BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (3 page)

Hyperventilating, I flipped onto my hands and
knees and clawed at the space in front of me. My knee bumped one
end of the fallen post. The rest of it was buried in the slope of
dirt before me. My hands groped madly in search of an opening.
Along the left wall I found a channel, then squeezed through and
crawled as fast as I could back toward the shaft. When I emerged
from the tunnel, I got to my feet and gulped stale air with my
hands on my knees. Centering myself at the base of the shaft, I
looked up toward the daylight and began to yell.

***

Drew, as it turned out, had made the
reasonable assumption that I'd found a frog to catch or some
colorful stones to collect on the bend above our fishing hole. When
he realized I'd been gone a while, he walked up the bank and around
the curve to look for me. I didn't appear, so he started calling my
name. He pushed further upstream before realizing I might have
wandered back along the route we'd taken. Maybe I'd slipped past
him unnoticed. So he'd backtracked down past the fishing hole and
gone a few bends beyond. Then he remembered my reticence about the
copperhead and decided I was still somewhere upstream. He reversed
course again and started to sweat.

***

I don't know how long I stood at the bottom
of the shaft, looking up and yelling "Drew!" and "Help!" every few
seconds. Long enough for my muddy feet and hands to chill on a warm
June day. And long enough that my throat began to burn from
exertion. With no reference points except the distant tree-tops, I
lost my sense of time. And when tilting my head finally made my
neck sore and I had to look down and rest with my eyes tearing up,
I thought I heard a voice. I held my breath and listened hard.
Nothing for a few seconds, and then a drawn-out call.

"Hello-o-o!"

I replied with a piercing "Help!" then held
my breath again and stared skyward.

First one backlit head broke into the frame,
then a second. All I noticed was that one of my discoverers was
wearing a cap and the other wasn't. Both were shading their eyes to
see better into the darkness.

"What are you doing down there, buddy?" The
cap-less face leaned further into the frame. Its voice seemed young
but strong, and more rural than the ones I knew. Before I could
answer, the other face spoke with a girl's voice.

"Did you fall in? Are you hurt?"

I answered yes and no, and that I couldn't
get out. They asked me my name and where I came from, and I told
them I was from Seven Locks, and that I'd been fishing with my
brother before venturing off on my own. I heard them exchange a few
words that I couldn't make out.

"Is that a rope down there?" the man asked me
loudly. He lifted his eyes to look around, then focused back on me.
"We ain't got no windlass or ladder up here to get you out."

I grabbed the broken plank with the rope
wrapped around it and held it up to show them.

"Go on and unwind that rope. Count every loop
out loud."

I counted from one to eight out loud.

"Now find the other end. Pull it toward you
hand over hand, and count each pull out loud."

I pulled until I'd counted to ten and reached
the bucket.

"OK, good," the man said. He exchanged a few
more words with his partner, then turned back to me. "You said you
brother was fishing near here, right? I'm going to find him, and
Jessie will stay here with you. Don't worry, Owen – we'll get you
out." And then both faces were gone.

My faith and self-confidence were badly
frayed, and seconds after the faces disappeared I let out another
cry for help. But Jessie reappeared immediately to assure me she
hadn't left. And because her position had shifted a little, her
face was better lit.

"When I was little," she said, trying to
cheer me up, "our dog Coots fell in an old dry well. He was gone
for days before a neighbor heard him barking. But we got him out
and he was good as new." She shaded her eyes to peer into the mine
and I noticed a couple of curls had escaped from under her flat
cap. "After that, Coots decided there was no use running off
anymore. I don't think he ever missed another dinner!" She smiled
at the recollection, but I was stuck on "gone for days."

Jessie engaged me enough to keep my mind off
my cold extremities, drenched legs and torso, and aching shoulder.
Left alone, I might have curled up with my knees against my chest
at the bottom of the shaft and sobbed. Instead I felt more hopeful
by the time I heard an indistinct male voice. Jessie turned away to
answer, and then there were three faces peering down at me, and I
recognized Drew.

"Owen, you little rat! What happened?" I
started to explain that I'd been following a deer, but I could tell
that he was listening to something the other man was saying. I saw
him nod, then retreat out of the frame. Within seconds he was back,
extending his fishing rod over the shaft.

"OK, Alphonse. Henry here has got this all
figured out. I'm going to drop my line down to you, and you're
going to hook it onto the free end of the rope. Not the end with
the bucket. Can you do that, Owen?" I nodded and he spooled out the
line. "Careful with that hook!"

When the hook reached the mud near my feet, I
impaled the free end of the rope and Drew reeled it straight up.
The rod and faces disappeared, and then Drew was climbing down
toward me, holding the taut rope and leaning back with his feet
braced against the shaft wall. He stepped down onto the mud floor
and knelt to look at me.

"I'm sorry I lost track of you, Owen." Now my
chin fell and I couldn't hold back the tears. Drew put his hand on
my ribs as I choked back sobs. "It's OK, pal. You're a brave guy.
Now let's get you out of here."

He untied the rope from the bucket, curled
several snug wraps around my chest below my armpits, then knotted
it against my breast-bone as I wiped my eyes. Instructing me to
keep both hands tight on the rope near the knot, he lifted me up
until I was standing on his shoulders. Then he called out, and I
began to rise in a stop-and-go rhythm. Henry and Jessie were
pulling me out.

When I reached the lip, the world opened onto
a bright June day, and I had to squint at first. "Well done, Owen!"
Jessie said as she pulled me away from the shaft and Henry held the
rope, feet braced on the base of the mound. He got up grinning and
I got my first clear view of him. About Drew's age, with an open
and lightly freckled face, blue eyes, dirty blond hair. But when he
untied the knot on my chest, it was his calloused, dust-colored
hands that impressed me the most. Especially the left one, where
his ring-finger was missing beyond the middle knuckle.

***

As we walked down the hill toward our fishing
hole, Henry and Jessie conversed with Drew, who led me by the hand.
My relief at being out of the mine had ebbed into a frazzled
numbness that left me barely able to put one mud-drenched foot in
front of another. But even if I hadn't been too exhausted to
interpret the scene, I would have been too young. Instead it took
years of thinking back on that day's events for me to get a better
perspective.

Henry and Jessie had been panning for gold a
bit upstream from where I'd encountered the deer. When they'd heard
Drew calling my name and drawing closer, they'd packed their gear
into a canvas bag and slipped into the woods, not wanting to be
seen working a stretch of creek where they'd successfully panned
out colors and flakes. They'd retreated up the other end of the
mine trail, but it wasn't until the rushing sound of the creek
diminished that they heard my cries for help. When they found me
and I told them I had been fishing with Drew, they already had a
good sense of where he was.

I don't know if the connection between Drew
and Jessie started even before Drew climbed down to help me, or
whether it began on the walk down to Rock Run, in the charged
atmosphere of a successful rescue. But even though I was dead on my
feet, I couldn't help but notice how Jessie pulled off her cap to
shake free her auburn hair. And how she turned back more than once
to smile at Drew while answering a question or echoing a thought.
She had darting green eyes that reminded me of fireflies.

Leading us down the path, Henry had less to
say than Jessie. We got to the fishing hole and Drew pointed out
the undercut bank, but Henry spat and said we'd have had better
luck at Cabin John Creek, which was practically in our backyard. As
Drew explained that we'd fished every hole in that creek already,
Henry ran his hand with the severed finger through his hair and
squinted at Jessie, whose attention was focused on Drew. Henry
shifted his eyes to Drew and then back to Jessie, but she didn't
seem to notice.

Like Drew, Gig Garrett was nineteen years old
in 1893, and Jessie was his girl. Gig and Henry had grown up in the
same household and could have been fraternal twins. But Henry must
have long since realized that his adopted brother was a quicksilver
version of himself, and that Gig's impulsive spirit and dissembling
charm made him more interesting in Jessie's eyes. When Henry
squinted at whatever circuit was arcing between Jessie and Drew on
that June afternoon, could he have sensed that it would be enough
to inflame our lives?

Chapter 3

Fifteen months after she helped rescue me
from the mine, Jessie Delaney was found dead in the wooded creek
below the aqueduct bridge at Widewater. We learned later that her
windpipe had been crushed, but the coroner declared her injuries
"consistent with a fall from the bridge." Jessie was the first and
only real love of Drew's life, and after she died I often caught
him staring absently into space. He still called me Alphonse, but
the pranks and tickling ended.

The police came to talk to him, and it must
have been Drew who steered them to Jessie's parents in
Williamsport. And to the Zimmerman family, also in Williamsport,
and their son Henry and adopted son Gilbert "Gig" Garrett. Garrett
had been seeing Jessie until she took a job at Anglers Inn to be
near Drew in Cabin John. And Garrett disappeared right after
Jessie's death, finally surfacing eighteen months later in Alaska,
at a gold-mining camp on the Yukon River.

I never saw Gig Garrett alive. I was nine
years old in 1894 when he fled after strangling Jessie, and eight
years later I met his charred corpse in the smoking ruin of his
cabin. But Jessie told Drew a few stories about Garrett that she'd
heard while growing up, like how the Zimmermans adopted him and how
he got his nickname. So what I know about Garrett I heard from Drew
– mostly in the days before they killed each other in 1902.

Gilbert Garrett was born in 1874 in
Georgetown. That made him Drew's age, but unlike Drew he had
parents who didn't amount to much. His father would travel around
the area with a painting crew, but he didn't always come home
between one job and another, and sometimes he came home broke,
having spent his earnings at the nearest tavern.

And then before Gilbert turned four, his
father vanished – disappeared from the river span of Chain Bridge
while he and his crew were working. It was getting late on a winter
afternoon and the painters were squaring away the work site, when
something must have spooked a horse on the bridge. Whatever it was
made the horse try to reverse direction and sent the empty caisson
it was pulling swerving across the bridge. The painting crew
scattered, reassembling once the driver got his horse settled and
caisson straightened out.

That's when one of the men realized Garrett's
father was gone. When the crew was finally sure he wasn't on the
bridge, they climbed down to the water, but that stretch below
Little Falls has deadly currents and the river was running high and
cold. Fishermen found the body three days later, down near
Fletcher's boathouse.

After his father died, Gilbert and his sister
went to live with their father's mother in Georgetown, because
their own mother wasn't up to the task of raising them. She
eventually ran off to Pittsburgh with a worker on the painting crew
who already had children and didn't want two more. But once Gilbert
got to be eleven or twelve, Grandma Garrett couldn't stop him from
hanging around the Georgetown streets and wharves.

When the canal boats reached Georgetown,
they'd usually lie at the wharf for a day or two waiting their turn
to unload coal. Kids who were boating with their father or parents
would go swimming or visit the candy stores on M Street, and the
adults would start preparing the boat for the week-long run back to
Cumberland. That meant provisions would be brought on board and
sometimes lie unattended on deck while other tasks were
handled.

Gilbert learned how to exploit these
opportunities. Moving quickly but never hurrying, he would carry
off a sack of potatoes or a few loaves of bread, while looking like
a kid who absolutely knew his way around and belonged on that boat.
That's what he was doing when he was caught in the act by Captain
Oliver Zimmerman in the summer of 1887 at age thirteen.

Henry was on the canal that summer, and he
watched his father walk up behind the retreating boy and clasp both
of Gilbert's suspender straps in one large fist.

"Where are you taking that watermelon, son?"
Captain Zimmerman was a barrel-chested man with a full beard. He
released Gilbert's suspenders and spun him around by the shoulder.
Without a trace of apprehension, Gilbert looked up at Captain Z and
then down at the melon in his hands. He'd been watching for a week
or so, and he knew that the watermelons were delivered to the
tied-up boats around two o'clock. When no one was on board, the
watermelon man would leave a melon on deck, then swing by an hour
or two later to collect payment from boats that wanted them, or
retrieve melons from boats that didn't.