The Book of Speculation (2 page)
I don’t bow, not for Frank. The last time I bowed was when I taught Enola and the salt stung our eyes so badly we looked like we’d been fighting. Still, I smile and take in a deep breath through my nose, let my ribs stretch and fill my gut.
“Thought I was going to have to go in after you,” Frank calls.
“How long was I down?”
He eyes his watch with its cracked leather strap and expels a breath. “Nine minutes.”
“Mom could do eleven.” I shake the water from my hair, thumping twice to get it out of my ear.
“Never understood it,” Frank mutters as he frees the oars from the locks. They clatter when he tosses them inside the skiff. There’s a question neither of us asks: how long would it take for a breath-holder to drown?
When I throw on my shirt it’s full of sand; a consequence of shore living, it’s always in the hair, under the toenails, in the folds of the sheets.
Frank comes up behind me, puffing from dragging the boat.
“You should have let me help you with that.”
He slaps my back. “If I don’t push myself now and again I’ll just get old.”
We make small talk about things at the marina. He complains about the prevalence of fiberglass boats, we both wax poetic about
Windmill
, the racing sail he’d shared with my father. After Mom drowned, Dad sold the boat without explanation. It was cruel of him to do that to Frank, but I suppose Frank could have bought it outright if he’d wanted. We avoid talking about the house, though it’s clear he’s upset over the idea of selling it. I’d rather not sell either. Instead we exchange pleasantries about Alice. I say I’m keeping an eye out for her, though it’s unnecessary.
“How’s that sister of yours? She settled anywhere yet?”
“Not that I know of. To be honest, I don’t know if she ever will.”
Frank smiles a little. We both think it: Enola is restless like my mother.
“Still reading tarot cards?” he asks.
“She’s getting by.” She’s taken up with a carnival. Once that’s said, we’ve ticked off the requisite conversational boxes. We dry off and heft the skiff back up on the bulkhead.
“Are you heading up?” I ask. “I’ll walk back with you.”
“It’s a nice day,” he says. “Think I’ll stay down here awhile.” The ritual is done. We part ways once we’ve drowned our ghosts.
I take the steps back, avoiding the poison ivy that grows over the railings and runs rampant over the bluff—no one pulls it out; anything that anchors the sand is worth whatever evil it brings—and cut through the beach grass, toward home. Like many Napawset houses, mine is a true colonial, built in the late 1700s. A plaque from the historical society hung beside the front door until it blew away in a nor’easter a few years back. The Timothy Wabash house. With peeling white paint, four crooked windows, and a sloping step, the house’s appearance marks prolonged negligence and a serious lack of funds.
On the faded green front step (have to get to that) a package props open the screen door. The deliveryman always leaves the door open though I’ve left countless notes not to; the last thing I need is to rehang a door on a house that hasn’t been square since the day it was built. I haven’t ordered anything and can’t think of anyone who would send me something. Enola is rarely in one place long enough to mail more than a postcard. Even then they’re usually blank.
The package is heavy, awkward, and addressed with the spidery scrawl of an elderly person—a style I’m familiar with, as the library’s patrons are by and large an aging group. That reminds me, I need to talk to Janice about finding stretchable dollars in the library budget. Things might not be too bad if I can get a patch on the bulkhead. It wouldn’t be a raise, a one-time bonus maybe, for years of service. The sender is no one I know, an M. Churchwarry in Iowa. I clear a stack of papers from the desk—a few articles on circus and carnivals, things I’ve collected over the years to keep abreast of my sister’s life.
The box contains a good-sized book, carefully wrapped. Even before opening it, the musty, slightly acrid scent indicates old paper, wood, leather, and glue. It’s enveloped in tissue and newsprint, and unwrapping reveals a dark leather binding covered with what would be intricate scrollwork had it not suffered substantial water damage. A small shock runs through me. It’s very old, not a book to be handled with naked fingers, but seeing as it’s already ruined, I give in to the quiet thrill of touching something with history. The edges of the undamaged paper are soft, gritty. The library’s whaling collection lets me dabble in archival work and restoration, enough to say that the book feels to be at least from the 1800s. This is appointment reading, not a book you ship without warning. I shuffle my papers into two small stacks to support the volume—a poor substitute for the bookstands it deserves, but they’ll do.
A letter is tucked inside the front cover, written in watery ink with the same shaky hand.
Dear Mr. Watson,
I came across this book at auction as part of a larger lot I purchased on speculation. The damage renders it useless to me, but a name inside it—Verona Bonn—led me to believe it might be of interest to you or your family. It’s a lovely book, and I hope that it finds a good home with you. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions that you feel I may be able to answer.
It is signed by a Mr. Martin Churchwarry of Churchwarry & Son and includes a telephone number. A bookseller, specializing in used and antiquarian books.
Verona Bonn. What my grandmother’s name would be doing inside this book is beyond me. A traveling performer like my mother, she would have had no place in her life for a book like this. With the edge of my finger, I turn a page. The paper nearly crackles with the effort. Must remember to grab gloves along with book stands. The inside page is filled with elaborate writing, an excessively ornamented copperplate with whimsical flourishes that make it barely legible. It appears to be an accounting book or journal of a Mr. Hermelius Peabody, related to something containing the words
portable
and
miracle
. Any other identifiers are obscured by water damage and Mr. Peabody’s devotion to calligraphy. Skimming reveals sketches of women and men, buildings, and fanciful curved-roof wagons, all in brown. I never knew my grandmother. She passed away when my mother was a child, and my mother never spoke about her much. How this book connects to my grandmother is unclear, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
I dial the number, ignoring the stutter indicating a message. It rings for an exceedingly long time before an answering machine picks up and a man’s weathered voice states that I’ve reached Churchwarry & Son Booksellers and instructs to leave the time and date in addition to a detailed message as to any specific volume I’m seeking. The handwriting didn’t lie. This is an old man.
“Mr. Churchwarry, this is Simon Watson. I received a book from you. I’m not sure why you sent it, but I’m curious. It’s June twentieth, just six o’clock. It’s a fantastic specimen and I’d love to know more about it.” I leave multiple numbers, cell, home, and library.
Across the street, Frank heads toward his workshop, a barn to the side of his property. A piece of wood tucked under his arm, a jig of some sort. I should have asked him for money, not a contractor. Workmen I can probably find, the money to do the work is an entirely different matter. I need a raise. Or a different job. Or both.
A blinking light catches my eye. Voice mail. Right. I punch in the numbers. The voice at the other end is not one I expect to hear.
“Hey, it’s me. Shit. Do I call enough to be an
it’s me
? I hope you have an
it’s me.
That would be good. Anyway, it’s me, Enola. I’m giving you a heads-up. I’m coming home in July. It would be good to see you, if you feel like being around. Actually, I want you to be around. So, I’m coming home in July, so you should be home. Okay? Bye.”
I play it back again. She doesn’t call enough to be an
it’s me.
There’s noise in the background, people talking, laughing, maybe even the sound of a carnival ride or two, but I might be imagining that. No dates, no number, just July. Enola doesn’t work on a normal timeline; to her, leaving a month’s window is reasonable. It’s good to hear her voice, but also concerning. Enola hasn’t called in more than two months and hasn’t been home in six years, not since announcing that if she spent one more day in this house with me she’d die. It was a typical thing to say, but different in that we both knew she meant it, different because I’d spent the previous four years taking care of her after Dad died. Since then she’s called from time to time, leaving rambling messages. Our conversations are brief and centered on needs. Two years ago she called, sick with the flu. I found her in a hotel in New Jersey, hugging a toilet. I stayed three days. She refused to come home.
She wants to visit. She can. I haven’t touched her room since she left, hoping she’d come back, I suppose. I’d thought about turning it into a library, but there were always more immediate concerns, patching leaks, fixing electrical problems, replacing windows. Repurposing my long-gone sister’s room wasn’t a priority. Though perhaps it’s convenient to think so.
The book sits by the phone, a tempting little mystery. I won’t sleep tonight; I often don’t. I’ll be up, fixating. On the house, on my sister, on money. I trace the curve of a flourished
H
with my thumb. If this book is meant for me, best find out why.
The boy was born a bastard on a small tobacco farm in the rich-soiled Virginia hills. Had his birth been noted, it would have been in the 1780s, after a tobacco man could set his price for a hogshead barrel, but before he was swallowed up by all-consuming cotton. Little more than clapboard, his diminutive home was moss tipped and permanently shuttered against rain, flies, and the ever-present tang of tobacco from the drying shed.
His mother was the farmer’s wife, strong-backed Eunice Oliver. His father was Lemuel Atkinson, an attractive young man and proprietor of a traveling medicine show. With little more than a soft endearment and the lure of a gentleman’s supple hands, Eunice gained three bottles of Atkinson’s Elixir and a pregnancy.
The farmer, William Oliver, had three children to his name already and did not look kindly upon a bastard. Once the boy was up, walking, and too large to survive on table scraps, Mr. Oliver led the child into the heart of the woods and left him to fate. Eunice cried mightily at having her son taken, but the boy remained silent. The boy’s great misfortune was not that he was a bastard, but that he was mute.
He survived several years without words to explain them. In light the boy was hungry and fed himself however he could, picking berries with dirt-crusted hands; when he happened upon a farm, he stole from it on silent feet. A meat-drying house meant a night’s shelter and weeks of food. In dark he slept wherever there was warmth. His days shrank, becoming only fog, mountains, and a thick of trees so full the world itself fell in. The boy disappeared into this place, and it was here that he first learned to vanish.
People may live for a century without discovering the secret of vanishing. The boy found it because he was free to listen to the ground humming, the subtle moving of soil, and the breathing of water—a whisper barely discernible over the sound of a heartbeat. Water was the key. If he listened to its depth and measure and matched his breath to it, slowing his heart until it barely thumped, his slight brown frame would fade into the surrounding world. Had any watched, they would have seen a grubby boy turn sideways and vanish into the trees, becoming like a grain of sand—impossible to differentiate from the larger shore. Hunger, his enduring companion, was all that kept him certain that he lived.
Vanishing eased his survival, enabling him to walk into smokehouses and eat until heat and fumes drove him out. He snatched bread from tables, clothing from trees and bushes where it dried, and stole whatever he could to quiet his body’s demands.
Only once did he venture to the home that had abandoned him, when his memories of it had grown so vague he thought them imagined. He happened upon the gray house with the slanted roof and was shocked to find it real and not a remnant of a dream. He lifted the latch on a shutter just enough to peer through with a deep brown eye. This vantage showed the interior of a bedroom lit by what moonlight the ill-fitting shutters allowed.
A man and a woman slept on a straw mattress. The boy looked at the man’s rough features, the stiff dark bristles jutting from his chin, and felt nothing. The woman lay on her side, brown hair spilling across the edge of her smock. Something woke in the boy, a flash of that hair brushing the back of his hand. He crept into the house, past a long table and the bed of a sleeping child, and slipped into the room where the woman and the man slept, his body remembering the way as though it had traveled it thousands of times. He gently lifted the bedsheet, slid beneath, and closed his eyes. The woman’s smell was at once familiar, lye soap and curing tobacco, a scent that lived deep inside him that he’d forgotten. Her warmth made his chest stammer.
He fled before she woke.
He didn’t see the woman rouse the man or hear her tell the man that she’d had the sensation of being watched, or that she’d dreamt of her son. The boy did not return to the house. He walked back into the woods, searching for other shelter, other food, and places that didn’t make his skin burn.
On the banks of the muddy Dan River, not far from Boyd’s Ferry, was the town of Catspaw, named for the shape of the valley in which it lay; it was colored the ochre of the river’s loam and dusty with the tracks of horses and mules. The freshets that plagued Boyd’s Ferry would later cause Catspaw to melt back into the hills, but at the time the settlement was burgeoning. The boy traveled the Dan’s winding edge until he stumbled upon the town. It was frightening but filled with potential; washerwomen boiled large tubs of clothing, sloshing soap and wash water down to the river, men poled flat boats, and horses pulled wagons along the banks and up through the streets, each carrying women and men. The cacophonous jumble of water, people, and wagons terrified the boy. His eyes darted until they latched onto a woman’s bright blue dress and watched as the heavy cloth swung back and forth. He hid behind a tree, covered his ears, and tried to slow his heartbeat, to listen to the breath of the river.