The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  He remembered how he had awakened, sprawled on the ground by the fire pit, as the sky was turning pale gray. The family was asleep still; no one had moved. He rubbed his aching arm and shook out the soreness. The box lay about two feet away, the lid open, and he picked it up. Immediately, the wood began to warm in his hands; it glowed with a golden color he had never seen and the stones sparkled red, green and blue. His breath caught.

  All trace of pain was gone from his arm. His mind raced with the possibilities—what was this thing? Did it possess some kind of magic?

  The moment his thoughts settled on that word he knew he must keep silent about it. The priests were free with talk of God and His miracles, but they also spoke of witches and evil humans who would be caught and burn in hell for the sin of practicing magic. He set the box on the ground and its color quieted. Perhaps he should destroy it before it had the chance to destroy him.

  He watched it as the minutes went by. The color became quite dull and plain, the beauty of that glowing wood and the sparkling stones only a memory. He felt sure his father had never experienced anything like this with the box. He would have said so. Or he would never have given the item to his young son. Somehow, in that moment, Enrique knew he alone was meant to have the box, that he and this artifact would have a special relationship. He carried it back to his sleeping pallet and wrapped a blanket around it. Suddenly, he was shivering in the early morning air.

  Now, in a new house in a new land, he folded the last of his clothing and arranged the items to cover the carved box. He would have to decide what, if anything, he should do about it. His mother saved him the trouble of making a decision by calling out that lunch was ready. “Enrique, go find your brothers.”

  Francesca carried the baby into the kitchen. Enrique raced out the door and found the other boys near the water. Lorenzo was poking with a stick at some creature that had washed up on the shore, a slimy-looking thing with short horns coming out of its head. Enrique backed away from it. Miguel stood staring toward the big house, where a girl about his age stared back. Her skin was very black and her simple dress suggested that she was a maid at the house. He nudged Miguel and laughed when his brother jumped. Girls! Was this what it would be like to be fifteen years old?

  Everyone had settled at the table when their father arrived, flush with excitement.

  “I have an actual studio inside the house,” he said, as he washed his hands in the bowl by the door. “There is a work table where I can mix my paints, and Señor Smythe … oh, I cannot say his entire name yet … he says to call him Brookie. What a silly name. Anyway, he says he will order the finest canvas from Europe for the portraits. See? I have learned two more English words! Meanwhile, until they come, I think I am free to use the space to paint other things. This afternoon I will walk along the playa and look for suitable subjects.”

  “Is he a nice man?” Ramona asked. “This Mr. Brookie?”

  “He seems like a very devoted father, very kind to his children. But he also has a stern way with the slaves. I heard him bellow orders to the foreman and then when Mr. Brookie turned his back the other man lashed out with a whip at two of the dark men who were not moving fast enough.”

  Enrique had seen incidents of cruelty between people—there were nice ones and mean ones everywhere, he supposed—but never one who was allowed to use a whip on someone else without punishment for doing so. He would stay clear of these Europeans.

  * * *

  Brookie sat on a chair on the wide veranda of his shady home, rocking slowly when Enrique mounted the steps.

  “What seems to be the problem today?” Enrique asked the man whose hair had grown pure white over the years.

  “Probably the damned lumbago,” Brookie growled. He shifted in his seat and grinned as he indicated the other chair. “Can you believe us? I remember you as a skinny little Mexican kid when you were eleven years old. Now you’re my doctor, speaking perfect English, and our families have blended so thoroughly that I can’t see the edges anymore. Where’s the old man?”

  It took Enrique a moment to realize he meant Carlito. Among the extended Martinez family, Brookie himself was often called the old man.

  “Ah, Papá is resting. He finished a new painting yesterday and decided to take a day off.”

  “I’m not sure I like his new style,” Brookie commented.

  Enrique laughed. “That’s actually his old style. When we were kids in Mexico he always painted the popular primitive way. He switched to realism when he came here because it was what Europeans wanted.” He turned to the older man. “Stand up. Let’s see about that back of yours.”

  He’d handled the mysterious box before coming over and wanted to apply his healing touch before the effects wore off. From the moment he’d held his direly ill little sister—was that really almost forty years ago?—he realized that he had great power with that box. Aurelia’s deadly fever had subsided within minutes, and since that day he had used his gift to heal hundreds of people.

  Of course he had studied the Western medical books and often used those medicines that he found useful, but in his experience modern medicine was still a mixture of experimentation and quackery. Just because men could now name the organs inside the body, it did not mean that all was understood or that all cures recommended in 1790s medical practice were effective. In the local community, many people referred to Enrique as a curandero while others like Brookie actually used the word doctor.

  He asked Brookie to lift the back of his shirt and Enrique rested both of his hands on the skin over the muscles at the lower spine.

  “Ah, that feels good,” the old man said.

  Slight pressure, gentle movement of the hands. He massaged the area for five minutes or so, mainly to make it seem as if he was actually doing something medically.

  “Do you still have that salve I gave you?” he asked as Brookie tucked in his shirt.

  The older man nodded.

  “Use it, every morning and every night. The herbs in it will help keep those muscles flexible.”

  “And stop trying to kick logs around on my own?”

  They both chuckled.

  “Papá! Mr. Brookie!” Shrill voices rang through the morning air and the men turned to see Enrique’s two young sons racing toward the Smythe-Brookington house as fast as their short legs could carry them.

  “Boys! Decorum.” Both boys came to a halt and then approached with small steps. He agreed with Catherine, his wife and Brookie’s daughter, who tried valiantly to instill a bit of English manners in their children. Given a choice, the boys would run wild on the beaches like natives.

  “That’s better,” Brookie said. “You know that good little lads get a story.”

  George and Jonathan responded by walking slowly onto the porch and sitting at Brookie’s feet. “May we hear about the pirates again, sir?”

  Brookie and Enrique exchanged a smile at the small triumph.

  “Certainly, lads.” He leaned forward in his chair, hands clasped, elbows on his knees. All part of the anticipation. “Well, when I came here to Belize with my family, oh, this was many years ago when your father was hardly bigger than you are now, it had not been that many years since pirates roamed these beaches at will …”

  Enrique stood quietly and tiptoed away to visit his next patient, just up the dirt road in the town that had grown steadily. How many times he had heard Brookie’s tales—how British pirates would raid the Spanish settlements for gold and silver, how the Spaniards would build forts along the coast and fight back, how ships were hijacked and the two empires battled. Things had certainly quieted down since then although rivalries were not unknown even now. Word of a Spanish attack on the settlement of St. George’s Caye had only reached them two weeks ago.

  His father-in-law’s voice rose with the excitement of the story, as Enrique walked on. Life had changed drastically in that man’s lifetime. The American colonies had won their freedom, the Caribbean islands were being sorted out—some attain
ing nationhood, others remaining under control of their European discoverers, be they English, Spanish, Dutch or French. People, too, moved on. He knew of ancestors back in the New Mexico territory but had never met any of them. Perhaps one day there would be a means more effective than a horse-drawn cart to travel inland. For now, transportation to other parts of the world remained best navigated by the hundreds of ships that dominated the seas.

  He put all that rumination aside when he reached the cottage of Alphonse Mbaba, a patient wracked with such a cough that Enrique suspected some sort of virulent cancer eating away at the poor man’s insides. This one, he knew, was beyond his help for a recovery. Sometimes all he could do was offer consolation.

  From Alphonse’s bedside he made his way through the village, stopping to check on three additional patients and responding to a frantic shout for help when a young mother discovered her son had fallen from a banyan tree. The lad had the breath knocked out of him but responded quickly to Enrique’s touch. Luckily, he had landed on soft sand and there were no broken bones.

  At home Catherine’s cook had kept his dinner warm in the miraculous new six-plate cast-iron stove her father had imported from Germany as their wedding gift. He pecked a kiss on his wife’s cheek as she set his plate on the table.

  “Where are the boys?” he asked. “I hope they’ve not overstayed their welcome with your father. He was in the middle of his famed pirate stories when I last saw them.”

  She laughed, the light musical sound which had drawn his attention when he was fifteen. “That was long ago. They came home and would have eaten everything in sight, including your own dinner, I’m afraid, had I not stopped them. George has gone to study his lessons with the Galbraith children and I believe Jonathan is reading in the parlor.”

  He smiled at the way she clung to the British words, such as parlor. In his childhood homes there had usually been one common room, sometimes a separate bedroom or kitchen, sometimes not. His parents would have never conceived of having different rooms for each purpose and certainly would not have imagined a thing called a parlor.

  Since Ramona’s death five years ago, his father had spread out in the small wooden house which he had bought from Brookie at some point, now using the children’s former bedroom as his studio. He lived a solitary life, painting in the mornings, the better time for his failing eyes to take advantage of the light. Catherine normally took him some dinner in the early afternoon but Carlito ate little these days. Enrique recognized the signs—his father would not live much longer.

  He handed his empty plate to his wife and gave her another kiss. His youngest son sat on the couch, another addition courtesy of Brookie, the softest piece of furniture in the house, with its padded seat. The wooden arms and back had been carved to match the room’s other chairs and Catherine took great pride in seeing that their slave girl dusted and polished them until they gleamed.

  “Not outside playing?” Enrique teased.

  Jonathan looked up with copies of his own dark, serious eyes. He pointed to the book on his lap. “It’s the history of ancient Rome. Did you know that the Romans held nearly all of Europe and built roads that are still in use today?”

  Enrique actually had not known that last part. “You are an excellent scholar. Mr. Billingham says so.”

  “I like his classes. He loaned me this book but it isn’t part of our course work.”

  “Good. I’m glad you get along with your teacher and that you are learning so much.”

  “Papá? Can I ask you something?”

  Enrique nodded and took a seat nearby. While George’s questions always followed the lines of, “may I take some more pudding?” or “can I sail with one of the galleons when I’m sixteen?”, Jonathan’s questions were likely to come from the inner reaches of his intelligent mind and could concern anything. It was often a challenge to provide answers.

  “Papá, that box you keep on the shelf … would you teach me how to use it one day?”

  A knot formed in Enrique’s stomach. “To use it?”

  “Yes. I have noticed that you take it down and hold it nearly every day. Always on the days when you visit your patients.” The boy closed his book and looked at his lap. “I have a confession, Papá. I touched it once.”

  The knot went tighter. His thoughts flashed through a half-dozen scenes—events where he had cured sickness, times when he found himself with such unlimited energy that he had to leave the house for fear of the destruction he might do, and one time when someone else had touched it, an old woman whose eyes then glowed with the frightening power of the devil itself. He watched his young son’s expression carefully. “And what happened?”

  “I … I am not sure I should say.”

  “You will not be in trouble. But you need to tell me.”

  “You know how the box is normally somewhat dark and dull? This day, you had not put it on the shelf. It was on that table by the window. I thought it looked more attractive, much handsomer in some way. That’s when I touched it.”

  “And?”

  “The wood was warm. I thought the sunlight had been on it, but that window was in the shade at the time. I put my hand on it like this …” He laid his palm flat on the book. “… and the box became even warmer. I think the color of it grew brighter. The little stones … they were most definitely brighter.”

  “Did you open the lid? Put your hands inside?”

  The boy’s eyes went wide. “No. Only the lid, I promise. I’m sorry, Papá, if I should not have done it.”

  “But the box has aroused your curiosity and you want to know what makes it react.”

  Jonathan nodded vigorously.

  “I will tell you. I promise. But you are not yet twelve and it’s an important responsibility, an adult responsibility, to use that box. A time will come in the next few years when I can show it to you, teach you what to do with it. For now, though, I need your promise that you will not touch it again.”

  “I promise.”

  Their eyes met, two dark pairs. They understood each other. At least Enrique hoped they did, for the futures of many people could depend upon his finding exactly the right person to hand the box to one day.

  * * *

  Carlito’s time came on the eve of his eightieth birthday, although dates that far back in time, births that were never officially recorded in the small pueblo towns of northern New Mexico, were rarely remembered and in Carlito’s case he had long since lost track of his age. He was unsure even of his children’s ages. Ramona had once remembered them but she had left this earth many years ago. They gathered here now, those remaining.

  Miguel must be close to sixty—his hair was completely gray—and his own children were adults. His wife, the freed-woman Adana who had changed her name to Edna, had died giving birth to their third.

  Lorenzo had long since sailed to make his fortune in Spain. The family had never heard another word, and his fate was unknown. Many ships went down in those years. He never would know, Carlito realized as his final breaths wheezed in his lungs.

  Francesca went away with a Cuban who came to Belize on a ship that delivered rum. Once in a great while, during the years her mother was alive, she had written. That man had beaten her but she met another, a good man. As far as Carlito knew, she still lived there with him.

  His eyes moved to Enrique, the son who had stayed closest, who had helped his parents through the years. His wife, Catherine, stood at his side with tears in her eyes. He wanted to tell her not to be sad, that he had finally reached life’s ultimate goal. Beside the couple were their two boys. Something in that younger one was special. Carlito knew it but was too tired at the moment to figure out what that special quality was.

  Then he thought of baby Aurelia. Prone to fevers and tropical diseases, she had fought a brave fight but one day an especially bad bout came. Her brother cried over her, wanting so badly to save her, but despite the fact that he was able to cure many people of many troubles he had not been able to keep her aliv
e. She’d lain in the graveyard beside her mother for several years now.

  A tear slipped from Carlito’s eye and ran down the side of his face. Although his eyes were closed now he heard Catherine sob loudly.

  “Do not worry about me. I have lived a good life, a satisfying life,” he said, wishing his voice did not sound so garbled. Then he exhaled for the last time.

  * * *

  “Jonathan, come with me,” Enrique said, motioning his son toward Brookie’s old study in the house he and Catherine and the boys had moved into after the old man’s death a decade earlier. He closed the solid door behind them.

  The paneled walls and sturdy furnishings had always felt reassuring and comfortable to Enrique, here in this place where he had established his medical office so patients could come at any time to see him. Many had come to the house during the past two days of visitation, for everyone in town knew the Martinez family, most had been treated by Enrique and all were respectful of his father. Now that the burial in the plot next to beloved Ramona was done, nothing was left but the empty hours until everyone left.

  “The subject we talked about, years ago, when I told you the right day would come,” he said, reaching for the shelf which held the carved wooden box.

  “I am ready now?” asked the young man whose deep brown eyes were now magnified by a studious-looking pair of spectacles.

  “I believe so.”

  Enrique set the box on his ornately carved desk. He stepped back. “Open it.”

  Jonathan took a deep breath and moved forward. Both hands steady, he raised the lid on its hinges. Enrique watched, practically holding his breath, waiting for any sign of trouble. None came. He breathed again.

  “Your grandfather repaired those hinges once, I had forgotten the incident until this very minute.”

  Not taking his eyes from the box, the young man tilted the lid fully open. Enrique remained watchful but said nothing. Jonathan touched the inner lid where a few letters had been carved in some unknown long-ago time. They were faint but in bright light he had once been able to make out a few V-I- something-T. The rest was unreadable. He ran his index finger along the inside edges of the box, following the perimeter. Enrique remembered the exact moment when he had done the same, and the box’s reaction. The very same thing happened this time.