Saving Lucas Biggs (21 page)

“Would Judge Biggs listen to you, Grandpa Josh?” I asked.

“He hasn’t for over seventy years,” replied Grandpa Joshua. “I don’t see why he’d start now.”

“If only that old Mr. Ratliff could come back from the dead to tell him what happened in that meeting,” I said. “Or if Aristotle could tell him it wasn’t like he thought. No suicide. No running away. No fear. If he just could’ve spoken to Luke one last time. Maybe that’s what Judge Biggs has been waiting for all these years. For his dad to tell him what happened.”

“But the real Aristotle is gone,” Margaret cried. “Without a trace. Now he’s just a lie in our history book. His accomplishments, his dreams, his good name evaporated the day he died. Elijah Biggs made sure of that.”

“Here,” said Grandpa Joshua sadly, retrieving a battered pencil box from deep inside his suitcase. In it was nothing but a scrap of cloth and an old-fashioned fountain pen. “This is all there is of Aristotle.”

“These are the things that fell out of his pocket when Elijah Biggs tried to murder him,” said Margaret sadly. “I scooped them up. And when I left, I gave them to you.”

“And I kept them,” said Grandpa Joshua simply. “His pen and his handkerchief.”

“Hold on,” I said, reaching for the cloth. “Let me see that.”

Margaret handed it over.

“This is a lot more than just a handkerchief,” I said, looking it over.

Sometimes when I look at things long enough, they give up their secrets. Even though my brain is usually a mess and my thoughts typically swarm around like ants on a picnic blanket, when Grandpa Joshua walks with me outside of town, at night, as I stare at stars, they seem to shift until they form a message that tells me where I fit in. Not quite as spectacular as
some
people’s ability to see passageways through time, but still, it comes in handy.

And as I gazed at the ragged cloth, stained brown with what we all knew was Aristotle’s blood, it began to change like that. Hidden beneath the blood were shapes, shapes that formed a pattern, a design that had been very important to somebody once.

“Under the stain,” I whispered. “Look. A star.” And in the light of the guest bedroom, we could make out the contours of an eight-pointed star. I turned the cloth over to find the stain wasn’t as heavy on the back. “It’s colored,” I murmured. “Gray and pink. A long time ago, it must’ve been black and red.”

“He called it his talisman,” offered Grandpa Joshua. “I thought he just meant it was his lucky handkerchief.”

“Is it a quilt square?” Margaret wondered. “Or a flag?”

“It’s a symbol,” I declared.

“Of what?” asked Margaret.

“I don’t know,” I said. But now
I
was beginning to understand history, too, maybe a little like Grandpa Joshua and Margaret after all their travels and experiences. In these shapes Aristotle used to carry around in his pocket, and in the way they fit together, there was a meaning that had to do with right now.

“I couldn’t bear to look at it again after you left, Margaret,” lamented Grandpa Joshua. “But I couldn’t bear to throw it away, either.”

In one corner of the “talisman,” figures appeared. Not really
appeared
. They must have been there all along, but I could suddenly see them: letters.

“‘For L,’” I said, “u-k-e.”

Margaret and Grandpa Joshua leaned in to look.

“I see!” yelped Margaret.

“So do I,” said Grandpa Joshua, softly.

“For Luke,” I said, wonderingly. “Aristotle was going to give this to Luke?”

“He had it at the meeting,” said Grandpa Joshua. “This must be what they were talking about while I was trapped outside the room. The memento. Before you came in, Margaret. I heard their voices.”

“This square meant something to Aristotle, something important,” I continued.

“And it was supposed to mean something to Luke,” added Margaret. “But Aristotle never got a chance to deliver his message.”

“So we’ll have to deliver it for him,” I said. “After
we
figure out what it means. What do we know about Aristotle? I mean, his past? Where could this have come from? What could it have meant to him? What kind of star has eight points? Do you think Aristotle has any relatives left anywhere who would know?”

“Aristotle’s family stayed behind in Greece,” Grandpa Joshua said slowly. “He never saw them again after he left. I think he must’ve made some friends in the US before he came to the coal mine in Arizona, though. There was that reporter he knew, based in Denver. Walter . . . Walter . . . Mendenhall! I remember how he talked—I think he and Aristotle were young fellas together in West Virginia. But that’s all I ever heard about Aristotle’s past,” lamented Grandpa Joshua.

“Still, it’s a place to start,” I said, because all this felt alive to me, even if it was a long time ago, and I knew Walter Mendenhall, although he was surely dead by now, would help us, if only I could figure out how.

Margaret

2014

THIS TIME, IT WASN’T THE GREAT, WHEELING, dancing stars in the sky we put our trust in, but a single star, pink and gray, eight-pointed, and not beautiful, or beautiful only because it had been precious, for whatever reason, to Aristotle.

Our internet search turned up more Mendenhalls than Charlie and I knew what to do with, and after many awkward emails and two mortifying phone calls, just when we were starting to seriously feel like stalkers, we found a Mendenhall family in West Virginia with their own web page and everything: Mendenhall & Sons & Daughters Roofing Company. Right away, I liked them. They’d been around since 1868. They included “& Daughters” in their company name. They specialized in slate and tile, two solid, high-quality materials. I had a good feeling about these Mendenhalls.

“I bet these are
our
Mendenhalls,” I said to Charlie, because that’s the point we’d gotten to: Aristotle was part of us; he belonged to us and so did his Mendenhalls.

“Yeah,” said Charlie, “I bet so, too.”

One of these Mendenhalls—Edith, who I assumed was one of the “& Daughters” daughters (or more likely great-great-great granddaughters)—answered our email within three hours, and she not only didn’t act like we were totally insane or possible creepers but offered enthusiastically to help us in any way she could.

It turned out that Edith’s family, Walter Mendenhall’s family, had taken Aristotle in when he had just arrived from Greece and was dirt-poor, still battle-weary from World War I, and totally alone in the world. Which seemed to me like an extremely nice thing to do, but Edith acted like it was nothing special. In fact, she acted like her family members were the ones who got lucky in finding Aristotle, instead of the other way around.

Aristotle Agrippa is still a beloved figure in our family,
wrote Edith Mendenhall-Smith.
His loss still haunts us. We know what he tried to do for the miners of Victory, and how hard he worked for justice. I’d call him a family legend, except that sounds so impersonal. He’s more like just plain family.
How wonderful that you’re researching him. We’ve got a letter from him, one my great-grandfather saved. I’d be happy to scan it and send it to you, if you think it might help.

Oh, yeah, we thought it just might, and within the hour, there they were, pieces of the past sliding page by page out of the printer in my mom’s home office and into our hot little hands. Charlie and I were so excited we were goofy, laughing and jostling to see who could get to the printer first. But as soon as we got a look at the top page, we got quiet because we understood that the letter was a sacred thing. Not in a church way. In a human being way. I sat staring at the page, not even reading, just taking it in, and maybe Charlie was doing the same thing, because after a few seconds, he said, “You know what? We should wait.”

“For Grandpa Joshua, you mean,” I said.

“Yeah. It only seems right.”

Grandpa Joshua had taken Charlie’s little brothers to a movie, so we had to wait hours until he got back. It almost killed us. When they finally got home, even before he had quite made it across the threshold of Charlie’s house, we each grabbed one of Grandpa Joshua’s arms and pulled him through the hallway and the kitchen and out into the backyard.

When we were all outside, I stood there for a moment, with Charlie’s yard spread out before me. It was ordinary, littered with balls and toys, Charlie’s dad’s big old grill hunkered down like a rusty spaceship at one end, the splintery seesaw his mom had built when Charlie and I were little cutting a sharp diagonal against the pearly, streaky, almost-evening sky. The yard looked like it had looked for as long as I could remember, and yet it was different because now it was the place where it had all started, where Grandpa Joshua had sprung the idea of time travel on me like a guy pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It felt right to be there now, to walk over to the picnic table and sit down, with the giant, stern oak tree as witness, and to hand Grandpa Joshua Aristotle’s letter.

Aristotle had written it during the miners’ strike but before the Canvasburg Massacre, back when it looked like reason and justice would peacefully win out and the four Martinelli kids would all live to adulthood, back before anyone knew just how truly cruel and twisted Elijah Biggs could be. The hope shining in every line of that letter was enough to break your heart. It’s funny—you could tell from the writing that Aristotle didn’t grow up speaking English, but the broken sentence structure and odd word choices couldn’t hide Aristotle’s braininess or his sense of humor. The letter had a quirky, honest gracefulness to it. Grandpa Joshua’s voice only cracked once, when he read the lines:
Always my boy there watching. My boy the fighter, his strong arm ready to throw. He watch how peace is powerful. This thing, he needs to see.

Out of the jangly music of the letter, one sentence floated like a gorgeous white bird:
I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars
.

“I remember you telling us about these words before,” said Charlie, “or some of them, anyway. Such a cool sentence.”

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

“Aristotle said it a lot,” said Grandpa Joshua, “whenever we got down and needed our spirits raised. He’d tell us we were taking away the occasion of all wars. Even when I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, it made me stand up straighter.”

“Can you read that sentence again?” I asked.

Grandpa Joshua did.

Slowly, I said, “So is he saying there’s something more powerful than war, something that makes war unnecessary?”

“I think so,” said Grandpa Joshua.

“What is it?” I asked.

We all sat, thinking.

“Virtue means goodness, right?” said Charlie, finally. “So maybe that.”

I thought about what my dad had said about all the small goodnesses adding up to amazing. I thought about Grandpa Joshua’s voice shaking, even after all these years, at the part in the letter where Aristotle talked about Luke. Goodness. Yes, that was right. The kind that connects one person to another person and never goes away.

“Love,” I blurted out.

As soon as I said it, I felt embarrassed, not because I didn’t mean it, but because it was just not a word I said that often, even to myself. I could feel Charlie not looking at me. But then Grandpa Joshua was smiling right straight into my eyes.

“Atta girl,” he said.

“Hey,” said Charlie. “That sentence. It’s not how Aristotle talked all the time, is it? All formal and poetic-sounding?”

“No,” said Grandpa Joshua. “He was an eloquent man, a gifted speaker, but no, he wasn’t fancy like that. Mostly, he sounded more or less like he does in the other parts of the letter.”

“It sounds like a quote,” said Charlie.

“It does!” I said.

Charlie’s eyes met mine for a split second, and then we were off, knocking into each other and tripping over baseballs and grass clumps on a mad dash to the computer. Charlie’s mile-long legs got him to the kitchen door first, and before I went in after him, I turned around to call Grandpa Joshua, but then I stopped. He was still sitting where we’d left him, reading Aristotle’s letter again in the light of the setting sun.

George Fox, 1624–1691. That’s who’d written Aristotle’s fancy sentence the first time.

We’d never heard of him, but apparently he’d started something called the Religious Society of Friends, which we’d also never heard of.

“The Religious Society of Friends people are also called Quakers,” said Charlie, reading from the computer screen.

We looked at each other, puzzled.

“Oatmeal?” I said.

“Motor oil?” said Charlie.

“Hold on!” I said. “The beard-around-the-edges people!”

“Uh, what?”

“You know! The horse and buggy people. From, like, Pennsylvania.”

“Those would be the Amish, genius.”

His superior tone of voice demanded an elbow in the ribs, which I dutifully gave him. He elbowed me back, and it was on the edge of becoming a real occasion of war when Charlie’s mom called out, “Dinner! Now! Electronic devices of all kinds
off
.
Now
, people!”