A month later, she was appointed director of Old Comers Plantation, and the oral history project began. She talked first with Rake Hilyard, who told her that
Voyage to Hertfordshire
had been in his house for years.
ii.
Geoff had not slept well. In the middle of the night he had felt the ghosts ambling through the old house, Sam Hilyard and Hannah, Rake, and all the rest. Once, the wind banged the barn door open and he was certain he saw the ghost of Jack Hilyard skitter through the moonlight.
It had been the kind of night to bring out the black dogs, as he called them, thoughts of mortality that could make you question whatever you were doing at the time and that usually fetched a little religion right behind them. His had been Catholicism, learned from a mother who kept her faith though she married a lackadaisical Protestant and brought this lackadaisical half-Catholic into the world.
If he started asking hard questions, he knew he’d be up all night and useless when he went after the answers in the morning. So he contemplated the effortless majesty of whales gliding through the bay and finally slipped back to sleep.
Around eight o’clock he decided to walk down to his brother-in-law’s house. Maybe Janice was there.
The bobwhites whistled in the woods along the road. The shade was cool and dense. The underbrush grew so thick around pitch pine and oak that you couldn’t see more than a few feet into the woods. It was dark and primeval, seemingly indestructible, though not much more than a generation old and as fragile as… well, his marriage.
The road came into a meadow about a hundred yards from the L-shaped Greek Revival house the Bigelows had built in 1850. Geoff was wearing jeans so that he could slip into the brush and case the place, like some rip-off artist with a screwdriver in his pocket. But he didn’t see the Now Voyager or hear his kids.
He picked a few blueberries from a bush by the road. They were fat and juicy and tasted of pine. Pick some for your cereal, grab a few blackberries. Enjoy life. But first, find your family and straighten out this mess.
Then, a stretch Cadillac about the size of a coal barge came down the west side road and pulled into Doug Bigelow’s driveway. Was he so confident that he now had a chauffeur?
But it wasn’t a chauffeur. It was much worse—John M. Nance, Strip-the-Plants Nance, Public Enemy Number One on the environmentalists’ hit list, also on the lists of the several conservation commissions, the EPA, a few horned husbands… and Rake Hilyard.
Doug seemed to treat Nance like the long-lost uncle who also happened to hold the mortgage on the house. They shook hands, and Doug invited him in. But Nance wanted to go for a walk, so they went for a walk—right down the road toward Rake’s house.
Geoff didn’t think he’d look too good if they saw him spying from the brambles. He’d look even worse if he popped out of the woods like some tourist hunting for the beach. So he hunkered down and hoped he hadn’t grown allergic to poison ivy in his old age.
“… doesn’t know what’s good for him,” Nance was saying.
“He seems very interested in this
Mayflower
log.”
“You’d better hope he doesn’t find it. If he does, he won’t be a struggling architect with two mortgages, two car payments—”
“And a few pretensions.”
Pretensions?
Geoff almost jumped up right then. He had
principles
, not pretensions, but they were right about the rest.
“He’ll have a lot of dough,” Nance was saying, “and very little incentive to make the sale.”
“My sister has become his incentive.”
Geoff raised his head and peered past three shiny leaves. They looked like mafia dons in conference while their bodyguard idled along in the car behind them.
“She’s left him,” said Doug.
Nance laughed. He had never met Geoff Hilyard or his wife or kids, and he
laughed
, the bastard.
“If he can’t find the log, what will he do next?”
“Protect the bones,” shouted Geoff from the brush.
Nance dropped into a crouch, as though somebody was about to shoot him. “Who said that?”
Nance’s driver sprang from the car, gun in hand.
“Morning, gentlemen.” Geoff decided to march straight out of the brush. Act as if he owned it, because he did.
“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Doug.
Geoff ignored him and went up to Nance. “I’m thinking of an archaeological survey, to protect the bones.”
Nance looked at Doug. “The brother-in-law?”
Geoff kept talking. “Did you know the best collections of Indian artifacts on Cape Cod belong to backhoe operators?”
“You’re going off the edge, Geoff,” said Doug.
“How many backhoes do you have, Nance?”
“None. I’m a venture capitalist.”
“And my island is your latest venture?”
“Our
island,” said Doug.
Geoff slipped the rose from Nance’s lapel and inhaled its aroma. Let him know he wasn’t frightened by bodyguards and rich men in white suits. “I didn’t think the Bigelows and Cousin Blue could develop this island by themselves, Dougie… but Strip-the-Plants Nance?”
Nance looked at Geoff as though he were a job seeker, not the obstacle to the job. “Only idiots call me that, people who don’t know any better, like your uncle.”
“Let’s see… there’s the Mount Hope Mall, built on a wetland in Rhode Island, and that monstrosity in Sandwich, right on top of the watershed—”
“All legal.”
Geoff studied the sleek features and the perfect tan. Sometimes the ones at the top didn’t show a trace of the struggle to get there. He decided to throw something out and see how it played. “Nance, Iron Axe, and charcoal on the floorboards.”
That was the strangest entry on Rake’s list, but Nance just looked at him, as though he made no sense at all. “
This
is the guy the project hinges on?”
Geoff looked around him. “ ‘Whose woods these are…’ are mine. That makes me the guy.”
Nance stalked to the car and opened the door. “You need an architect, Douglas. If this guy isn’t interested, find someone who is. And if this guy won’t sell, we’ll build around him.”
Geoff watched the Cadillac disappear around the bend. “Does your father know about him?”
“We need deep pockets on this one, Geoff.”
“I thought your father and that guy had a grudge—”
“I’m running things now. Besides, grudges are wasteful, as wasteful as pinning your future on a myth.”
“Pin it on a principle. Know the truth before you act rashly. Then you won’t be acting rashly. If you talk to Janice, tell her that.”
iii.
Doug talked to her in the sitting room of the Bigelow 1700 house. She was wearing a red bathing suit under a wraparound skirt. She had not slept well, but she looked composed and serene.
“It might be a good tactic to stay away from him a bit longer,” said Doug.
“You may have played the breakup of your first marriage like a game, Doug, but that’s because you’re a man.”
“Low blow.”
“I think a little differently.” She tucked her feet under her, though the ancient Victorian settee was not quite made for the posture. “Geoff and I, we’ve started seeing the world differently. I don’t know how or why, but it’s happened.”
“He said he was doing this because of principles.” Douglas laughed.
That word again. Janice looked at the letters on the table. Hannah had lectured Sam about foolish principles. Yet she had done a few foolish—and principled—things herself when she got older.
“Let him stew a while longer,” said Doug. “If not for me, for Dad.”
“For Dad. For the future… I want to look to the future, and Geoff keeps looking to the past.”
Doug got up. “I’m going over to the island. We’re doing wetlands prelims on Clara’s land. Emily and Arnie are hot to trot.”
That
she did not need to hear. She sat there for a long time, looking at her purse, wondering why she didn’t just get rid of that damn will. It didn’t carry any legal weight, and it felt as heavy as a soapstone sink in her purse. But she couldn’t do it.
iv.
On summer nights, up and down 6A, candles flickered in the windows of the inns where Yankee sea captains once lived, and where chefs now put raspberries on chicken, cooked duck in orange sauce, and did things to mussels that no self-respecting Cape Codder would do to a barnacle.
At the Bell-in-Hand you could still get a fisherman’s platter—deep-fried seafood with a side of slaw for $9.95. Add to this a salad in a little wooden dish, dressing from a bottle, a big highball in one of those heavy glasses, and serve it on a paper place mat featuring a Cape Cod map. Not that the locals cared about maps. The Bell-in-Hand didn’t even have windows.
There was, however, a jukebox filled with fifties rock, and somebody was spending his week’s pay on Buddy Holly songs.
Geoff preferred to eat at the inns, but they were one more sign of what he called the creeping chichi of Cape Cod. They had been catering to tourists for nearly a century down here, but it had only been in the last twenty years that Off-Capers had rubbed away the character of the place, that sense of stiff-spined, chowder-eating independence that had made Rake Hilyard such a hard case right up to the night of his death.
“If I were you, I’d be looking for my wife. Not the log,” said George. “I
do
have a sense of priorities. Once I found her, I’d take out that list and look for the log.”
Maybe so, thought Geoff. But a bad night’s sleep, the day’s revelation, and three beers had left him pretty depressed. Not even “Peggy Sue” could cheer him up. That was why he had called on his friends to do the job. George was chowing on the fried clam plate, and Jimmy was on the way. “Let Janice look for me.”
“She won’t want to if you hang around that museum director,” said George.
“The museum director is in it for herself. I wouldn’t trust her any more than those guys over there.”
Four big guys, in work shirts, jeans, and mortar-stained boots, were at the bar watching the ball game on television. Geoff would not have noticed them, but sitting in the middle of them was the Humpster, working a beer and a shot.
And they didn’t notice Geoff until the door opened. Guys at a bar always checked out a new arrival, because it might be a pretty girl or a troublemaker or an Indian named Jimmy Little, wearing jeans, T-shirt, and a new Red Sox baseball cap. They watched Jimmy go over to Geoff’s table, and someone whispered something in the Humpster’s ear.
Jimmy pulled out a chair and straddled it backwards.
Geoff gave him the once-over. “I thought you wore a blue blazer after five o’clock.”
And Jimmy said one word: “Nance.”
Geoff nodded.
“This changes things. If Nance is in it, I might occupy that island myself.”
“Was Nance one of the plaintiffs in the ’77 land suit?” asked George.
“He’s the guy. Dirty fighter. Tried to make the Indians look like a bunch of lazy reds, screwin’ the good white developers just to get their land. All we were trying to do was save it.” Jimmy raised his hand and called for a beer.
Geoff had always liked Jimmy because he was so cool, a perfect foil for George. But there was no cool tonight. The name of Nance had touched something in the old alligator brain or, more likely, in the ancient anger that most Indians carried around whether they knew it or not. “Do I smell vengeance in the wind?”
“A little vengeance is good for the soul,” said Jimmy. “It gets us in touch with our roots.”
“Unh, I signed on for a treasure hunt,” said George. “Is this thing going to get ugly?”
“If Nance is involved, it already is ugly. But he papers over the ugliness with money.” Jimmy ordered a beer. “When the Wampanoags brought the land suit, I was the young crusader, ready to get something back for all that the tribe had given up. But we weren’t quite as high-powered as the other guys.”
“Money won the fight,” said George.
“It always does. And the idealistic young lawyer went off to Wall Street to get some money of his own.”
“And Ma’s still mad,” said Geoff.
“More disappointed than mad.” Jimmy snatched a fried clam from George’s plate. “She doesn’t think they care too much about Mother Earth down on Wall Street.”
“Mother Earth…” Geoff sipped his beer. “I’ve always liked the way Ma talks. She’s known all along what this is really about.”
“She says Mother Earth is the spiritual center of everything. Indian mysticism. Simplistic, but it works.” Jimmy took another clam from George’s plate. “Respect Mother Earth.”
“And order your own clams,” said George.
Geoff drained his beer. “I guess that’s what I’ve really been trying to do here.”
“Order your own clams?” George played his role as the one who kept things light.
“Respect Mother Earth,” answered Geoff. “But I’ve let a good commission slide, my uncle’s gotten killed, my wife’s walked out…”
“Mother Earth as bitch goddess.” George looked at Jimmy. “So how is Nance’s money helping the Bigelows to scar Mother Earth’s face?”
“Blue Bayou” was playing now. A couple of people were singing it at a nearby table. The noise level was rising as the supper crowd came in.
Jimmy drained his beer and ordered another round. “As far as I can tell, Nance must have saved Bigelow Development from Chapter Eleven. He probably figures that the 1904 subdivision will let the Bigelows slam dunk every agency in the county, from the Cape Cod Commission on down. Any that stand in their way get hauled into court, because Nance has deep pockets. Once they get all the permits, that land will be worth a fortune.”
“I’d love to see the written agreement between Nance and Bigelow,” said Geoff.
“I’ll go to the county registry and check the mortgage listings tomorrow,” said Jimmy.
“And if you find something, where does that leave Geoff?” George fished through the bread basket for a hard roll.
“Right where he is. He can do the deal they offered and live like a king, sit back and watch the Bigelows develop from his designs in conjunction with Nance, who does quality work, the bastard.”