The Trouble with Tom (25 page)

Breeze had an oil portrait of his fellow rebel proudly displayed, along with pieces of wood taken from Paine's old house in Thetford when it had been demolished. Perhaps it helped buck him up a bit to look upon them and think of Paine's troubles whenever he encountered his own. Aside from the sorrows of being a widower, his medical notions occasionally ran him afoul of compulsory vaccination laws—for when not petitioning Parliament against these laws, he flouted them by refusing to vaccinate Florence. And among his bottles ofwintergreen, his antivaccine pamphlets, and his jars of rose hips, Louis Breeze had another unusual item in his shop: a small black lump shrunken to about two inches by one inch in size, wrapped in an oiled piece of paper that bore the familiar writing of a long-dead tailor:
B
.
Tilly.

It is always death or debt that shakes the remains of Tom Paine loose from their owners' hands: both would prove true for Louis Breeze. The stubborn herbalist bought the brain of Thomas Paine from his old friend George Reynolds—the Baptist minister was now short of money after ruinous legal battles with his neighborhood rival Dr. Barnardo. But Reynolds knew that at least Louis Breeze would be an appreciative guardian of Paine's brain. Taking time off from administering steam baths, the brain's new owner was happy to show the hardened chunk to Moncure Conway, and even lent it for a two-day exhibition of Paine memorabilia that Conway held over at the South Place Institute. The institute, after all, hosted everything from socialist and anarchist meetings to a convention of vegetarian Esperanto speakers; these were the kind of idealists well acquainted with the words that this now inert lump had once so stirringly produced. So there now was, at long last, the public viewing of Paine—albeit with a body now reduced through theft and secret burial to a piece the size of an india-rubber eraser.

And as for the res—who knew? In 1887, there came yet another report of Paine's bones. Some years before, perhaps in 1880, one George Potter rode on the train from Winchester to Waterloo Station and ran into a London bookseller of vague acquaintance; while chatting the fellow mentioned that he'd bought a trunk of some papers belonging to a Cobbett descendant—and that, at the bottom, he found a single sheet of paper reading "The Bones of Thomas Paine." It sounded like the cover parchment of John Chennell's jar of bones, which nobody seemed to know the fate of anymore. And it would be easy enough to check, except . . . ah, wouldn't you know it? Potter couldn't remember the name of the bookseller now.

Of course.

Surely you know the rules to the Mornington Cresc
. . .

I walk away from Louis Breeze's shop—from the lifeless space that once held it. My legs feel tired, like watch springs wound up too tight, and I could probably use one of Breeze's steam baths myself. But that's long gone: even as he showed the remains of Paine, the old herbalist was being borne down into the grave. The brain and a snippet of hair disappeared in an estate auction in 1897, first reappearing in the hands of George Reynolds, and then with Charles Higham, who ran a theological bookshop on Farrington Street. And there, for
LS,
a polite and aging Southern minister bought it from him.

Years and miles passed. Within a rented room on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, the steel nib of the minister's pen traced out the words on a carefully wrapped mail parcel:
New York

Forgetting

WHEN YOU THINK of the thousands of days you have lived by now, it is strange to realize that there are probably only a few that you can specifically remember. Most are forgotten: they only exist as a date in the indistinct past, one of an unmemorable many. But for the McNeil family, July 17, 1976, was a memorable day indeed.

Jack McNeil had been living in Tivoli for fourteen years with his wife and kids, out among the open fields of rural New York on a stretch of Kerley Corners Road, and he could be pretty sure that he knew the surrounding land and everyoneon it: after all, they'd bought their property back in '62 from the neighbor who still lived across the road. Enough years had passed now that the place was needing some work, and they had to lay in a leach line out to the septic field. They had better things to do that day: indoors, ABC was televising the opening ceremonies of the Olympics up in Montreal, while other channels had talking heads nattering away about yesterday's announcement by Jimmy Carter that Walter Mondale would be his running mate. And outside? It was a glorious day—warm, sunny, a hint of a breeze. Digging a sewage ditch wasn't what anybody would pick as an ideal way to spend a perfect weekend in July—but then, septic system work isn't the sort of thing one puts off for too long.

The backhoe operator from Pease & Sons had shown up and was getting ready to dig a furrow through the lawn. Jack McNeil probably could have run the backhoe himself—he was a highway worker, after all, a heavy-equipment operator, and he looked the part. He was a muscular guy with the sort of blond mustache that might have suited him just as well on Ted Nugent's road crew as on his DOT road crew. But today was his day off, a Saturday, and in any case this wasn't his equipment. So Jack stood aside and, mindful of the nature of the digging business, offered up a piece of advice before the operator started.

"Look out for bones," he joked.

The backhoe chugged to life and began pawing away at the old farmland, gouging out chunks of dirt and severed roots from the ground. As it tore a ditch into the earth, just a few yards from the property's old hemlock tree, the shovel hit a rock:
Crack.

It was not the ordinary sound of pebbles and stones: this was something altogether more solid. The men stopped their work and peered into the ditch.
What was it?

Sticking up from the earth, buried about three feet down, jutted the top of a curious piece of stone-a buried obelisk, the tip ofwhich had been smashed away by the backhoe. As they dug down around its sides, and scraped and brushed the dirt off its marble sides, an inscription appeared beneath their fingertips:

In memory of. . .
Thomas . . .

Josephine had been out running errands—picking up shopping, that sort of thing. It was just a regular day. But when she pulled up the driveway, the kids were jumping around, running to her excitedly.

"There's a grave! A grave!" they yelled gleefully. 'We found a grave!"

Oh
christ.

Jack had been assiduously digging and scraping the dirt away, and now they worked with brushes to get the dirt off that clung to the obelisk's side. More and more words appeared on the side, and . . . And there were numbers written on it too: years.

"Let's get the encyclopedia," someone brightly suggested.

And so they went into the house and grabbed the volume covering the letter
P
, found their entry and looked at the dates in it. "Born 1737, and died 1809."

Jack started to get excited. It was the Bicentennial, afler all. The names and faces of the Founding Fathers had been everywhere: Washington and Franklin reproduced endlessly on Bob's Big Boy place mats, Jefferson on Qyisp cereal boxes, Patrick Henry on Jim Beam decanter bottles. So this . . . well, this was a name they knew. This was in their
front yard
. The family looked at the obelisk that lay broken in two amid the roots of their old hemlock tree, and they examined it in disbelief. Its inscription read:

In memory of
Thomas
PAINE
who was born at
Thetford, England
Jan. 29, 1737
Died
at New York
June 8, 1809
Aged 72 years, 4 months
And 9 days

They looked in their encyclopedia. Thomas Paine: from Thetford, England. Born 1737, died 1809. The encyclopedia entry said that Paine's body had been stolen two centuries before by an enemy turned admirer, and had been lost and never found. It could be anywhere, anywhere at all now.

They viewed their yard with widening eyes:
It was him.
.

The father of our country! Or, at least, our eccentric uncle. The man who wrote
Common Sense
! The patriot who flipped off King George! Here he was!

So they laid in the sewer pipe and covered him up.

Well, come on. People needed to use the toilet. What were the kids supposed to do: wait around, hopping on one foot and then the other? And Josie, being a practical sort, had an even more pressing concern. 'What if it is him?" she asked. "I don't want the state taking over our land."

Jack wasn't sure. But if they were reimbursed, well . . .anyway, he was at least ready to let someone dig up the grave plot. "If," he added, "they are willing to pay for it." He wasn't going to be paying Pease & Sons to dig the same ditch twice, Founding Father or not. Still, he had to admit, it was an interesting situation. Jack had heard something about graves out in the front yard, right by the hemlock tree—a tree, he remembered, that was traditionally planted by gravesites. So that made sense. There was some story about a previous owner here getting rid of some graves. A guy named Jesse Rockefeller—no, no relation to
those
-he'd bought the place knowing full well that Mrs. Rockefeller would never move in if she knew there was a burial plot on the lawn. And so, before she ever saw the new house, he made sure the graves . . . vanished. He did this by hitting upon the expedient of kicking over the gravestones and then shoveling dirt over them.

You could hardly blame Jesse. Paine's original grave in New Rochelle had itself been a neglected farm plot. Everybody did it back then. Graves out on farms were only hallowed ground as long as the family owned the land: once someone else moved in, country graves had a tendency to . . . go away, shall we say. It was no different in the city, really. In the old days graves and stones were moved all the time to make way for developing midtowns and suburbs, and the plots rearranged helter-skelter, if they even bothered moving them at all. So Jesse probably didn't lose much sleep over it. What difference did it make? Who would know?

Everyone would—now.

Word was getting out in the village of Tivoli and over the phones about Jack McNeil's find. And the next day, there came the roar of vans, trucks, and cars down Kerley Corners Road. TV crews were coming. Newspapermen. Radio reporters. Historians. Politicians . . . It was the Bicentennial, and by God,
they had found Thomas
Paine
.

"Are we lost?"

"No . . . maybe." I examine the useless map I've printed out from Yahoo. 'Yes. No. I don't know. I thought you werepom here?"

"Well, Kingston. Not Tivoli," Olivia explains, and laughs. 'You wouldn't choose to come here. We used to make fun of the Tivoli kids in school. It was the total redneck place to live back then."

Back then. And those news crews didn't even have a crappy map printout to follow in '76. I watch a line of picket-fenced old houses flash by at the side of the road. Quaint shops. Nice cars. The rednecks have been quietly cashing out to Manhattan exiles for a while now.

"Roller coaster!" Elena yells from the backseat when we approach a hill. 'Wheeeeeeee!"

She throws up her arms, Coney Island Comet style, as we descend a minute grade in the road. Well, she's six: she's entitled. She's grinning happily.

"Funny way to spend a Saturday, isn't it?"

"We're going to see
Home on the Range
," she asserts.

"Soon," Olivia corrects her. 'We'll go to the movie soon, okay? Paul's visiting up here and we're going to this house first."

It is a strange visit: on any remotely normal day they would be halfway to the cineplex by now. But I've known Olivia since college—since before we had real jobs, before she had a daughter and before I had a son-since before I can even remember anymore, having become a forgetful grownup-and the idea of taking a jaunt to what should be an utterly random address in Tivoli was too good to miss.

"Wheeeeee!"

Somehow, afler zipping back and forth along a stretch of rural routes, we find West Kerley Corners Road.

"147 . . . 147 . . ." I read from my notes, and then point accusingly at a mailbox. "There."

The house still looks the same, I imagine: an early sixties ranch home, clad in wood and stone siding that is, unfortunately, every bit as durable as its manufacturer promised. Off to one side is a low garage, sprouting some ad-hoc plywood additions. A few rolling acres of fields spread out from each side of the house, and when we step out of Olivia's car and onto the long dirt and gravel driveway, we can hear what sounds like dogs from three surrounding farms barking at us all at once.

I ascend the concrete stoop up to the house gingerly, and as I lift up my hand to knock, the front door flies open. She has been waiting for us.

"Hi," Josie McNeil greets me. "So you're here about the grave?"

* * *

Well, it's all dead people now, pretty much. It's only Josephine who still lives here. There are more dead than living on this property.

"That's me." Picture. "That's Jack." Another picture. "He passed away ten years ago." Shufle. "That's me and Jack with, um, this politician—a representative from Red Hook who came out here. He's probably dead now too." Another sheet. "Here's the news reports. They're from all over. Here's one from Colorado, even. We had the
Times
here, TV people. Everybody."

The
Times
article shows Jack McNeil, shirtless, standing next to the upright obelisk, the smashed-off top lying in the grass at his feet.
PAINE TOMBSTONE UNCOVERED UPSTATE REVIVES MYSTERY ABOUT PAMPHLETEER
the headline reads.

"M-o-m-me-eee." Elena skips around the yard, occasionally pausing to listen to the dogs behind the house. "Hang on." Olivia leans in and looks over our shoulders at the
Times
clipping.
"The political theorist whose writing had a profound
effect on the Declaration of Independence was original4 buried in New
Rochelle,"
it explains,
"but his body was disinterred for reburial in his
native England a few years later."

"Nobody knows where he went," Josie adds.

I nod.

"He was never reburied in New Rochelle,"
the article ends,
”or, as far
as is known, buried in England."