Authors: Thomas Cater
“Anything else interesting happen while you were out
of town?” she asked.
Many interesting things were happening, but that
wasn’t what she wanted to hear. In fact, I gathered from her voice that she had
something to say and did not want to hear a word out of me.
“Not much,” I said, “Anything new happen in your
life?”
I couldn’t believe how inane small talk could get.
Here I was, standing on the brink of discovering for the first time whether life
and death were mutable, or was it as common as a traffic accident.
She was silent for a moment, licking envelopes, which
concerned me. A solemn expression gathered at the corners of her mouth.
“Well, how about it?” I felt compelled to ask.
“Jeffrey’s father came back,” she said.
That was neither a sudden nor a surprising revelation.
For all I knew, he could have been coming and going for the past five years.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means we won’t be able to see each other,” she
said.
I disliked being treated like a game fish: played, hooked
and allowed to run, and then abandoned to die in the sun. I felt regret stir
inside me, but it did not last. It was that insidious territoriality in men. In
fact, it seemed to dissipate in a breath.
“Where did Jeffrey’s father come back from?”
“He’s been working on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf.
He made enough money for a down payment on a house in Louisiana and wants us to
live with him.”
“I think a child should be with both parents,” I said,
“if it’s possible.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that because I wasn’t sure…”
“Sure about what, Jeffrey’s father?” I asked, angry
with myself for being so understanding, though in a strange way, this is how I expected
it to end.
“I love him,” she said, “but I don’t’ know if I can
trust him. He wasn’t always that way. I think it was not being able to find
work with dignity that made him unfaithful. Always waiting for life to get
better only made things worse. West Virginia has always been hard on her
people. It seems that politicians and parasites feeding off people make things
worse. That’s why the ones with pride usually leave. It’s not in them to sell
out for a hand out. Men like Jeffrey would rather leave than accept anything
less.”
“Young men are like that,” I said, “intolerably proud,
but easily swayed from obligations and responsibilities.”
“Do you think it will work out?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said. “He’s older and wiser now,
hopefully. If he hasn’t found someone else, which he hasn’t, or he wouldn’t be here,
it’ll work.”
She stopped sealing envelopes and took my hand.
“You came along at the right time, Charles. You were a
godsend.”
“Please,” I said, “it’s not necessary. We did not meet
in Sunday school. We just happened to need each other in different ways at the
same time.”
“I’m glad my leaving won’t disappoint you. I thought
you might think I was reneging on some kind of unspoken promise.”
I smiled and squeezed her hand, regretting that I had
not studied her body in greater detail when I had the chance. It would have
been a memory to cherish.
“I’m a sophisticated man of the world,” I said. “I
don’t really believe too strongly in the inviolability of matrimony or any
other kind of institution, including mental institutions.”
She kissed my cheek tenderly and walked to her desk,
back to her envelope stuffing and licking. I stared at her for a few moments in
silence, trying to remember what it was like, that field of skin with its nooks
and crannies, forests of soft, thin hair, streams of slick fluids.
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
“In two weeks,” she said. “He has to be at work by
then.”
I didn’t have the nerve to propose a final farewell
fling, though it was on my mind. I knew she would refuse. A true love had rediscovered
her. At least this parting was far less painful and expensive than the previous
one. There were no vehicles or real estate to haggle over, just a few cracks in
the ego.
“Good luck, Miss Pennington.”
“Thank you, Mr. Case. I hope you find whatever it is you’re
looking for.”
It sounded like such a strange but appropriate thing
to say, or so I thought. Did I give people the impression that I was looking
for something? If so, I didn't know what, or I'd probably forgotten all about
it. True, I was looking for something for Elinore. It was not as if I were on a
quest to get rich. I was looking for someone else’s happiness, or so I thought.
I was looking for the happiness of someone who had died many years ago.
“Oh, Charles, before you go, there’s one more thing,”
she said. “Remember the letter I sent to Harvard? We asked About Grier’s
qualifications and education?” I nodded, feeling my interest in abstractions
waning rapidly. “Well, we got an answer, it came yesterday.” She gave me the
envelope. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. I opened the letter and
began to read. “They never heard of him,” she said.
“No!” I said sadly, feeling a pang of remorse deep
down inside, but I kept reading. In the second paragraph, they claimed they had
no record of ever registering a graduate medical student by the name of Ezekiel
Grier. “Bullshit, I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true,” she piped, as confident as I was
skeptical. “Here’s a card from MEETH the New York Eye, Ear and Throat Association,
which is now defunct and only a museum. They have no history of him, either.”
“It can’t be!” I shouted. “They didn’t check back far
enough.”
She kept shaking her head defiantly. “It doesn’t
surprise me. He was probably just some old quack who talked Ryder into giving
him the job for a big campaign contribution.”
“No,” I was firm. “Samuel wouldn’t do that to his own
daughter. Not to his own flesh and blood!” I was responding a little too
aggressively. Connie winced.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Right as rain,” I replied, “right as rain.”
I said good-bye for the last time and walked sullenly
back to the van. If Grier wasn’t a surgeon or a psychiatrist, I could not
imagine the kind of inhuman thing he was.
Chapter Forty-Five
I drove to the Good Shepherd Cemetery, right up to the
rusting chain link fence and parked. It was an hour or two before dusk. I
opened the door to let the breezes sweep in and ventilate the van.
I felt the setting sun on my face; felt it warm my skin
and bones. It had been a bright and balmy day, a day to hold communion with the
living, not the dead.
I made a cup of tea, opened Samuel’s shoebox full of
letters and set them on a gravestone. I listened to the birds chattering, as if
they were impatient for dusk.
It was a strange family I had become involved with, Samuel
and Elinore. I knew nothing about them and yet I thought I knew them well. I
had become some kind of intermediary between them, but not in death, in this
other life.
I balanced the cup of tea on the stone and thumbed
through his dated letters. I was looking for anything in the 20s or 30s. Much
of the stuff was from …Washington. From a woman whose name was Alice Cadman! Her
address was … I couldn’t believe it. Her former address was mine! 1609 16
th
St. NW. next to the Swedenborgian Church! Talk about strange and unsettling
circumstances. The more I thought about it the more
uneasy I
became. Cadman, I suddenly realized, was the name of the woman who had married
my belated benefactor Rufus C. Dangerfield.
I removed the letter carefully from the envelope and
unfolded the three-page missive.
“
My Dearest Samuel,”
the letter began. ‘Dearest Samuel?’ I couldn’t believe they knew each other and
they were on familiar terms. “He is coming!” the letter extolled. It reminded
me of the words in Elinore’s diary. Could ‘he’ have been the one coming? Her
letter announced the arrival of a clever man, a former theosophist and a man
who professed interpreting the ‘Voynich Manuscript’. There were those words
again. She talked about how many years he spent in the Jesuit school of
Mandigone in Fracati, Italy, studying the pages of the text, until it sold to a
book dealer by the name of Wilfred Voynich.
She also discussed Elinore’s problem and Dr. Grier was
‘sure he could help.’ He said there were sections in the text that covered such
operations and it was, in fact, possible to transplant organs from one creature
to another. If Samuel wished, he could provide Elinore with the vision of a
sacred Ethiopian temple baboon, which ‘
possessed vision capable of gazing
into the depths of the human soul and discovering what lies therein’.
She went on to tell him in detail about the Voynich script,
a paper that baffled men for the past 600 years.
“In all that time no one had been able to translate
its strange cipher,” she said. “No one, that is, until now. Some have claimed
to understand it, but no one has revealed nearly so great an understanding of
its mysteries as Dr. Grier.”
She continued to extol the man’s learning and virtues,
as if he were a messiah.
B
efore closing, she said, “and so, my dearest, I urge
you find some excuse to visit my home again in Washington. We can discuss your
beloved’s fate.”
Chapter Forty-Six
I returned the letter to its envelope. I could not imagine
Samuel’s strange belief system. What compelled him to commit such unforgivable
sins: I could not believe he took his daughter's eyes! He also denied her the
satisfaction of knowing a man and the pleasure of loving her child. How could he
have condemned her to such torment?
It could also be true that his love for her had driven
him to attempt restorative surgery, years ahead of its time and inspired by an
obscure medical treatise. He also tried to provide her with the eyesight of an
old world monkey, rumored to see far beyond human capabilities and into the
very heart and darkness of men’s souls. His impossible plan for her well-being
had apparently driven her mad and the results bore terrible witness to what he
had accomplished.
The wall was undoubtedly another one of his machinations,
something evil that would sustain his empire forever and keep his world beyond everyone’s
reach. I was of the opinion that the only evil in the world was the evil men
did to each other. Samuel however was succeeding where others had failed. If my
suspicions were correct, I suspected I knew how to end Samuel’s reign of terror
from beyond the grave.
I was going to blow his wall to smithereens, not with
conventional explosives, but with …well, I would take care of that later if my
calculations were correct. When I breached the wall, there would be a
tremendous exodus of spirits, free to return to wherever spirits were destined
to return.
My tea was cold. I poured the dregs out on the ground
and listened to the earth drink it in. There was no point in putting off the
ghoulish chore any longer. I gathered up the digging tools and set out for
infant Harmon’s grave.
It took lass than twenty minutes to reach the
desacrilized sight. Traffic on the dirt road was light. Only one car had passed
since I had arrived. I went to work digging just below the head stone. An infant’s
coffin was bound to be less than half the size of an adult’s. I did not intend to
dig three feet beyond it.
The ground was soft. Once I stepped in the hole, I was
no longer visible from the road. I dug into hard clay sooner than I had
anticipated, but kept on digging. The air became cool. I saw the sun dip slowly
behind the rolling hills. There was still a splash of soft light and color in
the sky. I heard the birds chattering noisily, settling down before dusk in
nearby trees.
My shoulders were nearly even with the ground when
the shovel struck the coffin. The depth and length of the coffin would extend
another foot, or so I’ve been told. They went by the book in the 1920s.
I removed the dirt from the coffin. Bodies, I decided,
do not care to vacate their comfortable graves. It took nearly another hour to
remove enough soil to lift the child’s box from the earth. I could not help
imagining what people would think if they saw me robbing a grave. It was as if the
ghost of old Nicodemus Thanatos was on the prowl again. I dragged the tiny
coffin back to the van and swept it off with a broom.
After spending nearly a century in the ground, it was
in good shape, even though the seals had rotted. Samuel had chosen a good piece
of high and dry ground in which to bury his unnamed grandchild.
I needed headlights to drive back to town. By the time
I reached the Elkton Road, darkness had settled over the surrounding hills. I
still had Virgil’s flashlight in the glove box; it was long-handled and
required five batteries. It projected a beam of light that could nearly reach
the stars. I drove straight to the Ryder house. For the first time, since I had
arrived in Vandalia, I knew what to expect.
I was not wearing my murdered man’s suit. After
tonight, I would not need it. I was confident. If Elinore did not approve of my
plan, she could wait several more decades for another liberator to come. Time
meant nothing to the dead.