by Jane Langton
Old bawd
Article of traffic
Presents neked
Pocks & venereal
All in scabs
Venerious & pustelus
Sport publickly
“Insane,” said Pratt. “Uneducated guy, wouldn’t you think? Can’t spell worth a damn.”
Homer stared at the list. “The spelling’s odd, I grant you, but the words aren’t exactly uneducated. This word Publickly, for instance.” He glanced up at Pratt’s tormented face. “There’s this classy bar in Boston, calls itself Publick House, Publick with a ‘K.’ You know what I mean—ostentatiously old-fashioned.”
Pratt took the list back from Homer and studied it. “That’s right. I see what you mean.”
“They probably have something to do with sex, wouldn’t you say? Venerious and pustelus, meaning some kind of venereal disease? All in scabs? Symptoms of the same thing? This word sport, maybe it doesn’t mean basketball or baseball, that kind of sport. Maybe—”
“Hey,” said Pratt, “hold it. I gotcha. Wait a sec.” He whirled around in his chair. “I just happen to have the complete OED right here.”
Homer’s jaw dropped. There they were, all twenty thick volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, lined up on a shelf in the office of the Charlottesville Chief of Police, squeezed between catalogues of firearms and reference books on toxicology.
Pratt heaved the SOOT-STYX volume off the shelf, plopped it down on a reading stand, and flipped the pages to the word sport.
Homer stared enviously at the reading stand. It was a beautiful piece of furniture with a slanted top. In a flicker of resolution, he decided to make one for himself out of pine boards, because it didn’t look all that difficult, you’d just need to cut the side pieces on the slant and screw a square piece on top and there you’d be with the reading stand of your dreams, and you could leave the dictionary open on the top and store the entire twenty volumes of the OED on a couple of shelves underneath, so handy, right there in the kitchen, next to the refrigerator, Mary wouldn’t mind, she’d be delighted, and then they could look up words in the middle of a meal.
“Sport,” said Pratt. Turning around triumphantly. “First meaning, pleasant pastime, recreation, diversion. Second meaning, amorous dalliance. So in this case, Professor Kelly, it must mean—”
“Please, Chief, not Professor. Call me Homer.”
Pratt beamed at him. “Okay, Homer, and my name’s Oliver. Anyway, what the hell, as I was saying, this weirdo is using the word sport to mean amorous dalliance. Using it in its archaic sense. But why? Where does it come from? Is it a quotation of some sort? A quotation from what?”
Homer laughed. “Chief Pratt, you’re a man after my own heart. Those books must have cost a pretty penny.”
“Money no object.” Pratt smiled. His haggard face was transformed. “You see, I’ve got this project. I’m looking up old words in the language of Thomas Jefferson. Hobby of mine. You know, instead of building birdhouses or collecting stamps.”
“The language of Thomas Jefferson? Why Jefferson?”
The learned police chief looked at him keenly. “Do the words created equal mean anything to you? Self-evident? Pursuit of happiness?”
“Oh, oh, I see what you mean.”
“Revolution? Republican? Traitor?” Once again Pratt turned in his chair and reached for the OED. Then he changed his mind. “Hey, Homer, I’ve got a job for you.” He plucked another book off the shelf and handed it across the desk.
Homer looked at the title in surprise—The Mind of the Monster: A History of Serial Killers. It was a steep descent from the sublime heights of Jeffersonian lexicography.
“You won’t like it,” said Pratt. “It’s a disgusting book written by an idiot, but it may come in handy.”
Chapter 28
… it is now all important with us to meet with those people … for without horses we shall be obliged to leave a great part of our stores … a stock already sufficiently small for the length of the voyage before us.
Captain Meriwether Lewis, August 8, 1805,
near the Great Divide
When two people of different sexes and more or less the same age find themselves in the same room for weeks at a time, they size each other up. Well, the truth is, they size each other up in the first fraction of a second, but as time goes by, the first instantaneous judgment may change—growing warmer or colder, or perhaps just more confused.
Both Tom and Fern were wary. In the past both had fallen in love with, gone to bed with, fallen out of love with, or been dumped by several different partners, and each of them regarded people of the opposite sex with suspicion, however plausible they might seem in the beginning.
Fern was leery of toothy smiles, artificially induced states of rapture, and knives in the back. Well, it hadn’t been a knife exactly. Jim Reeves had broken up with her carelessly, like a boy tossing a pebble into the sea. Oh, God, why didn’t he write?
Tom was cagey about beauty—in the past he had been led astray by extraordinary gorgeousness, learning to his cost that sometimes it was only skin-deep. He had figured out that you had to treat a woman the way the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition handled a deer they had shot for supper—you had to insert a sharp knife and pull back the hide and find out if the heart inside was the size of a pea.
But in Fern Fisher’s case there was no question of excessive glamour. She was a big healthy woman with a lot of brown hair falling down her back.
And Fern could see that Tom’s homely face with its big nose was a long way from the artificial charm of ex-husband Buddy. Nor did he seem in the grip of any mind-altering drug. As for a knife in her back, it was too soon to tell. It could happen in a flash—the skewer between the shoulderblades.
And there was always the probability that he was gay. The men she was attracted to often were. Fern watched for any sign, a particularly subtle understanding, an outrageous comic sense, a total blankness of response to the fact that she was female.
Tom was equally uncertain about Fern. She didn’t seem to be giving off any pheromones, or whatever you called the invisible globules of sexiness pouring out of the female animal. Some women moved in a steamy cloud, but not Fern. The air around her was clear.
But of course it didn’t matter anyway, because there was a gulf between them about the thing that mattered most, their opinion of Thomas Jefferson, the man who had built this house, who had arched over their heads this spacious dome.
The nature of their disagreement infuriated Fern. It was like a game of cards with someone holding nothing but trumps. Tom’s trumps were from a suit called Slavery.
Fern would toss down on the table the Declaration of Independence, and—BANG!—down would come Tom’s card to win the trick, because the man who wrote the Declaration had owned slaves. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? What kind of liberty did his slaves have? What kind of happiness could they pursue?”
“But—”
“And anyway the Declaration was just a bunch of ideas that were floating around all over the place.”
Fern was exasperated. “But Jefferson said so himself.” She closed her eyes and the words appeared. “Not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject. You see? That’s all he was trying to do.”
Tom looked at her slyly. “But I notice he bragged about it on his tombstone.”
“Oh, God.” Fern abandoned the Declaration of Independence and slapped down another winning card. “Okay, then, what about the Louisiana Purchase? He doubled the size of the country with a stroke of the pen.”
“Was slavery forbidden in the entire new territory? It was not.” WHAM.
Infuriated, Fern tried again. This card was a winner for sure. “What about Lewis and Clark? I mean, the expedition was Jefferson’s idea from the start.”
Tom looked at her pityingly, and pulled another trump out of his sleeve. “Don’t tell me you didn’t kn
ow about Clark’s black slave, York? Poor York! He was with them all the way, but he never got paid, he never got a piece of land like the other men, and he wasn’t freed either. You mean you didn’t know that?”
All Fern’s arguments collapsed. Struggling to hold her own, she threw down her last ace. “Well, for heaven’s sake, what about the University of Virginia? He did it all. I mean, he persuaded the legislature, he designed the architecture, the whole idea was new, it was a model for all the schools that came after, it was—”
Tom said mildly, “Were black students admitted to the University of Virginia?”
So it was no use. All Thomas Jefferson’s noble cards were swept off the table, leaving only Thomas Jefferson, Slave holder.
George had to find another fast-food place. Twitchy-looking men in uniform kept showing up in the pizza parlors and Burger Kings in his neighborhood. He cruised around in his van, exploring the north side of town.
George was proud of the van, it was so invisible. It had once belonged to an electrician, and the back was windowless and empty. George had spray-painted the whole thing a dull gray. You could hardly see the vehicle, it was so blah.
Late one night he found a new Chuck Wagon way out beyond Shopper’s World. There were no customers inside and nobody behind the counter but one woman flipping burgers. George sat on a stool and watched her pick up his order from the steam table and slide it on a plate.
She was not pretty. She’d probably be flattered if he asked her to come outside for a smoke. She had coal-black hair and a broad dark-complected face with high cheekbones. Indian blood for sure.
Sometimes George felt himself raised to a great height, looking down on the earth from above. This was one of those times.
Chapter 29
The Great Chief of this nation proved to be the brother of the woman with us.… We spoke a fiew words to them in the evening respecting our rout intentions our want of horses &c.… The account they gave us was verry unfavourable, that the River abounded in emence falls … perpendicular clifts impenetrable.…
Captain William Clark, August 17, 1805,
among the Shoshones
Anew and ghastly suspicion had occurred to Augustus Upchurch. There had been another horrible killing, and this time a high-school boy had come forward claiming to have seen something out of the corner of his eye, the poor victim walking out of a new fast-food place with a man.
There were now two vague descriptions. Both had been turned over to a police artist. Bewildered, he produced a sketch of the murderer’s face that was a compromise between two wild extremes.
The resulting figment of his imagination was featured on the front page of the Charlottesville Daily Progress.
To Augustus Upchurch it looked exactly like young Tom Dean. He was profoundly alarmed. Poor darling Fern! She might at this moment be in mortal danger!
At once he put into operation his plan to install a spy.
There was no question about who it should be. Flora Foley, his fellow board member in the Society for Jefferson Studies, was perfect for the job. She was a fellow writer, turning out a new thriller every year. Her novels were never published, but they were packed with torrid and violent action. Her characters talked out of the sides of their mouths, using obscenities a quarter of a century out of date.
She knew everything about police procedure and the scene of the crime. She was informed about the proper care of bloodstained garments. She knew the importance of evidence tags. She sprinkled her manuscripts with the gruesome details of mortuary science, the consecutive degrees of putrefaction, the grisly succession of insects on a cadaver. She knew the muzzle velocities of firearms, the pockets of her characters bristled with snub-nosed derringers and .22-caliber Magnums. They carried duct tape, hand grenades and hunting knives. She had the lingo down pat—aggravated assault, unnatural intercourse, unauthorized personnel. Her characters never got out of a car, they exited the vehicle.
“Flora?”
“Oh, my God, is that you, Gus?”
It pained Augustus to be called Gus. “Flora, I wonder if I could drop in on you this morning? There’s something I want to talk to you about, something very important.”
“Oh, God, no, not this morning. I’m writing this big scene in the morgue. They’ve got the perp on the slab.”
“The perp?”
“The perpetrator. They’re sewing his mouth shut, only he suddenly wakes up. God, I can’t stop now.”
At once Augustus was aware of his half-digested breakfast. He swallowed, and went on bravely, “Well, what if I came over this afternoon?”
“Well, okay, sure. Come for a drink.”
Flora Foley’s apartment was something of a mess. As a talented and creative person, she had no time for stupid things like cleaning house. When Augustus appeared at the door, she pulled him inside, heaved a pile of papers off a chair, dumped a cat, and commanded him to sit down.
Flora had picked up her mannerisms from fifty-year-old movies, her tough talk with the cigarette wobbling in the corner of her mouth, her eyes narrowed against the smoke, her foul-mouthed vocabulary—although Flora’s goddamns were pretty puny.
She sat opposite Augustus with her feet planted mannishly far apart and the paraphernalia of the hardnosed private investigator in her hands, the pack of cigarettes and the glass of bourbon. “Okay, I get it,” said Flora. “You want me to hang out up there, keep an eye on the guy, ask him point-blank what he was doing last Tuesday at midnight, et cetera? Right?
“Well, yes, I think so. But—”
Flora rasped her thumb on the wheel of her silver cigarette lighter, lit her cigarette, leaned forward, and tapped her visitor’s knee. “Tell me this, Gus, do you think there’s anything of a sexual nature going on? Killers, lots of times they’re highly attractive to helpless young females. God, some women are gluttons for punishment. Does he kick her around? Is she black and blue? And listen to this, Gus, I’m telling you this, eyeball to eyeball. If he fucks her, ooh boy, is she in trouble.” Flora blew smoke from her nostrils, which produced a fit of coughing. Recovered, she gasped, “So, okay, how do I explain what the hell I’m doing there?”
Augustus waved away a cloud of smoke. “Tell Fern you’re her new research assistant. You know the sort of thing. You’ll get books out of the library and”—Augustus had no idea what a research assistant was supposed to do—“take dictation? You used to do shorthand, didn’t you, Flora?”
“Did I? Christ, Gus, for twenty-five years I was executive secretary to the president of the Albemarle County Tobacco Growers Association. My boss used to say to me, Flora, you’re a goddamned wonder, and if I say so myself he was right.” Flora dropped her smoldering cigarette into her glass, where it hissed and went out (an authentic gesture from an old Edward G. Robinson movie).
The Missouri River flowed still farther across the ceiling. Under Tom’s meticulous brush it was now approaching the Great Falls, where the long and strenuous portage would begin.
The time line too was progressing. Fern had inscribed many good entries for the summer of the year 1804 in Jefferson’s life. But this morning she had to take time out. Turning around suddenly, she bashed her forehead against a sharp corner of Tom’s ladder and fell back moaning.
She had to sit down while he ran downstairs for a wet paper towel. While he was gone, feeling lightheaded and dizzy, she had a new notion about Thomas Jefferson.
She would tell it to Tom, she would make him see that it wasn’t just the things Jefferson did or wrote or said, it was something in his very character that was significant. The nature of the country itself was still formless in some ways, capable of being shaped in any number of fatal directions. When Jefferson became president, he washed away the regal dignity of George Washington and the formality of John Adams with a pitcher of clear water.
Fern smiled, remembering the carpet slippers, the open door, the pell-mell seating at the dinner table. She closed her eyes and rehearsed a splendid conclusion—If it’s
true that we Americans today—all of us, right here, right now—feel free of the baggage of royal protocol and kingly majesty, we owe it to the determined simplicity of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.
Pressing the towel to her forehead, she tried to explain it to Tom. But her head was still throbbing. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll tell you later.” And soon she was back at work, bending over a new strip of paper on the table, recording the Burr-Hamilton duel and Jefferson’s triumphant re-election.
Tom’s part of the time line was farther along. Lewis and Clark had made their way halfway around the room. At the moment he was copying Captain Lewis’s astronomical observations at the Yellowstone River. Softly he read the entry aloud as he wrote it below the line:
… observed Equal altitudes of the with Sextant and
artificial horizon.
A.M. 9.h 41.m 13.s. P.M. 6.h 49.m 3.s
It was at that moment that Flora Foley walked in and said a loud “Good morning!”
Their two heads swerved. Who was this strange lady?
She marched into the room, flat-footed, and stuck out her hand. “Flora Foley here. You’re Fern Fisher?”
“Yes,” said Fern. Doubtfully she shook Flora’s hand.
“And who’s this” said Flora, staring at Tom.
Fern introduced him once again with exaggerated heartiness.
“Morning,” muttered Tom.
Glowering, Flora turned back to Fern. “Listen here, Fern Fisher, I’m a gift to you from Gus Upchurch. How do you like that?”
Fern was appalled. “A gift from Mr. Upchurch?”
“Who else?” Flora spread her arms wide. “Here I am, my girl, your own personal girl Friday. See? I’ve brought my steno pad and pencil. Tell me, dear, what can I do to help?” Then Flora leaned forward and peered at Fern more closely.
Her eyes narrowed to private-investigator slits. “My God, girl, what happened to you? You’re black and blue.”
