by William Bell
“Can I come out now?”
“Knock it off, Dad,” I said, taking a can of tonic water from the fridge.
He was standing at the window, looking out over the yard. “Come here. Look at the way the light is falling on the river.”
I stood behind him. The slanting light made the water look like a strip of pewter and lit up Mom’s little lilac bushes and the flower garden she had put in beside them.
“Hey, I think I’ve got an idea,” I blurted.
“An idea about what?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said, and I sprinted up the stairs.
Chapter 9
I closed my bedroom door tightly, switched on the light on my desk and got down on my hands and knees. I grasped a corner of the plastic bag and dragged it out from under the bed, lifted it onto the desk and removed the box. The box gave off a damp odour of earth and decay. Inside, the iron Cs clanked. I sat at the desk and examined my accidental discovery.
Maybe, just maybe, the thing might yield something interesting and important, and if it did I would make meticulous notes and drawings and dazzle The Book into giving me a history credit.
Rummaging around in my desk, I collected a few pencils (already sharpened during wasted hours), a small ruler, a notebook and a magnifying glass I hadn’t touched since I was a kid. On hot summer days I had used it to burn my initials into baseball bats, fences and plastic toys, and to incinerate unlucky ants as they marched across the parking lot of our apartment building. I then slipped the box back into the bag, added my tools and crept downstairs and out the back door to the garage.
There was a work bench there, unused since we had moved in, with a fluorescent light above it and all sorts of tools, cleaning solvents, rags and paintbrushes at hand. It took a few minutes to clear a work space.
I placed the box in the centre of the bench and tossed the bag away, then took out the objects and put them aside, replacing the lid. With a small paintbrush I whisked away the dirt encrusted on the surface of the box—not so difficult now that the soil had dried—to find that the wood was covered with some kind of material. Paper? Cloth? No, leather. Then I wiped the surface clean with a damp rag, working slowly because the leather wanted to crumble and flake. When the outside of the box was clean I brushed out the mouldy inside.
The box was about thirty-five centimetres long and half as wide. The front panel held a brass lock with the hasp missing. Two brass hinges had broken away from the back panel but were still attached to the lid. In the centre of the lid was a small curved brass handle, barely big enough to get three fingers under it. A fancy gold border ran around the lid’s edge.
I used my magnifying glass, feeling like a Sherlock Holmes wannabe, to examine the border, and that was when I noticed a diamond with the same design around the handle. And there was something else. I peered at the surface, my face inches from the musty-smelling leather, like a miser looking for a lost penny.
A lot of the gold—or whatever it was—had flaked off, but I was pretty sure I could make out an ornate letter, G, then a shape I couldn’t identify, then an R. It took more squinting and guessing before I knew that the shape between the letters had been a representation of a crown.
With a growing sense of excitement, I put down the glass, rubbed my eyes, stretched the stiffness out of my back and neck, and began to make notes, describing the box in detail. I used the ruler to draw it to scale. Then, in my clumsy, unartistic style, I attempted to copy the design of the border. Last, using the glass again to double check, I drew the crown.
“Zack, where are you?” my mother called.
I dropped my pencil and scooted out of the garage. “I’m out here, Mom. Be in in a minute.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing, just a school project.”
“In the garage?”
“Be in soon,” I repeated.
When I heard the door shut I let out my breath and stepped back into the garage. Why didn’t I tell her what I was up to? Why did I want to keep the box and its contents a secret, at least for the time being? Because if things didn’t work out I didn’t want to look like a loser. I was a little embarrassed, getting excited about my discovery. If I had been seven years old it would have been okay. It would have been nifty. Gee, golly, I could say, this sure is peachy. But not now. I was sensitive about looking like an idiot. Sue me.
I set the box aside and brushed the dirt from the top of the bench. Then I picked up the bit of skin that had held the metal nugget. The remnants of the little bag were now dry and stiff and would snap like a potato chip if I wasn’t careful. I poured an inch of solvent into an empty peanut tin and dropped the nugget in, swirling it around. Then, using a small brush, I cleaned it. The solvent quickly dissolved the grime from the surface of the metal, which, when polished with a dry rag, gave off a bronze glow. It was an almost perfect sphere with a rough surface.
I examined it with my Sherlock Holmes ant-burner, my pulse quickening. When I had dug it up I had wondered for a split second, could it be gold? And if it was, how much was it worth?
I packed up my loot and crept into the house by the back door. After stopping in the kitchen for a small sealable freezer bag, I silently climbed up to my room. I wrapped the box in an old T-shirt and slid it under the bed, then put the nugget into the plastic bag and buried it in my top drawer under my socks and underwear. That done, I undressed and hopped into bed. Even if this little investigation of mine fell flat, even if I ended up looking like a fool, maybe I’d be able to salvage something from the whole exercise. That day had started out even worse than most. The faint hope I had been given by The Book had evaporated when Jen had spoken to me in the parking lot, reawakening a long-familiar humiliation and anger. Now, after Jen’s visit and my work in the garage, it seemed that the spring might not be so bad after all.
But thoughts about Jen, about school and The Book’s offer marched around in my brain, keeping sleep away. I got out of bed, shrugged into my housecoat and went downstairs to drug myself with a little TV-watching.
I wasn’t surprised to see that a light was on in Dad’s study. He had always been a night-owl, preferring to work when the house was quiet, and a few days earlier I had heard him tell Mom he was under the gun to meet a deadline. Some article or other for one of the periodicals he contributed to.
He had changed into striped pyjamas and what he called his Balzac, a roomy woollen robe with a hood, and he sat behind his desk, reading glasses perched on the end of his aquiline nose. A hockey player throughout his childhood and teens, he was solidly built without looking lumpy like many ex-athletes. His black hair had a natural curl that made him look young.
His desk lamp, the only illumination in the room, threw a wide pool of light over the books and papers scattered across his desk in typical disorderly order, and cast a yellow glow on his face as he read. He was running thick fingers across his broad chin the way he always did when concentrating.
As I stepped into the room my eye was drawn to the picture of the neo-Nazi with the military cap outside the courthouse, only now he was upside down. Dad had printed out the stuff I had found for him on the Internet and the sheets were lined up along the edge of the desk.
“Oh, hi, Zack,” he said, looking up. “Bedbugs getting to you?”
“Yeah. Can’t sleep. Is that stuff any use?”
“Definitely. Not much that’s new or original, but I can cite some of it in the monograph I’m working on.”
“That’s good.”
“But I think next time it might be better if you just give me the Web site address. Don’t bother downloading.”
“Sure.”
“We don’t want the inestimable Ms. O’Neil on our case again,” he added, smiling.
We were silent for a moment. I pointed to the printouts.
“I guess it never ends, does it, Dad?”
He lowered the page and removed his glasses, then linked his fingers to form one thick fist on top of the page. “No.�
�� He lifted his chin towards the photo of Krupp. “Not as long as there are pathetic misfits like him around. And not as long as societies produce unhappy and hateful people to follow them.”
“Dad, are you sorry sometimes that you’re a Jew?”
He sat back in his old leather wing chair and disappeared into the shadows. Then he leaned forward and the light crossed his face again to reveal a frown. He looked into my face, as if examining me.
“When I was growing up, my religion, my culture, didn’t mean much to me. Your grandma and grandpa pushed it pretty hard, and I guess that’s why. It’s very important to them, but I’ve always believed a person has to come to these things on his own. So I’ve always been pretty secular.”
He paused and looked at his wall of books. “But sorry? No. Never.”
“So, does reading crap like that … does it make you mad? No, that’s not what I mean. Do you take it personally?”
“Has something happened, Zack?”
“No, no,” I lied. “I was just wondering.”
His left eyebrow rose slightly—an involuntary reaction he hardly noticed most of the time that told me he didn’t buy my answer. But he let it go.
“No, I don’t take it personally—well, that’s not entirely true. I try not to, and most of the time I succeed. But it’s hard. Isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
A tone I couldn’t identify came into his voice when he began to speak again.
“Zack, over the long span of history the Jews have been ghettoized and/or run out of every country in Europe. After the Holocaust they made their own country, and since then people have been trying to kick them out of there, too. But the Jews are still around. And do you know why?”
Without waiting for an answer he continued, punctuating his thoughts by tapping his index finger on the desktop. “Because, when things get bad, the Jews don’t sit around in bars” tap “or loiter on street corners” tap “moaning and complaining about being oppressed.” tap “First, we build a synagogue.” tap “Then we build a school.” tap “Then we start over.” He stopped, as if surprised at his own feelings. “Sorry, didn’t mean to make a speech.”
“Dad?”
“Uh-huh?”
“You said ‘we’.”
He laughed. “I guess I did, at that.”
Back in my bed, I lay on my back, studying the pattern made on the ceiling by the moon that hung in the sky above the river behind the house. I wondered, when a guy like Krupp looks at me, does he hate me half as much because I’m only half-Jewish, or twice as much because I’m half-black, too?
Then I remembered something Mom had told me when I was little—young enough to sit on her lap. She had taken me to a park near our apartment building and I had been playing with a few other kids on the climbers and in the sandbox, and when she called to me that it was time to go home, when she was brushing dust from my clothes and poking sand from the spaces between the laces on my running shoes with her long fingers, I asked her why the other kids didn’t have black and white parents.
Holding me tightly on her knee, Mom had pointed to a giant oak on the edge of the play area. “You’re like that tree,” she told me. “You have two strong roots going way down into the ground, strong enough to hold you up no matter how hard the wind blows.”
I hadn’t understood her, and I soon lost interest in my question because an ice-cream truck happened by. But I had thought about her metaphor a few times since then, and as I lay in bed after talking to Dad, I felt I grasped it. I did have two roots. One I knew a lot about; I had grown up with my grandma and grandpa at the centre of my life. But I had been cut off from the other root, and for some reason the older I got the more I resented Mom for doing that to me.
Chapter 10
As soon as the big yellow monster let me out at the end of our drive I jogged to the house to get the nugget, shining and inviting inside the clear plastic bag, and jammed it deep into the pocket of my jeans.
Mom wasn’t in her studio, so I knew she’d be outside. Sure enough, I heard her humming as soon as I pushed open the back door. She was on her knees in the middle of a patch of newly turned earth, a trowel in one gloved hand, some kind of pink flower in the other, and a sheen of sweat on her face. Around her, empty flats were scattered in the late-afternoon sun.
“Hi, Mom. I’m on my way downtown to see Jen at work,” I said, letting the door slam behind me and heading for the garage.
“Wait a minute. I want you to—”
“Later,” I called, pretending I hadn’t heard her.
I unlocked my one valuable possession—my mountain bike, a birthday present from my grandparents the year before. (“It’s too expensive,” Dad had said to Grandma. “You’re spoiling him,” Mom had added. “Where’s the key?” I had asked.) I strapped on my helmet, pushed the bike out of the garage and hopped on.
The Fergus Market, at Queen and St. David on the bank of the river, was once some kind of factory or mill that had used the river for power. Like a lot of the buildings in Fergus it was constructed of quarried stone. Now it was a sort of semi-upscale mall, with the Chamber of Commerce, a couple of shops that sold overpriced clothing from Scotland, and a farmer’s market. I got off my bike, removed the seat and front wheel and locked them and the bike to a stand.
I stood in the doorway blinking while my eyes adjusted to the semi-gloom, then headed for the fast-food stand where Jen worked after school and on weekends. The Market Grill was in the central aisle, flanked on one side by the Heritage Clothing shop, which, according to the sign, sold “only organic apparel”—which was what, I wondered, shirts made of cornstalks? Pants woven from hay?—and on the other by an antique stand displaying a lot of old coal-oil lamps and broken chairs.
Jen was serving up a paper plate stacked high with a cheeseburger and fries to a man in a track suit who looked like he’d be better off with a double order of diet pills. She took his money and put it in the register.
“Hi,” I said. “Got any food here?”
She smiled. She had on a navy blue T-shirt with “Market Grill” on the front in white, the letters following her curves, and her thick hair was pulled back and tied with a white scarf, accentuating her large eyes and oval face.
“Buddy, if you want food you came to the wrong place.”
“Do you have a break coming up soon?”
“Not really, Zack. I just got here twenty minutes ago. There’s only me and the boss. He’s a slave-driver.”
“Okay. Um, I’ve got an errand to run, then I’ll come back.”
“Good. Come here.” She waggled her finger, as if she wanted to whisper in my ear. But she kissed me instead. “Think that’ll hold you?”
“Maybe,” I said, and I left the market.
I climbed up the short hill to St. Andrew, turned left and walked past the library to Piffard’s Custom Jewellery—a word some people in Fergus pronounced joolery—a small store squeezed between a real-estate broker and the Theatre on the Grand.
A bell tinkled above my head as I pushed open the door, rehearsing what I was going to say. A glass case ran the length of the store to my right, containing costume jewellery, watches and fancy china cups. A man with a very large hooked nose and a very bushy walrus moustache stood at the back of the shop behind another glass case, writing something in a notebook. The stub of an unlit cigar was clamped in the corner of his mouth. He had a tiny magnifying glass on a stem clipped to the wire frame of his glasses. At his back was a curtained doorway.
He looked up. “Help you, son?” he asked in a voice that suggested he’d just as soon wash the floor.
I approached the counter. “I hope so,” I said, fishing the plastic bag from my pocket. “I was wondering, could you tell me what this is made of?” I shook the nugget onto the red velvet pad on top of the case.
The man put down his pen and pushed the notebook aside. He picked up the nugget and held it to the light between thumb and forefinger.
“Interesting,” he s
aid, the cigar bobbing. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
He pulled a lamp with a circular fluorescent bulb towards him and switched it on. In the centre of the bulb was a magnifying glass. He held the nugget under the lamp, turning it around several times with fingers made huge by the glass.
“Where did you get it?”
“It’s been in the family a long time,” I said, feeling justified in my lie because of his prying. “I inherited it. From my grandfather. I think—That is, I was told it’s gold and I thought maybe a professional jeweller could tell me for sure.”
“It was cast,” he said, continuing his examination, “but not expertly. And not properly. That’s why it’s a little rough.” He adjusted the little lens in front of one side of his glasses and squinted at the nugget some more. “And it contains impurities.”
His voice had been warming all along. He was clearly interested in the nugget.
“Bit of a mystery, isn’t it?” he said, switching off the lamp. He smiled for the first time and the cigar tilted towards the ceiling.
“Sure is,” I said lamely.
“This’ll take a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
He locked the jewellery case, pushed the curtain aside and disappeared. No one came into the shop as I waited with rising suspense. After what seemed like half an hour but was ten minutes by my watch, he came back into the shop. A thin blue line of smoke rose from the cigar. When he dropped the nugget on the red velvet I saw that he had scraped a thin line on it.
“Yup, interesting,” he repeated. “I think it’s shot.”
“You mean ruined?”
He laughed. With one eye squinted almost shut against the cigar smoke, he said, “No, no. Shot. Rifle shot. A bullet. You were right, it must be very old. Strange thing for an heirloom, though.”
“Yeah, it’s been sort of a family mystery for years. So, is it gold?”
“It’s gold, all right. Not high grade, though. Maybe ten carat, and like I said, it’s full of impurities.”
