I waited in the gathering darkness at the foot of the pool, hoping that an idea might emerge with the waters.
After a moment, I realized I was not alone. A woman had appeared on the stone steps that led down from the churchyard. I watched her approach.
“Good evening,” she said, as she reached the edge of the pool. “I was just up visiting the church. It’s quite famous. It had a patriot tree where all the parishioners took a pledge. Have you seen it?” she asked, making the kind of effusive chat one sometimes makes to a total stranger.
“No,” I said politely. “How interesting.”
“Yes, and there’s a graveyard. The stones are really old. I’m from California, and we don’t have graves going back that far. Except the Indians, of course, but they didn’t leave headstones. Much more civilized, I suppose. But still, you’re a Euro-American like me, so perhaps you understand. Three hundred years seems so
old
.”
I smiled. “Are you staying at the inn?” I inquired.
“Yes. Isn’t it lovely? Where I come from, there are no houses that old. There’s so much
history
here. Generations and generations. We quite forget all of this in California.”
“I suppose.”
“Just imagine being able to visit the graves of your ancestors. Your grandparents, and their parents, and their parents’ parents. That’s what it’s like up there in that yard.”
“Wow.”
“And yet I had to laugh when I read that plaque commemorating the oath all the parishioners took. It seemed so naïve, somehow. Loyalty and
all of that. How times have changed. Wars between peoples aren’t so simple anymore.”
“Hmm.”
“Well, I suppose I have to go. My husband will be wondering where I’ve gotten off to. It’s time to go to dinner, and I don’t want to turn an ankle moving up through the darkness.”
“Right.”
“Nice talking to you.”
“You, too.”
She moved off through the trees.
I stood a while longer, watching the reflection of the darkening sky on the waters. Loyalty. Wars. Traditions. Death and dying. Graves.
And suddenly it hit me: Mrs. Krehbeil’s illness was the key to the whole Krehbeil puzzle.
The question became, How could I prove what was making her sick?
BUBE’S BREW PUB WAS AN OLD BRICK BUILDING ON THE MAIN drag of the not-at-all bustling metropolis of Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. The town appeared to be a secondary hub built around the farming trades. A railroad ran through it, forming a slot through the heart of the central district. Bube’s was prominent within what Mount Joy had for a semi-industrial neighborhood. It was a very old brewery. It had the ten-foot-tall oak barrels to prove it.
“I’m supposed to meet a party here,” I told the hostess who greeted me inside the big wooden doors.
She looked at her clipboard and said something that was lost under a loud whooping from the bar. Somewhere, somebody was doing something clever with a basketball, and a number of young fellahs were sounding pretty excited about it.
I said, “We’re here to meet a party who’s … in the theater.”
“Oh. Then you’d be downstairs.”
She led me through the dark, lofty reaches of the barrel room to the top of a flight of wooden steps, the kind of rough-hewn staircase that has treads but no risers. The stairs led down—I mean
way
down. It went down at least two stories into the earth. Far below, I could hear music and raucous laughter, and I could just make out the rough form of a stone floor.
A limestone floor
, I noted.
Is this what Hector meant? Oh well, in for a Jenny, in for a pound
, I told myself, and started down.
At the foot of the stairs, I stepped into a cavern in the living rock. The low ceiling arched above me. Running the length of the room were wooden tables and benches, arranged in a U that opened to a curtained
passageway at the far end of the cavern. On the benches were twenty or thirty men and women howling with mirth and swilling from tankards filled with beer. Clearly, they’d been at it awhile. At the near end of the cavern sat two minstrels—there was no other word for it; they were dressed in tights and funny slippers with curling toes, and they sat on low stools and were playing lutes. Candles burned all around them, wax dripping down the natural ledges in the rock.
I glanced up and down, trying to understand what I had just walked into. The chief waitress—or head harlot, I wasn’t sure which was more appropriate—was dressed in full skirts and a peasant blouse gathered in close to her ribs by a tight vest emphasizing her comely breasts. Her blonde hair hung to her waist. Addressing the crowd was a man dressed as an Elizabethan street beggar, a study in burlap rags and grease-paint dirt. He held forth with a steady harangue designed to loosen the diners from their usual senses of propriety. They were dressed in modern clothing, but were drinking out of what appeared to be pewter tankards and eating their salads off of what appeared to be pewter platters. I hoped for their sakes that the metal in those implements was in fact something modern—aluminum or tin, perhaps—instead of pewter, which had fallen out of favor because it contained lead.
One of the diners at the near table stumbled to his feet. “Hey, here you are!” He said. “We were wondering if you were coming!”
I wasn’t quite sure how to volley this. “Uh—”
Sloshing his tankard, he said, “You’re Sylvia Piorkowski from Cleveland, right?”
“Uh, no … .”
He roared with laughter. “No worry! You join us anyway. If you’re not Sylvia from Cleveland, then you’re somebody else from somewhere else, right?”
“Must be. Or last time I checked.”
“Well, then, you take Sylvia’s seat.”
“Well, that’s quite a temptation, but I have to meet Jenny.”
As if on cue, Jenny popped off of the bottom step behind me. “Em,” she said. “Where are we?”
“In Cincinnati, it would appear. How’d you find me?”
“I described you, and the hostess said you were down here. How did you get here?”
“Same thing. I asked for you.”
Another man was on his feet. “Oh, great, you’re both here now. Hey, everybody, we’re all here now!”
“Hurrah!” shouted a chorus of looped Midwesterners. “May the hangings begin!”
Jenny and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Do you think we ought to go upstairs while our necks are still short?” she asked.
“Give it a moment,” I replied. “I have a funny feeling about this.”
The velvet curtains at the far end of the cavern split open, and more waiters in medieval garb stepped through it, pushing carts with food. One carried a baron of beef. My mouth started to water.
“Wonder what it costs to join them?” I asked Jenny.
“Sit down!” roared the woman to my right. “You’re gonna get us in trouble with the Feastmaster!”
“Who’s that?” I asked, bending near her to hear over the jollity.
The man to my left yanked me onto the bench next to him. “Get down! Here he comes now!” he bellowed, about bursting my eardrum. Another man got hold of Jenny and pulled her onto a bench between himself and me.
I stuck a thumb into my ringing ear and looked up just in time to see the curtains swish open around another man in tights. This one was about six feet tall and very chesty, especially with all the padding in the black velvet doublet he wore under his black velvet cape, and inside the black tights covering his otherwise not-very-shapely legs. His hair was greased back with brilliantine, and his eyes were liberally outlined with makeup, like a spoof of a bad production of
Cleopatra Queen of the Nile
. Around his neck, he wore a pewter boar’s-head that brandished tusks the size of carrots. Under his arm he carried a heavy, leather-bound book. Staring glassily to the far end of the room in a splendor of affect that would have put Sir Laurence Olivier to shame, he pronounced, “I am thy Feastmaster, and
this
”—he held high his volume—“is
The Book
!”
“The Book!” howled the assembled masses, raising their tankards high.
“Oh. My. God,” whispered Jenny, in the brief of silence that punctuated this explosive call and response. “This is nuts!”
I said, “No, Jenny, it’s crazier than you think. Do you know who that is?’”
“Who?”
“The Feastmaster.”
“Some nut who flunked out of theater school. I don’t know, how’m I supposed to know him?”
“That’s Hector, Jenny. I know the voice. Not to mention the sense of drama.” The heavy makeup could not eclipse the color of his eyes. They were a cool, pale gray, just like his brother’s.
“Prithee quiet, ladies,” the Feastmaster ordered of us. “For thou art unsettling the nerves of those who wouldst consume my feast.”
“He’s talking to us, Em.”
“Yes, Jenny, he’s looking right at us, too.”
“Don’t let him get away.”
“He’s not going anywhere, Jenny. This is his finest hour.”
“Omigosh.”
“Wench!” cried the Feastmaster. “Giveth thee names to these who wouldst speak when told of silence!”
The bosomy woman with the long blonde hair came over to us and planted her fists on her hips. She pointed at Jenny. “This one be Purple Claws,” she said, and of me, she declared, “and this one shall hereby be known as Blue Jeans!”
“Be it so!” roared the Feastmaster.
“Purple Claws!” howled the merrymakers, pounding their tankards on the table. “Blue Jeans!”
The Feastmaster drew himself up in a vampish impression of a Veronica Lake pinup and began to sing, falsetto, “I dream of Brownie with the light blue-oo jeans … .”
The man next to me just missed my shoulder in a last-ditch effort to avoid laughing himself clean off the bench. He lay on the floor with his legs still up beside me, gasping for breath. His friends shrieked and pointed at him.
Jenny twisted her lips into an evaluative look as she viewed the upended male. “Darwin was right,” she said.
Over the next hour and a half, we were treated to a fine repast and the very finest in in-your-face dinner theater. The Wench and the Beggar played tag team down the rows of increasingly jolly Ohioans, giving shoulder and neck rubs for tips while the Feastmaster coached the women on the fine art of lying across the men’s laps and reaching for proffered grapes with their tongues. I watched in fascination, feeling like little more than a voyeur until the man next to me slung an arm around me and purchased
the attentions of the Beggar for me. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone with that much dirt on his hands to touch me, but as he moved up behind me and extended a hand to either side of my face, I realized that the palms were freshly washed and smooth with scented oils. He spoke to me softly and touched me with utmost kindness and care, and told me to rest against him. For the first time since Jack had left, I leaned against a man and relaxed.
When all was said and done and the drunkest of the drunk had slopped back up the steps to the main level, the actors who had played our heckling Wench, the Beggar and Feastmaster joined the crowd at the hostess’s station. After one or two last rounds of hugging and singing and final swapping of jokes and slipping of tips, the Ohioans got their coats and began to depart. One man came by and pressed a hug on me and said how glad he was that I’d been able to make it and to please not be such a stranger. I assured him that I’d see him back in Ohio and sent him on his way out the door.
The Wench patted Hector on the back. “You did great tonight,” she said. “I hope you stand in for Gary another time.”
Hector bowed with a dramatic flourish which caught the Wench’s hand to his lips for an eloquent but chaste kiss. “Would that he need not fall ill that I could be of assistance, madam.”
Jenny whispered into my ear. “Working for heritage has never been like this.”
“Now’s when we really get to work,” I assured her. “And I think the outrageous approach is in order.”
I stepped forward and slipped my arm through Hector’s. “Oh Feastmaster,” I crooned, “prithee let a lonesome wench purchase you a drink.”
Hector rolled his expressive gray eyes and cocked a hip, sending the message that he was thirsty but not my kind of guy. “I never turn down a drink,” he said. “The bar’s right over here.”
WE WERE QUICKLY settled and, in the time-honored fashion of those who are truly devoted to being hammered, Hector was soon drunk. After that, it was no trouble at all getting him to talk about his family. All I had to ask was, “Are there more talented artisans like you in your family?”
“Father liked to paint,” he told us mournfully, slipping down another
Mai Tai as full beers lined up in front of me and Jenny sipped a raspberry lemonade. “He was a wonderful painter, in fact; studied in Philadelphia, and even New York.
His
mother painted, you see … . It’s a family tradition, art. We like to think we’re like the Wyeths.”
“You mean like N. C. Wyeth?” I indicated that I was very impressed. “Was he from around here? I’ve seen some of his paintings in a museum.” I didn’t mention that the museum in question was near his aunt’s ranch. I wasn’t supposed to know that yet.
“Why, yes, my dear woman. The Brandywine School, you know.”
Jenny chimed in, “The Brandywine School of art refers to a wonderful bit of heritage. It’s—”
I held up an index finger, shushing her. “Hector was telling us about his father and grandmother,” I told her.
He was in fact dramatically arching his neck and staring up into the beams of the ceiling, warming to a tale that would assure us that he was related to a noble tribe. Jenny nodded and fell silent again.
Hector crooned, “Just one county east of here, you’ll find lovely Brandywine Creek, and its banks are fairly
littered
with men of artistic flair.” He took a capacious swill of his drink. “
And
a few women, I hasten to add. Grandmummy was able to persuade Granddaddy to let her study painting with Howard Pyle of the Brandywine School.”
“Tell me more,” I said.
Hector rolled his eyes, quite a show with all that mascara and eyeliner. “Heavens, my dear woman, the Brandywine was a regular mecca for artists, always has been … or at least, since its founding in the 1800’s, which by local history is really
not
all that old, but just the same … N. C. Wyeth was of the Brandywine School, and of course you’ll know his son, Andrew. And I think Andrew has a son, though I wonder at his sexual orientation … but Pyle was a very important illustrator of books.”
It seemed time to sink the first probe. “I’ve seen some of his work in the Whitney Gallery in Cody, Wyoming.”
“Ah, Cody … cowboys … Indians … and the domain of Miz Whitney and her royal court. She took Grandmummy under her wing. Whitney had a summer home there, you see, and she’d have all her artistic friends come out, and they all built homes nearby. So you see, Grandmummy eventually realized her girlhood dream and went west. She had the house here in Lancaster County
and
the ranch near Cody.”
Hector’s monologue suddenly took a left turn. “But
I
did not inherit the family gene for the visual arts. No, I find the expression of my own dark soul in the
theater
.”