End Of The Year Collection - 2014

by Spain, Laura

  “I’m very sorry,” she said. “His papers have been extensively catalogued, but I can find no reference to any such letter.’

  I was turning to go, when another thought struck me.

  “Have you ever heard of Herbert’s Map?” I said.

  “Can you possibly mean Sir Thomas Herbert, author of Some Yeares Travels into Africa and Asia?” she said with the kind face of a daughter trying to find the right word for an aging parent.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “I saw a reference to it in the catalogue for Professor Hunt,” she said and disappeared again into the archives.

  I paced in a circle during one of the longest ten minutes in my life until she emerged carrying a small volume in an aged leather binding. When I reached for it, she held up her hand.

  “You must rest it on these to protect the binding,” she explained, setting two wooden triangles on a reading table. “And wear these.” She held out two thin white cotton gloves. “This was Professor Hunt’s own copy.”

  So I sat down and opened Herbert’s 1638 account of his travels to Persia and India that lead to the establishment of the Laudian Professorship in Arabic studies. The binding was about seven by eleven inches; it had been decades or centuries since anyone had opened it. At the bottom of the frontispiece was a shield with three prowling lions, the Royal Arms of England, above the motto: Pawb yn y Arver, or “To each his own customs,” as I learned later. Herbert, it seems, was Welsh.

  On the title page, he had added a final line:

  “With a revivall of the first Discoverer of America.”

  Illustrated by his own maps and drawings of the people, plants and animals of the Middle East and India, Herbert’s Travels was a natural history, guide book, and compendium of classical references, fables and cultural critiques of those strange and distant places. The last chapter was entitled, “Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd discovered America above three hundred yeeres before Columbus.”

  Herbert then repeated the legend of the Welsh prince who discovered America in the twelfth century and set off with a party of colonists never to return that had captivated Governor Dinwiddie. He found proof of their colonization through a number of common words in the Welsh and Aztec languages.

  Having set forth the argument that by virtue of Madoc’s expedition, the King of England had superior title to the Americas over the King of Spain, Herbert reported an encounter between a Virginia colonist and Welsh speaking Indians a hundred years before Dinwiddie:

  And a certain Inhabitant of Virginia (a place subject to the King of Great Britain) straggling not long ago into the Wilderness, by chance, fell among a People who according to some Law or Custom of theirs condemned him to Death when he, in Hearing of them, made his Prayer to God in the British [Welsh] tongue; upon which he was released.

  I photographed the frontispiece, cover, and last pages about Madoc and the Welsh-speaking Indians. Maybe they would give Lowry some support, but still nothing about the Devil’s Map that led Addleton and the four Welshmen to their deaths.

  “Would you be interested in seeing Mr. Pocoke’s commentary on Herbert?” the young woman asked.

  She was holding a folio.

  “Mr. Pocoke?” I said.

  “The first Laudian Professor of Arabic. We found it next to Herbert’s Travels.”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said, trying to conceal my excitement.

  I opened it carefully and caught my breath. A sheet of paper covered with Arabic script and numbers with a skull drawn over it was at the top. Lifting it out, I saw that the skull had a hole in the forehead, just like the skull on Addleton’s tombstone.

  “Is this helpful?” she asked.

  “This is exactly what I was looking for.”

  I doubt archivists have many moments like this.

  The next page was Miss Dinwiddie’s letter to Hunt, damning him forever sending John Addleton to Virginia with “Mr. Herbert’s cursed map” to make his fortune with her father’s reward for finding Welsh speaking Indians. Underneath that was William Powell’s letter to the former Governor demanding the reward as the price of the lives of the doomed men of the Addleton expedition.

  He led us into a terrible wilderness through the black arts, hunched every night over his own fire, making his devilish calculations. Then, when at last it appeared we had achieved the objective of this hellish journey, he vowed he would lead us on to what he called “the great city of Madoc,” another lifetime’s journey into the wilderness. Here God struck him dead for his insolence, and we four of his unfortunate companions set about upon a return journey, from which only I have emerged alive.

  “I cannot explain how these documents were placed in this folio,” the young woman said. “The catalogue is very clear that it contains papers of Mr. Pocoke.”

  “Perhaps someone was trying to hide them.” I said.

  “We do not hide things at the Bodleian,” she said, offended. “I shall inform the Librarian that a serious error has been made in the catalogue.”

  I set aside the 18th century letters and went deeper into the portfolio. On a discolored paper was a note in faded brown script, apparently by Pocoke, dated March 1639, about certain papers Mr. Thomas Herbert had put into his possession. While in Isfahan, capital of the Safavid Empire of Persia, Herbert had discovered a map drawn centuries earlier in Bagdad by Ibrahim bin Har’shun, the great Arab cartographer. Obsessed with secrecy, Har’shun described the continents and the empires of the world from Bagdad to Mexico in a series of algebraic equations. Perhaps seeing some link to the cabalistic numbers that had fascinated generations of scholars, Herbert had made a copy of Har’shun’s Cosmos. Unable to solve the equations, however, he had not included it in his Travels.

  “Are these papers significant for your research?” the young woman asked.

  “I now know why an Oxford student of Arabic led an expedition to Kentucky to find Welsh speaking Indians with Har’shun’s map,” I said.

  “Our graduates have always been quite imaginative,” she said, fixing me with the smile British academics employ when an American acknowledges them.

  I was so excited that I nearly forgot to ask about the connection between Addleton and Hunt.

  “Can you tell me if a man named John Henry Addleton was a student in the 1750s?”

  “Now that will be easy,” she smiled. “We digitized our student records back to 1740.”

  I followed her to her computer. A moment later, she told me that Addleton had matriculated at Hertford College, Oxford in 1752, where Hunt had been a tutor.

  As soon as I was outside, I called Lowry and emailed him my photos of the documents. He was so excited he could hardly speak. We finally had the secret of the doomed Addleton expedition: a young scholar learned of Dinwiddie’s reward and decided to make his fortune by finding the Welsh Indians with Har’shun’s mathematical map. Finally the kid from Lazard County had the documentation he needed to support his PhD thesis. I flew back to Cincinnati as happy as if I had found a Patterson Colt.

  * * * * *

  When I arrived in Addleton, I had to ask Gary to drive me up to Devil’s Mill. It was the critical part of the growing season, and Lowry couldn’t leave his crop, even for a few hours.

  “The wrong people can get in and mess everything up,” he said when I asked him about it that evening.

  Gary stayed with us while Lowry grilled steaks and corn, and we drank some of the beer we had brought up to the old stone house. Looking out from the porch, all I could see were a few cows and the corn screening the tops of the hills below us.

  “So the great mystery of Devil’s Mill is solved,” Gary said.

  “And it’s only taken 250 years,” Lowry laughed.

  “Ever find any of those Welch speaking Indians, Lowry?” Gary said.

  Lowry looked serious.

  “Did you hear about the graveyard they turned up over in Whitley County?” he said. “Dr. Sims and some of my friends went down to document the find.”<
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  “The ones they think were sacrificed?” Gary asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do they think they were sacrificed?” I wondered.

  “Because they were all hacked up,” Gary said.

  “They weren’t sacrificed,” Lowry said. “They were killed with broad swords.”

  “Same thing to me,” Gary said. “Hey, I got to get home before dark, Glen. You stayin’?”

  I told him I was going to spend the night so Lowry could show me what he’d found over the summer. He promised to pick me up the next day and drove back down the mountain.

  “Come on,” Lowry said. “There’s something I have to show you before I go on sentry duty.”

  I followed him up the hill toward the ruined stone triangle on the crest.

  “It’s over here,” he said, leading me toward a pile of fresh dirt and broken stones. “I dug it out this past summer.”

  We stopped at hole the size of a grave between two rows of the large cut stones. Steps led down into the earth.

  “Come on.”

  I followed him down about six feet and under a stone arch until a wall of mud and debris stopped us.

  “Look down here,” he said.

  There was just enough light coming down the steps to see that we were standing on two large stone slabs. Beneath me was the figure of a knight in chain mail armor holding a broad sword. On the other was a woman dressed like a rubbing from a medieval tomb.

  “Addleton didn’t find the Welsh speaking Indians,” Lowry said. “He found the Welsh.”

  “And they were all dead.”

  “That’s why he wanted to follow the map deeper into the wilderness to the Madoc’s city, to see if any had survived.”

  “Can you figure out where he was headed?”

  “I’ve done that. As soon as my crop’s in . . .”

  “Nice job, Lowry,” a voice said from the stairs. “You done most of the work for us.”

  I turned around, and a large man I had never seen before, stinking of bourbon and cigarettes and sweat, was halfway down the steps, leaning against the side with his left hand and pointing a Patterson Colt at Lowry with the other. At the top of the steps, covering us with an AR-15, was Tommy Taylor. He had grown up big and hard, like so many of them before their first term or two in prison, or before they start on meth.

  “Sorry about this, Mr. Osborne,” he said to me. “You came here at the wrong time.”

  “I’ll give you my crop, Darrell Lee,” Lowry said to the big man.

  “Don’t want your crop, Lowry,” he said, taking another step toward us. “We don’t want yer fancy friends comin’ up our mountain and diggin’ up things that should stay buried.”

  “Like you,” Tommy snickered.

  “Which one of you wants to be first?” Darrell Lee said, grinning.

  Lowry shrugged.

  “May as well be me,” I said, seeing Lowry’s right hand moving to the back of his belt.

  Darrell Lee leveled the Colt at my forehead.

  “You always wanted one of these, didn’t you?”

  I was staring into the muzzle of the most valuable revolver in America, my forehead aching where the bullet was going to hit, my stomach knotted under my chest. In that instant I realized that this was what guns were for, to shoot down men in cold blood and hide their bodies in the earth, the same as William Powell had done to John Addleton so long ago.

  “Darrell!” Lowry shouted.

  The big man glanced to the side, and the pistol fired and fell. Lowry’s knife was sticking in the side of Darrell’s neck. As his knees collapsed, Lowry dove into him like a linebacker tackling the quarterback and drove him up the stairs into Tommy’s rifle, but the shot from the Colt had snapped his prosthetic leg, and he stumbled. The AR-15 caught in Darrell’s overalls and popped like cherry bombs under water, showering Lowry and me with his blood. I grabbed the Colt and for the first time in my life drew back the hammer, felt the trigger snap into place, and shot Tommy in the head. Lowry was lying on top of Darrell Lee, breathing heavily.

  “You OK?” I said, hardly able to speak.

  He was trying to roll off Darrell and didn’t answer.

  “Lowry?”

  I helped him turn and knelt beside him. Blood was pulsing out of his chest.

  “It was all so beautiful,” he said. “I know I could have found Madoc’s city. I know it.”

  “You’re going to be fine, Lowry,” I said, taking his hand. “Lowry?”

  He died before he could say anything else.

  Gripping the Colt, I looked over the top of the steps. The hillside was dark green and empty in the coming darkness. The two killers had thought they could handle it by themselves, but when they didn’t come back, others would come looking. I had one night to give them a Kentucky burial. As long as there weren’t any bodies, the family would invent some reason for their disappearance to spare themselves the shame of having their own killed by someone meaner and stronger. Then they would wait for years or generations until they could identify the killer and take their revenge.

  Where could I bury them on what was about to become the most important archaeological site in Kentucky and the United States? Even if I could convince a Lazard County jury that I hadn’t murdered the Taylor boys, their survivors would find me. No, they and Lowry had to disappear and the site be abandoned, as it had been for so many centuries before the first Grimes’ had climbed up the mountain and claimed it.

  I carried Lowry’s body down the stairs and laid him over the knight in the crypt. Then I stretched out Darrell Lee under the arch and dragged down Tommy beside him. For a second I thought about keeping the Patterson Colt, but I’d never be able to sell it without saying how I got it, and it would be the best evidence against me in a trial. So I put it in Lowry’s hands and crossed them over his chest, like the knight beneath him. Then I spent the worst night of my life filling in the crypt and the stairs with the mud and dirt Lowry had spent the summer digging out.

  When I was finished, the sky to the East was starting to glow, but there was still too much dirt left over. The cows were lowing when I went to the barn for a wagon. I pulled it back to the dirt pile, shoveled it all on, and dragged the wagon up to the edge of the mountain beside the remnant of the stone wall. Then I dumped it over the cliff and listened to it rattling down 500 feet below. I had never been so tired, but I was filthy dirty, stained with enough blood to convict me a dozen times. So I stripped off my clothes and sat down beside the spring that had watered Madoc’s descendants and generations of Grimes and washed and washed and washed until the sun came up.

  I walked back to the stone house naked. Thank God I had brought a change of clothes and a suitcase to take my soaking rags away. I took a beer, then another out of the refrigerator and sat on the step to the porch to drink. The cows were still lowing in the barn. Damn it! Why did he have to keep cows for cover?

  I went out to the barn, found his stool and pail, and sat down to milk them. Everything had to look as if nothing had happened when the Taylors came by that night, thirsty for revenge. So I put the milk into the cooler and let the cows out into the field. Then I went back to the house and collapsed. Maybe they would think that he had run away after killing Tommy and Darrell Lee.

  I woke up late morning with a pang like a knife slicing up under my chest. I had forgotten Lowry’s notes and the papers that would bring the archaeologists back to excavate the site and find the three fresh bodies. He had set aside one room as his study with copies of everything I had sent him and notes on how to translate the Cosmos. I stuffed them into my suitcase and took his laptop. Nothing was left to make anyone think he was anything other than a graduate student with a crazy idea for a thesis. I finished just as Gary drove up and honked in the yard.

  “Where’s Lowry?” he asked when I got into the cab.

  “Watching his crop.”

  “Quite a guy,” he said.

  I had to turn away to say “Yes” without weeping. />
  Gary called the next summer and asked to meet at Dudley’s in Lexington. Maybe he’s found another Henry rifle for me, I thought, or maybe he’ll tell me that the Taylors have figured it all out and are coming after me. So we talked about UK’s prospects for the new season until he came to the point. My chest was tight for fear of what he would say.

  “Lowry had a girlfriend,” he finally said.

  I remembered him talking about the girl who searched Boswell’s writings for him in the middle of the night so I would know where to go when I got to Oxford.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “She called me.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s from Eastern Kentucky, and she’s figured out somebody killed and buried him. She wants to put up a tombstone for him in Addleton cemetery, so he won’t be so alone.”

  And she’ll have a place to weep, I thought. So Gary agreed to drive up to Devil’s Mill and bring one of the stones back in his truck, and I agreed to have it engraved. After everything was done, he sent me a picture:

  Lowry Grimes

  1982-2010

  Canys mewn llawer o ddoethineb y mae llawer o ddig: a’r neb a chwanego wybodaeth, a chwanega ofid.

  “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” My friend at UC translated it for me.

  I will never return to Lazard County, and I will never again long for a Patterson Colt. I still drive the circuit through the near South every year, looking for historic firearms and swapping tales with people who may have them or know where they may be found. I have noticed that I am drinking more, and instead of adding a story of my own to something I hear, I often just shake my head and say, “Is that a fact?”

  I have seen everything this business has to offer, but I can’t talk about it. I put Lowry’s papers into a file and gave them and his computer to my lawyer, with instructions to send them to the Archaeology Department at UK when I am dead. After all, no one knew about the Welsh settlement of Kentucky for centuries after they had all died, and it hasn’t made any difference yet. I wonder if anyone will care when they finally discover that Madoc really did discover America.