Saving Lucas Biggs (7 page)

Margaret

2014

I SWEAR I DIDN’T STOP THINKING about my dad the whole time Grandpa Joshua told this story, never stopped seeing his beautiful green eyes behind his glasses or the handcuffs chafing his wrists as he walked away from me in the courtroom, but I couldn’t keep from getting sucked right into Grandpa Joshua’s tale, which wasn’t just his but mine, too. Because a place isn’t just a snapshot of itself in the present; a place is everything that ever happened in it. I listened and realized that I’d lived in Victory my whole life without ever really knowing where I was.

And for a few minutes, anyway, Grandpa Joshua’s story took a turn for the brighter, veered away from gunfire and broken families, straight toward peaceful negotiation and hard-won, good, solid change.

Because the letters written by Aristotle and the miners began to work! Folks across the country began making noise. Outraged noise. Clamoring-for-justice noise. The noise traveled all the way to New York City, straight through the thick stone walls of Victory Fuels’s owner Theodore Ratliff’s palatial mansion, into the ears of Ratliff himself, and even though those ears were probably more used to opera, Beethoven, and flattery, they listened. Ratliff agreed to give the miners what they asked for.

“Which wasn’t that much, when you think about it,” I said.

“Basic, ordinary American stuff,” said Charlie. “A safe place to work, a fair salary, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

Grandpa Joshua smiled at us with pride in his eyes. Then he said in a tired voice, “We came so close.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“We know what happened. Or some twisted version of it,” said Charlie, bitterly.

I’d gotten so caught up in hearing the story of Canvasburg, that I’d almost forgotten I’d already read about it in our school history book.

“Oh. Right,” I said, struggling to recall. “The meeting in the cigar parlor of Ratliff’s hunting lodge to sign the miners’ new deal. Mr. Ratliff, Aristotle Agrippa, and Elijah Biggs. Three people went in, two came out. That’s what the book said. ‘Three went in, two came out.’ And Theodore Ratliff stayed where he was, stabbed to death on the parlor floor, murdered by Aristotle.”

I slapped the table in realization. “But he didn’t! He wouldn’t!”

“No way!” said Charlie.

“No,” said Grandpa Joshua. “And Aristotle was nearly half dead himself, he’d been bashed over the head so hard. Again, it was Doc O’Malley who stepped in; saved his life, Doc did. But while Doc was busy doing what he did best, so was Biggs. Before he set foot out of that hunting lodge, the man was spreading lies. He claimed that Ratliff tricked Aristotle, went back on all his promises to improve life for the miners, and tried to force Aristotle to go back and make the miners return to work anyway. Biggs said that was when Aristotle chickened out, said he couldn’t face the angry miners, and asked for money to get out of town right then and there, that same night. When Ratliff laughed in his face, Aristotle went into a rage and killed him. Biggs launched a full-out smear campaign, calling Aristotle a traitor, a coward, and a liar to anyone who would listen. Including, I’m sorry to say, Luke.”

“But he didn’t listen, did he?” Charlie said.

Grandpa Joshua rubbed his forehead.

“Biggs tailor-made his lies just for Luke, worded them perfectly, and the man was a champion liar. Besides, Luke was just a kid, and he was already down on his dad for refusing to fight, so, well, I’m afraid the lies started to work.”

Almost in unison, and in the same stunned tone, Charlie and I said, “What?”

How could anyone not stick by his own father, especially a father as brave and noble as Aristotle? I thought of my own dad, locked in a cell, and hot tears filled my eyes. I’d cut off my own arm before I’d turn on him.

Grandpa Joshua sighed.

“Luke Agrippa was a good kid. He loved his dad. But despite being better-looking and a better athlete than anyone around, he couldn’t stand the idea of being seen as weak or cowardly. He even came up with a plan to steal some guns, arm all of us, and fight back, but Aristotle squelched it. Truth is, Luke had kind of despised his dad ever since the massacre. But I know he would’ve rallied and stood by Aristotle in the end if it hadn’t been for the terrible thing that happened next.”

I tried to remember what we’d learned in school, but it was hazy.

Charlie jumped in. “Aristotle committed suicide before he was tried for Theodore Ratliff’s murder, and Elijah Biggs, the new president of Victory Fuels, restored order. That’s all I remember.”

“But I don’t believe Aristotle would’ve killed himself!” I cried. “No father would do that, knowing his kid was out there, waiting for him to be set free and for everything to go back to normal!”

“He wouldn’t have, and he didn’t,” said Grandpa Joshua. “No matter what the history books say, I know that like I know my own name. Biggs and his henchman were just finishing off what they’d started in the hunting lodge. They were smart enough to know Aristotle would never stop fighting for the miners, not even from prison. So they got rid of him. They must’ve dragged him out of his bed in the town infirmary and hanged him by his bedsheets from a beam in front of one of the windows, because that’s where he was found.”

I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.

“Aw, man,” breathed Charlie.

“It was a pitiful, horrible, low-down thing,” said Grandpa Joshua quietly. “And oh, what it did to Luke.”

“He was angry? Sad?” I asked.

“Worse. I was by Luke’s side when he joined the crowd gathered around his father’s poor body. Inside, he must have felt a thousand things, but what he looked was ashamed. Sick with shame to be his father’s son and ashamed to be ashamed. The boy was just ruined. After that, Biggs and the company dive-bombed him like the vultures they were and swept him up. He was lost. I tried to talk to him, to stop it, but he turned on me, too. The Luke I knew, my best friend, was gone for good the second he saw his father’s broken body swinging from that beam. Somehow, he set his mind on believing the worst about his dad, and that’s exactly what he did from that day forward. Before I knew it, even before they changed his name officially to Biggs, he was one of them.”

Charlie and I should have seen this coming, but we’d gotten so caught up in the story that we hadn’t. We gaped at each other in horror and amazement.

“Luke Agrippa became
Judge Lucas Biggs
?” I could barely choke out the words. My head was spinning so hard that I didn’t even fully understand what I was thinking until Charlie spoke.

“They killed his father for a crime he didn’t commit, and now he’s going to help them do the same thing to Margaret’s dad?”

“Luke spent his life believing his father was a loser, a coward who killed himself,” said Grandpa Joshua simply. “And once Luke was all alone in the world, Biggs gave him everything: a home, some fancy boarding school, college in France, Harvard for law school. Made him feel strong and powerful, like he’d always wanted. The Biggs family and Victory Fuels own him as sure as they own all that hydrofracking equipment. I think they have ever since the day his father was murdered,” said Grandpa Joshua.

“If only—” I said and stopped, shivering in the warm sunlight.

I gazed up at the sky and thought about how somewhere up there, under all that blue, the stars were burning, were arranging themselves into patterns.

Grandpa Joshua leaned toward me, his eyes bright.

“If only what, Margaret?” he asked in this odd voice, calm but sharp as a knife.

I shook my head. “There’s no use thinking about ‘if only.’”

“Maybe there is,” said Grandpa Joshua. “What were you going to say?”

His face was so focused and intense, it almost scared me. His eyes never left mine.

I shrugged. “If only someone could’ve been there to stop what happened in that hunting lodge,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Charlie, catching on. “If there had never been a murder for Luke’s father to get accused of, if someone had stopped it, then maybe Luke would never have gone down the road he went down.”

I didn’t want to continue that conversation, but somehow I couldn’t help myself. “And maybe he wouldn’t have turned out the way he has, and maybe my father wouldn’t have just been sentenced to death.”

Grandpa Joshua leaned toward me across the table. My breath came quicker.
He knows
, I thought, which was crazy. He couldn’t have known. No one knew.

“If only someone could
go back in time
,” said Grandpa Joshua in the same strange voice, “if only someone could go back and save Theodore Ratliff, they would also save Aristotle, and save Luke, and save your dad, too, Margaret.”

He knew. I didn’t know how, but somehow he did.

I leaped to my feet so fast, I knocked over my glass.

“No!” I said. “I can’t. History doesn’t want to change. History resists! And I promised I wouldn’t. We all promise.”

“What?” asked Charlie, alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

“There is one Now: the spot where I stand,

And one way the road goes: onward, onward.”

Because I was thinking the words in my own head, because the words were a secret from everyone but my family, because no one else could possibly know them, much less speak them out loud, it took me a second to realize that that was exactly what Grandpa Joshua was doing.

“No,” I whispered, backing away. “You can’t know about the forswearing. You can’t.”

“When I was your age,” Grandpa Joshua said gently, “I met a woman who was decades older than I was, but who would become my lifelong friend. She sent me to college, helped me get out of this town, and got my little brother out of it, too. She was like a grandmother to me, but she would’ve been your great-great-aunt.”

I tried to make sense of what he was saying, but my pulse was pounding in my ears.

“One day,” he went on, “not long after I met her, she told me a story about her family and the promise they all made, and about herself and how she was the one who broke it.”

“Grandpa! Don’t you see that you’re scaring her? What is all this about?” cried Charlie.

“Margaret,” said Grandpa Joshua. His clear voice was hushed, but it seemed to ring out over the yard. “Your father is a good man and an innocent one.”

A sob broke from my throat.

“What the heck is going on?” said Charlie.

I wrapped my arms around myself and felt the earth tilting under me; Grandpa Joshua’s story, my father’s face, the words of the forswearing, the stars moving invisibly in the blue sky, all spiraling like a hurricane inside my head, and then I turned and ran across the yard as fast as I could run.

Josh

1938

AFTER THE MASSACRE, OUR JOB was to keep Canvasburg alive, because if we left, or starved, or froze in the fall wind that’d started cascading down Mount Hosta, everything that’d happened to us would disappear into thin air, and everybody who’d died would’ve died for nothing.

Mr. Martinelli stopped talking about going after the Victory Corporation with guns, and a huge sadness descended over him. He didn’t speak for days at a time. But when our food began to run out a few weeks later because we weren’t allowed in the company store, and even if we had been, nobody had any money anyway, he went tent to tent with a canvas bag collecting up every spare tin of sardines, every box of cracker crumbs, every dented can of Campbell’s soup, and he set up an iron pot over a tumbleweed fire on the ground, and somehow, three nights a week, he boiled all this into enough stew to feed everybody.

Of course, that left four nights of nothing. And we got hungry. And we got cold.

So we wrote letters to give ourselves a purpose.

Aristotle sent the Kowalski brothers on a mission to the nearest library, three towns away through the mountains, to fill up a notebook with the names and addresses of reporters, politicians, preachers, writers, singers, movie stars, doctors, lawyers, baseball players, you name it, people from all over the country—anybody who might care about what’d happened to us.

Then we began putting down our story on paper and mailing it all over the country. Aristotle wrote more than anybody. He had a giant black fountain pen carved of ebony that his grandfather had given him to do his schoolwork with when he was a little boy in Greece. He scrawled out whole bales of letters. He must’ve used half a gallon of ink a week, even though he was awfully weak on spelling, commas, and putting
s
’s on the ends of verbs. My mother helped him out as much as she could with his English, but there was nothing she could do about his handwriting, which gave the impression a centipede had fallen in an inkwell, swum across, climbed out, and swarmed across his page. Still, Aristotle’s letters were masterpieces, sometimes ten pages long, telling the story of who we were and what had happened to us, so people put up with the penmanship.

We wrote to President Roosevelt. We wrote to Eleanor. We wrote to Babe Ruth, and we even sent a letter to a guy named Woody Guthrie, some new singer a few people had heard about. And after the day’s letters were written, Aristotle crept out of camp and sneaked through the mountains in the dark to Mercury, thirteen miles away, to mail them, dodging the Victory company’s so-called detectives, who had guns and strict orders not to let us communicate with the outside world. He always made Luke stay behind, no matter how much Luke begged. We invited Luke to sleep in our tent while Aristotle was gone, but he was too proud to admit he was lonely, so he never did.