Lineage (33 page)

John nodded in agreement, his eyes searching the lake against the glare of the water. Lance stared at the caretaker for few moments as they walked. John’s face had
less lines
than it had in days before. The caretaker wasn’t wearing his customary black hat and Lance realized his hair was combed. Something else was missing too, but he couldn’t put a finger on it.

“I’m sorry, John.”

John turned his head, a confused look on his face.
“For what?”

“For everything that happened to you because of this place and my family.”

John’s lips pursed, and for a few seconds Lance thought that he might cry, but instead he merely smiled, something so sad it barely passed for such.

“You know what keeps me going sometimes?” John asked. “Hope. Not God per se, but maybe something like him. Hope that someday I’ll see them again and that I’ll be forgiven for all my mistakes and shortcomings in this life. Without that, I don’t have much to get up for in the morning.”

They reached the shoreline. The waves were gentle in the morning light, just a suggestion of what they had been in the storm the day before.

John turned and put a hand on Lance’s shoulder. “You don’t need to be sorry about anything. Everything that happened couldn’t have been any other way, and questioning it will only nurture a little madness inside of you. I suffer every day, there’s no getting around it, but somewhere inside I believe that things will be righted. Otherwise, what’s this all about?”

Lance smiled. The simplicity of John’s outlook tugged at
him,
pulled him toward something that he felt unfamiliar with. He had felt it when he knew that he would see Mary again and when she kissed him. There was a line drawn in the earth, and some lived on one side, while the rest lived on the other. The separation felt too great to step over right then, so he merely patted John’s hand with his own.

“So when will you be leaving?” John asked, looking back out at the lake.

Lance frowned, turning his head. “What makes you think I’m leaving?”

“Well, you’ve uncovered your family history, which isn’t a pleasant one. You’re almost done writing your book, I assume, and now you’re sleeping in your car.” John’s eyebrows rose and he shrugged.

Lance couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m not done yet. And I haven’t figured everything out.”

“By ‘everything,’ I’m guessing you’re not just referring to the plot of your story?”

Lance chewed at the inside of his cheek, looking over John’s shoulder at the large gazebo that sat several yards up the slope of the hill. “When was that built?” Lance said, pointing at the octagonal structure.

John turned and surveyed it for a moment. “Well, I think it was about 1990. It was the second or third owner that built it after your grandparents lived here. Why?”

“Just wondering,” Lance said, as he reached to remove his cell phone from his front pocket, where it buzzed like a trapped hornet. The number didn’t look familiar but he answered it anyway.

“Hello?”

“Lance? It’s Harold. You told me to call if I found anything. Well, I just remembered something that might interest you. Can you stop by sometime later today?”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Lance said.

“Great, I’ll see you then.”

Lance thumbed the phone off and brought his attention back to John. John’s eyes were locked on the house. Lance followed his gaze. The front face of the building wasn’t as oppressive or menacing in the morning light reflecting off its many windows and slanted surfaces, but it still made him want to avert his eyes.

“Looks like it’s waiting, doesn’t it?”
John asked, his eyes glazed over.

Lance looked at him, finally realizing what else was missing from the old man: the smell of liquor. Lance turned his head and stared at the house for a long time.

“Yes, it does.”

The historical building had only one man perusing its glass cases and cluttered tables when Lance made his way through the door. The man, who could’ve passed for Walter Cronkite’s older brother, gave Lance a short look over one shoulder before returning his attention to a display regarding the Korean War and the veterans from the surrounding area who had fought in it. The rear door leading to the kitchen opened as Lance neared it, and Harold stepped out holding an armful of papers.

“Oh good, you’re here,” Harold said, turning in a few semicircles while searching for a sufficient place to set his armload. After resting the towering pile of documents on an unsteady three-legged stool, the older man turned and smiled at Lance the way an archeologist might after finding an undiscovered artifact buried beneath his porch. “Follow me.”

Harold led him through another doorway in the main display room. A narrow hallway followed, and then they twisted left and down a flight of steep carpeted stairs. The steps emptied out into a wide basement that spanned the entire area of the building above them. The ceiling felt low and was sparsely lit with random banks of fluorescents every few yards. Each wall was fronted with towering shelves that held box upon covered box. A few folding tables were set up here and there, their surfaces covered with books and photo albums. Several shrouded pieces of artwork were stacked against the far wall, and Lance could even make out a row of early-model bicycles leaning on their kickstands in a shadowy corner off to his right.

“This is our archival space. Any prior displays or information that isn’t pertinent to the public gets put here,” Harold said, walking to a shelf a few steps from the edge of the stairs. He hoisted a box from the bottommost shelf and hobbled over to a small table that had been cleaned.

Lance approached the table as Harold lifted the cover from the box. Inside were dozens of leather-bound ledgers and a separate box no larger than a dictionary. “We received this from Dominion Inc. about twenty years ago. Dominion was the company that bought your grandfather’s shipping line after he died,” Harold said, lifting a ledger out of the recesses of the box and handing it to Lance.

The leather felt cool and damp in his hand. Inlaid in gold lettering on the cover
were
the words
Front Line Shipping
Co
.
When he opened the large book, he saw that the thick pages had yellowed with time, but the writing and columns were crisp and clear, as if whoever had written in it was distinctly concerned with legibility and form.

“Most of these are work ledgers. They have the day-to-day information about the employees, the loads that were being shipped, and whatnot. Dominion didn’t feel the need to hold on to them after they acquired Front Line, so they brought them to us. We did a display on Front Line quite a few years back, since it was the first shipping company in this area and a majority of the people here had worked for your grandfather at one time or another.” Harold’s eyes had taken on a shine that Lance assumed came from the vast knowledge of history held within the vault of his mind.

Lance flipped through the pages, and then peered into the box. “How many are there?”

“There’s a ledger for every year the company was in business, twenty-five years in total. Back then computers were few and far between. Everything was handwritten.” Harold put his hands on the small of his back, stretching a knot there. “I figured you might want to see these, to give you a handle on the company your grandfather built.”

Lance stared down the dusty tomes before him. Perhaps something of importance lay there, nestled in the pages, written by an unknowing hand, that would shed some light on what was happening to him and why.    

“Thank you, Harold. Do you mind?” Lance asked, gesturing to the table.

“Not at all.
That’s why I cleared this one off. Take as much time as you need, I have urgent business to attend to upstairs.” Harold widened his eyes and poked a finger at the ceiling.

Lance listened to the older man’s receding footsteps as he disappeared up the stairway, and then looked around the basement again. The stacks of boxes and stoic objects stood motionless. He turned his attention to the first ledger he had pulled from the box. On the first page a date of June 13, 1955, was written in the upper left-hand corner. Lance breathed, turned the page, and began to read.

Lance looked up from the third ledger when he heard someone approaching down the stairs. Instead of Harold stepping in to the room as he expected, Mary’s face smiled brightly at him across the gloom of the basement.

“I didn’t expect to see you,” Lance said as she approached the table. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, which accentuated her cheekbones and thin eyebrows. He couldn’t help but look at her lips and wonder if she would lean close to him again to press them to his own.

“Harold stopped by the store a couple hours ago. Said you were down here poring over these,” she said, as she pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat down opposite him. A moment of disappointment ran through him at the lack of a kiss, but he pushed it aside, chiding himself for being immature. “Found anything so far?” she asked, peeking over the edge of the box.

Lance sighed.
“Yeah.
Basically the ledgers have a daily account of current employees and a lot of meaningless information like what type of shipments
were
on each load and departure times. So far I haven’t really been able to figure out what the abbreviations for each of the employees mean.”

Mary glanced at the ledger that lay open before Lance and flipped to the beginning, eyeing the page from where she sat. “You skipped ahead to Rhinelander’s time period, huh?”

Lance nodded.
“Yeah.
He was hired in 1967. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. He’s listed in the ledgers until October of 1968, just like Harold said. Other than that, I can’t see anything strange.”

Mary’s eyebrows scrunched together, and she inspected the box again. “What’s in the smaller box?” she asked, shifting her eyes back to Lance.

Lance reached into the container and pulled the smaller box from within. “It’s a few newspaper clippings about the shipping company. There’s only two or three, actually.” He pulled the top off the box and pushed it across the table.

Mary held the yellowing pieces of paper out and examined them. She turned the first one over, showing it to Lance. “That’s actually the first picture I’ve ever seen of your grandfather and grandmother. I’d heard the name of the company before, but never knew who really owned it or what happened to them.”

Lance nodded. The photograph gracing the thin page from the local paper depicted three people standing before a docking bay and the flat calm of
Superior
beyond. Two of the people he immediately recognized. Annette looked almost like a different person, her hair flowing in golden waves and a smile on her nearly unlined face.
She had been pretty,
Lance thought as he looked at the photo. The man to her left wore a black mask over the lower part of his face, covering the damaged tissue underneath it, but there was no mistaking the eyes that burned in the picture. Lance had seen them only the night before, boring holes into him from the corner of the room by the light of the shotgun.

This had been the only photo of Erwin Metzger that Lance had come across in the box. Erwin stood apart from his wife, like a statue hewn of the coldest stone. A rotund man with a paunchy smile on his face stood on the other side of Erwin, and was identified in the wording below the picture as Brian
Ethridge
, the mayor of
Stony
Bay
at the time. The headline above the photo read
Front Line Shipping Co: A growing powerhouse in the industry.
The article went on to chronicle the accomplishments and endeavors the company had achieved so far.
Nothing more than his grandfather’s and grandmother’s names were mentioned in the story.

Mary placed the clipping back into the box after reading it and its brethren. The other two articles only briefly outlined the startup and the subsequent buyout of the shipping company after Erwin’s death. A few moments later they heard a thumping as Harold made his way down the stairs.

Lance smelled the coffee before he ever saw the tray Harold carried. Mary cleared a spot on the table as the old man set the load down and began to pour cupfuls from a steaming pot.

“Thought you could use a little pick-me-up,” he said, handing Lance a boiling cup of the black liquid. Lance thanked him and sipped the drink, suddenly aware of how tired he truly was. Mary pulled another chair close to the table and Harold sat at the end, crossing one leg over the other, a cup in one hand.

“So, anything interesting so far?”
Harold inquired, drinking from his brimming mug.

Lance shook his head. “Nothing unusual, but I guess I didn’t expect anything. Can you explain the abbreviations for the employee lists to me?” he said, pushing the closest open ledger toward the older man.

Harold squinted through his glasses at the pages before him. “Well, it’s fairly simple, actually. They didn’t get really complicated in the old days.” His finger slid along the top columns of the page. “These are just codes for information about the employees to the side here.” The old man’s hand traced the vertical edge of the page, the shadow of his hand passing over various names written in neat script. “The first column designates which position the employee held:
DW
is
dock worker
,
SM
is
shipping mate
, and so forth.
OT
is
on time
in regards to clock-in shifts for each position.
IT
is
in transit
, which means the person was part of a crew on a ship delivering a load somewhere.
V
is
vacation time
.
HW
is
hourly wage
, and the last column is for notes.”