One Came Home (17 page)

Billy paid me no mind, which was fine by me.

Yes, I would have slept if I could. But my heart raced. I do not propose marriage every day.

The half-light made those forty feet an easy climb, but my puffy, closed left eye did not. More than once I had to use my hands to steady myself. After five minutes of struggle, I reached the top, turned around, surveyed the view (impressive), and noted that Billy was
still
reading. I had never taken
Billy McCabe for a reader, but he was engrossed in
The Prairie Traveler
. So I decided to explore the back side of the hill. Not a natural choice for a walk—it was thick with brambles, bushes, and tall trees—but I found a tiny path and followed it down.

The moon came out, and moonlight reminded me of cougars’ eyes. The hairs on the back of my neck rose to alert. I heard something snap.

I swung around, and when I put my right foot down, the entire ground gave way.

Down I went—bump, bump, bump—with a whole lot of tree branches and rubbish. New aches piled on old pains. I grasped at anything at all—rocky walls, moss, dirt, and pine boards. (
Pine boards?
) I stopped suddenly and heard my last thump echo. Damp air brushed my face. It smelled musty.

A cave.

Dark as an inkwell too. Agatha may like the muscle and bones of the earth, but I prefer the skin. Sky above and grass below is my motto. I won’t even go into a root cellar willingly! My hand skimmed one of the sharp corners I’d bumped against and I realized it was a stair. Stairs? In a cave?

I didn’t know what this place was or why people spent time in it but I wanted out. My right hand lay on something papery. I ripped it in my effort to get standing, and scrambled up those stairs as quickly as I could go.

By the time I made it back, I was truly exhausted. I plopped down in front of that fire and realized my right hand was in a fist. I opened up my hand and stared at what I held.

Billy didn’t even look up. He’d heard my arrival, though. “Listen to this,” he said. Then he read:

“Now, how could that be?” Billy gestured at the book like he could convince letters to rearrange themselves into something more reasonable. “No bear does that!”

When I didn’t say anything at all—no comment, no “Uh-huh,” no laughter—Billy finally looked up. He squinted at me. “Again? Oh no, Fry. What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into this time?” he said. Then I saw him look at what I held in my hand. “Where did you get a five-dollar note?”

I looked down again at what I held and frowned.

“In a cave,” I said.

Where do five-dollar banknotes come from? Five-dollar banknotes grow inside caves, right at the point where rough-hewn pine stairs meet rocky floor. They are found bound up in stacks and tossed amidst dirt, dried leaves, and tree limbs (debris left from an earlier bruise-rendering entry).

I know this because Billy made up a torch and I led him to that cave. Billy shoved aside the remaining branches with his right foot, and without so much as a “Here we go,” Billy plunged down those steps into pitch blackness. I watched the torchlight ring the sides of that cave and swore Billy was walking into someone’s oversized gullet.

As soon as the torchlight left, night closed in behind me and I thought,
Cougars
. So gullet or not, I scampered down the steps after that light.

Moments later I was where I’d been. There lay several bundles of five-dollar bills. The paper collar on one of the bundles was ripped. The dollars were splayed out and scattered across the ground.

No one keeps money in caves. It’s either the mattress or the bank. We have a currency shortage in Wisconsin, but looking at the amount of paper money in this cave, a body would never know it.

I saw Billy inspecting another pile of banknotes. “
One-
dollar notes,” he called. He picked up a bundle and ran his thumb over the edge.

Then he stood up. He held the torch against the dark, and light illuminated the space.

Nausea slammed into me. It was a cave all right—as big as a ballroom, but lacking a ballroom’s regular angles. There’s no pretending a cave is a proper room—it’s the belly of the whale, the innards of a clam, a bubble, a rock-hard belch. Everything is poured out and dried sideways or upside down. To my right, several columns of slick rock seemed to drip upward. There were knobby clusters, columns looking like gigantic candle-wax drippings, and a wall that folded in on itself. The torchlight wavered and shadows stretched until Billy turned and the light jerked to another spot. A fissure in a nearby wall caused me to consider that trees grew out of the cave’s ceiling—which is so dadgum wrong (not to mention
heavy
).

I escaped suffocating sensations by sitting on the last pine step and focusing on roomlike elements. I saw a stool, a table
covered with an oilcloth, and, on the floor, squarish mounds under tarps. I concentrated on their regular angles.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Billy make his way to the farthest point. He held out his torch to light a dark hole. In chorus, mouths screeched.

I screamed and dropped to the cave floor as bats swept over my head and up the stairs.

“My apologies,” called Billy.

I crawled back to the step and sat down again.

Billy moved into the middle of the chamber. He lifted the torch high above his head with his left hand. With his right, he took hold of a corner of a tarp covering one of the squarish mounds and pulled. The tarp snapped and hung in the air a moment before whirling to the ground. Billy pulled another and another and another.

Agatha spinning in Billy’s arms, the skirt of her blue-green dress snapping in the air with every turn around the Olmstead Hotel’s ballroom
.

The New Year’s ball was only five months ago. It felt like decades, but truly, it was the shortest amount of time.

I began a countdown in my head. Four months ago (February), Billy had proposed marriage to Agatha. Three months ago (March), the pigeons had migrated over Placid, and Agatha had spun underneath them. Two months ago (April), Mr. Olmstead and Agatha had courted, and the pigeons had nested. One month ago (May), Agatha had kissed Billy, and the nesting had broken, along with Agatha’s ties to Mr.
Olmstead. Agatha had been angry with me, but I’d honestly thought—and I hesitate to admit this—that it was all over. Life would return to the way it had been previously. Agatha would have no other choice but to run the store with me. So only one month ago, I’d felt
relieved
.

But Agatha had run off nineteen days ago. Six days ago, my family had held my sister’s funeral.

Seemed like I’d lived two lifetimes already. My first thirteen years took an uneventful forever, but this second lifetime? Why, it took all of three days: Billy and I had left on a Saturday night. I’d met a cougar on Sunday. I’d been in Dog Hollow on Monday. And today was Tuesday. On Tuesday, I’d been to the nowhere place and Garrow Farm, made a marriage proposal, and found money in a cave. Would this Tuesday
never
end?

But Tuesdays end when they will and not a moment before. I squinted at what Billy was uncovering. Then, frustrated by how little I could see from my seat on the stairs, I took a few unsteady steps around the chamber. I saw a stack of paper, and a paper cutter. What had looked like a table was, in actuality, a printing press.

“Fry, come see this,” said Billy. He held the torch up.

I put my hands against the wall—a bulging, earthy wall that caused my stomach to turn over—and made my way to him.

I saw it: four printing plates. I squatted and turned one over. What I saw was the reverse image of a one-dollar banknote.

I ran my hand over the engraving. “How do they make this? It’s so detailed.”

“They get an engraver. Or one of them is the engraver. You’d have to be an artist to produce anything like that. If they bought it, it cost them two legs and an arm. All I know is that if you want to catch a counterfeiter, you’ve got to catch him with the plates. Counterfeiting plates are a find. Pa would sure appreciate this.”

“Mr. Garrow is a counterfeiter?” I said. It was all coming together.

“Looks like it.”

“Remember how he said there was no road up this way? He didn’t want us up here,” I said.

Billy frowned. “But were those pigeoners also counterfeiters?”

I do believe Grandfather Bolte would have been proud of my deduction. It takes one business owner to understand another (legal or not). “No,” I said slowly. “If those pigeoners met Mr. Garrow, they met him to
purchase
false notes. Mr. Garrow probably sold the notes at some percentage of the face value. Maybe forty percent? A one-dollar note would cost the pigeoners forty cents. That way, Mr. Garrow didn’t have to risk passing false notes himself. He’d still make plenty of money.”

Billy looked at me with genuine admiration. “I swear, Fry.”

“I
do
work on the account books at the store. It’s not all scrubbing pigeon defecation,” I said. Some people think
that my youthful age precludes me from responsibility. It is irksome.

Billy did not respond to my fit of pique. Instead, he stood upright with a jerk. “We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to put out that fire. We have to clean this place up, and our camp too. It has to look like we’ve
never
been here.” Panic flooded his voice. “They’ve probably seen the smoke from our fire. They’re coming. We need to leave
now
.” Billy started pulling tarps over piles with the hand that wasn’t holding the torch. One-handed, he couldn’t get them straight.

“Fry, help me!”

While I pulled tarps on top of piles, I began to see Billy’s point. How had I overlooked that these were criminals? My heart started to pound in time with my face.

As we left, I saw Billy tuck a five-dollar printing plate under his arm. I was about to say,
Don’t you think we should leave
everything
as we found it?

But Billy slashed at the air with his torch. “Let’s go, let’s go!”

I ran past him and up the stairs.

Up top, we buckled down: Billy kicked dirt on the fire. I picked up
The Prairie Traveler
and shoved it in my saddlebag. I gathered our kitchen supplies and food, folded up my bedroll, and went for Long Ears.

Long Ears stamped his left hoof and turned away from me. When I realized he wasn’t having any of it, I fished out a sugar cube. His velvety lips scooped it off my palm, and
his head didn’t turn quite so much as I tried to ease on his bridle. I gave him another.

It became clear that Long Ears knew how to drive a bargain (and I didn’t have the time or patience to refuse him). With a sugar cube, I bridled him. With another, I took off his hobble. Sugar cube, put the saddle on his back and tightened the cinches; sugar cube, attached a saddlebag; sugar cube, led Long Ears by the bridle. When I’d finished, only one row of sugar cubes remained in the box.

Storm didn’t give Billy the same kind of trouble, so by the time I’d mounted Long Ears, Billy’d swept the whole camp with a leafy branch to cover up our tracks, had found the trail for Old Line Road, and was waiting for me.

Once again, Storm proved to be all the sweetness Long Ears required. Long Ears followed Storm without balking at all. I took no offense. I was glad we were going. I swore I could hear hooves behind us.

The road was truly unused, so we were lucky to have some moonlight to navigate by. A few times it disappeared into undergrowth and Billy dismounted to find the trail on foot. We crossed a dozen or so downed trees and one tiny creek. About every other sound made me jump—branches catching, owls hoo-hooing, a raccoon hustling by.

Even so, I was sapped of strength, and therefore my body went out like a lamp. My one open eyelid—the right—was the first thing to give, becoming leaden. As soon as it closed,
the rest of me went limp. So I jerked awake, slept, jerked awake, and slept while riding Long Ears into the night. When I was awake, I’d mumble “Can we stop?” or “How far until we stop?” or “Billy, let’s stop.”

Billy responded with something like “Try to stay awake, Fry. I know it’s been a long, long day …” My eye shut by “long, long day,” and if he said anything after that, I do not remember it.

Time passed and the trail became a road. Old Miller Road? Possibly. Though I cannot declare it with all certainty because I slept. That is, until Billy guided Storm into the water of a large creek and proceeded to head up the center of it. I opened my right eye as Long Ears’ hooves splashed into the water, and woke up absolutely when Long Ears slipped on a moss-covered stone. I grabbed at the saddle horn. For as long as we stayed in that creek, I held on with two hands, wideawake. It felt like forever, and the change in the sky seemed to prove it. Morning light diluted the dark of night into a yellow pink, then light blue. When sunlight dappled the water, Billy stopped.