Gravity Box and Other Spaces (25 page)

Will nodded and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small object and handed it to Alan, who stared at it until his eyes grew moist. He handed it back, and Will passed it across to Sean.

It was a wood carving of two arrowheads, one jammed into the base of the other. The paint had flaked, but at one time it had been bright red. Sean vaguely remembered them.

“A
King's Arrow
pin,” he said.

“Aye, I've lost near everything else in me life, but I hung onto that.”

“Why?” Sean asked.

Will frowned thoughtfully. “Your dear brother, Roy, meant everything t' me then. 'e was the first person what ever give me a chance.”

“A chance at what?”

Will looked surprised. “Alan, doesn't 'e know?”

Alan shook his head. “I don't think—”

“Ye haven't told 'im? But—”

“Will—”

“Told me what?” He recognized a sudden desire to know about the
Arrows
again, a desire he had thought he put aside after his illness. Impatient with himself, he stood. “I have to clean up.”

“Sean—” Alan started to say.

“I could care less about your daft Arrows. All that rot almost killed me. For all I know, it killed Roy.”

He scooped up the plates from everyone and hurried into the kitchen. He leaned on the sink and waited for the crying urge to pass. The door swung open behind him.

“Sean?” It was Will. “Your brother's gone out to the barn. Can I talk to ye?”

“About what?”

“The
Arrows
. Alan never told ye what we were?”

“No. I finally understood that it was nothing important.”

“That's wrong. It was very important. See, we were all wards.”

Sean turned. “Wards?”

“Delinquents. Bad kids. We'd all been in jail. Even Alan.”

“Alan?”

“That's where 'e and I met. When we got out, your brother Roy started an organization for us, the
King's Arrows
. 'e took the lot of us. Most of us were war orphans, our fathers dead, our mothers, most of us, gone or dead, too, from grief if nothin' else. Anyway, we got into trouble and ended up in bad situations. Alan got caught poachin' on public land—”

“You mean the King's land?”

“Aye. Ten months. I robbed a shop and got a year and a half. A lot o' the Arrows had done as bad or worse. Roy taught us t' do better.”

“Taught you to run around like the merry men?”

Will laughed. “He thought the stories meant somethin'. Maybe 'e was right. 'e said it wasn't the stealin' part that was important, but the charity. Lookin' out for others, especially them what can't do for themselves. A lot of us turned our lives around.”

“Even you?”

Will nodded, but he seemed embarrassed. “Times get hard. Doesn't matter much how good a person ye are, trouble falls on ye. Ye get by best as ye can. People extend a hand, give ye some help. Then ye do the same when it's your turn. It was the
Arrows
that brought you in. Alan had them searchin' for you all along. I'm glad ye made it home all right.”

Sean felt grateful. The
Arrows
had saved him after all.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I'm glad I got t' do a turn for Roy's little brother. 'e was a good man, Sean. Ye should be proud of 'im.”

Will left the kitchen then. Sean stood there, letting his feelings work at him until he felt he might burst. He went out the back door into the night air.

“Sean?”

Alan stood near the corner of the house.

“Yes?”

“Come here. I want to show you something.”

“Leave me be.”

“Please, Sean. It's important.”

Reluctantly, Sean followed Alan to the barn. He did not want to see the locker, the room where the memories were stored. But Alan unlocked the door and took the lantern inside. Sean stepped in after him.

“You didn't burn it,” Sean said, staring around, surprised. Everything was back where it had been—the banner, the photograph, the bows and quivers. “I thought you were—”

“How could I do that? It's all that's left of Roy.” He went to the wall by the banner and pulled something down. It was one of the shirts Sean had found.

“Roy used to say that every legend, no matter how silly, had a core of truth to it. That's why he always told us the stories of Robin Hood were real. But first look at this.”

He spread the shirt out against the oak slab.

“Prison uniform,” Alan said. “Mine. That's called the ‘Broad Arrow' usually, but it used to be called the ‘King's Arrow.'”

“That's where Roy got the name?”

“Partly. There was a company of soldiers during the crusades, Saxon and Welsh bowmen, who were said to be the best archers in the world. They were also called the
‘King's Arrows.' Roy told us that Robin had been one of them. He had been the best. He told us that we could believe this even if we believed none of the rest.”

“Why?”

Alan slapped the oak table. “He cut this old tree down when our dad was in Europe during the Great War. He kept this part. A lucky cut, this. It would have been easy enough to lose it.” He pulled it from the wall and Sean saw then that a cord attached it to the beam above. With an effort, Alan turned it over and eased it back against the wall.

He pointed. Sean came closer. Several inches in from the top edge were two old metal arrowheads, one right behind the other. There was a hollow trough through the wood where the shafts had been. All that remained now were the points, in a line, locked in the oak, one right behind the other.

“Roy used to tell us that to get anything done you have to believe in what you're doing. He said sometimes that faith is all you're going to get to see it through. But that once in a while, providence provides us with some proof that what we believe is real.”

Sean stared at the arrowheads for a long time. “I miss him.”

“I do, too.” Alan laid a hand on Sean's shoulder. “I'm sorry I never told you. I thought—I was afraid you wouldn't understand. Roy explained things better than I ever could.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled something out. “Here. I thought I'd give you this when you got older, but—well, it seems proper now.”

He laid one of the arrowhead pins in Sean's hand.

“That one was Roy's.”

Sean hugged his brother. Sean looked up at the arrowheads and knew then that everything would be all right.

He left the barn then and walked up to the stone fence and gazed across the field to the tree line. Briefly, he thought he saw movement in the shadows, under the green cover, a single hand raised in farewell. He blinked and it was gone.

Thomas Auerbach, legs trembling, stepped unsteadily from the carriage and waited for the apparition to follow him. After a few moments, he turned around and saw only an empty seat where for the entire ride from the landing at Newburgh-on-the-Hudson the specter of his dead son had kept him silent company. Thomas blinked, unsure whether he felt relief or disappointment.

“Will that be all, sir?”

Thomas looked up at the coachman. “Yes, I—forgive me.” He fumbled in his waistcoat for coins and handed them uninspected to the driver. “Thank you.”

The man touched a finger to his aging tricorn and flicked the reins. The pair of sweat-sleeked horses broke into a lazy canter. Dust billowed, obscuring the coach as it rumbled down the road.

Thomas squinted up at the house. Heavily whitewashed, it seemed to glow in the harsh morning sunlight. The window shutters were a fading spring green, but it was otherwise plain.

Sweat traced a ticklish path down his face, and he swallowed around the lump in his throat. He wanted a drink from the pocket flask in his coat. Instead, giving the
road a last quick look for his son, he went to the front door. He had raised his cane to rap when it opened.

A tall, broad-shouldered woman with small, dark eyes regarded him critically. Flour dusted her dark dress in patches. The one hand Thomas could see, pressed against the frame, was veined and thick-fingered: powerful.

“Yes?” she said sharply. “You here for the diggin'?”

“Mrs. Masten?”

She dipped her head once, economically.

“I've come looking for someone,” Thomas said. “I've been told I might find her here.”

“We've no guests, no lodgers—”

“I meant at Mr. Peale's enterprise.”

Her eyebrows shifted.

“I'm an attorney-at-law with the firm representing Mr. Peale—” The lie troubled Thomas; he valued truth above all.

Mrs. Masten's skepticism turned now to suspicion. She began to retreat, preparing to close the door.

“The truth is,” Thomas continued quickly, “I was told my wife would be there.”

Some of the suspicion seemed to leave her face. “Are you thirsty? It's quite a walk to the marsh.”

She led him down a long central hallway. The hardwood floor creaked like new leather. The air smelled of smoke and linseed and felt oppressive.

Mrs. Masten took him out the back door, onto a small porch. The kitchen shed stood several yards away, separated from the main house by a grassless patch of gray dirt. A hogshead of water stood at the left end of the porch, near a stone well. Beyond that, Thomas saw a large barn, sided by a fenced area in which chickens meandered. He could smell alfalfa-tinged dung.

“Here.” Mrs. Masten raised the lid on the hogshead and offered him a tin cup from a hook on the porch.

“Thank you.” Thomas dipped a cupful of cold water. It tasted faintly of iron. “Thank you very much. It's ungodly hot for this time of year.”

“Hasn't rained since April. Will soon.” She nodded westward. Thomas looked toward a ridge in the distance, but the sky above it was clear. “You say you're lookin' for your wife?”

He drained the cup and returned it to the hook. Self-consciously, Thomas pulled a letter from within his coat. “This may explain it more clearly than I,” he said, offering it to her.

She shook her head. “I don't have any letters.”

“Oh. Well, then.” He fumbled open the sheet of paper. “It's, uh, from my sister in Philadelphia. She wrote to tell me she had heard from my wife last year—”

“Last year? She's been gone a time.”

“Sometimes it seems longer—” Thomas caught a movement at the edge of his vision and looked across at the barn. It seemed someone moved within the shadows just inside. “Sometimes it seems like no more than a month.”

He shook his head and looked down at the letter. “But it's been two years.” When Mrs. Masten said nothing, he cleared his throat and read. “‘My Dear Brother Thomas, it is with some reluctance that I write you about a matter which has caused you suffering and, before it is seen to a conclusion, will continue to pain you. Last May, soon after receiving the news of your Abigail's abrupt disappearance, a group of pilgrims passed through the city on its way south to the Kentuckys. At the time I made no association between your troubles and this event, but they have come north again, and I chanced to discover your Abigail among
them. Upon inquiring, I learned that they were a band of Methodists under the Reverend Abner Bennington, who is said to be one of Bishop Asbury's first converts in New York. We had all heard news of a great gathering in Kentucky of such folk in a place called Cane Ridge. I must assume that this is from whence your Abigail is returning north. I approached her, but she did not seem to know me, so caught by the fever of camp meeting religiosity was she, though she blessed me and talked of continuing on with Reverend Bennington as far as Maine. I write you to let you know with whom she is traveling and give you some hope of finding her again, though I lost track of her after the band left Philadelphia in the wake of the riotous meeting which they held—' And so on. You see the problem.”

“How did you come to figure that she was here?”

“I made my own inquiries among friends more familiar with the rustic faiths. Reverend Bennington's group isn't very difficult to find. I learned last week that he was coming here, to your farm, to attend Mr. Peale's—whatever it is Mr. Peale is doing on your property. I came by ferry up the Hudson from New York.”

He folded the letter and tucked it back inside his coat. His pulse raced; he had yet to read the letter calmly.

“Methodists,” Mrs. Masten said, looking away. “Well, there's a group of them out there. I wouldn't have them in my house. We're Deists ourselves.” She squinted at him. “Honestly, though, I can't see why your Mr. Peale is diggin' out there.”

“I understood he was undertaking a scientific investigation.”

“Scientific?”

“A search for truth.”

“Hmm. As if he could find it at the bottom of a marsh.” She gestured west. “Over there. Hard to miss the trail now, all the coaches and wagons and boots gone up there these last weeks.”

She closed the lid on the water barrel and went inside her house. After a few minutes, Thomas realized that he had been given permission to go see for himself.

He stepped out of the shade of the small porch onto the beaten dirt expanse of the barnyard, the farthest edge of which was marked by a barn and a granary, the road beginning between them. He looked toward the ridge Mrs. Masten had indicated. As she had said, tracks etched a wide road from the end of the farm proper all the way to the top of the rise.

Thomas came abreast of the entrance to the granary and stopped. He glanced into the shadows of the doorway. A small boy stood just within, watching him. Thomas's ears began to ring faintly and he felt warm and cool at the same time. Slowly, he approached.

“Richard—” he whispered.

The boy gestured for him to follow and walked back into the darkness within.