by Spain, Laura
“Did he find any?” I asked, smiling.
“He died before he could do much,” Lowry said. “He’s buried at Devil’s Mill. I’ve seen the tombstone.”
“What’s it say?” I wondered.
Lowry frowned.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Some of it’s devil writing.”
“What’s devil writing?”
“I don’t know,” he said, squirming. “You’d have to see it.”
I’d never been to Devil’s Mill and didn’t want to go. After most Lazard County farmers had gone from corn to marijuana, it was dangerous for a stranger, who might be suspected of being an undercover cop or worse, to drive the narrow roads into the hills. Besides, you could get caught in a crossfire between competing growers, like the Grimes and the Taylors, and find yourself bleeding out in a ditch.
“How big is the stone?” I asked.
He held his hands about 2 1/2 feet apart about 3 feet from the floor.
“Why don’t you get some paper and crayons and do a rubbing for me.”
“What’s a rubbing?”
“Tape the paper to the stone and rub the crayon over it. The indentation for the letters will be lighter so we can read them.”
“It’ll cost you,” he said.
“How much?”
Lowry thought for a moment.
“Twenty dollars.”
“I’ll give you ten.”
“Deal,” he said, and we high fived.
* * * * *
I wasn’t planning on returning to Addleton for another year, but Lowry’s arrow and his story about devil writing were so intriguing that I went out of my way half a day to come by again that spring.
“Got your grave rubbing,” he said, handing me a rolled up piece of newspaper.
I spread it out on Gary’s desk.
John Henry Addleton
1728-1758
Pan fyddo marw dyn drygionus, fe a ddarfu am ei obaith ef.
Lowry had outlined each letter with the tip of the crayon so they could be easily read.
“That’s the devil writing,” he said proudly.
I shook my head.
“I’m not sure, but it might be Welsh.”
“Welsh?” he exclaimed. “Do you know what it says?”
“I can find out.”
He was as excited as the day I had told him his arrow head might be 900 years old.
At the bottom of the rubbing was a skull. Looking closer, I saw a circle in the forehead.
“I’ve never seen anything like that on a tombstone,” I said.
Lowry looked straight at me. The smile was gone.
“It means he was murdered,” he said.
Bending over the table, I looked closer at the rubbing. It was on a page from the Lazard County Beacon. Under the inscription, I could just make out “Comings and Goings.” Darrell Lee Taylor had completed his term in the state penitentiary and was coming home.
“Wasn’t he the one who found your Dad?” I asked.
The muscles on Lowry’s jaw stood out, but he didn’t speak.
“Let me see if I can get this translated for you,” I said, rolling up the rubbing.
A friend in the University of Cincinnati history department translated the inscription and told me that reports of Welsh speaking Indians were widespread along the American frontier in the 18th century. Welsh immigrants were moving into Pennsylvania and Virginia, bringing with them the legend of a Welsh prince who had landed on the Gulf Coast and founded a colony in the 12th century. Survivors supposedly went native and were assimilated by the Indians, except for their language. John Henry Addleton could have been searching for them or was just another unlucky pioneer who lost his life in the brutal and unrelenting wilderness.
When I came through the next year, however, everything about Lowry Grimes had changed. In place of the joy and enthusiasm was that dead, angry look the men here get, when the last door has been slammed in their faces, and they know they’ll never get out of Lazard County alive. Gary saw it, too, and went into the garage to supervise an oil change.
“I’ve got your translation, Lowry,” I began.
He looked at me blankly.
“It says, ‘When the wicked die, their hope perishes.’ It’s from the Book of Proverbs in the Bible.”
“Sounds like somebody was really out to get him, doesn’t it?” he said bitterly, as if he and the dead man had both been condemned by the same arbitrary deity.
“You should go to college,” I said to change the subject.
He looked away.
“That’s what Mr. Lutz says, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“No money.”
“What about your grandfather?”
“Lung cancer. He’ll be dead before I graduate from high school.”
“I can help you,” I said.
“We don’t take charity,” he snapped, fixing me with that hard mountain look that can chill your blood.
“Then what about the Army?” I suggested. “It got me off the farm. Spend a few years on active duty, go into the reserves, and they’ll pay your way.”
“When were you in?”
“Vietnam.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” he said, looking at me as if I had just saved his life. “But you still owe me $10.”
I took out my wallet and handed him $10. That was in April 2001. Lowry went into the Army in June. He didn’t come home for six years.
* * * * *
“Whatever happened to Lowry Grimes?” I asked at the station several years after Lowry was sworn in.
None of the kids would say anything. When Gary came in from the bays, I asked him.
“He tested out at the top of his recruit class,” he said, a flicker of pride in his voice. “So they sent him to California to learn a foreign language.”
The high school kids lounging elaborately around the office couldn’t meet my eyes. Lowry Grimes, the kid from Devil’s Mill, had outsmarted them all.
“What foreign language?” I wondered.
“Arabic.”
“I guess we know where he’s going, then,” I said.
Gary nodded and glanced at the teenagers trying to look like men. Already two kids who used to hang out at the station had been killed by IEDs in Iraq. No matter how hard they tried to get out of Lazard County, they always came home in a box.
When Lowry Grimes came home, however, they didn’t have to give him a motorcycle escort from the VFW hall to the cemetery. Except for being six years older, he looked nearly the same, just filled out a little more, when I ran into him sitting on the desk in the gas station.
He had talked with Mr. Lutz and was able to enroll as a junior at UK after the Army gave him an associate’s degree for learning Arabic. His world was opening up. Maybe he would be the one who would make it out of Lazard County.
“What are you going to do with the farm?” I asked him.
“Leave it to the growers for now,” he said. “I don’t have time to run them off.”
The growers were the marijuana growers, who were gradually taking over all the arable land left in the county after the farmers had exhausted it with the same crops year after year. Talking about the growers, both his eyes focused behind me in that thousand yard stare so many of our veterans have, scanning the horizon for someone coming at them with a gun.
“Do you ever see Danny Taylor?” I said to change the subject.
“I spot him out in the fields every now and then, but we don’t talk much.”
“Let me buy you a Coke,” I said, going over to the machine.
As he lowered his legs to get down from the desk, the left leg on his jeans rode up, and I saw a metal band stretching into his shoe. He saw me stare.
“Works as good as the original,” he said smiling, but something was wrong about the smile, as if the pain and the horror could be kept at a distance by pretending they weren’t really there.
“Keep an eye out for that Colt Patterson
for me.”
“I hear his Uncle Darrell Lee carries it sometimes,” he said. “Couldn’t tell you what for.”
* * * * *
When I saw him several years later at the garage, he had his B.A. and was starting work on a master’s in early American history. He wanted to write about John Addleton’s expedition to Devil’s Mill, but there was hardly any material.
“I even drove to Richmond and went through the papers of Robert Dinwiddie, Royal Governor of Virginia, to see if they had anything about Addleton that hadn’t been published,” he said. “All I could find was a letter offering to pay Addleton a £500 reward if he found the Welsh speaking Indians.”
“That’s great,” I said.
It isn’t often that a first year graduate student finds a document that the professionals had overlooked.
“Look at this,” he said, showing me a copy of the letter.
In the tight, clear handwriting of an 18th century businessman, Dinwiddie encouraged the young explorer, saying: “Mr. Hunt expresses the greatest confidence in your ability to translate and follow Herbert’s map. Indeed, Sir, he has dispatched you to me for this very purpose.”
“What’s ‘Herbert’s Map?’” I wondered.
“I can’t find anything about it.”
“And Mr. Hunt?”
Lowry shook his head.
“He’s never once mentioned in all the Virginia Historical Society’s records. All we know is that Dinwiddie sent Addleton with four men out here in the fall of 1758 to find the Indians.”
“And?”
“And nothing. No reports or letters from Addleton or anyone else. It’s like everything went blank.”
“Were there any survivors from the expedition?”
“Nobody knows,” he said, frustrated that his discovery had only deepened the mystery.
“What are you going to do?”
“Go back to farming,” he laughed. “Or find myself another topic.”
As he turned to go, I saw he had a sheath knife strapped to the back of his belt.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Something we carried in Iraq,” he said, opening the door into the bays. “In case they got up close and personal. Hey, Gary!”
Gary and his mechanic put down their tools and wiped of their hands to greet him. I was about to ask who might get up close and personal at Devil’s Mill, but they were talking about the UK basketball team, so I let it go.
* * * * *
Later that summer I was at an estate auction in Roanoke, waiting to bid on a collection of Revolutionary War muskets. The decedent had collected 18th century paintings and manuscripts and porcelain along with the firearms, and it was taking all day to go through them. Arriving just after lunch, it was all I could do to keep from dozing off as the auctioneer began the bidding on the manuscripts.
How could anything be so boring, I was thinking as my eyes blurred closed, when he called out, “A copy of a letter dated April 17, 1759 from The Reverend John Warrington to a George Powell of Roanoke, reporting the death Powell’s brother William, sole survivor of the Addleton expedition. Condition, fine.”
I started awake. The auctioneer, a thin haired man in a seersucker suit who kept patting his forehead with a linen handkerchief, caught my movement and smiled at me.
“Who will start the bidding at $1500?” he said, looking out over the collectors and dealers and agents sweating and squirming on gray metal chairs.
Nobody moved, except for a gun dealer who turned to me, wondering if I knew something about manuscripts that he didn’t. Discovery of the letter would be enough to get Lowry’s thesis published.
“$500,” I said, to show I wasn’t anxious but enough to scare off anyone who was bargain hunting.
The auctioneer pretended disappointment.
“The Reverend Warrington was Rector of St. John’s Church in Hampton Roads before the Revolution,” he said. “That’s the oldest church in Virginia.”
Someone bid $750, and I went to $1,000.
“Do I hear $1100?” the auctioneer asked the silent room.
“$1100,” someone said.
I went to $1300. Again no one moved. The auctioneer patted his forehead with his handkerchief and wrote down my number on his ledger. I had just bought my first manuscript.
That evening, after making arrangements to ship the muskets to Cincinnati, I spread out the letter on the desk in my hotel room. The clergyman’s elaborate script still stood out brown and sharp against the yellowing paper.
After the salutation to the “Honorable George Powell,” indicating he was a landowner or held some position in the colonial administration, the Rev. Warrington reported how his brother William, sole survivor of the Addleton expedition, appeared at the rectory door in March 1759. Half starved and shaking from swamp fever, he raged about how Governor Dinwiddie had departed for England without making any arrangement to pay the promised reward. William was furious with Dinwiddie for sending them into the wilderness with only a “map drawn by the devil himself and a mad man to lead them. Three of Gwalia’s brave sons, and now I, the fourth, have been sacrificed for his pleasure.”
So the four men who had accompanied Addleton were all Welsh.
“And now Addleton is where he ought to be, dead and buried, and his cursed map returned to that Governor who is responsible for all our grief and fruitless labours.”
Warrington wrote that he had written a letter for William to Dinwiddie enclosing the map and demanding the reward. Alternating between rage and hope, William said that he was awaiting the reward promised to Addleton. Shortly thereafter William succumbed to a fever. If the clergyman learned of any reply from Governor Dinwiddie, he would send it to George Powell, along with his prayers for the repose of his brother’s soul. In the meantime, William had requested that this epitaph be inscribed on his tombstone:
Er marw ‘mhell o Walia wen r’un faint yw’r ffordd lloewach nen.
If George would send 10 shillings, Warrington would purchase the stone and have it engraved. Apparently the money was never sent. When I drove to Hampton Roads to look at the church cemetery the next day, no stone marked the grave of William Powell. My friend at the University of Cincinnati translated the inscription as: “Though dying far from fair Gwalia, it is the same distance to a brighter heaven.”
* * * * *
It was one of those clear October mornings, just before the snow starts to fall, when Addleton was as brilliant as an old brass rail shined up for important visitors. Gary came out of the station when I pulled up to the pump, and I told him I was going to Devil’s Mill for the disinterment of John Henry Addleton.
“You’re not driving up there in that,” Gary said.
It was more of an order than a question. A Mercedes Benz can send the wrong signal in certain parts of Kentucky. Ever since Lowry Grimes had obtained a court order to open the grave and exhume the explorer’s remains, an influx of visitors had attempted the gravel road up to Devil’s Mill. For outsiders to travel the unmarked county roads could do more damage to the local ecology than tourists stepping off their ships to despoil the Galapagos Islands. Unlike the Galapagos Islands, however, the fauna here fought back.
“I’ll take you in my truck,” he said, wiping the oil off his hands and going into the office for the keys.
Accidents along the one lane roads were frequent, and Gary was often called to tow the wrecked cars and trucks back to town. A reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal had called in after his tires were ripped out by spikes in a board planted in the road, and a television crew turned around after two bullets punched holes in the center of the windshield of their van. On this fine October morning, however, Lowry was taking two SUVs packed with archaeologists and graduate students from UK followed by the TV van to conduct and document the disinterment of Lazard County’s first murder victim. A deputy sheriff led the convoy out of town, and Gary and I followed in their dust.
The county had long since run out of money, a
nd the road to Devil’s Mill had not been oiled down in more than a decade. Leaning over the wheel, Gary seemed to be sensing the van ahead more than seeing it, as if he were driving up a chute in a fog. The road was lined with last summer’s corn, brown and broken by the frost, and overhung by large second growth trees. Every mile or so the corn opened into a side road to an abandoned coal mine or farm.
“We wouldn’t make it if we’d tried this in July or August,” Gary said.
Although Lowry had been so excited when I gave him Warrington’s letter that he could hardly speak, we had to wait until after he got his crop in after the first frost before beginning the legal process to open Addleton’s grave. The corn was long gone by then, except the stalks left along the road to shield the real crop from prying eyes.
When I had asked who was paying for the lawyer to file the petition and the pathologist to examine the body and the archaeologists to supervise the disinterment, he said, “We have an angel investor.” That was his way of telling me that marijuana was funding this expedition into Kentucky’s deadly past.
Suddenly the dust cleared, Gary down shifted into second, and we were going up a hill into the sunshine. The corn was gone, replaced by a few cows on a rocky hillside. We passed a two story stone farmhouse with tire tracks in the yard. At the top, where the other vehicles were circling, were the remains of a three story wall, standing like a stone triangle with a widow slit at the top.
“That’s the mill,” Gary said, parking beside the TV van.
“Have you been here before?” I asked him.
He looked around before opening the door, as if wanting to be sure it was all right to get out of the truck
“Never this close.”
Lowry and the archaeologists and TV crew had walked over to a flat space across the hilltop from the mill. Gibson Tratchet, head of the archaeology department, was telling the TV reporter, an attractive young woman in her late twenties with an enticing, sharing smile, how the dig would proceed. With white, neatly moussed hair, North Face jacket, and a smile that matched the reporter’s, Professor Trachet was the model of the upwardly mobile academic archaeologist.
