Dickerson just stood there, the shotgun at his side.
And Nance turned his gaze to Geoff once more. “Keep your piece of the island pristine. Once all this foolishness is over, we’ll need some green space between the condo units.”
“Condos!” cried Rains. “You’ll never get condos in here. We won’t let you.”
“I have very deep pockets, and I’m very patient,” said Nance. “Just ask Dickerson.”
Geoff had never seen anyone gloat so well. But the winner had the right. The doors of the limousine slammed shut, and Nance rode off with Carolyn Hallissey. A cloud of car dust flattened out in the air above the clearing.
And Geoff noticed a strange thing—the sweet, damp smell of pine needles, as thick as the shock.
He looked at Janice, but she looked away.
Her concern now was for her father. She put an arm around him and twined her fingers into his beard, which no longer gave him the look of a seafarer but of an anachronism. When she gave the whiskers one of her traditional little tugs, he didn’t make a sound. And she could think of nothing comforting to say.
It was left for Ma Little to voice the first opinion. “That Nance was a son of a bitch fifteen years ago, and he’s a son of a bitch today.”
Then Emily said, “I have a mind not to sell at all.”
“What?” said Janice.
“Arnie thought that I should, but…”
And for the first time all morning, Janice felt as if she could do something. If she could, she always did something, even if it was the wrong thing. When she couldn’t turn her husband away from a fantasy, she took the kids and left. And now she pulled out something that had been burning a hole in her purse since it went in there.
She handed it to Emily and told her that this might change her mind.
“Your mother wrote that,” said Janice.
Emily’s eyes scanned the will, through cigarette smoke and rising tears. “Christ, she hated us that much?”
“She loved the island that much,” said Janice. “Maybe you should think about this.”
“Maybe I should.”
Geoff was reading, too, over Emily’s shoulder, shocked by what he saw. “A handwritten will and you kept it hidden?”
“It would never have stood up in court,” said Jimmy. “It isn’t legal.”
“Think of the spirit of the thing.” Geoff was furious with her.
“Like the spirit of your deal with Carolyn,” snapped Janice.
The distrust was growing between them, right there in the sand. In ground so well fertilized, it could not wither.
“If you hadn’t gone chasing after that log—”
“If you had stayed by me—”
“Stop it!” Douglas grabbed the shotgun and fired it into the air. “I’m to blame. I wanted to push us ahead, and I put us in the crapper.”
“We all have to gamble sometime. Just too bad you lost the whole pot,” said Dickerson, “to Nance.”
Geoff turned away from the Dickersons’ defeat, Douglas’s guilt, his new anger at his wife, and the betrayal on the faces of his friends. He took the path behind the barn and went toward the beach. He thought if he moved, he would not feel so paralyzed.
Within a few strides, the pine woods surrounded him. A bobwhite whistled off in the thicket. The wash of the waves on the shore was almost musical. He felt the peace of the island all around him.
And down there on the beach, his kids were running and playing. The future belonged to them, he thought, and they to it. But John M. Nance would soon take a piece of their future by taking the peace of this island. All because their father had found the log. The irony almost made him laugh out loud.
And in the quiet of the pines behind Rake’s barn, Geoff realized what he had to do. There was only one way to stop John M. Nance. He turned and hurried back up the path. “Hey, Douglas, how big is the note, again?”
“What?”
“The note? How big?”
“Why, six million.”
Geoff looked at Janice. “Watch.” Then he turned to George and slipped the metal box from his arms. “You’ll like the poetic justice in this one, Georgie.” He looked at Jimmy. “You and Ma will like the sentiment.” And he held the box in front of Douglas.
Douglas looked at it as though it might explode.
“Leverage, Doug, in here.” Geoff kept his eyes on his brother-in-law, though he felt Janice moving closer to him. “Nance’s money buys the log from me. You agree to leave your side of the island open, unless and until we agree on development. Then you liquidate Nance’s note with Nance’s money.”
“That simple?” said Douglas.
“Simple and beautiful.” Dickerson let out the kind of gusty laugh that no one had heard since the glorious Fourth, when he wanted everyone to believe he was back in control. Now he grabbed the shotgun from Douglas and fired it into the sky.
“Grampa! Grampa!” Keith and Sarah came running up the path from the beach. “What are you doing?”
“Savin’ a little bit of this island, kids, and sealin’ a deal.”
Janice went over to her husband, so that he was the only one who could hear her. “Geoffrey, sometimes you surprise me.”
That didn’t sound very good, she thought, and the anger in Geoff’s answer even surprised him.
“If what I just did surprised you,” he said, “we have a long way to go.”
“Maybe so, but thanks.”
“As somebody once said, ‘The book of history will set us free from the evil that bricks us up.’ ”
CHAPTER 37
Autumn
Connections
Geoff saved the Bigelow company, but it seemed that Geoff and Janice could not save their marriage. Too much damage had been done.
Janice went back to Boston with the kids.
Geoff stayed on Cape Cod and saw them on weekends.
Apart, they tried to understand what had happened to them together. Disagreement bred misunderstanding which became distrust and bred anger. It had begun long before the Fourth of July traffic jam.
And they were as stubborn as snapping turtles. You wouldn’t stand beside me when I reached for the unreachable. You wouldn’t accept a realist’s vision of a real world. You wouldn’t tell me the truth when Clara tried to save her part of the island with the will. You wouldn’t quit even if it cost you your marriage.
But sometimes the stubbornness faded. Janice knew that he had not been chasing a foolish dream but trying to make things right in a world spinning out of control. Geoff knew that without her pragmatism to balance his dreams, the center would not hold.
The log was hailed, within a few days of its discovery, as the historical, if not literary, equal of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation.
It and the accompanying manuscripts were sold to Old Comers for seven and a half million dollars, which liquidated the note and left a profit for Geoff, Jimmy, and George. Geoff stayed to watch the archaeologists peel away layer upon layer of the palimpsest that was Jack’s Island. Jimmy went back to New York, though he contributed his profits to the Indian museum and considered opening a practice in Mashpee. George gave up on sitcoms and took a place in Provincetown to edit and annotate the log for publication.
“It will sell forever,” John M. Nance said in People magazine, “because it’s a story of people surviving—some through faith, some through love, and some through pure cussedness.”
He got that part right. And some of those people had joined together to defeat him. He didn’t mention that.
But of everything that the Mayflower log contained, it was the love that drew the most attention. Especially love that led to scandal.
“Murder on the Mayflower!” shouted the People headline, over a photo of the Tom Hilyard painting. “Dorothy Bradford: Separatist Floozy?” asked the National Enquirer. Serious journals also explored the possibility: “A New Suspect in America’s First Murder Mystery?”
In her Boston condo, Janice read t
he stories and laughed. Who could know the truth of what had happened? Christopher Jones merely speculated on what had gone on, had seen it in shadow from the chartkeeper’s cabin.
The papers were right to say that history had been made on the deck of the Mayflower. The history of the world could be written in those passages about Ezra Bigelow and Dorothy Bradford, because no part of history was untouched by the mystery of a woman and a man reaching out to each other in the dark.
Though the truth was unknowable, Janice became obsessed by the story. She read all that she could. She attended lectures. And on a chill November Saturday she went to the Mayflower II, so that she could stand in the place where the captain had stood and look toward the rail where her ancestor and Dorothy Bradford had talked.
Part of the experience when you visited the Pilgrim village or went aboard the Mayflower II at Plimoth Plantation, was that you met interpreters who dressed, spoke, and thought like the Pilgrims.
Talking to them could be exasperating, but if you made the effort, the effect was magical. They could very quickly make you forget the school kids swarming about the ship, the traffic, and the Frostee-Freeze Ice Cream and Souvenir Shop directly across the road.
It was late when she got there. And a calm November cold was settling down with dusk.
She let the children explore the tween-deck while she climbed to the poop deck and stood in front of the chartkeeper’s cabin. She took a deep breath and looked forward, to the spot where, according to the Tom Hilyard painting, it had happened.
“Good evenin’ to thee, dear lady.”
He was big and bearded, a robust-looking man in a black wool suit with red ribbon points and a sea cape of heavy wool lined with rabbit skin. He had about him the proprietary air of the ship’s master. “Where be thee from, good lady?”
“Boston.”
He frowned a bit. “Thou be a long way, marm.”
“Just an hour,” she said, forgetting the little game.
He laughed. “Thou jest, marm. It took us sixty-six days from Plymouth. There be no wind drive you much faster from Boston.”
She smiled. “Uh, Boston, Massachusetts, I mean.”
“Massachusetts? I know not this place.” Then he smiled, as if they should not let such things stand in the way of their friendship. “Now, then, be there anything I can tell thee ’bout me vessel?”
“I’m curious about the things I read in your log.”
“Log? Me sea journal? How couldst thou know of me log?”
“It’s in all papers.”
“Papers? I know not of such things, good lady. And me log, as you call it, me log be in me cabin, where I always keep it.”
Now she made a conscious effort to force her mind backward, to see him not as an actor but as the master of the ship. She had done this before, with the children, and it always helped the experience. “Could you tell me, sir, a little about the death of… of my friend Dorothy Bradford?”
“Friend? What be thy name?”
“Bigelow.”
In the surprised little rise of the eyebrows, he came out of character for just a moment. But he dropped back quickly. “Be thou related to Ezra?”
“At some distance.”
He warmed now to his part. He spoke delicately, as though not wishing to offend her, but took her forward to the place on the deck where Tom Hilyard said it had happened.
“Why did he do it?” Janice asked.
“Who can tell for certain if he did? And if he did, who can tell why?”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
She looked out along the coast, at the lights of cars and houses, and the red flashes beyond the next hill, on the towers of the Pilgrim nuclear plant. And she closed her eyes. People talked about genetic memory, about things that nature had imprinted on us to help us survive, like fight, flight… and love.
But Janice sometimes thought there might be more to it than that. Maybe, if a person concentrated, in the right place, at the right moment, she could think herself back along her own genes, back through the memories of her parents and their parents before them. Back… back…
The lights of the nuclear plant stopped flashing. The cars disappeared. The night grew darker. And in her mind’s eye, she became Ezra Bigelow….
“Good Master Ezra, thou dost trouble me,” said Dorothy.
“I must speak with thee,” he whispered.
Dorothy Bradford pulled her heavy wool cape around her shoulders. “ ’Tis cold, good master. Miserable cold.”
“Aye, too miserable for words, good lady.” He leaned against her, and she pulled away. “Fear not, Dorothy. I seek only the touch of shoulders through our cloaks.”
“ ’Tis unseemly, Master Ezra, ’specially with my husband out there, wanderin’ the wilderness.”
“ ’Tis merely a touch.” He raised his voice slightly and looked about. The forward watch was nowhere to be seen. At the stern, the lights of the great cabin were out, the elders asleep. In the chartkeeper’s cabin above, the taper burned. The master wrote.
Ezra turned back to Dorothy. “I have admired thee for many years, dear lady.”
“Thou mustn’t.”
“I know how bitter this must be for thee, left to contemplate the wilderness while thy husband wanders this spit of sand. But think thee on his misery, helpin’ shoulder the burdens of our community.”
“Methinks too much on misery, Master Ezra. I see no future but death.”
“Nor do I.”
“Then why hast thou brought us here?”
Ezra looked out into the blackness and touched the wood of the rail, as if to feel something real, something solid. “God wills it. Men must do what God wills, else they are not men.”
“Men must quest for God,” she said bitterly, “whilst women are left to wash the bloody linens.”
“ ’Tis the way of the world.” He leaned against her once more.
She pulled away and turned to him, her eyes wide, her face a strange wax color in the starlight. “We have known each other for many years. I have long admired thee for thy constancy and felicitous preachments.”
At this, he felt a small leap of joy in his heart, but she was the wife of a friend, and he had placed himself already in temptation enough.
“Thou must promise me,” she went on, “that thou wilt speak nothing of the words I now say.”
“So I do promise.”
She took a deep breath and said, “God wills nothing. He hath forsaken us.”
“Yes.” It was as if he could not keep the word from rushing out of him.
Her eyes widened in shock. “Thou sayest such things also?”
It was blasphemous agreement to a blasphemous premise. Ezra felt a cowl of sin droop down over his face. He shook his head, as if to shake it off. But he could not drive from his eyes the image that had haunted him for days, nor could he keep from speaking of it.
“I would have gone with thy husband this time, but I could not. When I looked into the canvas sack on Corn Hill and saw the grim eyes of the corpse, I felt something wither in my heart. Then I did see the boy-corpse and lost heart. I saw us all dead afore our time, deserted by God.” The steam from his mouth disappeared into the blackness, like his spirit rising into nothingness. “I read my Bible to drive the eyes of the corpse away. I remember that even Our Lord knew this terror in the Garden.”
“Then he died.” She looked out, along the arm of sand that for weeks had lain bleak before them. “They have been gone many days. I fear they may not come back.”
“ ’Tis my fear as well.”
“Without William, I shall be alone… completely.”
He was overwhelmed by the need to touch her. He took her shoulders and drew her toward him. “Good lady, I am alone. I sailed without woman, without love. God guides my hand, but if I have not a woman to hold to my breast, I cannot know God’s heart.”
She looked at him, neither inviting more intimacy nor rejecting it, and in that moment he came as cl
ose to adultery as ever he would come. He wet his lips, as if to press them to hers. He brought his face so close to hers that he could feel the warmth of her breath. But the Lord had not forsaken him. The Lord gave him strength. He stopped and whispered, “If thy husband does not come back, I shall offer thee my love.”
She looked at him with eyes that seemed as lifeless as two wooden pegs. “Where God has forsaken us, no love is sufficient.”
“Do not say that!” he cried, then lowered his voice. “Do not say that. We must always believe the other. We must hope that love will come one day.” He looked into her eyes for some sign of acceptance, of understanding, and he saw none. He released his grip on her shoulders. He could do nothing against this misery, though he would try. “The Lord is my shepherd. I… I… I will leave thee to thy thoughts. My nightly reading beckons.”
He went to the great cabin and rummaged in the dark for his Bible. Then he heard something splash into the water, and a terrible thought froze his heart. He ran on deck and saw that her shadow was no longer there. He ran forward, but she was gone….
And no one would ever know the truth of what passed between that man and woman. Not Janice Bigelow for all her effort, not the historians, not Christopher Jones himself.
And it developed, as the months wore on, that no one would know the truth about the Vikings and Jack’s Island.
Geoff had been watching the dig. He had even learned how to plot a grid and excavate a small area himself. They had found many artifacts, from Rake Hilyard to Jack, from broken Carling bottles to clay pipestems. There were stone arrowheads and Indian jewelry buried in the shell midden. But the artifact they all dreamed of—a Norse coin that the midden might have protected—was not there.
The axe, which should have proved everything, caused only controversy. It did not take long before the world divided once more into anti-Vikings and pro-Vikings.
Yes, the axe looked Norse. Yes, it had the same strange markings found on the Bourne Stone. And yes, the log said this axe had been found in the marsh mud. But how could such an axe have survived a millennium? And what could have buried it?
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