Chaneysville Incident (23 page)

I did not, of course, know what I was about. And so, without even suspecting the danger, I fell prey to one of the greatest fallacies that surrounds the study of the past: the notion that there is such a thing as a detached researcher, that it is possible to discover and analyze and interpret without getting caught up and swept away. I believed, being a naive thirteen-year-old, that I was going to climb up into that attic and look at a few heirlooms and some dusty mementos and figure Moses Washington out, and once that was done, I was going to climb back down and go on about my merry way, unaffected, unchanged, unharmed. And so I moved with an arrogance and fearlessness born of nothing but ignorance. But at least I realized that what I was looking at was perfect, and that anything I did, one false step, would destroy that perfection, would probably obscure whatever message might be in the scene.

And so I stood at the head of the stairway for many minutes,
looking
at it—fixing it in my mind—before I walked across the loosely laid floor of two-by-six planks to the table, and looked down at the book lying on it. It was a Bible. Beside the Bible stood the lamp, and I could see that there was still some kerosene pooled in the reservoir. Beside the lamp was a small box of matches. I looked at those things for a long time, trying to understand why the matches were there, in the open, not put away. For I knew the way in which those men’s minds had worked: put things back when you are finished with them; put them in the same place every time, so that when you need them you won’t have to guess or fumble or even think. And then I realized that I had made an incorrect assumption (although I did not think of it in those terms). I had assumed that I was stepping into the scene at the middle of a cycle, when in fact, I was stepping into the beginning of one. They were beside the lamp because that was where he would want them when he first came in—to light the lamp.
Then
he would put them somewhere out of the way. His last act before blowing out the lamp and leaving would have been to take them out again and place them where he could find them easily, in the dark. I stood there feeling the flush of pride and power that comes from having been able to figure something out; pride and a surge of confidence. And so I reached out with a steady hand and removed a match from the box and struck it, and then I lit the lamp. Then I reached out to drop the match into the can that I knew (because Old Jack’s description of Moses Washington’s ways had extended even to the way he snuffed matches) he would have kept there half full of sand.

But the can was not there. For a moment I was frantic, certain that I had moved wrongly, and had therefore forever lost my chance to understand. But then I saw it, on the left-hand side of the table, not the right. Which made sense, since Moses Washington had been left-handed. I dropped the match into it, and all my confidence returned, tempered with some reason. All I had to do, I thought, was to use my head, to think carefully, to use all of the things I knew, not just part of them. Then I would be all right. And so once again I moved, slipping into the chair and settling back, trying to sit as he had sat. It was uncomfortable for me, for he had built it for himself, for a man, not for a thirteen-year-old. I understood that, and I almost gloried in the discomfort, for the chair was like a print of his body; each part that pressed against my body was an expression of his. I sat there, my eyes closed, feeling the odd shape against me. And then I looked down at the Bible.

I opened the Bible at the place where it had been marked, the Book of Jeremiah. Part of the first chapter had been marked with pencil. I did not read it; I sat there and memorized it: “Then said I, Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.”

I memorized it, and I puzzled over it, wondering why he had marked it, why he had been reading that at all. I was so busy with that that I almost missed the card that he had been using to mark his place, an ordinary plain white file card, but it was covered with writing in a small neat hand, writing that I knew was his from the way the letters were shaped, but which seemed to me to be terribly cramped and neat to be his. It was another Bible quotation, but one that was totally unfamiliar to me. Which was odd, since I had been required to memorize half of the Bible before I could read, and had read the whole thing several times in the years since. But I had never read this passage, had never even heard of the book from which it came. But I knew it was the Bible, from the way it sounded and from the manner in which he had identified it: 2 Esdras: xiv: 25. So I memorized that too: “I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out….” I wondered about that for a while, what Esdras was, why I had never heard of it.

But then my eyes drifted up from the page and I was, for the first time, looking into the recesses of the room, and what I was seeing was Bill’s “mess” of books. Only his description had been misleading. There was no mess, no clutter, no haphazard piles threatening to slide and tumble. I should have known there would not be, should have known that Moses Washington would have never tolerated here the kind of disorder that most people permitted in their attics. Still, I could hardly have been prepared for what he had done, which was to set seven-foot-high shelves into the spaces between the joists and the rafters. Every one of those shelves was burdened with books: printed volumes, record books, loose-leaf binders, tracing books, sketch pads, ledgers, plat books, bound volumes of newspapers, and a seemingly endless array of notebooks of every size, shape, and color. The number of those books was unfathomable, but whatever it was, it was large. I had never realized the Moses Washington had loved books as much as I did: it was a side of him that it had never occurred to me existed, that I had never heard about. Knowing about it made me feel easier about my own passion. And, like mine, his had been a passion for using books, not just for owning them; every one of those books had been read, and reread. The colors of their bindings were faded, and any stamping on the spines had long since been worn away. And that made me realize that he would have had to know not only what was in those books, but exactly where they were on the shelves. He would have had to assign each one a place, and memorize that place, and put it back exactly in that place when he was done with it. There would have been no other way to refer to them. It did not occur to me that he would not refer to them; I knew instinctively that he had been researching something, that what had happened was not, as everybody thought, that Moses Washington had given up hunting, but rather that he had transferred his efforts to a different forest, to the pursuit of other game. Until the day he had, for some reason, gone back…. I sat there, reconstructing it: he lifting his eyes from the words of the Prophet, standing, stretching, taking the matches from their keeping place and laying them beside the lamp, ready for his return, leaning over and cupping his hand behind the lamp’s chimney and blowing out the flame, taking—I stopped then. Because something was terribly wrong. It was not one of those seemingly odd configurations of data that it is the task of research to explain—not why had he not put the Bible back in its place, or whether it was significant that the Book was open to Jeremiah, not even why he had left his books and taken up his gun after ten long years. No; the problem was of that terrible basic variety that threatens the very possibility of meaningful research; the problem was an incongruity in the data itself: the problem was the matches.

They were ordinary kitchen matches—what the old folks call barn burners—and they were in an ordinary box, and they lay there exactly where I had put them after I had used them, without even thinking about it. Carelessly. It had been a mistake to do it that way, because I was not left-handed, and my casual replacement of the matches would have changed the picture. The matches should have been in the wrong place. But they were not. They were in exactly the same place as they had been when I had come in; available, easily available, to a right-handed person.
That
was what was wrong. I sat there in the attic, thinking furiously. Perhaps he had simply lit the lamp in a different way. But that would have meant the can was in the wrong place…. I sat there, staring at the box of matches, the confusion rising in me like a flooding tide, realizing how arrogant it had been for me to come in there like that, making judgments as to what made sense and what did not, how hopeless it was, how little I knew, how much I needed to know before I could hope to understand that place. And in the first act of sense I had probably ever performed, I had risen and blown out the flame and taken my flashlight and gotten myself out of there.

But I had found my reading; I had taken my Bible to bed with me, and by late afternoon I had been through Jeremiah three times and, not understanding why he had been reading it, had gone back to Genesis, and was well into the begats before the fever had come upon me.

That had been the beginning of a magic time. For that day, perhaps in the illogic of my fever, I had dedicated myself to the task of unraveling the whys and wherefores of Moses Washington. It was not as hubristic as it might sound; I was thirteen years old but I was not stupid—I knew that there was a great deal I needed to know before I would be ready to confront so great and absolute a mystery; my errors with the matches had convinced me of that. And so I had developed a plan, and I had followed it to the letter.

I had spent a month writing down in a loose-leaf notebook everything I knew about Moses Washington from my own observation and recollection. I had spent the next month writing down in a second notebook anything I could find out from other people, keeping those facts cataloged according to source. Then I had collected data from records—or I had tried to: there was practically nothing about Moses Washington written down anywhere in the County besides the recording of the deed to the property and the coroner’s certification of his accidental death.

Then I had composed two lists of questions. One set I labeled preliminary questions: Where had Moses Washington come from? Why had he come to the County? Why had he stayed? Why had he been a moonshiner? Where and when had he learned to read? What had happened in the war to make him change? The second list was only two questions long; I labeled it final questions: What had he been researching up in the attic? Why, after a ten-year hiatus, had he taken up his gun?

And then I had turned aside from anything that had anything directly to do with Moses Washington. For the next two years I had contented myself with the task of learning what his world had been like. Two years I had recorded and cataloged every world event I could find. I had realized early on that the key to it all was chronology, a strict time-ordering of events, and so I had developed a system of color-coded index cards on which I recorded events, and which I ordered by carefully noting the time of their occurrence, the time dating expressed as a string of numbers, year, month (in two digits), date (in two digits), and time of day (in a twenty-four-hour military-style expression), followed by the day of the week.

That was how I learned history. That was where the magic came from. Because in preparing myself to track down Moses Washington, I had begun to perceive connections where others, it seemed, saw only unrelated facts, and I had begun to delight in exposing those connections to the unaware; I had learned how much fun it can be to shock with the truth. (I had once given the World History teacher, a good-hearted soul who moonlighted as a Lutheran minister, a bad case of indigestion when, in the middle of class, I suggested that the form of Luther’s Theses had as much to do with his chronic constipation as with his complex theology.)

And then, after years of preparation, of reading history and theology and philosophy and anthropology and psychology and science, of cataloging events from the sublime to the ridiculous, I assembled my notebooks and my card files and pens and paper and, one morning at the beginning of summer, when my mother had gone to work, moved it all up into the attic.

For the rest of the vacation, I spent my days in the attic, among his books, filling in the gaps in my education, looking for clues as to what he had been. I worked nights as a busboy at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant on the Turnpike; I slept—when I slept at all—between five-thirty, when my mother came home, and ten-thirty, when I had to leave for work. Bill thought I was crazy; I was not, I was simply driven. I did not lose weight. I did not get sick. I was happy.

And then, when fall had come and I had to go back to school, when I had to give up the night shift for part-time work between three and eleven, I had begun the final phases of my research. Each night I would open the trapdoor and creep up into the attic. I would light the lamp (I did not bother with the fireplace) and open one of my notebooks—I had a separate one for each of the preliminary questions—and I would write down potential answers, speculations, references, cross-references. When I was done I would begin to check out the speculation, eliminating impossibilities, assigning probabilities. I had done that for a year.

And then, in the beginning of the following year, my final year in high school, I had felt I was ready. I had begun at the beginning, reading over the dossier of Moses Washington that I had compiled, reading over the cards time and time and time again, etching the order of the world’s events on my mind, looking over my own speculations and eliminations. And then I had begun to think.

I thought about it constantly throughout that fall and winter. It looked, I suppose, as though I were coming out of some kind of shell—I did not spend nearly so much time in the attic. But I could think anywhere, and I thought everywhere, daydreaming through school, it seemed, hunting, it appeared, almost by instinct—Old Jack had marveled at the sudden ease with which I tracked, and commended me for finally giving up trying to think my way to game and allowing myself to feel my way to it. But towards the end of the winter I had begun to go up into the attic again, to write again in notebooks, speculating now, not on the preliminary questions, but on the final ones, working now towards what I expected to be answers.