Grey reached out his right hand. A look of annoyed uncertainty grew on Lean’s face, but he shook the offered hand.
“Send word to me if necessary. I shall do the same.” Grey nodded, turned, and walked off across the uneven alleyway.
[ Chapter 33 ]
GREY WATCHED THE MAN APPROACH DOWN QUEBEC STREET, where modest inquiries had revealed he was staying with friends during his time in Portland. Though Chief Jefferson clearly outfitted himself with an air of rough living, it was a relief to Grey to see the man dressed in appropriate street clothing. He’d been prepared for an ostentatious costume designed to highlight this white man’s claim to his adopted Indian heritage. That wasn’t the case at all. Chief Jefferson even sported a long mustache such as would have looked foreign upon a full-blooded Indian.
“Chief Jefferson, thank you for agreeing to meet me.”
The chief tipped his tall, broad-brimmed hat. “Perceval Grey. Always willing to help one of our kind, even if he is doing the bidding of a wealthy white man whose greatest pleasure in life seems to be pissing in my porridge.”
“My client is Miss Phebe Webster. My services have in no way been engaged by Euripides Webster.”
“Well, that puts a better shine on things. Explains why you were sent instead of some ruffian. The young lady did seem less intent on seeing me dead.”
The two men headed toward the midpoint of the Eastern Promenade, strolling slowly to accommodate Grey’s lingering limp.
“Yet you were still willing to talk, even when you believed that Euripides had hired me. Explains your choice of a public venue,” Grey said with a wave toward the passing wagons and carriages.
“I was a bit worried. But curious, too,” the chief added. “Heard the rumors about you all those years back, the Abenaki boy taken and raised by rich Portlanders. Besides, you aren’t the only one looking for information.”
“I’ll provide what answers I’m able,” Grey said.
“I came to Portland soon as I heard old Horace Webster finally slipped off the boat. He was never willing to give a thought to selling what he calls his thunderstone. I was foolishly hoping the son might be open to reason. Though I knew from before that he’s as stubborn as a deaf mule. With a temper on him, too. When I saw him the other day, ’Ripides said the stone had been stolen. He telling the truth for once?”
“Do you mean to say you don’t trust such a fine, upstanding citizen?” Grey asked.
“Hah! The whole family’s so damn crooked the neighbors bring their stone walls indoors at night. When did it get stolen?”
“The last two weeks, maybe three.”
“Any idea where it is now?” Chief Jefferson asked.
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
“He said the same. That I only came round at all so I’d look innocent. I hear you got more sense than the average fool on the street. You truly reckon me as the thief?”
Grey shrugged. “The matter remains unclear at this point. But the Websters certainly view you with suspicion.”
“I suppose that figures easy enough to them.”
“You’re the only one who has ever shown an overt interest in possessing the stone.”
“The only one apart from them, that is.” The chief spit on the ground, then regarded Grey with an earnest look. “I give you my word: I do not have the Stone of Pamola. I’ve never had the honor of holding it in my hands. And you can bet, if I was lying now and had the stone, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”
“You could merely be keeping up your charade of innocence.”
“I wouldn’t bother doing a dance about it for the benefit of that lot. And I wouldn’t care if you thought me guilty neither. I’d be gone already.”
“And where, for the sake of argument, would you be gone to?” Grey asked.
“Back to its home, where it belongs. Pamola.”
Grey scrutinized the older man, like a sort of palm reader trying to glean hidden meaning from the crisscrossing lines and wrinkles of the chief’s weathered face.
Chief Jefferson cracked a smile. “There’s more than a little something to be said for finding your way home. You ought to think a long while on that.”
“Sorry? I don’t follow,” Grey said.
“Your spirit has wandered far from the paths it was meant to travel. Soon perhaps you will come to know that your time has arrived. The time for you to go home as well.”
“I’m as home as I choose to be. And I suspect that your comments are meant to take me down a path other than the one I’m interested in.”
“A man’s free to choose as he may, of course”—Chief Jefferson tapped the side of his head first, then his breast—“but a man’s true home is where his heart tells him he belongs.”
Grey recognized this as mere distraction but was unable to ignore the hypocrisy in the chief’s position. “Odd words coming from a man who’s spent his life other than where he belongs.”
“The blood and the heart can sometimes be of two minds. I weren’t long off my mother’s pap when I went missing from my white home. I suppose I must have known I was lost at first, but at that age it didn’t take long for memories of my first family to fade. I spent five or six years with that Abenaki couple that first found me. Makes them about as close as I can ever remember of having parents. How old were you when you left the Abenaki?”
“Seven,” Grey said curtly. He was slightly irritated at the man’s digression but held his tongue, hoping the dialogue might come around to something more relevant to his inquiry.
“Ha, aren’t we just heads and tails on a strange old coin? So you were old enough to recall going from our people to a fancy house, being raised among Portland’s tippybobs. You must have missed it.”
“After a manner, I suppose.” Grey kept a straight face and clear eyes, not wanting to reveal any hint of the strain of those early years that might encourage the chief in his verbal meandering.
“Oh, ‘after a manner,’ he says. How could you not? Going from that life—freedom, movement, living in the round of the year. And trading it in for a white childhood. Barely a childhood at all. Nothing but primers and teachers’ rules. Keeping your knees clean and your ears scrubbed. You missed out on something precious.”
Grey looked out over the open, sloping expanse of green park. It was nearly half a mile wide and five hundred feet deep. A short, level space by the Promenade gave way to a sharp slope that dropped down to where it leveled again at the rocky shoreline of Casco Bay. A train chugged slowly along the Portland & Rochester line, the tracks laid out along the outer rim of the Neck. For a moment the engine’s smoke mingled with that of the Portland Smelting Works, the sole commercial endeavor located along the base of the eastern end of the city’s neck. The wafting smoke dissipated in the air before it could ruin the pristine sight of the bay dotted with its dozens of islands and hundreds of boats of various sizes and purposes.
“There was nothing left for me in that life,” Grey said.
“You’re wrong. Take it from me, one who’s lived long enough to know.”
“I’ll judge for myself. Don’t mistake me for one of those who lazily assume that age brings wisdom to every man. Years bring experience but also give a man time to stake out a spot and dig himself in so deep he can no longer see five feet past where he’s standing.”
“I tell you, Grey. Once it’s inside you … well, the pull of that life stays with you, always. I was seventeen when I came traveling back south with some Penobscot families. Some fellow in Arundel caught sight of me and recognized something.” Chief Jefferson lifted his left hand. The top knuckle of his little finger was missing, and an old scar still showed across his other three fingers.
“Childhood accident. It wasn’t long before the police had a hold of me. The next day an elderly white fellow and two younger women came to the jail. They stood there gawking at me for a good ten minutes, comparing me to an old photo, before they decided I was the little boy they’d known as John Jef
ferson. I thought they were all mad. Weren’t until what turned out to be my elder sister hummed an old bedtime ditty—one my mother used to sing me—that the memories began to stir.”
“That’s touching,” Grey said, “but what I’d like to hear about—”
“I was glad to know the truth,” Jefferson blurted out, ignoring Grey’s attempt to divert the conversation to the present once more. “There was a queer sort of joy in coming back to a home I’d forgotten. But still, finding out I’d been meant to live another life could never erase the one I’d actually lived. They wanted me to put my past behind me, pretend it never happened. That’s what this whole country wants the Indians to do. But I could never shake it out of me. Whenever I heard that a group of Abenakis had come within ten miles, I’d run off to join them.”
A faraway look had settled into Chief Jefferson’s eyes, and he chuckled. “It got to the point my father hired armed men. They’d stash me away at a hotel in Biddeford. Sometimes it worked, other times I still got loose. Eventually my father learned he had to let me be who my heart said I was.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Grey asked.
“You want to know why I’m so interested in this thunderstone? That’s why. Learning I was born a white man, that I didn’t truly have Abenaki blood … well, it was like a piece of me got hollowed out. Never could quite fill it up all the way again after that.”
“And you think recovering this thunderstone is somehow going to make you whole once more. That this is really an ancient Indian artifact that will make a true Abenaki of you.”
“When I first saw that stone, it hit me like a flash of lightning. I knew what it was. I felt its spirit calling to me. So yes, I do believe I was meant to take the stone back. And when I do, maybe in some small way that will help the rest of our people, be a small reminder of the people they truly are in their hearts.”
Chief Jefferson stopped along the sidewalk, opposite from where the city’s grandest thoroughfare, Congress Street, reached its eastern terminus. A tall granite pillar stood on that spot, along the seaward side of the Promenade. The Cleeves and Tucker Memorial honored the first two English settlers to stake a permanent claim on the area of Portland Neck in the year 1632. Above the square base, each of the four sides was engraved with one of the names the city had held in its history.
“Portland,” recited Chief Jefferson as he began a slow walk about the pedestal. “Before that they called it Falmouth. Earlier still, the English ears heard an Abenaki word describing the place as Casco.” The chief stopped in front of the last panel. “And the original Abenaki name: Machigonne, ‘the Great Neck.’ Call it what you like. This was all the land of the Abenaki: The Dawnland.”
The chief’s arms fanned out wide. “The white men came and ripped it from them. It was here in Machigonne, or Casco, that Thomas Webster uncovered the Stone of Pamola. He was a wealthy man. Over time he’d bought property all over the Neck. And at one of these sites, his workers dug up the stone. Of course it’s an Abenaki artifact. What other possible explanation is there under the sky or, more precisely, under the earth?”
“The most logical explanation, especially when you’re considering the words and actions of someone you obviously think of as such a devious white man: He lied. He didn’t dig it up at all. It’s a hoax. The stone is too perfectly shaped to be natural,” Grey said.
“Natural. You mistake nature for only what you can see and understand with your eyes. But that is not all there is in the world. There are forces and spirits beyond what man can see.”
“Old Thomas Webster made that stone,” Grey said.
“Why? Tell me where your logical explanation goes from there.” Chief Jefferson started to become flustered by his own urgency to make his point. “Why would a man commit a hoax only to never let anyone know about it? If it was fake, why hide it from public view all his life? Why bind his heirs from ever showing off the fruit of his grand jest?”
“I could ask the same of you, if what you say is true. Why would a white man hide away an Indian artifact?”
“For the same reason the family is still dead set against it coming into my hands. Because a man like me would know what it truly is.”
“Please, enlighten me.” Grey let the sarcasm show on his face, challenging the chief to reveal whatever he knew of the true origin of the thunderstone.
“Because even a hundred years ago, Thomas Webster was smart enough to recognize that this is the Stone of Pamola, that it holds a sacred power. Pamola is the Abenaki god of thunder. The Websters acknowledge that themselves—that’s why they call it the thunderstone.”
“An idea not unique to the Indians. Other cultures, even European ones, have placed superstitious value in the idea of formed stones that appear from lightning bolts or fall from the sky. Gifts from the gods, or weather spirits, or whatever nonsense rules the day in that particular time and place.”
Chief Jefferson’s eyes were set as hard as rocks, and Grey momentarily relented before the full brunt of the man’s stubborn insistence on the impossible.
“Fine, let’s have it, then,” Grey said. “What awesome power does this Stone of Pamola hold? In your hands it will call to life some Great Spirit who will swoop down and drive the white men back into the sea?”
“I’m not fool enough to think that we’ll ever have our country back. That war has already been lost. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t battles yet to be won. And maybe, at first, the only victories to take are symbolic ones. But there’s power in that, even—the power of a full heart. That’s what I want—to do what I’m meant to do and to feel the Great Spirit in me. And maybe by doing that I’ll help our people remember who they truly are.”
Playful shrieks wafted up the hill, carried on a pleasant afternoon sea breeze. Grey let his eyes drift down to the shore. He expected to witness women in long, light dresses and straw hats sitting or strolling about, paying some mind to the boys and girls in full-length bathing outfits who splashed away in the shallow surf. Instead the land made a short, final dip. The East End Beach’s bathing house and the brief stretch of rock-strewn sand were hidden by thin birches and a scattering of other scraggly hardwoods.
“Look here.” Chief Jefferson drew a folded paper from inside his coat. “This is the news article—the photograph of the so-called thunderstone taken at Maine’s statehood anniversary. It’s grainy, but look at the stone.” He produced a small magnifying glass and offered it to Grey.
“I’ve seen this photograph before.”
“Then you have no doubt seen the symbol there.” Chief Jefferson pointed to the circle topped with a small arc.
“What do you say this proves?”
“Are you familiar with Pamola?” the chief asked.
“Not intimately, no.”
“Pamola was the thunder god who lived atop the great mountain, Katahdin. Though he had the body of a man, he had the talons and wings of an eagle and the head of a moose. This symbol, the circle with horns on top: It’s the head of Pamola.”
“The human mind wants to recognize what it sees. It wants the world to hold a unique and personal meaning,” Grey said. “And so you see what you wish to see, much the same as other men have.”
“That’s what I’m counting on. The Stone of Pamola is, after all, a symbol. It’s a symbol I believe in. One for our people to see again, to remember.” Chief Jefferson folded up his picture.
“And bringing this stone back to its home will make of you what you’ve always believed yourself to be?” Grey asked.
“Returning the stone is what I’ve been called upon to do. It’s a sacred duty. Something I feel in my heart. Maybe you’re not familiar with that feeling, can’t understand what it is I’m saying. I know you aren’t yet convinced, Grey. But later, when you’ve had time to think on this, you may yet see.”
Chief Jefferson looked Grey over once more and extended his hand.
Grey shook the man’s hand and said, “You’ve certainly given me som
e thoughts to consider, but as for my coming around to your way of seeing this symbol—I doubt that very much.”
[ Chapter 34 ]
AND THAT IS HOW ULYSSES ESCAPED THE CYCLOPS,” LEAN said as he closed the tattered copy of Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable.
He saw the disappointment in Owen’s eyes as the boy looked up from his pillow. Before any pleas for another chapter could start, Lean announced, “That’s enough for tonight. Tomorrow we’ll do his adventure among the Laestrygonians.” He had to flip the book open again to make sure he’d gotten that last name right.
“The who?”
“A tribe of giant cannibals,” Lean said. “We’ll just call them the giants.”
Owen nodded at the wisdom of that decision. Lean stood up from the edge of the bed and extinguished the light.
They said good night, and Lean made it almost to the door before the boy’s voice caught up to him.
“I don’t think Ulysses should have told the Cyclops his real name. He was smart to trick him before and say he was Noman. Now that the Cyclops knows it’s him, he might try to find him again.”
“He doesn’t. But the Cyclops’s father, Neptune—or Poseidon—does take revenge on Ulysses.”
“I knew he shouldn’t have told him. I wouldn’t have told him my name.”
“Usually it’s best to own up to your actions. But once in a while I suppose it’s better to be Noman,” Lean said as he eased toward the hallway. “Like when you took that extra cookie from the tin and Mom asked who stole the last cookie. Maybe you should have said Noman did it.”
A quiet giggling emerged from the darkness as Lean said a final good night.
He made his way downstairs and out the back of the house. He drew in a long, slow breath through his nostrils, savoring the smell of their little backyard garden like a parting kiss before striking a match. He lit a cigarette, drank in the smoke, and sighed. The tiny flame mesmerized him, that briefest spark, so alive yet so doomed. The match burned down toward his fingertips, and he dropped it. The flame evaporated into smoke even before it reached the bare patch of earth between his feet, leaving nothing but a charred, broken remnant.
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