The Paper Grail (37 page)

“Come inside,” Aunt Edith said to Howard. “You don’t look well.” She opened the front door of the shack and stepped in, Howard following. On the table in the center of the room lay a bouquet of lilies, brownish green and bruised purple. A sickening odor rose from them. Edith swept them up angrily. She pushed past Howard through the front door again and flung them off the porch with so much force that the heavy, moist flowers flew to pieces in the air, scattering into the weeds. She came back in and pulled the windows open to air the place out.

“She was here, then,” Howard said. “She killed him, didn’t she?”

“She isn’t strong enough to have killed him, although she wishes she were. Here,” she said to Howard, “take his cane.” She looked old herself in that moment, and tired. She had an even-keeled air about her, though, as she handed Howard the stick, looking him full in the face. Her eyes were as green and deep as well water, as if she had endured great suffering in her time, and it had made her wise. “He won’t be needing it anymore.”

Howard looked down at the cane. He could use it, certainly, lame as he was. It looked old, polished from long years of use, and it occurred to him that if he were to take it out to the garden and thrust the tip of it down into the dirt, green tendrils would sprout from the old dry wood. He knocked it against the floorboards. It was stout enough to trust, and he leaned on it gratefully as they walked outside and clumped down the porch steps.

The sky was full of crows now, circling high above them, waiting and watching. There must have been thousands, tens of thousands. He could see them through the trees in every direction. Sylvia had laid her shovel down alongside the grave and was watching Howard intently, a little fearfully maybe, as if she saw something in his face that suggested his own mortality.

He shifted the cane in his hand, feeling a little dizzy. There was something sticky on it—sap? He looked at it more closely.
Was it blood, leaking out of the cane as if out of a wound? The notion was crazy. He shook his head to clear it and leaned heavily against the cane with both hands, steadying himself and wondering suddenly if he was sick. He was certain that he didn’t have any sort of fever, but his mind refused to focus. It was drifting at the whim of some vast tide, almost as if his normal concentration had come unstuck, and something else—the forest itself, or nature, or something even more boundless than that—was peering in at him from outside, assessing him.

He remembered the dream he had had for months now, the dream about the fireplace, the hot coal. And the dream suddenly was more real to him than the forest and the people round about. He stood staring into the fire again, the dark mill around him, the sound of the millwheel turning, and his knee throbbing with pain where he’d burned it. Only this time the mill didn’t have walls or a roof except the dark tree line and a sky black with crows, and he was aware that even though people stood silently just a few yards away, just on the edge of the firelight, he felt alien and alone, with the sea wind blowing and the night sky turning overhead. He put his hand to his mouth and touched his tongue to the sticky residue on his fingers, the sap that had flowed from the stick. It was coppery-tasting, salty, like blood, and the taste of it made him feel faint. He sat down hard on the ground and closed his eyes, and the cawing of the crows fell down around him like raindrops.

H
OWARD
spent the day cleaning the rest of the barn lumber. What had happened to him in the woods was nothing but hyperventilation. He had told himself that a dozen times. He had been at a seance once, years ago, where a college friend of his had gotten excited and hyperventilated, making everyone think for a moment that a ghost had gotten into her. Someone had made her breathe into a paper sack, and she was all right again. This business up at the cabin was no doubt the same sort of thing—lack of sleep, a dead man, the strange conversation he’d had with Uncle Roy, the earthquake, the hurt knee. There were a thousand reasons for him to have gone temporarily off the deep end. Certainly there was no need to get mystical over it.

He was convinced that work was the antidote. After breakfast, Uncle Roy had gone off to meet Bennet, leaving the lumber to Howard. By two o’clock Howard had a big clean pile of it, all stacked and stickered alongside the house. There was nothing left of the pile on the grass but junk—firewood, boards too cracked
and twisted to work with. He felt good for a half dozen reasons, although he was growing nervous as the afternoon wore on. It was Monday, and that meant that Mrs. Lamey’s “little circle” was meeting tomorrow night.

Since he had last talked to Mrs. Lamey, things had gotten vastly more complicated. They couldn’t know anything certain about him, though. Not really. As far as Mrs. Lamey knew, Howard was a free agent, or else represented the museum, and so was in a position to be lured away, into the enemy camp. He was a potential new recruit. Certainly the man who had chased him through the streets that morning hadn’t identified him, although he would know by now that it had been no simple car theft.

The man was still in a holding cell at the police station, and might stay there for a while. He wouldn’t be at Mrs. Lamey’s place tomorrow. The police weren’t fond of his shooting tip the neighborhood, and MacDonald down at the mill had testified that he had threatened the yard hands, waving his gun like a murderer, clearly out of his head. Of course it was his own car that had been stolen, so there were mitigating circumstances. Mrs. Lamey, or more likely one of her paid acquaintances, would come to his rescue eventually. Palms would be greased, doors opened.

Certainly it would be dangerous for Howard to show up at her house, but not all that dangerous. They had nothing to gain from assaulting him. But maybe there was a potential gain from winning his favor. Of course there was. There was time enough to worry about it later, maybe lose a little sleep over it tonight. In an hour and a half, though, he was meeting Sylvia for dinner and then they were taking in a movie, whatever the hell was playing. Howard didn’t care.

Whistling, he looped the extension cord and rolled the radial arm saw back into the shed. Then he pitched a coffee can full of bent nails into the trash and put away the hammer and pry bar. The stack of lumber sat there solid and clean, a thing of value now and not a pile of trash. It would be a tonic for Uncle Roy, money in the bank. The afternoon was fine—almost hot—and the ground around the house was hard and dry. He could hear the cawing of crows still, out over the woods. His knee felt pretty good. It had started to improve when he got the walking stick that morning. Howard picked the stick up from where it was leaning against the house and inspected it one last time. There was no sap on it, no blood. It was smooth and tight-grained. Shrugging, he knocked the dust off his shoes with it and then went in to change clothes.

21

A
LMOST
two hundred dollars in Roy Barton’s pocket, and the sun was barely over the yardarm. The lumber that Howard had so kindly cleaned up yesterday had only fetched eighty bucks—not even twenty cents a foot. Still, it was all profit, and only Tuesday, to boot. No sense in even thinking about labor. What difference did it make to a retired man like himself? A dollar an hour, a nickel an hour—time wasn’t money anymore and hadn’t been for years.

He slapped his shirt pocket and started to whistle, but then he remembered his conversation with Jimmers that morning, and he quit whistling. News of the old man’s death had nearly bowled Jimmers over. “Shit,” Uncle Roy said out loud, wishing that it hadn’t been him who had to tell Jimmers. Jimmers was fragile. Graham had been his only real friend, and now Jimmers was left alone … Uncle Roy shook his head. Things fell apart; there was no denying it.

He thought about the morning again in order to cheer himself up. He had driven around the city after selling the barn lumber, and had found a garage sale up at the end of Perkins Way that was hustling a lot of old construction debris, including a dozen French windows that the owner had torn out of his house. Roy had bought four wooden planes from the man, too, the irons all rusty and the wood gummy and dark.

The lot of it had cost him forty-eight dollars of his barn lumber money. It took him a half hour to pull the hardware off the doors—brass hinges and sliding bolts and glass doorknobs. He spent another hour on the planes, buffing out and sharpening the irons and cleaning the junk off the wood, then rubbing the wood and steel both with mineral oil. He sold the doors for sixty dollars to a man he knew of on Oak Street who was building a greenhouse, and the door hardware and planes to an antique store in town for another eighty.

It had been luck, though. The man was a fool to dump the
doors for that kind of money. If Roy had taken some time with it—stripped the old paint off and refinished them, replaced a couple of panes of broken glass—he might easily have doubled his profit, tripled it. But, hell, who was he kidding? The truth was that if he had gotten fancy, the doors would have spent the winter stacked in the weeds, just like the bam lumber had done. They would have come to nothing. A quick turnover—that was paramount. Don’t overreach yourself. Get in and get out.

He wondered idly whether there wasn’t a book in it:
One Hundred Ways to Make One Hundred Dollars, Overnight
. What did Xerox cost, a nickel a page? You could have the copier bind the thing, too, inside colored boards, and then distribute them yourself out of the back of the station wagon. Half the north coast was out of a job, it seemed. People would snap them up. You could leave half a dozen on a liquor store counter—forty percent for the owner on consignment, sixty percent if he bought them outright.

That would be best, selling them outright would be. To hell with consignment; there was no profit in that. People would steal them or else the store owner would say they did. He calculated profits in his head as he pulled into a parking place in front of Sylvia’s shop. What were there? Fifty thousand people out of work along the coast? Twice that? He could buy an address list, maybe, of all the poor bastards on food stamps, and send them a mailer. They could afford a fiver easy enough when they knew they could parlay it into something big. The sky was the limit, wasn’t it? The whole damned country was going broke. The future lay in a man’s doing for himself, outside the stinking system. Barter, co-ops, labor trading, neighborhood day care, backyard gardens, chickens in pens, goat cheese.

He pulled the wad of money out of his pocket, amazed at how a little bit of dough set a man thinking. The horizon wasn’t any kind of limit for an onward-looking man. He hesitated out on the sidewalk, not going straight into the shop.

Sylvia would only be happy to see him for a moment. She would know he was up to something. She was too serious sometimes, though. What she wanted was a longer view. Easy come, easy go; that was the nature of the wicked world. It was better to be philosophical about it. If he himself was a responsible man, he would give the money to Heloise Lamey; or rather, he would give it to Edith and let her parse it out according to her budget.

He hated budgets. There was something small and mean about them that killed a man’s gumption and imagination. Spend it when you get it; that was his motto. A man couldn’t be running
across town to save a nickel on a bottle of ketchup or to put his few miserable pennies in the savings bank. By God if you wanted a drink in the afternoon, because you were thirsty and because that’s what the Good Book advised—he couldn’t recall the chapter and verse, but he knew it was in there—then you either had a drink or you shut the hell up forever after. Did you want to be happy, or work up a reputation for being thrifty?

He walked into the boutique, and there was Sylvia, behind the counter, folding up some sort of oriental swan out of paper. There was one other customer in the store—a woman trying on a felt hat. Roy waved at Sylvia and then looked around at the merchandise, taking it all in. He nodded expansively. There was plenty to spend his money on.

In truth, he hardly ever came in. He didn’t give a damn for women’s clothes, and he didn’t want to seem to be meddling in Sylvia’s business affairs. This was her shop, after all. And, if they could keep out from under the thumb of the landlord class, the boutique would succeed where his enterprises had failed. If she made it through the winter, she’d be in the black. Come the spring, tourist money would start to flow, just like sap. Then all of them would rest easy. He was proud of her, and today he would do his best to help out.

He found a bulky, knitted sweater for a hundred dollars, Scottish wool dyed with berries—custom-built for the north coast climate. It was expensive, but nothing to a pocket-lined man like him, who had a daughter who was worth every penny. The sweater would do for Sylvia. Next he found a blouse for Edith, a dark green rayon blouse with a green and white scarf. It was youthful, and she would complain about that. But he wouldn’t listen. The blouse and scarf would cost him another fifty dollars, which would leave fifty for dinner—sixty if you counted the secret tenner in his wallet. Altogether that would just about make the nut. Edith would murder him, if Sylvia didn’t get him first. He nearly laughed out loud. This was rich. It had been too long since he’d lavished money on his family.