Zack (6 page)

He looked up. “Help you, son?” he asked in a voice that suggested he’d just as soon wash the floor.

I approached the counter. “I hope so,” I said, fishing the plastic bag from my pocket. “I was wondering, could you tell me what this is made of?” I shook the nugget onto the red velvet pad on top of the case.

The man put down his pen and pushed the notebook aside. He picked up the nugget and held it to the light between thumb and forefinger.

“Interesting,” he said, the cigar bobbing. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

He pulled a lamp with a circular fluorescent bulb towards him and switched it on. In the centre of the bulb was a magnifying glass. He held the nugget under the lamp, turning it around several times with fingers made huge by the glass.

“Where did you get it?”

“It’s been in the family a long time,” I said, feeling justified in my lie because of his prying. “I inherited it. From my grandfather. I think—That is, I was told it’s gold and I thought maybe a professional jeweller could tell me for sure.”

“It was cast,” he said, continuing his examination, “but not expertly. And not properly. That’s why it’s a little rough.” He adjusted the little lens in front of one side of his glasses and squinted at the nugget some more. “And it contains impurities.”

His voice had been warming all along. He was clearly interested in the nugget.

“Bit of a mystery, isn’t it?” he said, switching off the lamp. He smiled for the first time and the cigar tilted towards the ceiling.

“Sure is,” I said lamely.

“This’ll take a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

He locked the jewellery case, pushed the curtain aside and disappeared. No one came into the shop as I waited with rising suspense. After what seemed like half an hour but was ten minutes by my watch, he came back into the shop. A thin blue line of smoke rose from the cigar. When he dropped the nugget on the red velvet I saw that he had scraped a thin line on it.

“Yup, interesting,” he repeated. “I think it’s shot.”

“You mean ruined?”

He laughed. With one eye squinted almost shut against the cigar smoke, he said, “No, no. Shot. Rifle shot. A bullet. You were right, it must be very old. Strange thing for an heirloom, though.”

“Yeah, it’s been sort of a family mystery for years. So, is it gold?”

“It’s gold, all right. Not high grade, though. Maybe ten carat, and like I said, it’s full of impurities.”

“How much is it worth?”

“Oh, I could give you, maybe, a few hundred for it.”

“You’d buy it from me?”

“I make custom jewellery from time to time for certain clients. I could use it. But like I said, it’s not very high grade. And I’d have to see a letter from your parents giving you permission to sell it.”

I slipped the nugget back into the baggie.

“No problem,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

Practically bursting with happiness at my sudden wealth, I rushed back to the market and Jen asked her boss if she could take a fifteen-minute break. She drew two giant colas from the machine when the boss wasn’t looking and we walked around the displays, holding hands and pretending to be interested in the merchandise. I fought with myself. One minute I’d be on the verge of telling her about the nugget, the next I’d be counselling myself to keep it secret a while longer, at least until I talked to The Book about my research project.

“Why not come over tonight and we’ll watch a movie?” Jen said as we returned to the grill.

“Um, maybe not.”

“Why? Got another date?” she said playfully.

“No, it’s, well, would your parents be okay with me visiting?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do they know about me?”

“Sure. I told them I’m going out with you.”

We stopped. Jen went behind the counter and put on her apron.

“I mean, do they
know
about me?”

Jen looked at me curiously, then her brows creased in anger. “That’s kind of insulting, you know, Zack.”

I didn’t respond. I tossed my empty cup into the waste bin beside the counter.

“Maybe,” she said stiffly, “you’re a little too sensitive about that.”

“Maybe that’s easy for you to say.”

“My parents are colour-blind, Zack. Okay?”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“Come over around seven.” Then, turning to her work, she added, “If you feel like it.”

I left the market, depressed by the knowledge that, although things were going good between us, deep down I still wondered about her.

Before supper was put on the table—Dad was cooking up one of his culinary monstrosities, macaroni with cheese and ham—I helped Mom in the garden, breaking up lumps of soil with a hoe, working up a good sweat. After we had struggled through the meal, making fun of the “yellow death,” as Mom had named the dish, I hurried through my kitchen chores and drove over to Jen’s. She lived in a small stone house near St. Joseph’s Church.

Her parents were very nice. They said hello and cleared out of the family room as if on cue, then Jen and I watched a horror flick. The atmosphere was a little frosty at first—in the room, not the movie—but
after we had made a few jokes about the number-one vampire, who was about as scary as a wet rag, we were laughing. About halfway through the movie Jen climbed onto my lap. I don’t know what happened after that—in the movie, not the room.

I got home about ten-thirty, checked in with my parents, who were playing Scrabble at the kitchen table and arguing good-naturedly about a word Mom said Dad had just made up out of thin air, and took my loot from under the bed.

The two rolled-up straps were even stiffer and harder, because they had dried out, and when I attempted once more to unroll them they resisted. The ends were folded back and sewn to form loops. Probably, I thought, they were belts of some kind, and the loops had held buckles. If they were, whoever owned them must have been as fat as a tub because, if stretched out, they would have been pretty long.

So I made notes on them, and sketched them in my normal incompetent way, and set them aside. The Cs of iron were even less interesting. I took them to the garage and dropped them into a pail of solvent and went back into the house to wash the rust from my hands. Once more I began to doubt that the stuff I had found would make a project solid enough to satisfy Ms. Song. But I had no other ideas.

T
he Book rushed into the library, a thick sheaf of papers in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, her running shoes chirping on the tile floor. She sat down beside me at a table in a quiet corner of the reading room and plunked down her cup, slopping coffee on the Formica top.

“Shoot!” she exclaimed, wiping up the puddle with a tissue, her idea of a really raunchy curse, I guessed. “Okay, Zack, I’m all ears. What do you have?”

I had ridden the bus to school with my treasures on my knee in a gym bag, my stomach fluttering, alternating between hope and the certainty that I was about to make a monumental fool of myself. “What is this junk?” I imagined The Book sneering. “I gave you a break and you come to me with something you dug up in your yard?”

If she doesn’t accept my proposal, my history credit goes down the drain and I might as well quit school now and avoid the June rush, I had thought as I sat fidgeting in the library, waiting for her to be late.

My notes were carefully arranged before me on the table, along with the kindergarten-level drawings.
My gym bag was on the floor beside me.

“Well,” I began, “you’ll probably think this is a terminally goofy idea—”

“Nice sales pitch,” she interrupted, and sipped her coffee.

Great, I thought, she’s laughing at me already. But I plowed forward. I related how I had found the box, dug it up, cleaned and inspected both it and its contents. As I spoke I showed her my notes, pointed to the sketches, drew the objects one by one from the bag for dramatic effect.

As I spoke my confidence grew. She sat still and silent, her coffee cooling beside her, her hands resting on the pile of tests, fingers interlocked. I ended by handing her the iron Cs, now scraped clean of rust.

“And I have no idea what these metal things are,” I concluded. “But my proposal is, I want to find out what all this stuff is and how it ended up buried in the ground behind our house.”

“You really don’t know what this is?” she asked, taking the Cs from me. Her voice was quiet. “Are you serious?”

Damn. I had lost her. She hadn’t been interested at all; she had been letting me say my piece, politely, because that was the kind of teacher she was. Now would come the gentle criticism, the soft-spoken rejection.

“Yes, Ms. Song. I don’t have a clue.”

“I do.”

“And?” As if I cared at this point.

“Well, you’ll have to find out. I’m not telling. But, Zack, prepare yourself. You’re not going to like it.”

“You mean you accept the project?”

“Are you kidding? I think it sounds great. And you’ve made a terrific start, with your notes and all. Come on, I’ll give you some stuff to get you started.”

When we left the library, I was juggling my gym bag and six huge books Song had pulled from the shelves and slapped into my hands as I hurried behind her through the stacks.

“See you tomorrow, Zack. I’m late. Happy hunting.” And with that she tore off down the hall.

I stumbled to my locker and stored all the stuff, then began gathering my books for next class.

What had she meant when she’d said I should prepare myself?

The books Song had given me were about the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and local history. I would have bet Fergus had about enough history to fill a pamphlet, but there were two fat volumes.

That evening I sat at my now crowded desk with a can of tonic water and a bowl of taco chips, Miles Davis on the stereo, and set to work. I liked the
Illustrated Encyclopedia of the American Revolution
best because it was all pictures. I flipped through it at
random, wondering what The Book thought I’d find in there, since my box had been dug up in Canada. There were page after page of muskets, powder horns, uniforms, belts, swords, hats; pioneer tools like axes—I recognized the axe head I had found in the yard—adzes, plows and harnesses; dresses, bonnets, breeches and shoes. Three CDs were consumed as I pored over the photos, and by the time I closed the book I was able to make four lengthy additions to my notes. And I had generated lots of questions.

The soot-covered stones I had dug up from the same hole as the box had probably been remnants of a pioneer cabin’s chimney and fireplace. Which meant that our house was built almost on top of the site. Who had lived on our land? Had the cabin burned down or rotted away after being abandoned?

Piffard the jeweller had probably been right: the nugget seemed to have been cast in a bullet mould. There were pictures of these tools in the book. But why cast gold as a bullet? To shoot a werewolf? I wondered, laughing and spraying corn chip dust all over my work. Was it easier to carry or hide the gold as shot rather than dust? Or had it been a coin, melted down?

The leather straps, I deduced, were exactly that, not belts. In the book was a picture of a Butler’s Rangers dress uniform. The Rangers were a corps of British soldiers who had fought the Americans guerrilla-style, with Indian allies. The straps were worn
criss-crossed over the shoulders and chest and held a sword on one side and an ammunition box on the other. Had the cabin owner, the pioneer, once been an army man?

That question seemed to be answered by the identity of the box—and that was the most exciting discovery. It was called a document box—I saw it looking at me from page 256 of the book. The crown represented England and the initials
G R
stood for Georgius Rex—King George, who reigned during the time of the American Revolution.

In other words, my silly half-rotten box was more than two hundred years old! And that proved that the contents were at least as old.

That night sleep came late. My mind spun, throwing out question after question. Who had lived on our land on the banks of the Grand River two hundred years ago? Why had he or she buried the box? To hide it? To save it from or for someone?

“The thing to do,” I whispered into the darkness, “is search the title to the land.” I had learned when Mom and Dad bought the place that a lawyer had to do a “title search” first to make sure there were no financial liens on the property, and to be certain the person selling it actually owned it. Dad had explained that the registry office could tell you all the proprietors of a piece of land since the Crown had granted it to its first owner.

Maybe if I did that I’d find a clue to the person
who buried the box, the nugget, the straps and—

It was then I remembered the iron Cs. What the hell, I thought, I can’t sleep anyway.

I stood at the kitchen sink, having used up most of a box of steel wool pot cleaners, up to my elbows in dirty soapy water, working quietly so as not to wake up my parents. The solvent I had soaked the iron in had loosened most of the surface rust, which came off fairly easily with the steel wool. After half an hour’s scrubbing I decided that the thing was as clean as it was going to get. I dried the Cs with a dish towel—leaving it stained with rust—and returned with the iron to my room.

Under my desk lamp the ring was blackish, its surface pitted and scarred from corrosion. As I ran my fingers, now tender from the scrubbing, along it I noticed a place where the roundness had been ground flat.

I trained my magnifying glass on the spot. Barely visible were three letters scraped or punched into the metal.
R P
, then a big space, then a
T
. Once more a rummage in the desk drawer. Congratulating myself that I never threw anything away, I opened the smallest blade of the Swiss Army knife Mom had given me when I was ten. Carefully, I scraped the metal between the letters. Slowly, one by one, the rest of them emerged:
R. PIERPOINT
.

My enthusiasm soared. I had a name. I had a place to start.

T
he Wellington County Museum, a great grey pile of local quarried stone shaped like a shoe box lying on the long end, with a central tower, sat brooding on the top of a big hill on City Road 18 between Fergus and Elora, as uninviting as a prison. In fact, it used to be one—of a sort. According to the plaque bolted to the wall at the entrance, it was built in 1877 as “the House of Industry and Refuge”—in other words, a poorhouse.