The Bones of Old Carlisle (12 page)

occasional hippie who snuck onto base.
And Robert, of course, or so Arrowroot had concluded after
finding some suspicious items in his son’s bedroom. Robert wouldn’t
admit to it, but he would disappear for weeks at a time and come back
with a mysterious relic or two, and stacks of his own poetry.
Good poetry, mostly.
There was a rich history on these grounds, dating back to the
Native Americans who hunted here long ago. Europeans had arrived in
Colonial times, establishing grand estates before the Civil War and
rebuilding after that. Arrowroot was ready to play archeologist,
peering through the underbrush for something, anything, left behind by
the people who had lived here long ago. A spear point, perhaps, a
broken bowl, a bottle of spirits, a wagon wheel. He looked left, past
Hatfield, and for the first time on their drive that morning, he was
rendered almost speechless.
“Floyd,” Arrowroot said under his breath, pointing. “Floyd.”
Hatfield followed Arrowroot’s finger to a pair of brick columns,
10 feet high and so overgrown with vines and moss they would have been
invisible at any other time of day. But a break in the forest canopy
allowed in enough sunlight to reveal the flawless masonry that
someone, probably a slave, had fashioned almost two centuries ago.
This was the gate that once, long before, had marked the principle
entrance to the home and property of Clan Carlisle.
The two columns supported a pair of newer iron pillars that in
turn held up a rusty, wrought-iron arch. There were words on the arch,
obscured by time but remembered by Arrowroot.
“Gabh ealla thall,” Arrowroot whispered.
“Huh?” Hatfield asked, for the first time on the drive truly
interested in what Arrowroot was saying.
“That’s the old Carlisle gate,” Arrowroot whispered reverently.
“They didn’t write ‘Carlisle’ over it, though. They wrote something in
Gaelic: ‘gabh ealla thall.’ Meant something like ‘watch out for things
from beyond’ or ‘watch the heavens.’ On account of, I guess, they were
always worried someone was coming to take their stuff. Curse of the
rich, you know. Got pictures of it at City Hall, glad to show you if
you’re interested.”
“I’d like to see those pictures,” Hatfield said.
“Yup, this was all cleared way back,” Arrowroot said. “You could
see the house from here. Folks would park their cars all over the
lawn. Even had a plane land here coupla times. Damn shame they fenced
it all off. Quite a place in its day, still could be.”
The old gate faded from view and the path ahead brightened. Soon
they were in another clearing, this one far larger than the first.
Immediately ahead of them, the Army had erected what Arrowroot assumed
was their investigation command, a tent with a canvas top and netting
for walls, where tables had been set up and two soldiers, a man and a
woman, were looking at a laptop. Three Humvees had been parked
haphazardly around the tent, and Stapleton squeezed her SUV in between
two of them and turned the vehicle off. “Do not step anywhere that
hasn’t been cleared,” she barked.
Arrowroot exited, walked to the front of the SUV, took a deep
breath and gazed about him.
“That’s the house, Floyd, that’s the house,” Arrowroot whispered,
pointing. One hundred yards away stood the building where the
Carlisles had presided over their estate for almost 70 years. Finished
in 1873, it was constructed of pink granite, topped with slate
shingles, and lined with two rows of black-framed windows staring
blankly east, toward Heligaux and the sweep of mountains beyond it. A
tower rose at on one end of the dwelling, peaked black roof like a
church steeple, but Arrowroot knew it held nothing, no bell or even
stairs, put there just for looks.
The Carlisle family had been in decline for decades when the US
Army summarily commandeered their land and all around it in June 1942.
There weren’t any namesakes even living there by that time, in fact.
The last Carlisle had departed for California in 1927, leaving behind
a few odds and ends of family, a sister who’d married into the
Cronicks of Asheville, her husband and some other Cronick people, and
a daughter who’d married a swindler and moved back home after he died
or disappeared.
“If houses could talk, Floyd, this one’d have some stories,”
Arrowroot said. “Carlisle, now that was a family, ran mills in the
1800s, built things, traded land, made a fortune. But they all went
near crazy by the time the Army kicked ‘em out. Inbreeding did it, at
least that’s the gossip. Or just sitting on family money, watching it
dribble away, that can push you over the edge too.”
“The Army evicted them?” Hatfield asked.
“Worse than that,” Arrowroot replied. “Summer right after World
War II started. One of ‘em was getting kooky, even by their own
standards, so they all went to the hospital in town, to try to get him
checked in, you know, get him off their hands for a bit, but he didn’t
want to go, hospital didn’t want to take him, there was a scene of
some sort I guess, and somehow they finally dumped him off but it took
awhile, then they try to go back home and it’s all trucks and tanks
blocking the way. Army says, we need it for the war effort, thanks for
your time and all, go on down the road.”
“That sounds unconstitutional,” Hatfield said. “You can’t just
take someone’s home like that, can you?”
“Well there might be more to it than that,” Arrowroot conceded.
“Probably get a truer story if you had the run of that house. I bet
there’s papers in there, just out on a desk somewhere, like someone
was in the middle of going through their bills or whatever. Maybe
someone was sitting there, halfway through a book, they marked their
place in it, set it down on account of that one fellow just going
bonkers or whatever he was doing, like they said to themself, ‘Oh,
gotta mark my place here, pick it back up later today after I get done
taking cousin Fred or whomever down to the hospital, since he’s seeing
hummingbirds with elk antlers or whatever.’ So they set that book
down, with the bookmark in it, like on page one hundred, and it sets
there for 70 years. Seventy years, Floyd, just setting there, with a
bookmark in it on page one hundred, and no one picks it up in all that
time, so it’s just sitting there to this day, just waiting to be
picked back up and read some more. Might be in there still, right now.
Army’s had the place locked down tight – the house and all the grounds
– for 70 years now. If we can get in there today, no telling what
we’ll see. We might be the first to find that book and pick it up,
after 70 years. Could happen this afternoon. God knows what stories
you could find in there, just waiting to be discovered. I mean, not
just book stories, but the kind of stories you uncover yourself, like
paperwork, things people wrote, and you piece it all together and come
up with a new story, about craziness or whatever.”
“Hmph,” Hatfield agreed, and there was a pause before he spoke
again. “You said Robert’s been out here. Did he ever tell you
anything?”
“Couldn’t get a word from him about it,” Arrowroot said. “Either
he didn’t want to talk about sneaking onto federal land, or he’d never
really been out here, you know? Last summer, I found an old book on
the kitchen table with ‘Carlisle’ written in it, like they owned it
and wanted people to know it was theirs, and I asked Robert where he
got it, but he just said he couldn’t remember. Old book. Poetry and
some stories or something, like they used to write. Had ‘Carlisle’
written in it, with one of those fancy pens people used to use.”
“So what happened to the family?” Hatfield inquired.
“Oh, that’s the best part of the story, the best part,” Arrowroot
said. “Hey, check that out, there’s someone at the house.”
Two figures had been crouched before the dwelling’s arched
doorway, obscured for the most part by the tall grass, but one of them
stood and pointed a camera down at something while the other slid
forward on his knees, touching something or moving something.
“They’re working the bodies,” Hatfield said, and he turned to
Arrowroot and sighed. “Karl, I’m only going to say this one more time.
This isn’t going to be pleasant, and no one’s going to think less of
you if you wait in the car.”
“Gonna do you a big favor, Floyd,” Arrowroot shot back. “I’m
gonna forget you said that.”
Hatfield nodded. He’d said what he had to say. If Arrowroot ended
up traumatized by what they were about to see, it would be his own
damned fault.
To the left of the manor and much closer, about 25 yards away,
the Carlisle barn rose from the weeds, a grand structure in its own
right, its walls still mostly red, its gray, shingled roof still
mostly intact except for a blackened hole here and there, knocked out
either by lightning or, more likely, by a misdirected rocket or two.
The actual bombing range was at least a half-mile further south, but
sloppiness is not limited to the waging of actual war. Combat training
at Fort Shergawa had produced its share of errors, Arrowroot knew,
some documented, most probably not.
Two soldiers rounded the barn, one sweeping the ground with a
metal detector, the other placing flags every few feet. The pair had
been busy since the morning, Arrowroot noted to himself, observing
that hundreds of the little flags had been planted in what used to be
the Carlisle’s front yard. Green, yellow, red, they almost looked like
spring blossoms if you squinted your eyes and tried to imagine.
Arrowroot was ready to head to the tent and get permission to
start looking around when a scream emanated from the barn.
“Hey, damn!” someone shouted, and because Arrowroot couldn’t see
the speaker, it was almost as if the barn itself was talking. “Oh,
God! Shit! Another one!”

In the summer of his 25
^th
year, Karl Arrowroot learned in the
worst way possible that people don’t die clean.
It’s not like in the movies, where they utter a few tender words,
sigh and close their eyes. No, they say horrible things, then they
gasp like someone drowning, then they say more horrible things, then
they die, and their last words poison the rest of your memories of
them no matter how hard you try to recall the totality of the person.
Or so it was for Arrowroot and his mother.
He knew something was wrong, but he’d been assuming for months
hard living was just catching up with her 50-year-old body. Cut back
and she’d be as good as new, he thought. He had been working long
hours, not making much money and not seeing his mother much, so it was
easy to ignore the nature of her affliction.
But late one Saturday afternoon, on a cold day in February, he
was summoned to the hospital, told there was a lot of infection, and
death was imminent. It was AIDS, of course, one of the newer hazards
of an old occupation that could not ever be acknowledged.
“Momma likes to party,” he’d boast. “She’s got a lot of high-up
friends, and they always want her around.” If his friends knew the
truth, they didn’t dare speak it.
So Arrowroot came to the hospital to yell at his mother for a
lifetime of unspecified excess. But when he reached her bedside, he
found nothing to rebuke. She’d lost 50 pounds and was covered with
sores, a lump of flesh and misery drawing its last desperate breaths.
The smell, of her wasted skin, her incontinence, of whatever was
wrong in her lungs, was almost by itself impossible to tolerate, even
if he didn’t have to look at her and hear her too.
His eyes filled with tears as he took her hand, waiting for the
end.
Then she spoke.
“There you are,” she gasped. “Hi.”
“Hello, Momma,” he said.
“Siddown,” she hissed. “Lissen.”
“Momma, don’t –”
“Lissen,” she said again, sighing out the word.
He sat and let go of her hand, and she pulled it to her chest and
fell asleep, each breath a subdued “ah-ha!” as if she were discovering
new things in her dreams.
Then she started, her hands flew to her face to feel her cheeks,
and she wept in soft, despairing misery.
“Momma,” Arrowroot said.
“God cries,” she mumbled to the ceiling, “and the flowers lick it
up.”
“Momma, no,” he pleaded. For as long as Arrowroot could remember,
when the blossoms came in spring, his mother would pick them and put
them in a plastic cup and set it on the kitchen table, and she’d say
something like that. “God cried yesterday, and look what I found” or
“God’s tears, and then a little happiness.”
He’d always hated the notion, no matter what words were used to
express it. If an omniscient, omnipotent, supreme being could cry and
rain tears, what hope was there for him?
He might have stood again, but Arrowroot knew the smell was far
worse directly by the bed, so he stayed seated.
“You broke Lief Pullmon’s nose,” she said, her voice still weak
but suddenly clear and sharp. “Remember that?”
“Of course,” Arrowroot said. “Worst day of my life.”
“You cost me a customer,” she wheezed.
Arrowroot was silent, and his mother dozed briefly.
“His father,” she resumed immediately upon waking. “His father
was one of mine.” Another pause, then, “You know?”
“No, Momma, no,” Arrowroot lied.
“You do, though,” she gasped. “He calls. He says, ‘I can’t see
you no more. Your son broke my son’s nose.’”
For a time, silence reigned in the room, and then she started
making a “heh-heh-heh-heh” sound, and Arrowroot realized she was
laughing.
“I said, ‘Well, why did Karl do that?’” she recalled, and
Arrowroot had to lean forward to hear her next words. “He says, ‘Ask
your son. I don’t know.’”
She was silent except for her labored breathing, but she turned
her head and stared at Arrowroot between the bedrails with sharp blue
eyes. “So I said, ‘Your son called me a hooker, didn’t he?’” she
wheezed, and her eyes took on a life of their own, boring into
Arrowroot’s face. “Didn’t he?”
Arrowroot looked down at his hands and began to feel woozy.
“Didn’t he?” she repeated, and Arrowroot realized the question
was for him. “Didn’t he?”
This was not ever to be spoken of. These memories were to join
the long list of terrible truths that would not be written down, not
be discussed, that flickered like a sputtering candle as those who
remembered them passed away, until the last one died and the truth
dissipated like a wisp of smoke.
“Didn’t he?” she demanded once again, her voice at the extreme of
its capacity. The effort choked her, and her whole body convulsed as
she coughed a dozen times. Arrowroot wondered if she were about to
die, and a part of him hoped she might, because then her last question
would go unanswered.
But the coughing stopped, she drew in another breath and
repeated, more quietly, “Didn’t he?”
“Yes, Momma,” Arrowroot confessed at last. “That’s what he said.”
“Good boy,” his mother croaked. She laughed again, and then she
fell asleep. For almost an hour, Arrowroot listened to the unsteady
rhythm of her strangled breath, and then he wiped his eyes on his
sleeve and left.
She never spoke to him again. He came to her bedside that night
and the next day, and he was there on Monday morning when she died
with a final, desperate rattle from somewhere deep in her chest.
Death, Arrowroot knew, could be a terrible thing or a glorious
thing, a thing that good people did to bad people – in the movies, on
TV – with remarkable frequency and precision, and which typically
solved problems. Arrowroot had long ago gotten used to both
representations of human mortality, the noble and the horrible, and
they existed in harmony side by side in his mind.
At this moment, as Arrowroot stood with Chief Hatfield in the
front yard of the Carlisle estate, death seemed to have come in glory
to the old Carlisle barn.
Moments before, a soldier hidden within the structure had
announced the finding of another body. Now he materialized at the
barn’s gaping entrance, backing out slowly, staring into the dark
interior as if concerned that whatever he’d found there would follow
him out. Once clear of the building, he glanced around, spotted
Arrowroot and Hatfield and immediately trotted over to them. He was
short, distinctly Middle Eastern and, by the time he’d reached them,
out of breath – as much from excitement it seemed as from exertion.
He briefly made eye contact with both men, and then he bent over
and put his hands on his knees.
“You tourists?” he asked, panting and looking at the ground.
“No,” said Arrowroot, “we’re here to help with the, uh, the
situation.”
“Yeah,” the soldier panted. He straightened up, put his hands on
his hips and started bending at the waist, forward, backwards, to the
left and right, as if preparing for an athletic event. “This is some
situation, man. This is some kind of situation.”
The soldier was smiling. He looked to be no more than 20, and he
bore the accent and the streetwise swagger of the inner city, probably
somewhere up north. Chicago maybe, Arrowroot thought, or Pittsburgh,
or even New York.
“Just found another one,” he said, gesturing to the barn, then
pointing to his chest with his thumb. “Gonna have PTSD this time, my
friend, no way around it. Personal traumatic stress disease, that’s
what that means. Soldiers get it all the time from shit like this.”
He smiled again, put his hands back on his hips and spoke in low,
malevolent tones. “You gonna see some shit today, my brother, you stay
long enough. I just found another one in the barn, shit. But that’s
just part of the story. I saw something over there.” He gestured in
the general direction of the house. “If I tell the colonel, he’ll be
crossing swords with me, cuz I saw it when I was outside range.
“I was, like, the first one out here,” he said. “One of the first
ones out, this morning, and I been all over, man. They told me not to
but I know what I’m doin’, I was scoutin’. I’m a scout. Kind of like a
Ranger. I saw some shit, you’re gonna see it too.”
“Corporal!” barked Stapleton from the tent.
“Yes, Ma’am?” the soldier shouted back. He put his hand over his
heart, and Arrowroot noticed that “Watell” was stitched over his
pocket.
“When we find materials relevant to the investigation,” Stapleton
announced, “we report them through channel!”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Watell replied. “Just catching my breath, Ma’am,
trying to be friendly, Ma’am.”
He pointed toward the soldiers with the metal detector and the
flags, who seemed to be looking for another unflagged area to explore.
“Maybe them’ll find it, maybe not,” he said. “Gotta go through
channel, man.”
Watell tilted his head side to side so rapidly it made his neck
crack. “PTSD, man,” he said, looking at Arrowroot, and then at
Hatfield. “Gonna be my middle name by time this is over.”
Watel strode over to the command tent, opened the flap and
stepped inside.
Arrowroot turned to follow, but Hatfield grabbed his arm. “Karl,”
he said, “back off just a minute.”
The clouds were growing thicker, blocking out the sun throughout
the valley, and a surprisingly cool press of air washed over
Arrowroot. He looked up as two helicopters flew over in formation,
heading north. There was no live firing today. Either it wasn’t
scheduled or had been cancelled due to the investigation. Who knows
what the helicopters were doing up there? Maybe looking for more
bodies. Dead or not dead.
After the choppers were out of sight and their noise was a minor,
echoing reverberation, Arrowroot heard Stapleton’s voice, an intense
whisper that Arrowroot couldn’t decipher. Watell whispered something
back, but it was an immature whisper, a combination of ill-concealed
bravado and defensiveness, and Arrowroot made out a word here and
there: “sorry, Ma’am” several times, and “no, this was a man” and
“ripped up real bad, like the others, but worse.”
A third voice emanated from the tent, male but high and rolling,
like the speaker was half-talking and half-yodeling. None of the words
were remotely intelligible, but when his voice rang out everyone else
shut up.
“I don’t think they’re happy we’re here,” Hatfield whispered to
Arrowroot. “Best behavior, okay?”
Arrowroot laughed quietly. “It’s the only behavior I’ve ever
known. But I wanna get in that house. I’m warning you right now.”
The secret pow-wow in the tent complete, the Army was ready to
talk to the civilians. “Chief!” Stapleton shouted. “Arrow!”
Hatfield and Arrowroot headed for the tent. Stapleton opened the
flap and motioned them inside.
The introductions were terse. Col. Ed Demizu, the owner of the
yodeling voice, was heading up the investigation. His gray hair was
disconcertingly long, he wore a beard and mustache and looked more
like a sage or a prophet than a military officer. He shook hands
without smiling.
The other officer was Major Susan Schaumberg, a physician who was
there for what Stapleton called field forensics. Dr. Schaumberg, a
tiny woman in her late 30s with sharp eyes and long black hair mostly
tucked under her hat, remained seated and offered only a brief,
uncomfortable glance when Stapleton pointed to her. Bonaventure was
sitting next to her, looking at his chest.
The tent had been set up like a conference room, with chairs and
tables lined up in rows, and a whiteboard on an easel up front. Demizu
stood beside the whiteboard, which was still blank.
“I told Connie civilians got no place out here,” Demizu yodeled
bluntly after Arrowroot and Hatfield sat down, “but she had other
ideas. Seems things didn’t go too well in town.”
“Town nothing,” barked Arrowroot, “it was my damned living room.”
Hatfield coughed and Arrowroot adjusted his tone. “Anyway, I hope
I can help out here,” he said. “I’m the mayor of Heligaux, you know,
and I have some knowledge—”
“I was supposed to be golfing this morning,” Demizu said, then
continued with barely enough volume to be heard. “I don’t want any
more bodies out here, so do what the flags say.”
Hatfield nodded. Arrowroot stared.
“You know how to read flags?” Demizu inquired.
“Refresh my memory,” Hatfield replied.
“Wasn’t supposed to happen, but over the last half century, lotta
ordnance been dropped out here, everywhere,” Demizu began, sweeping
his hand in an arc. Arrowroot realized he was enjoying the strange
music of the officer’s voice. “Most of it blew up, so it’s harmless.
Some of it didn’t blow up and never will, so it’s harmless. Some of it
didn’t blow up, and it’s just waiting there for some fool to give it a
little nudge, and then you got bloody pieces where your two feets were
holding forth.
“None of us should be out here,” Demizu continued. “No one should
ever be walking this land again, but something has happened out here
I’m trying to understand and that’s why we’ve all had our day ruined.
“You walk between the green flags,” Demizu said. “Yellow flags,
that means we don’t know, and we don’t have time to find out, so stay
the hell away. Red flags, you walk over to one of those if you want to
die. Not because it’ll blow you up. Probably won’t. But I’m gonna
shoot ya myself if I catch you. You set one of those off it puts
everyone in danger, so better you die short of it than you kill
yourself plus everyone else. Army’ll back me up on that.”
Demizu crossed his arms and looked at everyone there, although
Arrowroot knew the speech was meant primarily for him.
“Corporal, get the door,” Demizu yodeled.
Watell crossed the tent and opened the flap wide, and two more
soldiers ducked through, bearing between them a corpse on a stretcher.
“Set it over here,” he said, motioning to a table next to
Arrowroot, then he turned to Dr. Schaumberg. “Major, you ready to take
a look?”
Arrowroot spun in his seat to watch the proceedings, not knowing
that the stretcher was just behind him, and he was suddenly face to
face with the remains. He put his hand over his mouth, grateful he
hadn’t eaten more recently than breakfast, and devoted all his energy
to not fainting, and not throwing up.
Karl Arrowroot had seen a lot of good death in his life, as well
as some bad death. This was bad.