The Trouble with Tom (26 page)

"It made news all over the country,'' she says, as I gently leaf through the few other clippings in her folder. I realize I'm not seeing the one that brought me here.

"You know, it went further than that."

She looks at me quizzically.

"Have you seen . . . ? You haven't. Wait a moment."

I jog back to Olivia's car, retrieve a photocopy from my bag, and return to Josie with it.

"Here. Have it if you like."

She looks at the date: July 19, 1976.

"It's from the other
Times,"
I explain. "London."

Her eyebrows nearly rise up into her knit cap at this, and she sits back down on her stoop to read it.

"Burial was refused in England, and
it
is not known what happened
to
the remains after that
. . .
'Why else would the tombstone show
up
here?' McNeil asked today. He believed that the remains were 'right
here'."

"I didn't know about this one." She takes a moment to absorb the idea of worldwide fame, and then neatly sets the clipping in her folder with the others. "I had no idea. Hmmph. Want to see it?"

"The grave? Sure."

"You don't have to go anywhere for
that.
It's right there." She indicates a spot in the grass a few feet away. 'That's where we found the obelisk."

"Right here," Jack once said. Now he is gone, and probably in a well-marked grave. But Thomas Paine is not. And there is nothing marking this spot now save for the mute hemlock tree.

"So they didn't exhume . . ."

"No, no. The grave is still there."

"And this is it? This is the same tree?"

"Yeah. Though a big piece of it came off in a storm last year." She waves us to follow her. 'Tombstone's in my garage now. This way."

The three of us follow her across the driveway, Elena skipping alongside Olivia. As we get closer to the back garage, the dogs get louder. Much louder.

"I raise German shepherds," Josie explains. ''Just had two litters of pups. They're in the house, oh, they're taking over the place. The others I have out here. You know—did I tell you?—there's a kid down the road who had a project to do at school. Had to write about something. So he chose the tombstone in our yard. And his teacher didn't believe him. Didn't believe him! So he wrote about it and brought all the clippings in. Oh, did
she
apologize."

You can imagine the teacher's droll dubiousness; but what you can't imagine, I suspect, is how she felt when she saw what he had brought. There was headline after headline, all from 1976, all datelined Tivoli, New York.
It
just didn't make
sense.
I mean, how would you not know about that? How could the whole town, the whole country, not know about that? How could something that big be forgotten?

"He got an A," Josie absently concludes her story, and wrenches open the shed door.

Am-w-mrr-awhhHHH.
I jerk back; a dog lunges forward, and bangs into his cage. The smell of dog urine wallops me.

"It's okay," Josie says, taking special notice of Elena, whose eyes are widening. "They're okay. They're in their cages."

And there it is, just inside the door of a rural garage. The obelisk is surrounded on every side by caged German shepherds, inches away, like the idol of some canine religion. They are all facing it—facing us—and whining and barking and howling and banging at the cages all at once. The din is unbelievable. But there it is: on a concrete floor of a rural shed, in the filtered light of some dirty glass and fiberglass roofing, there it stands.
PAINE
, the stone announces.

"What," I start, "is, uh—"

There is a saddle atop the obelisk.

"—does someone
ride
this?" I finish my thought, as a howling dog bangs his muzzle several inches from my head. Josie begins to answer, but I have to strain to hear her over the baying. So her answer goes something like:

Dog 1:
Art-am-am-aw
. . ."

"Oh, that saddle

Dog 2:
ooohhwooo

"I keep that there . . ."

Dog 3:
RRRRRRwRRRRR

"just to store it"

Dog 4:
Ufl Ufl Ufl Uh-uh-uFF

"but I've been meaning to move it."

The dogs' sentiments, as best I can tell, may be translated loosely into English as: "Come closer, that I may separate you from your extremities."

"So, umm . . ."

"Look at both sides of that stone," Josie orders me. "Both sides. There's inscriptions on both sides. See them?"

Yes, there are
two
sets of inscriptions on this tombstone, for two different men altogether, and they are on opposite sides of the obelisk shaft. I kneel down, resting my hand lightly against the stone. The Paine inscription is still as clear as ever. Then I look at the other side.
(Rw-Grrrrrr.)
Then I move back several inches from that cage. Then I look again.

John
G.
Lasher
born Mar. 5, 1797
died Mar. 9, 1877
aged 80 years 4 days

Why, the man barely had time to digest his birthday cake.

"Now," Josie says, "what do you think? You look too, um . . ."

"Olivia."

"Olivia. You look too. Doesn't the writing look different? The Paine looks a lot older, doesn't it?"

We look back and forth, from side to side, comparing, and . . . I can't
tell.
It's an old inscription on a tombstone, one that was buried and hit with a backhoe. The difference is a very, well . . . I mean, really, if Adobe doesn't provide it on a pull-down menu, then I don't
know
those fonts.

"So," I start. Josie is clearly waiting for my answer. "Uh. Yeah, I guess that could be different."

"Yeah," Olivia adds vaguely. "It could be."

"'That's what I said." Josie nods. "Now why would they do that? Why would there be two kinds of writing, unless the Paine was a lot older?"

Ahhh. And there is the problem.

On July 19, 1976, the Thomas Paine story ran everywhere. Readers of both the New York and London
Times
could see Jack McNeil, shirtless and burly, gazing at his newfound tombstone. So could readers of the
Times Recorder
of Zanesville, Ohio, and subscribers to the
Walla Walla Union Bulletin,
Nebraskans who picked up a rolled-up
Lincoln Star
from their front step, and innumerable other newspaper readers and TV watchers across America. But on July 20,1976—the day after that exciting Thomas Paine story hit the AP and UP1 wires—a very different story ran back in New York.

THOMAS PAINE MYSTERY AT TIVOLI, N.Y., SOLVED
, the paper announced. "The tombstone," the
Times
reported, "was a token of admiration ordered by a local resident." Looking through records, even as media were descending upon the McNeil residence, a local historian found a newspaper article, this one dated September 9, 1874, about the mysterious Mr. John Lasher. He was a former owner of the McNeil property—"an eccentric individual," as the old paper put it—and "a staunch follower of Thomas Paine." He had, apparently, simply ordered the obelisk as a monument to his hero. When Lasher himself died a few years later, the wonderfully nickel-grubbing shortcut was taken of putting his own inscription into the other side of the monument already sitting in his front yard. John Lasher was the man buried underneath that stone. His descendants still lived nearby, even. But nobody remembered him now, or where he had been buried.

But that's what happens, isn't it? Even the remains of Thomas Paine are half remembered and half forgotten at odd intervals over the centuries. There are true stories of his travels and just as many untrue ones. Some claimed that he had never been moved at all; others that Cobbett had lost him overboard on the way to Britain. That there were a number of witnesses to what Cobbett had done, not to mention a depression left in the ground on Paine's farm, didn't stop such idle speculation. The evidence gathered by Paine's biographers didn't keep ministers from entertaining children with fables of how Paine had recanted on his deathbed, or that he'd been turned into buttons and doomed to roam the world scattered into little pieces on men's shirts. And so it's little surprise that one woman in Brighton who claimed to own Paine's jaw never actually produced it: she didn't need to for such stories to become part of his hazy legend. Perhaps inevitably, another murmur arose a few years ago, along with talk of DNA testing, that Paine's skull had been found in an antiques store in London. But the buyers seem to have lapsed into silence. The hopeful shouts get heard: the disappointing facts are always strangely muted.

The Tivoli discovery—but
not
its retraction—was the greatest media exposure the story of Tom Paine's missing body has had in nearly two centuries. Most papers didn't bother with the second wire story, which inconveniently refuted the first. And so to the millions who thought of it, if they'd even bothered to think of it at all, as they flipped past the weather, past the sports, and past the CARLTON IS LOWEST ads, they all went along with their lives believing that Thomas Paine had been found after all. And so they forgot him once again.

Why do we forget?

I don't remember much of 1976. But here's the funny thing: I
do
remember the particular day they found that tombstone. I was seven years old, hundreds of miles away, and never heard the news, but I do remember the
Day.
In fact, I remember every day during and surrounding that weekend. The day Jack McNeil dug up his tombstone, police in California were digging a bus out of a California quarry with twenty-six abducted schoolchildren in it. The next day, as TV crews arrived in Tivoli, everyone else in America was glued to the TVs in their living rooms: there, to the swelling of a weepy piano and string accompaniment, a young Romanian gymnast received the first perfect Olympic score. And then, the day afler, as the Paine story became yesterday's news, the
Times
had a huge photo and headline across its fiont page: VIKING ROBOT SETS DOWN SAFELY ON MARS AND SENDS BACK PICTURES OF ROCKY PLAIN.

I can even remember, I think, the cereal I was eating back then—it was called Grins & Smiles & Giggles & Laughs. ('The first cereal that smiles back at you.") It was comprised entirely of iconic yellow smiley faces; it was like eating the seventies in a cereal bowl. I can remember by proxy, through movies that I was not yet allowed to go see, and would not be able to see for many years. But if you read the movie listings for that weekend, here's what was playing:
All
the
President's Men. The Man Who Fell
to
Earth. The Omen. Mother, Jugs
&
Speed Midway. Murder by Death. Logan's Run
. . . you might as well stick a red pushpin into it, and announce: there.
That
is where our culture was at this precise moment. And yet, for periods of months, years, before and after that weekend—nothing. I can't remember a thing.

We forget
all the time.
We forget very nearly every single impression that passes through our minds. What we ate for lunch: who our roommate was ten years ago: what we paid for a soda in 1982: what we just came from the living room to the kitchen for. It is constant and vital, and we only notice it if everyday useful things go missing. Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbag—which, in a sense, is what the past is. Memory is a toxin, and its overretention—the constant replaying of the past—is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad. And so it is that the details of nearly every single day that we have lived, nearly every single moment of each day, nearly every person that we have met and spoken to,
the exact wording of the paragraph
that
you
have just read
. . .

Gone.

(RrrrrRRR-mm.)

"Okay!" Josie reassures the dog nearest me. "Calm down."

My ears are ringing from the guard-dog chorus gnashing within inches of us, and I notice Elena clinging tightly to the hem of her mother's shirt. We'd better get out.

"By the way," I ask Josie as we back gingerly out of the shed, and the door slaps shut on the infernal din. 'Where did the top of the obelisk go?"

"Oh, the broken-off bit? It's behind the garage. It's just sitting in the grass. Sometimes I think of putting it together and putting the whole thing back up. I think that would look nice, don't you? See that little hill over there? Actually, right there—" She points at a neighboring house a few hundred yards away, with an unhitched big rig parked out front. "That's my brother's place. Anyway, I've thought of putting it on that hill. Wouldn't that be a good place for it? It'd be like the . . . oh, what is that, the guys with the flag . . . like the Iwo Jima monument."

"Oh." I nod.

Josie goes back into the garage a moment to quiet her dogs.

"Mommy?" Elena retrieves an animal quiz book from the car.

"Mommy, I have a question."

"Yes?"

"What-do-horses-eat,'" she reads from the book in a single breath. " 'Steaks-ice-cream-apples-pickles-oats-pineapples-hot-dogs-or-pizza?' "

"Apples," Olivia says. "And oats."

This satisfies Elena for the moment. I look at her, and then back at the garage.

"You ever have a childhood memory that you simply
cannot
place?" I finally ask Olivia. "Some random thing or place that makes no sense, that you can't figure why you'd possess in that place?"

"I do have memories like that."

"I wonder if Elena will remember this. Because it will make no sense."

"'I
went
to
this
farm,'" Olivia muses, "
with this strange man, and
we went
to
a shed full
of
barking dogs, and there was a lady with a funny
white hat, and
a
tombstone with T6omas Paine's name on
it' "

"And it had a saddle on it."