Navigating Early

by Clare Vanderpool

  I could still hear the water outside, the river rushing all around this place. But this time I also heard the Allier River in central France. And as I touched the stone archway, I felt the arches of the Gaston Bridge.

  The second room led to another. Then another. There was a light up ahead. I shut off my flashlight and walked toward the opening, lit up by a single lantern, which must have been there already, because Early didn’t have a lantern. But he did have matches. I entered the room and picked up the lantern—and there was the red tartan jacket. Early lay motionless on the dirt floor.

  “Early.” My voice sounded raw. He didn’t move. I reached down, but just before my hand touched him, I could tell something wasn’t right. The jacket was his, but he wasn’t wearing it. It just lay on top of him. I raised the lantern and held it a little closer. The shape of the body was wrong. Kind of flat. I lifted the jacket sleeve just a bit.

  “Early?” I said again, in a whisper. This time hoping with everything in me that it wasn’t him.

  The jacket was caught on something, so I gave it a tug, then jumped back as if I’d seen a ghost. Only it wasn’t a ghost. It was a skeleton—bony white fingers and all.

  “What the—” I jerked back, knocking out the lantern and hitting my head against the low rock ceiling. My heart pounded and my head ached. In total darkness, I touched the back of my head and felt something warm and thick. Blood.

  Then I heard a breath in the cave that wasn’t mine.

  I fumbled around for my flashlight. I must have set it down when I’d come in. Reaching this way and that in the dark, I hoped I wouldn’t grab hold of a skeleton foot. Found it! I switched it on. The light was getting dimmer, but it was still bright enough to allow me to see the room. And there was Early. He sat scrunched up against the wall, his head resting on his knees. He was crying.

  28

  Blood and bones. What a combination. I was getting ready to pass out. I bent over at the waist to get my blood flowing back to my brain and found myself counting to ten, out loud. I used to do that when I was a little kid to distract myself from my many cuts and scrapes.

  “One … two … three …”

  But Early corrected me. “The ones have disappeared.”

  “Four … five … six …”

  “There’s only been one five in the last one hundred digits.”

  “Seven … eight … nine …”

  He looked at the body in its shroud. “That’s not Fisher, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Ten.” I stood upright, still feeling a little wobbly but not falling over.

  “Of course it’s not Fisher. But who is it?”

  “Take a closer look,” said Early.

  “You take a closer look.”

  “You do it.”

  “You do it.”

  This time I wasn’t going to give in. Besides, Early already seemed to know the answer.

  “Early, who is it?”

  “It’s Martin Johannsen.”

  “What? It can’t be. He disappeared over fifty years ago.”

  “Look what’s pinned on his jacket.”

  I didn’t want to look. But I had to. Early had looked already, and he’d survived it.

  I reached out my hand and pulled down Early’s red jacket, just far enough to reveal a blue one. There, pinned to its breast pocket, was a Civil War medal. And there was a bullet hole ripped through his jacket, just below the medal. A piece of paper stuck out of the pocket. It was a receipt. 1894 Winchester Rifle—$18.00.

  Early drew the jacket back up over Martin Johannsen and smoothed the wrinkles out as carefully as if he were tucking the dead boy in for a good night’s sleep.

  “Who would have done this to him?” I asked. “Shot him, I mean, and then left him here all laid out?”

  “It was an accident.”

  That’s the way it was with Early. So sure about everything. No maybes. No guessing. No speculation.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. How do you know it was an accident? Maybe young Martin here walked in on somebody’s wrongdoing. Maybe there was a band of hooligans dealing in whiskey or gambling, and they couldn’t risk Martin running off and giving away their hideout. So they did him in. Or maybe Martin got in the middle of some kind of brawl, and two ne’er-do-wells decided they’d rather shoot him than each other.”

  Early didn’t answer.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling a sense of satisfaction at having poked a few holes in Early’s assessment of what had happened to poor Martin Johannsen. Taking his silence as a rare acknowledgment of defeat, I decided to be a good sport and let it go.

  “Well, there’s nothing we can do for him now,” I said.

  “His mother is waiting for him. We have to take him home.”

  “That’s a nice thought, Early, but I don’t know if we’re exactly the right people to be moving his bones.”

  “Who else is going to do it?”

  Now it was my turn to be a few words short of an answer. Poor Martin Johannsen had lain here for more than fifty years, and we were the ones to find him. Maybe that did leave us with some sort of responsibility to him.

  “Okay, but we can’t just sling him over our shoulders and carry him out of here. Let’s take the Civil War medal. It must belong to Martin’s father, and we can give it to Mrs. Johannsen to prove that we found her son. Then somebody else can come back for his … remains.”

  Early carefully removed the medal from Martin’s jacket pocket. He looked at me as if sizing me up, then reached a decision.

  “You wear it, Jackie.” He reached over to pin it on me.

  I took a step back and held up my hand. “Just put it in your pocket.”

  “But this is a medal for bravery. It doesn’t belong in a pocket.”

  “Then you wear it.” The medal belonged to someone else. Wearing it would feel like an honor that was unearned. And unwanted.

  “I’ve already got Fisher’s dog tags. They’re important. You need something important too.” Before I knew it, Early had the medal pinned on my jacket, and that was that.

  “All right. Now let’s get moving before …”

  “Before what?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt uneasy. “Before Martin here jumps up and wants his medal back.” Early and I began making our way back through the tunnels and caves, toward the waterfall. But something was working its way through the series of cogs and wheels that turned in my own brain. Something was missing.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Early. “You don’t really think Martin is going to want his medal back, do you?”

  It was in that moment that I realized the reason for my uneasiness. It wasn’t that I’d stood next to a dead body—bones jutting out from pant legs and jacket sleeves. It wasn’t that we were in a series of tomblike caves beneath a massive waterfall. Strangely, neither of these was the cause of my unrest.

  “No, I don’t think he wants his medal back. But I think he probably would like to have his gun back. His brand-new 1894 Winchester short-barrel carbine. And I know who has it. The catalog said it was seventeen dollars and fifty cents, and an extra fifty cents for engraving. Martin’s receipt shows he paid eighteen dollars, so he must have had his initials engraved on it. Those initials would have been engraved into the wooden stock of the gun—where someone could trace them with their fingers. I recall someone running his fingers over the stock of his gun. Someone we had an unpleasant encounter with at the Bear Knuckle Inn. I wasn’t paying much attention to it at the time, but I remembered seeing letters engraved on the stock of that someone’s gun.”

  Just then there was the familiar sound of a rifle lever being cranked, and it echoed throughout the very cavern we were standing in. I stood facing the waterfall, its spray glistening on Martin’s medal, until Early tugged on my sleeve.

  “Jackie, Pirate MacScott is here.”

  “I know,” I said, turning around to find myself looking down the barrel of a gun. “That’s not your gun,” I said. “
His initials are engraved right on it. M.J.—Martin Johannsen.”

  MacScott spoke, just above a whisper. “So you think you’ve got it all figured out, do you?”

  “I know enough to know that you’re holding Martin Johannsen’s rifle. You must be the boy Mrs. Johannsen said had come by to show off his new gun. She saw him with it the day Martin went missing. She said the boy’s name was Archibald.” MacScott flinched a little at hearing his given name spoken so freely. “What I don’t know is why you shot him.”

  Archibald MacScott’s face flushed, and he looked as if he’d been struck with the paddle of a schoolmaster.

  “He trifled with me,” MacScott said quietly.

  “He what?” I asked.

  “Trifled.” It was Early who answered. “That means ‘to treat someone like he’s not important.’ ”

  “He was out coon hunting with his shiny new rifle,” said MacScott. “Acting so fine and fancy. I come along and wanted to see that gun. Just feel it in my hands. Yes, I’d gotten a gun, too. I bought it secondhand from a traveling salesman.” MacScott ran his hand over the smooth, polished wood of Martin’s gun handle, still keeping it pointed at the two of us. “But Martin’s was fine. I challenged him to a bet. My gun for his. A little target practice. He said he had a piece of paper with a bull’s-eye printed right on it. The Winchester Company sent it along with his new gun. So we tacked it up to a big sycamore tree and took aim.

  “He took his shot, and I took mine. His hit the bull’s-eye. Mine went right of the mark, hitting only the tree.”

  MacScott breathed deeply, caught up in his own story. “ ‘No harm done,’ he says to me. ‘You keep your gun, and I’ll settle for bragging rights.’ Then he tears off that bull’s-eye and says he’s got to get back home, that his mother will be waiting supper on him. Just like that, and he’s off. Like my gun’s not even worth taking. And I could hear him already, spreading it around to everyone that Archibald MacScott could barely hit a hundred-year-old sycamore tree. He’d probably be waving that bull’s-eye to everyone who’d take a look.”

  MacScott held the Winchester to his eye. “So I took up my gun again. I was just going to whiz one past him, you see. I shot once. ‘You get back here and take my gun,’ I called after him. ‘I never agreed to bragging rights. You got no call to change our bet.’ ”

  MacScott’s breath grew ragged and his voice gravelly. “He didn’t answer. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Just ’cause you got a fancy new Winchester, my gun’s not good enough for you?’ I walked in his direction and came across the bull’s-eye first. He’d wadded it up in a ball and tossed it aside like it was nothing but a game. I walked some more.

  “He was lying still when I come up on him. I’d shot him right through.”

  29

  “It was an accident,” Early said a second time, only this time I realized he was right. It had been an accident. But how had he known? “Why did you put him in a cave?” asked Early. “His mother has been waiting for him to come home. She has supper ready.”

  MacScott lowered the gun slightly, the weight of it taking its toll. “I put him in the cave to keep animals away while I went to tell Mrs. Johannsen. She’d been my teacher in the eighth grade and had always been good to me. But then I got near the house and saw her calling out for him, searching those woods. She said she expected him home any minute, and I lost all courage. I left and never went back.”

  “You could still tell her,” Early said in his way that made everything sound so simple. “You could still make things right.”

  The Winchester sagged a little more. I looked at Early, amazed. Could he actually persuade MacScott to tell the old woman?

  “That’s an admirable suggestion,” he said, the gun and his decision seeming to teeter in the balance. MacScott thought a moment, maybe actually considering the possibility, but then made up his mind—again. He took a partially smoked cigarette from his jacket pocket. Still cradling the rifle in one hand, he ran a match against his pant leg with the other and lit the cigarette stub in one quick motion.

  “No, I’m already too far down this road. There’s no turning back. Mrs. Johannsen’s an old woman who’s better off waiting for her son to come home than knowing he’s dead. And I’ll spend the rest of my days hunting down every bear, coon, and eight-point buck from here to Canada, starting with that Great Appalachian Bear you two have been tracking. He’ll bring in a fine bounty.”

  So that was what he’d been doing all this time. Making up for one missed shot on a bull’s-eye by racking up every hunting trophy and bounty in Maine. He was trying to prove to everyone that he could hit his mark. But looking at MacScott’s gaunt face and one sunken eye, I could tell that wasn’t all. It wasn’t just the missed shot at the bull’s-eye that he’d been carrying around for fifty-some years. It was the shot he’d made and hadn’t meant to that had eaten him from the inside out.

  He puffed the last of his cigarette, letting it drop to the ground and smashing it under the toe of his boot.

  “Hey,” Early said, his eyes wide. “You told a lie earlier. You said you never went back to Mrs. Johannsen’s house. But you have too been there.”

  I expected MacScott to deny it and wondered what a back-and-forth argument between Early and MacScott would be like.

  But MacScott said nothing. He just shifted his weight from one leg to the other.

  “You’re the one who’s been cutting Mrs. Johannsen’s firewood. When I went to get the shovel, the wood was stacked up under the overhang of the shed, and there were cigarette stubs lying all around. They were Lucky Strikes, just like the ones Mr. Wallace, the custodian at school, smokes. Only yours are all burned down to the quick and smashed flat, like that one there.”

  I shifted my gaze from Early, back to MacScott, still waiting for his rebuttal. He remained silent.

  “So you know, then,” said Early.

  MacScott refused to answer.

  “Know what?” I asked, unable to continue being a spectator in this bizarre showdown. One of them had a gun, but the other had words that were apparently hitting their mark. I’d seen everything Early had just mentioned at Mrs. Johannsen’s house. The same cut wood and cigarette stubs. It hadn’t meant anything to me. Could Early be right? Had MacScott been a sort of caretaker for Mrs. Johannsen, cutting her firewood? Maybe even bringing her food—a box of tea, an occasional chicken, a jar of blueberry jam?

  “What does he know?” I asked again.

  “He’s seen Mrs. Johannsen,” Early said. “He knows that she’s ready to let go. But she can’t. Not until Martin comes home.”

  “Well, now”—MacScott broke his silence, his voice a little more gravelly than before—“that’s been the problem all along, hasn’t it? Her son ain’t coming home.” He gave the telltale cigarette butt a nudge with his boot. “That was a long time ago, and there’s nothing left that can be put right.”

  Maybe it was the way MacScott stared so intently and with such regret at Martin Johannsen just then, but I had a thought. I reached down and lifted Early’s jacket. Then, searching through Martin’s other jacket pocket, I pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.

  Early recognized it for what it was before I did. “Hey, it’s that old bull’s-eye.” He unfurled it and held it out to MacScott. I thought that was like waving a red flag in front of a raging bull. “There’s only the one hole, so you’re right. You missed it altogether.”

  MacScott started to squeeze his finger on the Winchester trigger.

  “What he means is …,” I said, trying to come up with something else that Early might have meant, something other than You’re a lousy shot, and here’s the bull’s-eye to prove it. We had to get out of that cave if we didn’t each want to end up another pile of bones, and Early’s pointing out MacScott’s miserable failure to hit that bull’s-eye was surely not going to help us. “I mean, what Early is trying to say is …” I grasped for words.

  MacScott was obviously reliving this whole story as if it we
re happening all over again. How many times had he replayed that day in his mind? How many times had he wished he could have one more chance at that bull’s-eye? Actually, that was an idea.

  I stood up a little straighter. “What Early is suggesting is that it’s a very small bull’s-eye. Maybe you could hit it if you just had another chance. I mean, you probably still wouldn’t hit the actual bull’s-eye, but you might at least hit the paper.”

  The dread pirate’s eye narrowed. “What are you talking about? I could hit that bull’s-eye dead center five times in a row if I wanted to.”

  “From in here, sure. It’s a tiny little cave.”

  MacScott sneered. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you. You don’t want me to kill you right here in this cave. You want me to take you outside to prove I can hit this bull’s-eye, so that you’ll have a better chance of getting away. Is that right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Is that right, Jackie?” Early asked.

  “Pretty much,” I grumbled.

  “That’s a good idea. I like that idea,” said Early. “Do you like that idea, Mr. MacScott?”

  “A challenge,” he mused. “Marksmanship and a hunt all in one.” He seemed to warm to the idea. “All right. Why don’t we go outside, get ourselves some fresh air. I’ll take four shots at the bull’s-eye and still have two bullets left.”

  MacScott walked behind us, gun at our backs, as we headed out under the waterfall. I nearly lost my balance on the slippery rocks, but Early and I made it to the bank only slightly damp from our efforts.

  “There’s a good sycamore tree about forty paces off. Tack it up there and you can make your move.”

  Early and I headed for the tree. Once we were out of earshot, Early asked the worst question he could possibly ask.

  “Which direction should we go in?”

  Our lives depended on the answer to that question. And the obvious answer was, in the opposite direction of MacScott and his gun.