The Man in the Woods Read online

  By the grim, chilly illumination of a moss-covered window they began deciphering the scratchy writing. “Doctors had terrible penmanship in those days too,” remarked Sister Ignatius. They read what they could of the short paragraph, Helen holding one end of the box and Sister the other.

  I have concluded an examination of Major Freder Valdosta Light Horse. He remains in good health, b mind and body, excepting his blindness that can healed by the hand of God alone. He suffers this im with courage and grace, thanking God each that the Union shell, which exploded and cruelly robbed him of the gift of sight did not take his life or limbs Though he passed many months recovering his sensiblilty despicable conditions in the swamps of Louisiana, he shows no symptom of swamp fever, dysentery, malaria or cholera. His personal effects and household are comp free from contamination, thus no quarantine is held to be necessary.

  Duly sworn before

  The Magistrate, Court of Assizes

  County of Bristol, City of New Bedford

  Commonwealth of Massachusetts

  Roger Wilberforce, December 4, 1863

  “My God! Oh, Sister”—Helen’s hand flew to her mouth in apology—“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take the name of the Lord in—”

  “Go on, Helen. What does this mean to you?”

  “It means,” said Helen simply, “that Lucy had the Thurber.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Sister, this man was blind! Lucy’s husband was blind! I’d clean forgotten that Uncle Max told us the Thurber was also invented as a braille writer for blind people. The letters it printed were raised so that you could read them with your fingertips. It says right here he spent months in a field hospital in Louisiana. Lucy must have written to him there. The only way he could read was in braille, and that’s why she had the Thurber!”

  “I think you are right, Helen. Lucy must have owned the Thurber braille writer. You are getting very close to Lucy now.”

  “I still haven’t any idea where she lived. Where the house was. The house Lorenzo had burned to the ground.”

  “Your Asa Roche was not making up a story,” said Sister Ignatius. “Lorenzo did indeed trump up a reason for destroying everything. The doctor says right here there was no disease. No reason for quarantine. I wonder why Lorenzo did it? What a pity all the reasons and records and all memory have been burnt to the ground.”

  “All except her Thurber machine,” said Helen. “That’s here in New Bedford somewhere.”

  Sister cleared her throat. “You will get closer and closer to Lucy,” she said. “I have no doubt you will find her one day, but be careful if you find her and she leads you to the Thurber, because someone else has found it first. Do you understand me? Go and discover Lucy and all the story around her. Write about it and win your medal, but don’t take that last step and go after the writing machine. It’s too dangerous. I implore you not to.”

  Sister Ignatius pressed the gangrenous wooden box deep against the front of her habit. Her smooth face broke into a clear smile of triumph, just as the sun broke through the cloud cover outside, transforming the ugly mossy windowpane into a web of translucent spring green.

  Suddenly, as if they had been instructed to, Helen and Sister Ignatius both peered at the paper in the bottom of the box. They watched the free sides of it rise and curl of their own accord. Then the paper sagged and disintegrated, the whole of it now only a patch of gray dust.

  Sister Ignatius whispered, “We let it into the oxygen and daylight for the first time in nearly a century and a half. It was too much.” She hesitated and whispered again, “But it was alive for one moment, child, and it spoke to us!”

  Chapter 10

  “STUPID, STUPID, STUPID. DUMB, dumb, dumb,” said Mr. Bro, cracking open his fiftieth pistachio nut and sweeping a pile of shells into his wastebasket.

  Helen had already read Mrs. Fairchild’s letter. Pinky was in the process of reading it. In clear and animated handwriting Elizabeth Fairchild had written the principal of the school asserting that Helen and Pinky had been loud and abusive to the custodian of the Fairchild mansion, and Pinky had damaged property there.

  “I just dropped an old whale tooth,” Pinky complained.

  “What did you call the custodian?” asked Mr. Bro.

  “A … a fish-faced old barnacle. I could have said worse,” said Pinky.

  Somewhere behind Mr. Bro’s stern face Helen saw the twitch of a smile. “The custodian lied to me,” Helen said. “I told him I’d write up the story of Lucy.”

  “And blow it sky-high, right?” asked Mr. Bro.

  Helen nodded unhappily.

  “Well, you guys are up a creek without a paddle. I can’t believe you’d be so boneheaded,” Mr. Bro said, opening another nut and pushing a few across the desk for them. “You were almost there. Almost there, and now you’ve blown it. Blown it! You know about Lucy, you know she had the Thurber. You could have gone to Mrs. Fairchild and gotten the rest of the story from her. Believe me, she knows it. Now she’ll never talk to you. And I doubt you’ll find the house or the Thurber.”

  A wasp banged itself again and again into one of the back windows of Mr. Bro’s classroom. Helen wondered why it didn’t have a concussion. It had been banging for ten minutes. Mr. Bro’s shoulders relaxed. “I don’t blame you,” he said after peering at Pinky and Helen for a curious minute. “I suppose if I were your age, I’d have called him a fish-faced old barnacle too. Let’s think.”

  Helen allowed herself to hope.

  Mr. Bro went on. “This … this Ladies’ Aide Society. I think Lucy, with a southern husband, probably was in on that with her sisters.”

  “Sending all that junk down South,” said Pinky.

  Mr. Bro assembled a new pile of nutshells on his blotter. “Junk!” he said. “Do you have the slightest idea what conditions were like then? During the Civil War doctors used to have races to see who could cut off a leg fastest! They had no anesthetics, nothing but morphine. That and opium were the only pain-killers in the world. You could buy them at any general store in America. But try having a leg cut off with just morphine! They had to strap the soldiers onto the operating tables with saddle girths to stop them from flying through the top of the tent. They had to stuff their mouths with shirt sleeves to keep down the screaming. Do you know that dentists back then, even with morphine and liquor in their patients, strapped them into chairs and pulled teeth with the head of a key? So don’t call it junk. It was needed. Now. Get back to the point. The only thing you can do is to go back to Elizabeth Fairchild and apologize. And then see if you can make her talk to you.”

  “Could you,” Helen stammered, “could you call her ahead and sort of calm her down first?”

  “It’s not my apology,” said Mr. Bro. “It’s yours!” Mr. Bro collected himself and added, “But I’ll tell you just how to approach her.”

  The moment Elizabeth Fairchild answered the door and stood over them on the top step like an eagle examining a couple of mice, Helen forgot everything Mr. Bro had told them to say.

  “I suppose you’ve come to apologize,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Helen and Pinky together.

  “Good!” said Mrs. Fairchild and slammed the door.

  “Hatchet-faced crock of lard!” muttered Pinky to the closed door.

  But Helen got down on her hands and knees on the steps and, pushing open the mail slot, yelled, “Please, Mrs. Fairchild. We are truly sorry. Please help us.” She fumbled in her pocketbook and took out her locket. She dropped it through the slot in the door. “Please look at this. Somebody sent it to me. Inside is my mother’s picture. The eyes have been poked out with a needle. Someone wants to do that to me! To my eyes. I need your help!”

  A minute went by. The bird-of-prey eyes peered down through the fanlight at the top of the door. “Go to the police, then, why don’t you?” was Mrs. Fairchild’s answer.

  “They won’t believe us, Mrs. Fairchild. Please just hear me out!”

 
Very slowly the door opened. Elizabeth Fairchild gave the locket back to Helen. But it was open. She had looked at it. “You may explain,” she said, “If you take under a minute and do your explaining on the doorstep.”

  Helen’s explanation took many minutes. During it she kept her eyes locked on Elizabeth Fairchild’s. Little by little, as she told about the whistler and Uncle Max and the search for Lucy’s Thurber, the patronizing steeliness melted. The stiff-necked posture relaxed.

  “You should have told me all this the first time you came,” said Elizabeth Fairchild.

  “I tried,” said Helen.

  They waited in the sitting room while Mrs. Fairchild fetched tea. Once again she refused any help with the heavy silver tea service and did not talk until she had stirred lemon and sugar into her own cup and made sure they did the same.

  Then she began awkwardly, tracing the pattern of a running deer in the Persian rug idly with her shoe. “I’m a Roche, of course,” she said. “Only a Fairchild by marriage. I would never have heard the story of Lucy if it hadn’t been for Asa.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Asa was always a blabbermouth,” she added. “How he found out I don’t know, but my husband, John Fairchild, the Lord rest his soul, made me swear with my hand on the family Bible that I would never tell it.” Mrs. Fairchild stopped for a moment, as if to recall that moment of swearing. “But now that you’ve told me about this … this criminal who’s threatened to … to poke out your eyes or worse, I suppose I must break my word.” She picked a tea leaf off the tip of her tongue and placed it delicately on her napkin. Pinky stared at his cup of tea. He hated tea. “That’s Earl Grey tea,” said Mrs. Fairchild. “Don’t waste it!” Pinky swallowed about half a spoonful. Satisfied, Mrs. Fairchild continued. “I cannot in good conscience let old Lorenzo reach out of his grave with his bloodstained hands and cause any more trouble than he did during his lifetime.”

  “What did he do to Lucy?” asked Helen.

  “Dynamited her house. Or so they say. It may be a rumor, but there was a great explosion that night. Lorenzo removed most of the valuables”—here Mrs. Fairchild chuckled—“including the gold buttons off her husband’s uniform, one of which I see Asa gave you.”

  Helen nodded and felt the little button instinctively.

  “Yes, well. Even the uniform buttons. How terribly cheap! At any rate, I have no idea whether Lucy died in the fire. I know her husband did. They found his body—he was blind, you see. Blinded in the war. I suspect Lucy was not in the house or else Lorenzo would never have been able to remove the valuables that afternoon. Perhaps he never intended to kill the husband—but he did. He was a murderer, Lorenzo. All I know about Lucy is that she worked shoulder to shoulder with her sisters in Bedford Ladies’ Aide Society. Whatever happened to her is lost.”

  “Where was the house?” asked Helen.

  “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Fairchild. “No one knows that. Lorenzo was mayor of New Bedford at that time. He not only destroyed every record of Lucy’s existence but had all the town maps changed so the location of her house would be erased forever. Lorenzo was a very methodical man.”

  Helen had finished her tea. Her cup was empty. The Persian rug was deep and soft, and the cup did not break when she dropped it.

  “Dear child!” said Mrs. Fairchild and was at Helen’s side in an instant, her hand tentatively patting Helen’s back, as if Helen were a puppy who’d choked on a bone. “My dear, don’t cry. Crying helps nothing. I wish I could help you. I would do anything to help you, but I simply do not know where her house was.”

  “Thanks anyway,” said Pinky. He picked up Helen’s cup and saucer.

  Helen steadied herself just to be polite. She took the teacup from where Pinky had put it on an antique cherrywood drum table and set it back on the silver tray, where it wouldn’t make a wet ring.

  Mrs. Fairchild had settled herself in an armchair, as if nothing had happened. “I wish more than anything in the world I could help you,” she repeated, “because I have something to ask of you.”

  Here it comes, thought Helen. She said nothing.

  “If you write up this story,” said Mrs. Fairchild, “and I can’t stop you after all, our family will be remembered for evil and not for all the good we have done in this town. It will appear first in your school paper, and then, as you said in the mansion, it will be picked up in the Sunday supplement of the Post-Dispatch. Helen, is it?”

  Helen nodded.

  “Helen, you have a long life ahead of you. I have only a few years and Asa little time at all. Reporters will badger us, because the family is an important one. People will not leave us alone. I have a heart condition. I don’t think I could bear the questions and the scandal this would cause. Please keep this story away from anyone else until Asa and I both pass on.”

  At the door Mrs. Fairchild pressed the little tintype of Lucy and Lorenzo into Helen’s hands. She touched Pinky’s sleeve and looked at them both brightly, trustingly, more like a wren than an eagle. “There’s a dear,” she said to Helen, holding both Helen’s hands over the portrait with her own and with great warmth.

  That evening Pinky was invited to dinner for the very first time. Aunt Stella watched him the way a cat watches a canary. Pinky contentedly downed two platefuls of homemade lasagna and asked for more. He even ate the edges, which were so hardened by their trip into the oven that Helen decided he must have teeth like razors.

  Cheerfully and with care Pinky filled Helen’s father and Aunt Stella in on all the details of their visit to Elizabeth Fairchild, except of course for any mention of the Thurber or why they wanted to find Lucy’s lost house. When he came to Mrs. Fairchild’s begging them not to write the story at least until she was dead, Helen’s father snorted loudly, almost gleefully.

  Aunt Stella let her knife fall on her plate with a clank. “Helen will of course be good and charitable,” said Aunt Stella, looking warily in Helen’s direction. “She has never had a mean bone in her body and I’m certain will not break this poor woman’s heart in order to win herself a gold medal. She is not a Judas who would betray her nature for thirty gold medals.”

  Helen said nothing. The lasagna stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  Her father looked at her just as warily. “You are going to write this splendid story, aren’t you?” he asked.

  Everyone waited for Helen to speak. At last she washed down the lasagna and said, “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “You don’t know!”

  “Dad, it was a big thing for Mrs. Fairchild to break the promise she made to her husband. She has a heart condition. I don’t want her to have a stroke or a seizure because of me.”

  “Stroke!” he trumpeted. “She’s faking. She’s only broken her promise because you two came up with some evidence. The old bat’s probably terrified she’ll die and not get into heaven if the Fairchild family name is ruined. That’s why she asked you to wait until she dies. She figures she’ll squeak past Saint Peter, and then it’ll be all right. You don’t get banished from heaven once you’re in. That’s what she’s betting on.”

  “Duncan Curragh,” said Aunt Stella sharply. “Heaven is not like your Boston Red Sox, where you look over your shoulder to make sure they don’t send you down to the minor leagues. Heaven is a state of grace, as you well know!”

  “Not to the bloody Anglicans, it isn’t,” he snapped. “Their idea of heaven is a bloody yacht club with no Catholics or Jews or Hindus allowed. They may let the good Lord run the place, but you can believe me they make Lorenzo Fairchild and his sort chairman of the board.”

  “The child is being wise and charitable, Duncan,” said Aunt Stella. “Button your lip.” Then Aunt Stella asked if Pinky would be so kind as to bring some of his mother’s Norwegian recipes with him when he came over to pick Helen up for the Wareham game the next day.

  Helen’s father glared at her. “Doofus,” he said. “You’re being a bloody doofus if you don’t write that story, that’s all.”

  Pinky
volunteered to do the dishes with his sweetest smile. Aunt Stella agreed to let him take Helen to the movies. “A movie will cheer you up,” he whispered to her over the lasagna dish, even though he knew it wouldn’t.

  Aunt Stella fussed over them at the door and said it looked like rain and didn’t they want to take an umbrella. Helen put the umbrella back in its stand, and she and Pinky ran down the slate walk to catch the approaching bus, but Aunt Stella’s voice trilled after them.

  “Yes, Aunt Stella?” said Helen wearily. They would now miss the bus. They had been warned about everything from purse snatchers to drunken drivers running red lights. “Something in the mail for you today!” Aunt Stella waved a manila envelope under the porch light. “From Georgia!” she added, as if to say Afghanistan.

  A late summer moth flapped wildly against the yellow light on the porch. The photocopy in the envelope was too illegible to make out in the dimness.

  Helen took it inside. She stared at it without speaking. She felt as if she had lifted up a giant rock and was about to peer under it.

  Impatiently Helen’s father took the copy from her hands and, holding it under the dining room chandelier, began to read.

  “It says here,” he said, “‘Dear Miss Curragh: At Mr. Brzostoski’s request we are writing to you about Lucy Fairchild de Vivier. Sorry it took us so long to find her. Her married name, de Vivier, is how we all remember her down here.’” Her father paused and then went on to the newspaper article reproduced in clotted black print on the photostat. “From the Valdosta Clarion, April 5, 1911:

  Mrs. Lucy de Vivier, one of Valdosta’s most beloved citizens, passed away in her sleep last night, at her home on Lee Street. Mrs. de Vivier shunned the limelight all her life but was called “the Angel of Shenandoah” by General Stonewall Jackson for the part she played in his great victory there.

  Fearing discovery and hanging for treason to the Union cause, Lucy de Vivier shipped over twenty thousand rounds of ammunition and seven thousand Enfield rifles to our brave boys in grey. Working out of a hidden basement at the end of a private railway line in New Bedford, Massachusetts, “Miss Lucy,” as affectionate Valdostans called her, sent arms secretly to our troops for over two years. Believed to have been cast out by her Yankee robber baron father, whose name was Fairchild, she never revealed her past to her many friends in town. She was the wife of Frederic de Vivier, major, Valdosta Third Light Horse, who distinguished himself and his regiment at the Battle of Shiloh. Miss Lucy chose to spend the rest of her life here, in her departed husband’s home town.