Garage Sale Riddle

by Suzi Weinert

  “Homothermic?”

  “That means they don’t depend on the sun for warmth like other reptiles. They’re clean, competitive and antisocial. Some speak and although they have their own language, many are depicted as speaking our languages, if they choose, or communicating with telepathy. They’re exceedingly intelligent, which makes their enormous power even more staggering.”

  “Should you mention riddles, dear?” asked Old Woman.

  “Ah, yes. Many like the challenge of riddles. In fact, posing the riddle a dragon can’t answer could win your escape from him.”

  At the riddle connection, Jennifer’s eyes sparkled with interest. She pulled up a photo on her cellphone. “Can you tell me anything about this dragon?”

  He studied the picture. “Hm… unusual. The golden color of the scales and also—see, here—the number of toes suggest royalty. I think not even the Chinese imperial family, but only the emperor himself, was allowed a five-clawed dragon. So this must be a very special Chinese dragon, but with wings. Strange. If I’m right, and that’s a big ‘if’ because after sixty years I’m still an amateur, maybe your dragon represents a union of some sort between China and Europe—perhaps symbolizing some East-West alliance or agreement.”

  “Thank you.” Jennifer studied the cellphone picture for these new clues.

  “How did you happen to photograph this dragon?” asked Old Man.

  “I bought him at an estate sale similar to yours. Seemed more like he found me, since dragons didn’t interest me at all until this particular one wouldn’t let me leave without him. I’m curious about people and things, so now that he’s mine, I’d like to better understand him. He almost seemed to have a live quality about him.”

  “Besides his value to you, he may have tangible value as well. Did the owner know his origin?”

  “He belonged to her parents, who got him while they lived in the Philippines.”

  “Well, this may be your clue.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Along with their own distinctive culture, the Philippine Islands have had strong Eastern and Western influences for centuries.”

  Old Woman’s keyboard clicked as she searched and reported. “Magellan found those islands in 1521 and the Spanish colonized them from 1565 until their rule ended in 1878 with the Spanish-American War. The Philippines became a U.S. colony and later an independent nation. Of course, before their European discovery, they had their own indigenous population dating back unknown centuries.”

  “So,” Old Man picked up on this, “the Spanish ruled there about 300 years. Then America rescued them from Japanese occupation in WWII in the 1940s. But despite this Western influence, the Philippines’ location is clearly Asia. How might this dragon link the Philippines to a Chinese emperor? I have no idea.”

  Jennifer considered this. “So what other cultures told dragon stories?”

  Old Man searched his memory. “Before biblical times, Mesopotamian and Babylonian creation stories involved dragons. Those stories spread west to Greece and across the Mediterranean world to Europe, and East to India, China and all of Asia. More dragon myths appear in the Icelandic sagas, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, the red dragon of Wales, England, Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Persia and the Middle East. Just about every culture has dragon tales.”

  Remembering Deputy Martin searching for underlying reasons dragons appeared in so many cultures, she asked, “Do these planet-wide dragon myths reflect common symbolism?”

  Old Woman sat back from her computer. “Some philosophers think dragon myths represent basic cosmic dualism.”

  Seeing Jennifer’s puzzled look, Old Man explained: “The most basic dual symbolism is life-versus-death. From that evolved good-versus-evil. You see this easily in Western dragon legends, but Eastern legends also show human survival depends on the power of divine sources that created the world. In this way the dragon myth is also the creation myth.”

  Old Woman’s eyes twinkled. “And here’s a recent New Age angle. In Erich von Daniken’s book, Chariot of the Gods, he suggested ancient aliens visited our planet’s early cultures. These primitive people later tried to describe what they’d seen in terms of their simple experience. They couldn’t begin to understand fiery space ships, but the arrival of space men was a huge event they wanted to understand and share with the future. Had visitors from the sky traveled here on birds? No, birds didn’t leave smoke trails, and smoke, they knew, came from fire. But if they arrived on fire-breathing dragons—this could explain what they saw. Von Daniken and other ancient alien theorists expand this theory convincingly. Since those ancient aliens displayed powers baffling and mysterious to early humans—think of the technology and ideas such visitors would have brought–then didn’t the dragon bringing them have those powers, too?”

  “Wow,” Jennifer marveled. “This is a lot to absorb.”

  “But stimulating, wouldn’t you agree?” Old Man smiled.

  “Absolutely. Thank you both for sharing your time and knowledge with me. Which of your dragon books do you recommend I buy today to increase my knowledge?”

  “Follow me into the den and I’ll select some for you.” He pulled several from the shelf. “Please take these with my compliments. Look, here’s my card. If you ever solve your own dragon mystery, please tell us what you learn.”

  “Tom O’Bannon,” she read aloud from the card. “Your estate sale ad says you’re moving?”

  “Yes, to a senior complex right here in Naples. That address appears on this card.”

  Jennifer flipped open one of the books to a picture of an ancient map showing land on the left, ocean in the middle and a blank space in the right. In this open space she read, “Here be dragons.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “When men thought the world was flat, they couldn’t imagine what lay past the outer edge where the land and ocean dropped off into oblivion. They capsulized this scary unknown and unknowable with the ominous saying, ‘Here be dragons’ or ‘There be dragons.’ It came to stand for something you knew must be there but you couldn’t possibly understand.”

  Jennifer clapped her hands. “Fascinating. I’m so glad I stopped here today. You’re a dynamic duo and your energy is contagious. A pleasure to meet you both.” She extended her hand to shake theirs. “The best of luck in your new adventure. Will all your dragons go with you?”

  “Many will and are already boxed for the move. Those in the den are some extras. And thank you for the good luck wish.” His wife nudged him and whispered something. “Ah, of course. Just a minute, please.”

  He reached into a kitchen drawer, removed something and handed it to his wife. “Speaking of good luck, Tom and I would like you to have this.” He smiled agreement as she held out a jewelry-size box covered with intricate symbolic gold tracings.

  “What in the world?” Jennifer lifted the lid, looked inside and smiled. “Oh, my.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Inside the box against a black velvet background lay a silver-dollar-size cloisonné dragon, red with gold trim, on a slender gold-colored chain.

  “So unusual,” she marveled, lifting the necklace from the case. “May I buy it? After all, this is an estate sale.”

  They shook their heads. “No, because you’d break the charm. One day you’ll give it to someone else, and you mustn’t accept payment either or your good luck changes to bad.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “An old Chinese shopkeeper insisted I accept it for my wife when I bought a dragon from him many years ago,” Tom explained.

  Marie smiled. “He told Tom the luck works for its owner whether the dragon’s in the box or worn around the neck, but I enjoyed wearing it until last week when I knew it was time to pass it on. Shall I help you put it on?”

  “Yes, please.” She touched the amulet hanging at her throat.

  “How can I thank you for this?”

  “By exploring the meaning of dragons and sharing your knowledge with others, as we d
id with you.”

  Spontaneously, Jennifer hugged them both. They waved as she left.

  Excited about this unexpected development, Jennifer drove back to the hotel to find Grammy enjoying a room service breakfast on their suite’s balcony overlooking the Gulf. After show-and-tell about her morning excursion, Jennifer sat in a chair to thumb through one of her new dragon books.

  “Things happen to you, Jen, that don’t to other people. Today’s an example.”

  “Or maybe if you just show up where things happen, you might become part of them.”

  “Speaking of which, any events on today’s to-do list?” Grammy asked.

  “No, and with Max caged again, we have a relaxed day to catch our breath. I expect we’ll hear from Goodwin about Chelsea. We might even visit her if she’s ready for company.”

  When Becca awoke, they ate lunch together and the day proceeded in leisurely fashion. Becca spent the evening with Tony while Jennifer and Grammy ate at a restaurant. The two of them watched TV until Grammy fell asleep and Jennifer also went to bed.

  She riffled through another of her new dragon books, glancing at pictures, but felt too tired to read. Remembering info learned at the O’Bannon’s sale this morning, she stared at her own dragon, perched on the bureau. His gaping mouth looked to her tonight more like a grin than a roar. “So, you like solving riddles, do you? You watched me struggle to figure out mine and laughed all the while because you already knew the answer.” Did his eyes twinkle or was it a trick of sheer fatigue?

  She slid under the covers, smiling into the dark. “If I envision anything tonight,” she guessed, “it’s bound to include dragons.” In a few minutes, she began taking slow, deep breaths.

  A vision came all right, but not what she anticipated. No, her subconscious rocketed her again onto a farm in l863.

  When the ear-splitting firearm explosions, shouting and turmoil ended in the farmyard, a deadly silence replaced it. Birdsong, Gentry and the field hands lay motionless on the ground. Suddenly the house door burst open and the women tumbled out.

  The missus screamed, “Quick, see if any of ‘ems alive. Why didn’t he let them Yanks just steal whatever they want? Why did he cross them? Why?”

  Searching for signs of life, the women rushed to each downed man, but to no avail. Soon their wails of grief echoed through the air.

  “What should we do?” cried one.

  The missus sobbed with anguish for her husband’s death and for the hopelessness this new calamity brought. She couldn’t begin to run this farm without him and the other hands, even in peacetime—never mind during this terrible war while robbed of supplies, animals and crops. What would happen to them all? To their land? How would she feed her children? With Frank gone, they’d all look to her for answers…but she had none.

  Then one clear thought blinked into her mind. With every man dead in this improbable skirmish, only the women and children knew what had just happened. If the Union found out, they’d take further revenge. To protect what little she had left, she must erase all evidence of this tragic event and deny what occurred here. Spurring the other women into action would mask her true helplessness with the appearance of purposeful action. Motion, if not progress.

  “One of you help me carry Frank and the corporal into the house. One of you hide these extra horses in the barn. The rest of you check for anything valuable on the bodies to use or sell. Then we must bury the bodies—the Yanks in the swale behind the barn and our farm hands in the orchard behind the house. It’s hard, but we have no choice.”

  Selby hurried to Birdsong, her blond-hair trailing across his still-warm cheek as she knelt over him. She smoothed back his hair, above the trickle of blood oozing from the round hole in his forehead. She curled her fingers into his warm hand.

  Stricken at the mindless waste of life of this man whom she’d welcomed to play an intimate role in her future, she shed tears upon his still face. “Why? Why him?” she whispered into the wind. She sobbed as despair invaded her soul.

  At her mother’s frightened shout to “get a move on,” Selby jerked from her lost dream to face heartless reality. With a shudder, she removed Birdsong’s holster, spurs and boots, placing them neatly beside his guns. Inside his shirt, she found some cloths with drawings and added them to the pile, together with the contents of his jacket pockets. Something caused her to open the small folded paper. As she read the poem he’d written her, a strangled sound rose in her throat and she cried at the sky, “Of all the men in this terrible war, why did you have to take him and Paw?”

  Doubled over his body, she wailed her torment at the tragic waste of war’s dead. She gently brushed her lips against Raiford’s before she straightened and with a final sob, forced herself to move on to the next body.

  Hours later, exhausted and in semi-shock, the women and boy slumped in chairs around the kitchen table, the life they’d known altered forever by fate’s random intervention.

  “The bodies are hidden,” the missus managed, “and tomorrow we give all them extra horses to the Rebs, who’ll ask no questions. If them Yankees return, we deny this ever happened. We say our men are away helping other farmers with spring planting.” She looked around at the others, emotionally and physically wrung out as she was. ”We accomplished the impossible outside today and I couldn’t a done it without you. Besides the big shallow grave for them Union killers, we laid out Frank, the help, and the corporal in plots in the orchard.”

  Selby dried her reddened eyes. “The apple trees are blossoming over them. Looks like a white fairyland they’re lying under with the petals starting to fall.”

  “Remember,” warned the missus, “their graves must stay unmarked until this awful war ends. The Blues must never learn what happened here.”

  Wilbur smiled but said nothing, for he had marked the graves his own way to honor the memory of these men. From his rock collection, he’d placed a special quartz stone atop the graves where each hired hand lay. On his father’s grave, he tied his father’s handkerchief to the end of a stick and pushed the other end into the ground. On the corporal’s grave, he’d placed the bucket the man filled at the stream where they first met.

  The missus’s short-term plan worked, but within a year circumstances forced her to begin selling off parts of the large farm, which eventually dwindled to a twenty-five acre “farmette,” composed of the land surrounding her house, the out buildings and orchard.

  When the war ended in l865, many men of marriageable age lay dead or returned home physically mangled or emotionally traumatized. Sixteen years old when the Union soldiers shot her father, his farm hands and Raiford Birdsong in April l863, blond-haired Selby had more suitors than most because of her beauty. In 1865, at age eighteen, she married a man with one arm, his other removed during a field amputation when this standard solution for gunshot wounds saved some lives, if not limbs. By l870, she’d borne her husband two children. In 1901, Selby’s daughter married and had four children of her own.

  In l920, Selby’s grown granddaughter prowled through the attic of her grandmother’s farmhouse. Poking among the trunks and suitcases, she found a box containing two six-shooter pistols, a holster, spurs, and two pieces of cloth with odd pencil scrawls.

  She also found a frame of twisted branches and a primitive painting-on-wood of trees surrounding a flat boulder with another rock atop it and more small stones atop that. The frame and painting sizes matched, but the picture’s wood had warped slightly. She folded the two cloths to the right shape and smoothed them across the back of the painting as filler. Then she cut cardboard to the correct size and nailed on this backing to give it a finished look. The granddaughter stared at the picture, seeing how the twig frame brought out something haunting in the way sunlight spilled on that big rock pile in the circle of trees and the odd, short, crescent-shaped stone beside it…

  Later that day, she sat by her grandmother. “Nana, what can you tell me about these things on the table that I brought down from the att
ic?”

  Selby, then seventy-three, walked along the table. She touched again various items, which kindled forgotten memories. When she reached the picture, the holstered pistol, the spurs and boots, she grabbed the edge of the table to steady herself as tears filled her eyes. These had survived, unlike the small piece of paper she’d re-read so many times that the folds frayed until the paper disintegrated. Until today, she’d shelved the memory of that heart-wrenching day in her young life when Union soldiers murdered the men in her life. She wept again for her slain field hands, her father and Corporal Raiford Birdsong, the first man she’d ever loved.

  CHAPTER 61

  Jennifer awoke slowly the next morning and lay in bed, temporarily immobilized by the power of this mysterious drama haunting her mind. These flashbacks weren’t disjointed dreams—they felt more like visions. This entire slice of the Civil War exactly fit facts she knew could have happened at that time, but did they?

  Unlike her friend, Veronika, Jennifer was no psychic. Yet she felt these events, so clear in her mind, had occurred exactly as they unfolded in her vision.

  Was this all a figment of her fertile imagination or a glimpse into the past through a portal, perhaps one opened by the mysterious framed painting? Her logical mind promptly discarded this notion.

  But it crept back into her thinking. Hadn’t she searched restlessly for two years for a frame she saw only in her mind until it lay on Selby’s estate sale table in Great Falls with the haunting painting inside? Was that coincidence? Or had that object begun pulling her toward it three years ago when she bought the first yard sale picture that she intuitively knew needed a special one-of-a-kind frame existing only in her imagination—the frame housing the painting of the Indian sacred place, the riddle and the map?