Gravity Box and Other Spaces (26 page)

A canvas-covered shape lay on the floor. Sweat ran into Thomas's eyes. He wiped at his face and stepped to the edge of the sheet. He prodded the shape with his cane, the tip finding a hard surface. He knelt and pulled the canvas back.

Two enormous bones lay side by side, crusted with dried mud.

“My God,” he breathed.

“They're digging up the rest in the marsh.”

Thomas looked up. Standing on the opposite side of the bones, the young boy watched him, eyes large and wetly intent.

“So you haven't left me,” Thomas said. “I thought maybe—”

“They shouldn't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Dig it up.” Richard frowned. “It's not right to dig things up after they're dead.”

Digging up the dead? Richard wondered. The same admonition. “You—they—shouldn't do that.” Hearing those words, now, memory welled up, overwhelming the moment.

Thomas sat down. Richard rarely spoke to him. Usually, the ghost chose to sit in the same room, watching him or playing with unseen toys on the floor. Most times Richard did not even seem to hear Thomas's words or his crying. In fact, for the first several months, since Richard's first appearance after Abigail's sudden departure, that had been the pattern: the specter came, stayed for a time, then, when Thomas slept or distracted himself or simply left the house, he would be gone. Nothing had prompted a response—shouting, weeping, long arguments, reasonable discourse—until Thomas had begun rummaging through Abigail's bureau. He did not know what he had expected to find—he had been very drunk—but when he found a packet of letters and began, hands shaking, to clumsily unwrap it, Richard had appeared beside him, quite suddenly, and said very clearly, “You shouldn't do that.”

Thereafter, Richard's visitations changed. The ghost began to notice him, sometimes even exchanged a few sentences. Not every time, but with more frequency of late.

Thomas believed he had gone mad. He had prided himself on his rationality and his freedom from superstitions. He had seen himself as a member in good standing of the Enlightenment, one with the philosophers, like President Jefferson. Specters and demons were on the
level of popery and discredited ignorance. What could he say now that the ghost of his only child continued to visit him and would not vanish in the light of reasoned argument that he should not, could not exist?

He had continued his law practice, spoke no word of the visitation to his friends, and kept to his house, in the comfort of his scotch at night, waiting for the company of his dead child. When he had left New York for Newburgh, Richard accompanied him; the first time the ghost had ever left what had once been his home.

“Why are you here?” Thomas asked now. “You've never come with me before.”

Richard shrugged then walked out of the granary, into the bright summer light.

Thomas pulled the canvas back over the bones and hurried after.

Richard was gone.

Thomas trudged up the road toward the ridge. He shrugged out of his coat as he reached the crest. A breeze cooled him briefly. Insects leapt and swirled above the grasses that twitched in the irregular winds, their wings catching the sunlight, gold and silver.

In the distance, he saw clusters of trees surrounding a broad open area. The clusters grew closer together toward the northwest until, even farther away, they seemed to close up and become regular forest. Smoke rose from various points among the oaks, elms, and maples. Thomas estimated a good mile to a mile and a half walk.

Reaching the first clump of trees, Thomas heard the sounds of voices and hammering. To his left a stream flowed into the thickets of thigh-high grasses, thistles, and ivy. Thomas followed it through a line of elms.

He emerged into a campground. Tents in a variety of pale colors billowed in the breeze, and people moved in
thick clots among them. The air was noticeably cooler here, and Thomas slipped his coat back on. A thick bacon aroma enveloped him, cut occasionally by a faint fetid odor from the marsh beyond. The clamors of speech, of horses complaining, of creaking and hammering, all rolled into a seamless murmur. It reminded Thomas of New York harbor: the docks, with its improbable mix of people—workmen in homespun, men in elegant suits and ladies in fine dresses, soldiers, backwoodsmen—and the constant moil of activity.

Beneath one large tent, tables held what must have been maps and diagrams, over which bent men with compasses and angles and squares. Smoke poured through a hole cut above cook-fires in another tent. Canvas snapped in the wind. Tarps covered stacks of lumber. Light faded the farther in he went, in proportion, it seemed, to the sound of wood groaning under weight and a chorus joined in hymn.

At the other side of the camp, the stench of the bog overwhelmed all other odors as he came through the last stand of dogwood. He stopped at the edge of a depression and stared up at a giant wooden water wheel, hidden till then by the curtains of trees that encircled a great pit.

Wide leather buckets scooped out sludge and hauled it high in the air to be emptied into a sluice that carried the liquid thickly through another copse of trees, out of sight. Ladders extended down into the excavation, and Thomas saw men with shovels and picks and more buckets, moving slowly through the black water and slime. A crane on the far rim of the pit was lifting a leather sling filled with mud-caked objects that might have been logs—or bones. Another array of tents stood just beyond the crane.

Thomas circled the edge of the pit. Smoke drifted from campfires, filling the woods around the edges of the marsh
with a thick haze. Near where the contents of the crane were being laid out on the ground, a man in shirtsleeves and waistcoat stood at the center of a circle comprised of several well-dressed men, lecturing, his arms gesturing over the sodden pieces like a magician.

Thomas hesitated, unsure where to go next. The activity around him made no immediate sense. The singing he had heard earlier had ended.

A man climbed up a ladder from the pit. His boots were caked with mud and his pants wet to the knees. He gave a backward glance across to the giant wheel, then started walking in Thomas's direction.

“Excuse me, sir,” Thomas said. “Who—who's in charge here?”

The man frowned, creasing his long face. “I didn't think no one didn't know.” He aimed a thick, calloused finger at the tent just by the crane. Workmen were now carrying the newly disinterred pieces from the ground to a table beneath the canvas. The man in shirtsleeves led his group after them. “That be Mr. Peale. This is his doin'.”

“Charles Peale?” Thomas asked to be certain.

“You know him, then?”

“I know of him. I've been to his museum in Philadelphia.” Thomas pointed at the wheel with his cane. “What is he doing?”

“He's drainin' my bog, what he's doin'. Diggin' up bones.”

“You're Mr. Masten?”

“Aye.” He nodded and gave the excavation a long, almost proud look. “Man's got pockets, I'll say that. He wanted the bones I found and the right to dig up the rest of the beast. I figured it to be a good bargain, havin' someone pay me to drain m' marsh. I never expected this—this—”
He shook his head. “I'll tell you, sir, I won't be unhappy when it's done and they leave.”

“Perhaps you can help me. I'm not here about Mr. Peale's excavation. I'm looking for someone. Is there a group of Methodists here?”

Mr. Masten hacked loudly and spit an enormous gob at the ground. “Devil's work, this here, you ask me. I never thought I'd say somethin' like that, but some of what they've pulled out of the muck—” He blinked at Thomas. “Methodists? Back behind there,” he said, pointing again toward Peale's tent. “Them especially I won't mind seein' gone. They been singin' and prayin' since they got here. Tellin' anyone who listens that what's happenin' here is evil. What does that make me, then? I allowed Mr. Peale to do this. Am I evil, then?” He grunted, spun around, and stomped off.

A shadow passed over the site. Thomas looked up at a cloud bank; the mass was heavy, dark, and gray. He did not care for the idea of being caught here in a downpour, but it would be better than being caught halfway back to the Masten house.

Thomas followed a hard-packed path around the edge of the pit. Beneath the creaking of the great wheel, he now heard the wet sucking sound of men pulling their legs from mud, voices mingled in, words muffled in the jumble of sounds, grumbling and shouts and occasional laughter.

As he neared the main tent, Thomas saw broad canvas sheets stretched across the ground, caked in drying mud from the huge fragments laid on them. He recognized the pieces as kindred to those huge bones he had seen in the Masten granary. Besides roughly straight sections, there were curved shards like ribs and short, truncated segments, like vertebrae. He studied the pieces, trying to
sort them into a shape in his mind. He knelt and reached for one small fragment.

“If you please!”

Thomas stood, startled. Peale came toward him, his face slightly flushed. A fine, brown crust coated his wrists and knuckles. Dirt speckled his boots. His hair was thickly streaked with gray and beginning to recede from a high forehead.

“I am Charles Willson Peale,” he declared, stopping barely an arm's length from Thomas. “This is my excavation. Those are my discoveries, and you are unknown to me, sir.”

“Mr. Peale of Philadelphia?”

“The same.”

“I've heard of you, sir. I've seen your paintings.”

Peale's demeanor changed immediately. A slight, indulgent smile tugged his wide mouth and one eyebrow twitched, amused.

“Indeed.”

“Yes, a portrait you did for Mrs. Bascombe.”

“Ah, yes! I remember it quite well.”

“Your pardon, sir, I didn't mean to trespass. I am Thomas Auerbach.”

Peale's eyes narrowed. “Auerbach. I don't know the name. Are you attached to a university?”

“No, sir, I'm a lawyer.”

“A lawyer! Sent by whom? I assure you, sir, my claim here is perfectly legal. I have a good contract with Mr. Masten—”

Thomas held up his hands. “Please, sir, you understand me too quickly. I'm not here about, uh—” he waved a hand at the bones, “this. I'm here on an entirely personal matter.”

“Personal.”

“Yes, sir. I'm—” He looked past Peale and noticed several people watching. Thomas leaned closer to Peale and said quietly, “I'm looking for my wife.”

“Your—” Peale caught himself and looked around. Lowering his voice to match Thomas's, he said, “Your wife, sir? Aside from a few ladies who have accompanied the curious, there are no women here. None attached to my enterprise, I assure you.”

“She's not. Attached to your enterprise, that is. She's with a group of Methodists.”

Peale's face twisted. “Oh! Those damned fools!” He flung an arm out impatiently. “They're over there, huddling together like a company of terrified children, praying! All day and half the night, praying! They came here and began preaching at my workers, preaching at my friends, my family, my admirers! I'm digging up Satan, they say, unearthing the Beast of the last days! Pah!” He lowered his voice again. “Frankly, sir, if you have any influence with them at all I would be willing to compensate you if you could get them to leave. They're a constant irritant and disruptive. I had to increase my day wages to keep some of my better men. They kept listening to that old fire-breather and fearing the worst.”

“I just came for my wife.”

“Of course, of course. Well, even if you lessen their number by one, I'd be grateful. Now, please excuse me.”

Peale marched back to his audience. As Thomas watched, earthen hands emerged from the ground at Peale's feet, groping for his ankles. Peale did not seem to notice.

Thomas squeezed shut his eyes and turned away. When he opened them again he saw torsos half-emerged from the ground, pocked skin eaten through, faces stretched in fear, and gradually sinking back into the solid
dirt. In the middle of the field of trapped corpses, Richard stood, hands clasped behind his back, staring at Thomas.

“It's only a vision,” he hissed. “A dream—”

Richard shook his small head and pointed at the wheel.

As Thomas looked up at it he saw the darkening sky beyond and a flash of distant lightening. He smelled rain on the air now. But the wheel reclaimed his attention with its slow, inexorable motion and its noise. The entire structure glistened.

“Faster!” someone shouted. “Faster! As much as we can afore it breaks!”

Thomas searched for the speaker but he stopped when he saw inside the wheel. The inner circumference had been planked over and on the bottom a gang of boys trotted doggedly, turning the entire structure. More boys rested a short distance away, some clearly exhausted.

“Things are changing.”

Richard stood beside him now, gazing at the wheel.

“What do you mean?” Thomas asked.

“They shouldn't do this.”

“Sir!” a man shouted. “We found somethin' big!”

Men scrambled from beneath tents to the edge of the pit, across the ephemeral bodies only Thomas could see. Peale pushed through them to the edge of the pit.

“Careful!” Peale bellowed. “Get some buckets over there. Let them wash it off! We need another sling!”

Thomas walked away, legs trembling, in the direction of the dogwoods lining the edge of the marsh. After several paces he risked a backward glance. The struggling dead were gone, and he saw no sign of his son.

He reached the trees and heard singing again. He picked his way through the grasses and underbrush, emerging into a small clearing. To his left stood a row of wagons. Thomas heard the chuff and whinny of horses
nearby. At the far end of the wagons, tripods stood supporting cook-pots. The aroma of stew cut the air.

The group of pilgrims gathered before a wagon that had been pulled up to serve as a stage. A man stood in its bed, facing his audience, arms raised, a Psalter clasped in his right hand. He was tall and thin, dirty gray hair curling in long trails to his shoulders mingling with an unruly tuft of beard. Though his mouth moved, Thomas could not make out his words.