beside him; caught up in the Legend of the West, they’d ditched their coats and ties for smocks and cartridge belts as soon as they got off the train. But gradually Marsh began to notice the way other men looked at him. Hooker was the first to drink in the bar-rooms, the first to be served at the general stores. Miners spit their chewing tobacco carefully away from Hooker’s spotless boots; hulking cavalrymen stepped out of his way as he ambled unassumingly down the street.Marsh dreamed of Cope, one night on the bluffs over the Green River; dreamed of him warm and responsive and present. Woke in the pre-dawn with the feel of it on his skin, the tangled ecstasy of their violence. It lingered through the day, an afterimage that lingered over digging, eating, scribbling in his notes. A salt taste in his mouth, an ache in his muscles.He’d sat down beside Hooker that evening, drawn the man into clumsy conversation.“Suppose a man had a sort of problem,” he’d said. “Suppose he were thinking about solving it.” “Dear Mrs. Cope Collins,” Marsh writes. “I have the pleasure…”He scratches through “pleasure”. And “Cope”. Dips the pen again. Considers the word “Dear”. She isn’t his dear anything.“Mrs. Collins,” he writes. “I am sending your late father’s estate exactly what he deserved, which is nothing.”He can’t send that. Even he can’t.“Dear Mrs. Collins. My condolences on the loss of your father. You will understand, however, that I cannot restore to you a memento which is, after all, of some sentimental value to—”Is it? He’s not sentimental or womanish, Cope be damned.“Dear Mrs. Collins. Your father’s loss of his collection was a consequence of his own mismanagement of his assets, and the numerous animosities he cultivated with nearly every eminent paleontologist of his day, myself not least. You will understand, therefore, when I decline—”She will not understand. She was, what? Five years old, the year of that expedition? Six? He had met a collector that year who told him Cope was offering exorbitant sums for a prairie dog. He’d offered to outbid him. The man had demurred, said it was just a pet for a little girl, no scientific value to it otherwise. Marsh had paid him double. It had, at the time, felt like the right thing to do.“Dear Mrs. Collins. Enclosed is the specimen you mention, which I trust will bring to mind fond memories of your father, the most hypocritical thieving self-promoting slanderous wretched skunk ever to set foot on American—”Can he send her the skull? It feels like surrendering. He won— it’s over and he won. He’s not going to surrender, not now.“Dear Mrs. Collins…” “If a man were going to solve a particular kind of problem,” Charlie Hooker had said. “Here’s the kind of thing he might do.”Cope had no right to the specimens, Marsh had explained. He’d paid bribes. They were Marsh’s property, fair and square, sitting in the rooming house in Bogue. It wasn’t fair. Hooker had waited, patient as a hunting dog. Terms like “fair”, Marsh had gradually realized, were meaningless to him. He had offered money. They had put together a plan.Under the bandanna, he remembers, his face had grown slick with sweat. He couldn’t scratch. If he dislodged the thing he might be recognized. If he were recognized he might be hanged, Professor or not. Of the first half hour of the robbery, that’s what has stayed with him most clearly: not how it felt to step out onto the trail, not the terrified look on the coachman’s face. Just wanting to scratch a particular spot on the left side of his nose, and not being able to.He’d tried to keep his hand from shaking as he held the heavy revolver. Watched the horses trembling a bit, unsure why they had stopped, ears and tails flicking at the flies.Hooker, calm and unhurried, bending to look through the coach window.“Nobody in here but a woman and an invalid. I’ll get these boxes down.”The top of the coach was piled with cargo: a few bags and grips and packages, but most of it plywood boxes scribbled with instructions. Fragile. Philadelphia. Property E. D. Cope. It had taken Hooker an eternity to get them all down, separating them into two piles, Cope’s and the others, stacking them neatly as he went. Marsh held the gun on the coachman and thought about how it would feel to take the bandanna off, to wipe his face with it.And then the man inside the coach had woken up.“Annie! What’s going on? Are we at the station yet? Has thee bought the tickets?”It was Cope, but it couldn’t be Cope. Cope had gone back East in the fall— all the scouts and diggers and prospectors said so.“Why have we stopped, Annie? Who’s taking my boxes? I need them!”The shades of the coach fluttered.“Get down, love. You’re sick, don’t exert yourself, they’re just boxes—”The window swung open, and the man— and Cope— looked out. Marsh was shocked at how ill he looked: his skin was chalky, splotched with huge red boils, his thick black hair turned thin and greasy. So he hadn’t gone East after all, Marsh had thought. Little wonder, in that condition. Even now, he didn’t look well enough to travel.“Leave the boxes,” Cope begged. He leaned from the window, coughed, spat a rope of reddish phlegm down the side of the coach. “Leave… no good to you. I promise. Nothing but bones.”Hooker had looked at Marsh.“Well, partner,” he’d said. “That sounds like the man himself, don’t it.”Marsh, too stunned to speak, had nodded his head just slightly.Hooker’s bandanna had twitched, as if the man was grinning underneath. Showing his teeth.“This seems like all sorts of an opportunity.”This is too far, Marsh had thought. We’ll stay with the plan. We’ll take the boxes.“It’s the man,” he heard his own voice say. “The man himself.”“Marsh?” Cope turned. “Is that thee, Marsh?”“It’s not Marsh, love.” The woman’s voice again. “It can’t be Professor Marsh. Lie down, love. We’ll be in town soon, I promise.”“It is Marsh,” Cope insisted. “I know it, I know…”He swayed, delirious, half inside the window and half out. His hot red eyes burning.“Well then,” said Hooker.And in a sense, Marsh had thought, wasn’t this the plan he’d really wanted to make? If he’d known Cope was here in Kansas. If he’d known Cope would take this stagecoach. Hadn’t he killed the man in his dreams, a thousand times over? And here was Hooker, drawing his gun smoothly from its holster, smiling reassuringly at the sick man, glancing down to check the percussion cap.Quantrill’s guerillas had gone house to house in Lawrence. They’d had a list, had checked men against it like outfitters ticking off supplies from a shopping list. Marsh hadn’t been able to imagine that. It had seemed too horrible a thing to exist.“Hold on, there,” he said. His throat was dry, his voice almost inaudible.“Hold on.” “Outgrown.”“It’s not a real life, Charles. Thee knows it isn’t.”“Why not? Why can’t it be our life?”“It was pleasing for a year or two—”“Five years. It’s been five.”“Hasn’t thee tired of it by now?”“No. Have you tired of me?”“I am your friend, Charles. I don’t mean to stop that. But this— obsession with one another.”“Is that all it is?”“Boys have these silly admirations, Charles. Men know better.”Marsh had not said the word ‘love’, had never said it. Not to a woman. Not to anyone. He still never has. He might have, he thinks, if he could have spoken then. But he could not. He had opened his mouth and found himself utterly silent.He had not been able to lie in the narrow bed after that, not with Cope splayed out across it as though nothing had changed. He had slept on the floor in his damp jacket and trousers. Risen early and taken the fossil with him when he went. Dryptosaurus, that was it— that was the name he’d given it, to replace Cope’s Laelaps. To wipe Cope’s name away and claim it himself. “Hold on.”“This man knows you. He said a name, partner, and names make nooses.”Hooker raised the pistol. There was a sound of thunder.Marsh cannot remember actually pulling the trigger. Just the sound of the shot, the slam of the heavy pistol recoiling. He’s not sure why he did it— was never quite sure he decided to do it at all. He did it, and he rode away. That’s how men settle things, isn’t it? “Dear Mrs. Collins.”“Your father and I were not friends. But I have enclosed…”Marsh dozes at his desk. It’s too late to write. He’ll write it in the morning.He dreams that they can all go back to the beginning. That nothing has really been lost, not beyond recovery, not him and not Cope and not America.In his dream he’s riding through the Kansas hills, the prairie bright with wildflowers around him, the wind blowing sagebrush and pine sap. He comes to the top of a ridge, and sees in front of him the buffalo spill over the land like a great black ocean, the herd fully seven miles long. Behind them shines the pure heartbreaking blue of the Tethys Sea. He can just see two mosasaurs playing in the shallows, snapping and splashing at each other. Overhead, leather-winged pterosaurs ride the updrafts, and a vee of Hesperornis flap across the shoreline.Marsh waves his hat in the air.“Come on, Edward,” he says. “I’ll race you to the forest, and we’ll see who spots a new species first!”“That’ll be me,” cries Cope. His hair is thick and black, his skin tanned. “I’ve promised to send it to Julia!”“Never fear,” says Marsh. “There are plenty for us both.”“Dearest Julia!” he says, planning his next letter out loud. “Your father and I send our fondest wishes from our trip. You’ll think us very silly once you see how we’re carrying on, but it’s made new men of us. We have been looking for a prairie dog to send you, and a Hesperornis, and a Laelaps, and a whole herd of buffalo. We’ve found out how to get them all back, every single one of them.”“Catch up, Charles! I’m already ahead of thee!”Marsh looks up. Cope has outpaced him by miles, is almost to the forest already. He spurs his horse toward the shade of the trees. “Professor?”Gibb’s voice is an intrusion. Marsh struggles back to wakefuless, blinking at the bright morning light shining over his desk.“Have you spent all night here? You don’t look well.”He doesn’t feel well either. His throat is dry; his lungs seem full of fluid. He gestures Gibb closer, speaks in a whisper.“Call a cab. And send— send—”Once he starts coughing he can’t stop. The spasm takes a full minute to pass.Gibb glances at the desk: a fossil skull that had better go back to the box room, a pile of half-written pages.“I’ll make sure of it,” he says.Marsh shakes his hand weakly.“Good… goodbye, Gibb,” he says, and he slips back, smiling, into the dream.